Monday Mailing Quote of the Week:
“The young, free to act on their initiative, can lead their elders in the direction of the unknown… The children, the young, must ask the questions that we would never think to ask, but enough trust must be re-established so that the elders will be permitted to work with them on the answers.” - Margaret Mead
Oregon Fast Fact #13
The state park system has 159 yurts located in 19 parks. Yurts are a circular domed tent suitable for camping.
Year 25 • Issue 26 18 March 2019 1. The Granny Flats Are Coming (Michael Walker) 2. Breaking Down Silos In Rural Communities (Corum Ketchum) 3. A Card Game Designed To Help Urban Communities Plan For The Future 4. How America’s Food Giants Swallowed The Family Farms 5. Study Finds Racial Gap Between Who Causes Air Pollution And Who Breathes It (Michael Hoch) 6. The Case Against Lawns (Emily Connor) 7. Urban, Suburban, and Rural: We’re More Alike Than We Think 8. How Fast Is Rural Internet? Consumers Are Asked To Fill In The Gaps 9. PODCAST SERIES – Building Better Communities With Transit (Bayoán Ware) 10. GRANT – AARP Community Challenge 2019 1. The Granny Flats Are Coming When Kol Peterson moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2010, affordable housing was a priority, as it was for many newcomers in this city’s booming real-estate market. He looked at two frequently discussed options for high-cost cities—tiny houses on wheels and communal living—but decided on another option: accessory dwelling units, or ADUs—also known as granny flats, basement and garage apartments, and the like. ADUs weren’t yet common in Portland—that year, the city issued only 86 permits for them—but when Peterson did the math he decided that building one was his best option. “I could buy a house, construct an ADU in the backyard, and live in the ADU while renting out the house,” he said. That’s what he did: He bought a home in the city’s King/Sabin neighborhood, built a tidy two-story minihome in its backyard, and moved in. The experience, he says, has been life-changing. “Building an 800-foot ADU eventually eliminated my housing costs, and I’m living in my dream house.” To access the full story, click here. 2. Breaking Down Silos In Rural Communities 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.
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In rural communities across the country, state agencies work with local leaders to help navigate their needs and choose which projects would most benefit their communities. For example, state agencies can help revitalize a town’s main street or provide grants passed on from the federal government. These state agencies, of course, have good intentions. They care about the people residing in rural communities and want to do what they can to ensure these communities can thrive. However, amid all the resources and services state agencies provide, a common issue can arise: many state agencies are unaware of the work other agencies are doing in the same community. To access the full story, click here.
3. A Card Game Designed To Help Urban Communities Plan For The Future
When mass protests erupted in Turkey in the summer of 2013, sparked by the planned development of one of the scarce green spaces in central Istanbul, a hand-painted banner hung in the threatened park encapsulated the demonstrators’ wide-ranging frustration with life in a city many felt was slipping out of their grasp. It read: “Hands off my neighborhood/square/tree/water/soil/home/seed/forest/village/city/park.” “There was a lot of anxiety about the huge influx of global capital pouring into Istanbul at that time, and all of the potentially destructive consequences. People felt that they weren’t being listened to,” says Alexis Şanal, an Istanbul-based architect.
In her architecture practice, Şanal felt stymied by how the politicization of public space was entrenching both citizens and city officials further in their positions, resulting in what she describes as “an endless loop of bad decisions guided by emotional perceptions.” Inspiration for a way to try and break that cycle came from an unlikely source: playing creative card games like Dixit, Zilli, and Exploding Kittens with her young children. To access the full story, click here.
4. How America’s Food Giants Swallowed The Family Farms
When the vast expanse of rural Iowa was carved up for settlers in the 19th century, it was often divided into 160-acre lots. Four farms made a square mile, with a crisscross of dead-straight roads marking the boundaries like a sprawling chess board. Within each square, generations of families tended pigs and cattle, grew oats and raised children, with the sons most likely to take over the farm. That is how Barb Kalbach saw the future when she left her family’s land to marry and begin farming with her new husband, Jim, 47 years ago. “When we very first were married, we had cattle and calves,” she says. “We raised hogs from farrow to finish, and we had corn, beans, hay and oats. So did everyone around us.”
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Half a century later, Kalbach surveys the destruction within the section of chessboard she shared with other farms near Dexter in southwestern Iowa. Barb and Jim are the last family still working the land, after their neighbours were picked off by waves of collapsing commodity prices and the rise of factory farming. With that came a vast transfer in wealth as farm profits funnelled into corporations or the diminishing number of families that own an increasing share of the land. Rural communities have been hollowed out. To access the full story, click here.
5. Study Find Racial Gap Between Who Causes Air Pollution And Who Breathes It Pollution, much like wealth, is not distributed equally in the United States.
Scientists and policymakers have long known that black and Hispanic Americans tend to live in neighborhoods with more pollution of all kinds, than white Americans. And because pollution exposure can cause a range of health problems, this inequity could be a driver of unequal health outcomes across the U.S. A study published Monday in the journal PNAS adds a new twist to the pollution problem by looking at consumption. While we tend to think of factories or power plants as the source of pollution, those polluters wouldn't exist without consumer demand for their products. The researchers found that air pollution is disproportionately caused by white Americans' consumption of goods and services, but disproportionately inhaled by black and Hispanic Americans. "This paper is exciting and really quite novel," says Anjum Hajat, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington who was not involved in the study. "Inequity in exposure to air pollution is well documented, but this study brings in the consumption angle." To access the full story, click here.
6. The Case Against Lawns
In the discussion of cities, there is much rhetoric about wayfinding and placemaking: the idea that a diversity of buildings from different eras, built for different purposes, and the way they interface with the street gives a city its sense of place. You know you are in New York City (and, if you are visiting, you know in which direction Penn Station lies) based on the orienteering beacon that is the Empire State Building. The grid systems and tall buildings of cities may be our default references when we think of wayfinding, but wayfinding and placemaking are actually inherent in the natural landscape.
What makes a place distinct goes beyond its built environment into its unbuilt environment. On the train home, I know I am exiting the mid-Atlantic and entering the South when the hardwoods fade into pine and the thorny smilax vine begins to creep along the peripheral trees. I know I am home in the sandhills of North Carolina because of, well, the sandy hills. To keep a lawn alive in the North Carolina sandhills where I grew up requires quite a bit of money and energy, because to do so is to fight against the landscape and its nutrient-poor, Page 3 of 5
sandy soil. Lawns require constant fertilization, care, and an automated sprinkler. My parents attempted to plant some centipede grass in our front yard, but at best, the grass was patchy. At worst, it was dead. Sooner or later, they left it to the whims of the sand and pine straw. To access the full story, click here.
7. Urban, Suburban, and Rural: We’re More Alike Than We Think
Our images of life in urban, suburban, and rural America are dominated by clichés: urban hipsters living in loft apartments, suburbanites mowing their lawns, rural Americans hunting and fishing.
Now, a fascinating new survey explores many of these long-standing tropes and finds that urbanites, suburbanites, and rural residents are much more alike than different in what we want from our communities. The survey, conducted in January of this year by researchers at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy in conjunction with the Associated PressNORC Center for Public Affairs Research, covers a random sample of more than 1,000 Americans across all 50 states. Not surprisingly, more Americans identify as suburbanites than urbanites or rural dwellers. Almost half of survey respondents (46 percent) say they live in a suburban area, 27 percent in rural areas, and a quarter in urban communities. This is a slightly smaller share of suburbanites than identified by the U.S. Census, which cites 52 percent of Americans as living in suburban neighborhoods. To access the full story, click here.
8. How Fast Is Rural Internet? Consumers Are Asked To Fill In The Gaps
If you want to know exactly how fast the internet connection is in your part of rural America, good luck. The National Broadband Map has been decommissioned. The latest report from the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) has serious flaws, researchers say. And private efforts to measure access speeds tend to underrepresent rural areas and cause confusion about what speed is available and what consumers actually pay for.
A collaboration of three national rural nonprofits hopes to create a more accurate picture for researchers and advocates to use to see how their communities measure up. A screenshot of the app. The TestIT smartphone app invites rural residents to participate in the effort, identifying current broadband speed and service gaps in underserved communities. “We came together to sit down and ask how could we paint an accurate picture of what broadband access is really like in rural communities throughout the country,” said Nathan Ohle, executive director of the Rural Community Assistance Partnership (RCAP). To access the full story, click here.
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9. PODCAST SERIES: Building Better Communities With Transit Welcome to Building Better Communities with Transit, a podcast series about transit-oriented development and how it works to improve communities across America. Our host, Jeff Wood, invites the experts each month for conversations about how communities of all sizes can catalyze smarter growth by encouraging development around transit stations and along transit corridors. This podcast is a production of TODresources.org, an initiative of the Federal Transit Administration in partnership with Smart Growth America. Visit TODresources.org to learn more. To access the podcast series, click here.
10. GRANT – AARP Community Challenge 2019 (Closes April 17, 2019, 11:59 (ET))
The AARP Community Challenge grant program is part of the nationwide AARP Livable Communities initiative that helps communities become great places to live for residents of all ages. The program is intended to help communities make immediate improvements and jumpstart long-term progress in support of residents of all ages.
For the first-ever AARP Community Challenge in 2017, AARP received nearly 1,200 applications and chose 88 winning grantees. In 2018, for the second challenge, AARP received almost 1,600 applications and funded 129 quick-action projects. In 2019, the grant program will provide funds for community-based “quick-action” projects related to housing, transportation, smart cities and public spaces. The goal is to spark change and build momentum to improve livability for people of all ages. For more information about this grant opportunity, click here.
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