Monday Mailing 032519

Monday Mailing

Year 25 • Issue 27 25 March 2019 1.

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Electrifying News: Solar And Wind Power Has Quintupled In A Decade (Michael Hoch) Portland, Oregon: Displacement By Design (Bayoán Ware) Remix Picks Up $15 Million To Help Cities Make Better Decisions Around Transit (Corum Ketchum) Born And Raised: The Parts Of America With The Most Natives (Carolina Negron) Consequences Of Inequality Will Strike Everyone Indiscriminately The Secret Ingredient of Resilient Cities: Culture Can Indoor Farming Fulfill The Dream Of Opportunity Zones?

Perfectly Legal: The Clear-Cut Rewards Of Campaign Cash The Karuk Tribe Fights A Growing Wildfire Threat and A Lack Of Funding WEBINAR – EPA Office Of Community Revitalization’s Strategies For Food Systems, Health, And Economic Development Webinar

1. Electrifying News: Solar And Wind Power Has Quintupled

In A Decade

Quote of the Week:

“To hope is to gamble. It's to bet on your futures, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.”

- Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

Oregon Fast Fact #2

Oregon has more ghost towns than any other state.

Across the United States, workers are covering fields with solar panels, and big rigs are hauling massive turbine blades to windscoured ridgelines. This is what it looks like when renewable energy expands exponentially.

The amount of renewable electricity generated in the United States has doubled in the last 10 years, according to number-crunching out Tuesday from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

And as impressive as doubling in a decade is, it understates the case. That’s because about 90 percent of that growth came from wind and solar: 57 million megawatt hours in 2008, and 301 million megawatt hours in 2018 — increasing more than fivefold in a decade.

So where do we stand after accounting for all that growth? Well, some 17.6 percent of the country’s power now comes from renewables.

To access the full story, click here.

2. Portland, Oregon: Displacement By Design Portland, the largest city in the state of Oregon, is reputed to be the whitest city of its size in the United States. According to the 2017 U.S. census data, Portland’s population is 77.4 percent white while the Black population has dwindled from a high of 7.7 percent in 1990 to just 5.7 percent today. Though much has been written

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about the institutionally racialized roots of inequality in Oregon, contemporary factors are making it worse.

“Take a group of people who have been systematically denied wealth-building opportunities for generations, add low, stagnating incomes, throw in a subprime mortgage disaster, spiraling housing costs and wholesale community displacement, and you have a recipe for a severe economic backslide,” Cheryl Chandler-Roberts, executive director of Portland’s African American Alliance for Homeownership said in 2017, quickly adding, “There is no African American community in Portland at this point. It’s a scattered community.”[1] My family moved to Portland in 2002, leaving a rural Oregonian community that offered no economic or social future for us. But by 2010, Portland would be following the same trajectory for my family and thousands of others. More than 10,000 African Americans would be displaced from their neighborhoods between 2000 and 2010. I am one of those people.

To access the full story, click here.

3. Remix Picks Up $15 Million To Help Cities Make Better Decisions Around Transit

A San Francisco-based startup just raised $15 million to solve the complicated problem of transit infrastructure in urban environments. Remix was founded by Tiffany Chu, Dan Getelman, Danny Whalen and Sam Hashemi in 2014 following a project they built during their Code for America fellowships.

The $15 million Series B round was led by Energy Impact Partners, bringing total funding to $27 million.

Remix allows cities to plan public transit infrastructure, quickly computing how a change in a certain bus or train route or the addition of a bike lane might affect the city overall, all through a drag and drop menu. The platform also looks at how to manage private transportation options like ridesharing, dockless bikes and scooters, etc.

To access the full story, click here.

4. Born And Raised: The Parts Of America With The Most Natives The Cajun country of South Louisiana is one of many small regions interspersed throughout the U.S. where nearly everyone seems to have grown up nearby. In several rural parishes there, roughly 9 out of every 10 adults were born in the state. The local makeup elsewhere is far different, with as few as 1 in 10 adults born in-state in counties in Florida and Nevada.

These differences are largely a function of migration patterns, as Americans have gradually relocated to recently developed parts of the southern and western U.S. Much like native-born residents, those born abroad are also largely concentrated in relatively few states.

Sometimes a place may be home to a high concentration of natives because of its ability to retain residents, particularly younger adults. But more commonly, this concentration results from a failure to attract outsiders due to a lack of economic opportunity.

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Nationally, about half of adults age 25 and older live in the state where they were born, according to the most recent American Community Survey data from the Census Bureau. We’ve mapped this data for all counties, showing where there are large concentrations of transplants or native-born residents.

To access the full story, click here.

5. Consequences Of Inequality Will Strike Everyone Indiscriminately

Inequality has risen sharply in the United States since the early 1980s. Here is a telling indicator of the problem: according to my calculations, the U.S. middle class has shrunk from around 50 percent in the early 1980s to 40 percent in the mid-2010s. This decline has been continuous for more than 30 years.

From the work of economist Thomas Piketty, we know that rising inequality stems from more income going to the very rich. Piketty estimated that the top 1 percent (those making more than $500,000) of U.S. households received more than 20 percent of all U.S. income in 2014, double the 10 percent prevailing from the 1950s to the early 1980s. The top 0.1 percent (those making of at least $1.5 million) did best of all; their gains drive a large part of the gains accruing to the top 1 percent.

After many decades, it seems that we have come to regard high and rising inequality as the norm, almost a given.

To access the full story, click here.

6. The Secret Ingredient Of Resilient Cities: Culture

An oft-told urban success story is that of Medellín, Colombia. Under Pablo Escobar, the notorious drug lord that inspired the Netflix show Narcos, the city was one of the most violent places on earth in the 1980s and early 1990s. And then it became one of the most innovative—a “model city.” The reasons for that transformation are complicated. But one key driver was the local government’s focus on changing the socio-cultural narrative, which gave rise to the concept of cultura ciudadana or “citizen culture,” as a way foster a collective investment into the city’s future—especially among communities that were previously physically and socially excluded.

The city’s multi-pronged approach to planning in the decades since has centered culture: building libraries and parks, enabling art, and creating transportation access in the comunas in the hills above the city.

Culture, which includes “art and literature, lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions, and beliefs,” is an overlooked element in rebuilding cities ravaged by disasters, war, and other forms of urban distress, according to a new joint World Bank–UNESCO report.

To access the full story, click here.

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7. Can Indoor Farming Fulfill The Dream Of Opportunity Zones?

Opportunity zones and indoor farms are both new frontiers for investment, and one company is seeking to combine them.

Zale Tabakman has developed a concept for an indoor farm that grows greens, herbs and vegetables using modular construction, called Local Grown Salads. One LGS farm would be 15K SF and fabricated off-site almost entirely — even the HVAC system, often one of the costliest elements of construction. All the site needs is for the walls, floor and ceiling to be sealed and the water and power to be connected to the grid.

“It’s like installing a giant washing machine into a building,” Tabakman, who is based in Ontario, Canada, told Bisnow.

Tabakman estimates that without any delays, an LGS unit can be installed in two weeks, with its first harvest possible in 30 days, and each subsequent one 30 days after. Each plant produced will be certified organic, non-GMO and kosher (in order for greens to be kosher, they must never come into contact with insects). Each farm is estimated to cost $2.2M, require 15 to 20 workers and start producing income after 150 days.

To access the full story, click here.

8. Perfectly Legal: The Clear-Cut Rewards Of Campaign Cash

After announcing she would retire from Oregon’s Legislature early last year, Rep. Deborah Boone freely spent her remaining campaign money — on herself.

The Cannon Beach Democrat wasn’t on the ballot. She had no need for yard signs. But she had $13,000. Some legislators transfer all their leftover money to other candidates or causes. Boone spent her account dry.

She bought tangible goods: A $2,799 Apple computer, $2,000 in Volvo repairs and a $700 set of tires.

She double dipped, using campaign cash to pay bills that taxpayers also reimbursed. There was the $170 dinner during the legislative session, the multi-day $595 hotel stay in Salem, the gasoline and cell phone expenses after the session ended. Charging her campaign let her pocket some of the $10,000 in expense allowances the Legislature provided during her last year in office.

“You know, it’s legal, it’s perfectly legal to do,” Boone told The Oregonian/OregonLive. “I’m not saying I should’ve done it or whatever.”

The failure to limit campaign donations has turned Oregon into one of the biggest money states in American politics, an investigation by The Oregonian/OregonLive found. Corporate interests donate more money per resident in Oregon than in any other state. All that giving worked.

Oregon now trails its West Coast neighbors on a long list of environmental protections.

To access the full story, click here.

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9. The Karuk Tribe Fights A Growing Wildfire Threat And A Lack Of Funding Deep in California’s Six Rivers National Forest, a satisfying “crack” breaks the early morning silence as Lisa Hillman snaps a dead branch from a bush. Behind her, apple trees line up like children before recess. On the ground, there’s barely a dead leaf. Clouds hang low in the mountains.

A Karuk tribal member and program director for the Píkyav Field Institute, a unit of the Karuk Tribe’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) dedicated to environmental education, Hillman often devotes her mornings to gardening. When wildfires ignite, she says, dry vegetation becomes deadly fuel.

With drier forests and rising temperatures due to climate change, the Karuk and other tribal nations face more frequent — and more violent — wildfires. But with no direct funding from the federal government, tribes have few options: Compete with each other for grants, or break the law by relying on the traditional practice of prescribed burns to protect their homes.

“They used to call us the ‘incendiary Indians,’ ” Hillman said. “But it’s the responsible thing to do.”

In 2014, about 3,000 firefighters battled the Happy Camp Complex Fire, which swept through the nearby Klamath National Forest, burning more than 132,000 acres and destroying eight buildings and residences. The year before, 450 firefighters worked to contain a 650-acre wildfire that destroyed a Karuk elder's home. But in the remote town of Orleans, home to Hillman and many Karuk tribal members, the DNR’s fire unit is composed of fewer than 20 volunteers. The resulting lack of manpower forces locals to take on the task of wildfire management.

To access the podcast series, click here.

10. WEBINAR – EPA Office Of Community Revitalization’s Strategies For Food Systems, Health, And Economic Development Webinar (April 24 at 11am Pacific)

Improving environmental and human health outcomes in communities across the country is challenging under any circumstances. In the early part of the 21st Century this is particularly true given the economic, political, and social changes occurring. EPA’s Office of Community Revitalization has developed strategies and programs that assist communities’ efforts to take stock of their assets, identify visions for growth that supports a better environment and healthy living. Through this webinar you’ll hear how EPA collaborates with communities to grow their economies and improve the environment. Join National TAB for a webinar featuring strategies to make every community healthy, wealthy and wise.

To sign up for the webinar, click here.

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