Monday Mailing 031119

Monday Mailing

Year 25 • Issue 25 11 March 2019 1. Your Next FedEx Delivery Could Be A Pizza (Emily Bradley) 2. Strategies For Sustainable Food Systems In Smart Cities 3. Oregon Congressman Blumenauer Seeks To Reinstate Bike Commuter Tax Break (Corum Ketchum) 4. Coastal Flooding Is Erasing Billions In Property Value As Sea Level Rises. That’s Bad News For Cities. (Michael Walker) 5. Your Community’s Essence Is More Than Bike Lanes And Edison Bulbs (Bayoán Ware) 6. Focus On Rural Livability (Corum Ketchum) 7. Shampoo And Ice Cream In A Metal Can? Meet ‘Loop,’ A New Way To Cut Down On Plastic Waste (Corum Ketchum) 8. Is Your City Racing To The Bottom Or The Top? (Bayoán Ware) 9. The West, When Women Are Telling The Story 10. WEBINAR – Cristina Garmendia on St. Louis’ Equity Indicators Baseline Report (Patrick Lynch) 1. Your Next FedEx Delivery Could Be A Pizza FedEx is getting into the pizza delivery business, but no one will be greeting hungry customers at the door.

Quote of the Week:

“Success isn’t about how your life looks to others. It’s about how it feels to you.

We realized that being successful isn’t about being impressive, it’s about being inspired. That’s what it means to be true to yourself.”

- Michelle Obama

Oregon Fast Fact #25

Eugene is rated by "Bicycling Magazine" as one of the top ten cycling communities in the United States.

As companies scramble to develop technology to get food, groceries and shipments to customers in hours, even minutes, FedEx unveiled an early model of an autonomous delivery robot on Tuesday. The shipper is teaming up with Pizza Hut, Walmart, Walgreens and other companies on the delivery program.

The initiative highlights the surging demand for speedier delivery and the race to develop autonomous technology for what’s known as the “last-mile,” or the final step of the logistics journey from warehouse or kitchen to a customer’s front door.

Experts say merchants and shipping companies will increasingly move toward automation to lower costs and speed up delivery, with fleets of drones and bots eventually dropping off goods without direct assistance from human staff.

To access the full story, click here.

2. Strategies For Sustainable Food Systems In Smart Cities Although we remain in the early stages, it is clear that a ‘Smart City’ revolution is sweeping the world. Technology driven solutions are being used to rethink and reshape the way that urban areas function. These solutions bring with them the promise of future cities that are more efficient with resources, more equitable for residents, and more resilient to climate events.

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As with any young revolution, there is still a lot to learn in terms of what works and what should be included. Urban agriculture, for example, despite its unique ability to ameliorate a multitude of issues plaguing urban areas, is often strangely left out of the Smart City discussion.

Despite this fact, the urban agriculture industry has continued to grow immensely with an ever increasing demand for nutritious local produce. AgriFood Tech investment reached $10.1 Billion in 2017, including $200 Million in Series B funding for vertical farming company Plenty.

To access the full story, click here.

3. Oregon Congressman Blumenauer Seeks To Reinstate Bike Commuter Tax Break Hoping to incentivize cycling in America, Oregon Congressman (and former Portland City Commissioner) Earl Blumenauer has introduced the Bicycle Commuter Act of 2019.

The bill would re-instate a tax benefit for biking to work that was repealed in 2017 as part of the Republican-led Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Rep. Blumenauer, who has pushed for a version of this bill since at least 2006 and got it passed in 2008 as part of former President Barack Obama’s financial bailout bill, said in a statement released by his office today that, “The bicycle is the most efficient form of urban transportation ever devised,” and that despite the proliferation of bike share and cycling in general throughout the country, there remains no tax benefit for riding to work.

The IRS currently offers a “qualified transportation fringe benefit” of up to $265 per month for driving a car, parking a car, and taking transit. Shockingly, the most efficient and healthiest form of transportation — cycling — is ineligible.

To access the full story, click here.

4. Coastal Flooding Is Erasing Billions In Property Value As Sea Level Rises. That’s Bad News For Cities.

Rising seas have already eroded coastal property values from Maine to Mississippi by billions of dollars over the past decade as buyers pay less for homes in neighborhoods where high-tide flooding is creeping in, a new report shows.

The loss in property values points to a compound problem for coastal communities: Just as accelerating sea level rise forces governments to build flood walls and repair infrastructure more often, it may also eat away at the property tax base that provides many cities' primary revenue stream for funding that very work.

"This is a real negative feedback loop," said Rob Moore, a senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council. "If they don't start to recognize these issues and reports like this and open their eyes to what is definitely happening, they're going to find themselves in pretty dire straits."

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The analysis, published Wednesday by First Street Foundation, estimates that property value losses from coastal flooding in 17 states were nearly $16 billion from 2005 to 2017. Florida, New Jersey, New York and South Carolina each saw more than $1 billion in losses.

To access the full story, click here.

5. Your Community’s Essence Is More Than Bike Lanes And Edison Bulbs

Want to better your community but don’t know where to start? Enter It’s the Little Things: a weekly Strong Towns podcast that gives you the wisdom and encouragement you need to take the small yet powerful actions that can make your city or town stronger.

It’s the Little Things features Strong Towns Community Builder Jacob Moses in conversation with various guests who have taken action in their own places and in their own ways.

Take a moment to think about what you love about your community. Maybe it’s the historic downtown, where you meet with friends after work; maybe it’s the local theater, where you watch your neighbors perform in plays.

You love these places not because of the structures themselves—no matter how interesting the architecture—instead, you love them because of their essence: that feeling of community and familiarity you get with every visit.

Your community’s true essence reminds you why you love where you live; however, it also helps both yourself and your community leaders create a brand.

To access the full story, click here.

6. Focus On Rural Livability

A key portion of America's demographic future is showing up first in rural areas, where a greater proportion of the population is older than, on average, residents of urban areas. "Rural areas are aging at a faster rate than the general population," notes the Rural Health Insurance Hub, adding that "older adults also disproportionately live in rural areas."

In 2010, one-quarter of all Americans age 65 or older lived in small towns and rural communities and that number is growing. In reporting that the population of people age 85 or older will more than triple from 5.8 million in 2010 to 19 million in 2050, the Housing Assistance Council declares, "This change will have profound implications in rural regions which already have a larger share of seniors and a smaller share of social services than suburban and urban communities."

The realities of rural aging are playing out nationwide, and the states with the largest percentages of older rural and small town residents can be found in every region. The top 10 such states are Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Oregon, Maine, Arizona, North Dakota, Virginia, Minnesota and Nebraska.

To access the full story, click here.

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7. Shampoo And Ice Cream In A Metal Can? Meet ‘Loop,’ A New Way To Cut Down On Plastic Waste

A new shopping platform called Loop — brought to life by Tom Szaky, the CEO of recycling firm TerraCycle — plans to offer reusable containers for some 300 household products in partnership with some of the world’s largest consumer brands.

"The general idea with Loop is that instead of the consumer owning their packages at the end when they're empty, it's always owned by the manufacturer. Instead of it going to waste or recycling, we simply pick it back up from the consumer, clean it and around it goes again — sort of like the way milk used to be delivered back in the 1950's,” Szaky tells Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson.

Szaky says the vision behind Loop is "to solve waste at the root cause, which we think really is this idea of using something once or disposability."

He says the circular shopping platform will help consumers drastically cut back on plastic waste all around the house, not just within their kitchen cabinets.

“The idea is to bring this reuse model to absolutely everything, from your laundry detergent to your mouthwash, from your orange juice to your granola," he says. "I mean, truly everything — in partnership with the world's biggest manufacturers — to really try to shift consumption from a disposable system to a circular one.”

To access the full story, click here.

8. Is Your City Racing To The Bottom Or The Top?

Whenever you’re selling something, you have a choice to make about how you will position yourself to the market. You could make a play for the customer looking for the absolute cheapest graphic design job, for example. You’ll find you have a lot of competition for this position, though. And because this isn’t a question of quality, you’ll step into a race to the bottom. There is always someone, somewhere, willing to do the same thing, more quickly, more haphazardly, and for a few pennies less per minute.

In a “sort-by-price” world, though, you should be careful getting into a race to the bottom.

Because as Seth Godin is fond of saying, “You might win. Even worse, you might come in second.”

On the other hand, you could shun the low-price game altogether. Because “lowering the price is a one-directional, single-axis choice. Either it’s cheaper or it’s not.”

You might instead decide that trading in trust, quality, identity, or story is more important. You could decide that, despite the hard work it will entail, you’re better off in the long run by creating something that people don’t want to give up. Something that they were never buying based on price tag to begin with.

To access the full story, click here.

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9. The West, When Women Are Telling The Story For years, starry-eyed initiates to the West’s backcountry have packed along classics like John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra, Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, and the journals of Lewis and Clark. These writers inspire us, open our eyes to the beauty and the fragility of the rugged West, and give this landscape a mythic resonance.

However, much of that myth has been written by men. “Here, in the wilderness, a man could be a real man, the rugged individual he was meant to be before civilization sapped his energy and threatened his masculinity,” writes environmental historian William Cronon, describing the ethos that’s shaped, and misshaped, our understanding of what wilderness is. Even the women writing in this tradition — Mary Austin, Terry Tempest Williams, Leslie Marmon Silko — often write about the struggle to make their way in a world dominated by men.

Recently, though, women have been storming the barricades. From Cheryl Strayed’s best-selling memoir of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail to Claire Vaye Watkins’ myth-busting fable of a waterless California, many of the exciting new names in the literature of the West are women. If the traditional vision of nature is one of struggle and conquest, of man testing himself against solitude and the elements, what does this shift mean for our collective vision of the wide-open spaces of the West?

To access the full story, click here.

10. WEBINAR – Cristina Garmendia On St. Louis’ Equity Indicators Baseline Report (March 20 from at 10am to 11am PST)

Join Next City for another event in our online seminar series, this time with guest presenter Cristina Garmendia, author of the City of St. Louis’ Equity Indicators Baseline Report, on Wednesday, March 20 at 1 p.m. eastern time.

Garmendia will share her approach to developing a racial equity benchmarking process for the City of St. Louis that aligns with the calls to action from the Ferguson Commission. Learn methods for having conversations about racial equity with institutional leaders, gaining access to data, and designing equity metrics that can guide policy and process reform. Participants will learn techniques they can apply to their own city or organization for evaluating hard-tomeasure equity concepts such as justice, opportunity and well-being.

To register for the webinar, click here.

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