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Monday Mailing

Year 23 • Issue 27 10 April 2017 1. Free Webinar: Fostering Smart Growth in Rural Communities - May 4, 2017 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM PDT 2. Local Media Know The Problems: How About Helping Communities Get to Solutions?

3. Are Millennials Really the Generation That Bikes?

4. Headwaters Economic Profile System-Human Dimensions Toolkit 5. Infinite Earth Academy 6. Infrastructure as Permaculture 7. 10 Ways to Speak Truth to Powerful Lies 8. 2017 State of Entrepreneurship Address - Report 9. Urban Land Institute Toolkit on Strategies to Enhance Health Outcomes Through the Built Environment 10. Mastering the Confidence Game: How to Revitalize Communities When State and Federal Funding Dries Up 11. A New, Powerful Data Tool For Cities 1. Free Webinar: Fostering Smart Growth in Rural Communities May 4, 2017 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM PDT The vitality of rural communities has become a focus of national debate as policymakers and stakeholders pursue strategies to create more jobs in rural areas. The success of these efforts will depend upon political will, capacity building and workforce development.

Quote of the Week: "They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself." ~Andy Warhol Oregon Fast Fact: The total elevation, in feet, of the Three Sisters is 30,490 feet. Each of the three peaks is over 10,000 feet in elevation. The South Sister is the tallest at 10,358 feet, while the Middle and North Sisters are 10,047 and 10,085 feet respectively.

In this webinar, Kendra Briechle of the Conservation Fund will look at how rural communities are carrying out smart growth principles by investing in their downtowns, expanding transportation choices, creating economic opportunities and protecting the cultural and natural resources of rural landscapes. The Conservation Fund partners with communities nationwide to complete livability assessments and apply a range of tools to help enhance their quality of life. This webinar will explain these approaches and highlight success stories in Colorado, Michigan and Oregon.

Panelist: Kendra Briechle is Manager for Community and Economic Development at the Conservation Fund in Arlington, Virginia. She forges on-the-ground conservation solutions by developing balanced economic and environmental results that meet the needs of diverse professionals.

To register for this webinar, click here.

2. Local Media Know The Problems: How About Helping Communities Get to Solutions?

VALE, Oregon — Community journalism might help get the country back on the path to civility in public affairs.

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At the moment, we’re behaving nationally as two people in a conversation talking past each other.

Neither side hears the other. Volume substitutes for reason.

Local journalists have the tools to change that, but the step ahead may be scary for some.

At small-town newspapers and radio stations, performance is standard. They report the news – last night’s city council meeting, the hospital bond election results. They give voice to local opinions and views – letters to the editor, guest columns, public affairs programming.

And then they call it “job done.”

To access the full story, click here.

3. Are Millennials Really the Generation That Bikes?

By Jennifer Dill, Ph.D.,TREC director -- Much has been written about millennials and their travel choices, both in the popular press and academic journals. The common theme of the storyline in the popular press is that millennials are driving less, owning fewer cars, and/or not getting their driver’s license. As a complement to that, they are early adopters of new modes, such as car sharing, bike sharing, and ridehailing. One assertion is that they would rather be using their mobile device in a Lyft car or on transit, than sitting behind the wheel. While the popular press often attributes these shifts to fundamental changes in attitudes or values, research from academics such as Noreen McDonald tells a more complicated story. McDonald found that economics, both decreased employment and the overall dampening in travel demand, explain much of the decrease in millennials’ driving. Switching modes did not, though attitudes and electronic substitution may account for 35-50% of the change. Researchers at UCLA came to a similar conclusion. And University of Michigan researchers noted that reduced licensing rates appear across generations. And, of course, the question remains as to what will happen as these millennials age. There is already evidence that some of the trends are shifting as the economy has improved.

To access the full story, click here.

4. Headwaters Economic Profile System-Human Dimensions Toolkit Economic Profile System-Human Dimensions Toolkit which allows users to produce free, detailed socioeconomic profiles at a variety of geographic scales. Free, easy-to-use software that produces 14 different detailed socioeconomic reports of counties, states, and regions, including custom aggregations.

Updates to the new demographics report use the latest available data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. New pages have been added that describe employment by occupation and industry, labor, commuting patterns, components of household earnings, and housing characteristics.

To access this toolkit, click here.

5. Infinite Earth Academy Infinite Earth Academy is an idea sharing, training, mentoring, networking, and movement building platform. We believe the path to a more sustainable, resilient, and equitable future is through radical innovation at the local level and rapidly spreading the best ideas, strategies, and tools.

Local and regional leaders are already making great progress in addressing the pressing environmental, economic, and social challenges of our time, but we need to more rapidly spread the best ideas and dramatically increase sustainability, resiliency, and equity in communities across the United States.

Our mission is to support visionary local leaders through idea sharing, training, mentoring, and most importantly by creating a support network and building a movement.

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About the Podcast Infinite Earth Radio is a weekly podcast hosted by Mike Hancox and Vernice Miller-Travis.

Each week we interview visionary leaders, dedicated government officials, savvy businesses and forward thinking individuals who are working to build smarter, more equitable, sustainable, and prosperous communities through social and economic inclusion that values the contribution of all citizens and seeks meaningful lives for everyone.

For more information, click here.

6. Infrastructure as Permaculture Can our paved grid of roads and sidewalks evolve into an ecology of functions that benefit both residents and the environment?

The majority of the developed, American landscape has been crafted around automotive transport. As auto technology matured, increasing amounts of resources and area have been devoted to expanding and solidifying our road network. The result has often been environments that are built for a monoculture of cars and their passengers rather than an ecology of transit that supports a variety of mobility options. In order for our streetscapes to evolve to cater to pedestrians more than cars, so too must the car-oriented infrastructure evolve in what kinds of services it provides to its municipality. A broader array of roles can allow infrastructure to improve quality of life in multiple ways with systems that complement each other.

To access the full story, click here.

7. 10 Ways to Speak Truth to Powerful Lies In an era of fake news, alternative facts, and downright lies, it’s a daily struggle to promote the continued benefit of our social justice work and a positive, inclusive vision for our country that’s rooted in truth and fairness. And when the loudest and most virulent falsehoods come from the highest levels of government, this challenge can feel overwhelming.

Research and experience point to clear ways that we as advocates, journalists, and citizens can overcome the fiction and push reality. Here are 10 of them: 1. Understand the Strategy Behind the Lie Political lies are not random. Each one has a clear purpose. When pressure was growing for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to resign after falsely telling Congress he’d had no contact with Russia during the presidential campaign, President Trump tweeted, falsely, that President Obama had surveilled Trump Tower during the campaign.

To access the full story, click here.

8. 2017 State of Entrepreneurship Address - Report During the event, Kauffman President and CEO Wendy Guillies outlined how entrepreneurs are driving a resurgence of business activity in America but that a long-term decline in entrepreneurship has prevented millions of Americans from achieving economic success.

The Kauffman Foundation also released a new report that reveals three megatrends that are fundamentally reshaping entrepreneurship in America:

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1. New demographics of entrepreneurship: The U.S. is becoming more racially diverse, but entrepreneurs – 80.2 percent white and 64.5 percent male – do not reflect the changing population.

2. New map of entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurship is an increasingly urban phenomenon, and it is taking place in mid-sized metros and outside traditional hubs like Boston and Silicon Valley.

3. New nature of entrepreneurship: In the past, as companies grew their revenue, jobs would scale at almost the same pace. That’s no longer true. Technology has made it possible for startups to grow revenue without as much hiring, and high-growth companies by revenue are not creating as many jobs as they did in the past.

To respond to these trends shaping entrepreneurship, the Kauffman Foundation is launching a new “Zero Barriers to Startup” initiative. The collaborative, nationwide effort will identify large and small barriers to new business creation to reverse the long-term decline in entrepreneurship. Along with entrepreneurs and policymakers, Kauffman will work to develop solutions and empower more entrepreneurs to pursue their ambitions.

Additional information about Zero Barriers to Startup is available at www.entrepreneurship.org/zerobarriers To access the report, click here.

9. Urban Land Institute Toolkit on Strategies to Enhance Health Outcomes Through the Built Environment The Urban Land Institute has a toolkit, Building Healthy Places Toolkit: Strategies for Enhancing Health in the Built Environment, that outlines 21 practical, evidence-based recommendations that the development community can use to promote health at the building or project scale. The recommendations, based on the latest documentation of the need for and impact of building for health, were formulated to help developers, owners, property managers, designers, and investors understand opportunities to integrate health promoting practices into real estate development.

The release of the report is in response to declining health trends in the United States and other countries around the world, with many of the conditions linked to past land use decisions that limited options for healthy, active living environments.

Click here to download the report.

Click here to download a poster with a summary of the 21 recommendations.

10. Mastering the Confidence Game: How to Revitalize Communities When State and Federal Funding Dries Up This article shows how to build local renewal capacity, making your city or region less vulnerable to the ebb and flow of state and federal funding that often accompanies changing political administrations.

These lessons apply to cash-strapped communities anywhere in the world. But it was written primarily due to the Trump administration’s “freeze” on Environmental Protection Agency grants and contracts, which has thrown hundreds of local redevelopment programs into a state of emergency.

Of course, the U.S. federal government has many other programs that help places with their various regenerative agendas: revitalizing downtowns, restoring natural resources, renovating historic buildings, renewing infrastructure, remediating contaminated properties, etc. Such programs are, in general, highlyefficient uses of federal funds, with a very high ROI (more on this later).

To access the full story, click here.

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11. A New, Powerful Data Tool For Cities I've long believed that most cities don't really have a good grasp on what they are. They most definitely know what they have: there are thousands of city officials across the country who can go into great detail about the housing, streets and highways, businesses and other data points about their city. But very few have any idea of their city in a larger context. How does one city's aging housing stock, for example, compare to that in another city? What makes your city similar to, or different from, some other city?

Similarly, most cities generally have done a poor job of actually trying to find peers to compare themselves with, and establishing reasonable benchmarks based on their selections. Most urban policymakers usually evaluate cities that are physically close to them, or similar in population size, or culturally similar. That can lead to some misleading comparisons. The cities of Detroit, Washington, Boston and Portland are nearly identical in population, with fewer than 30,000 people separating them.

Does that make them similar? Nashville and Memphis are similarly sized and located within the same state, but they're vastly different cities in terms of economy, demographic composition, age, education, housing, and other factors. The same could be said about Cleveland and Cincinnati, or Kansas City and St. Louis. Ultimately this can result in misleading comparisons, pushing some cities to seek a policy path that was easily achievable and successful for one city, but a difficult task leading to failure for another.

To access the full story, click here.

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