Monday Mailing 041519

Monday Mailing Quote of the Week:

“A gush of bird-song, a patter of dew, A cloud, and a rainbow’s warning, Suddenly sunshine and perfect blue– An April day in the morning.”

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Harriet Prescott Spofford

Oregon Fast Fact #3

The Columbia River gorge is considered by many to be the best place in the world for windsurfing.

Year 25 • Issue 30 15 April 2019 1. Doing The Math On Housing The Homeless (Patrick Lynch) 2. Japan Wants To Help The Elderly By Making Cities More Dense (Ariel Kane) 3. Natural Disasters Slam Americans With Long-Term Financial Impacts 4. Small Towns Are Dying Everywhere But Here (Alexi McHugh) 5. Why Is One Of Oregon’s Top Polluters Asking For A Clean Energy Reward? (Michael Hoch) 6. Why One City Stopped Asking “How Are We Going To Move Cars Across Town?”

7. The Secret History of The Suburbs (Gabe Leon) 8. Why Wild Salmon Remains King In The Pacific Northwest 9. Why Grocery Co-Ops Build Strong Towns And How To Start Your Own 10. Forests Are A Low-Tech But High-Impact Way To Fight Climate Change 1. Doing The Math On Housing The Homeless Housing prices are chronically unaffordable in many American cities.

Most prominently, mega-cities like San Francisco and New York feature home prices that effectively price out poor and middleincome people from vast swathes of their environs; however, there are also plenty of mid-size cities that have less extreme affordability problems. Several strategies are frequently on the table to make housing more affordable to those of moderately low incomes. These include: (1) increasing allowed residential construction, (2) incentivizing housing by offering additional air/development rights, (3) subsidizing housing, (4) requiring the mandatory provision of affordable housing alongside market-rate development, and (5) increasing the amount of government-run housing.

All these strategies are potentially valid ways to address different manifestations of a lack of housing affordability. However, many provide long-term rather than short-term relief, and/or do not reach the poorest people or those in the most dire circumstances: namely, the homeless.

Homelessness is the most extreme manifestation of an affordable housing crisis, and ending homelessness is the focus of this article.

Because my objective is to end homelessness, I will use the fifth strategy of providing government-run housing. I consider homelessness to be an individualized “state of emergency,” where the government must take urgent action to address the needs of its homeless residents—much like a municipality would swiftly put out a fire or stop a bank robbery. Slow-acting tactics like zoning law changes or providing subsidies strike me as an unacceptably Page 1 of 6

lethargic solution to the immediate needs of homeless people. Governments should provide housing for the homeless first, then work to get them into various configurations of private housing over a longer term.

To access the full story, click here.

2. Japan Wants To Help The Elderly By Making Cities More Dense Trams aren’t commonly thought of as beautiful places to be. But in Toyama, Japan, city hall found a way to change that. Since 2012, the city government has been offering free rides to people who buy bouquets from participating florists to fill the trams with flowers.

The gesture is part of a wider project to make the inner city more attractive. Toyama’s “compact city” plan aims to get its 420,000-strong population moving in to designated areas with good transport links using a system of subsidies and other incentives. In doing so, it hopes to improve access to services, especially for the elderly.

The central government in Tokyo is pushing the compact city concept across the country. It’s seen as one way of tackling the twin demons of Japanese public policy — namely, a population that is both ageing fast and declining.

According to the OECD, the majority of developed countries “implicitly or explicitly” promote compact urban policy — encouraging cities to concentrate populations and development in a smaller area — for a range of reasons from the economic to the ecological. But Toyama shows that keeping development contained can have health benefits too.

To access the full story and many more resources on Apolitical, click here.

Apolitical is a global network for government, helping public servants find the ideas, people and partners they need to solve the hardest challenges facing our societies.

3. Natural Disasters Slam Americans With Long-Term Financial Impacts

As climate change intensifies, Americans are getting used to seeing the devastation from major hurricanes, floods, fires and "storms-of-the-century." While such events can temporarily hurt the nation's economy, it's easy to overlook the financial havoc -- especially in the long term -they can wreak on people caught up in any of these catastrophes.

Residents affected by a disaster often see a decline in their credit scores, are more liable to fall behind on their bills and generally experience a cascade of financial consequences, including bankruptcy and homelessness, according to new analysis from the Urban Institute.

"In general, existing disaster relief programs and other forms of assistance, along with private sources of insurance and support, do not fully protect those affected by natural disasters from their financial consequences," the researchers write in the report called "Insult to Injury: Natural Disasters and Residents Financial Health.”

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People living in an area where the disaster is medium size see the most dire consequences.

Researchers defined medium-size as roughly less than $200 million in damage instead of the billions unleashed by massive storms like Hurricanes Sandy or Harvey.

To access the full story, click here.

4. Small Towns Are Dying Everywhere But Here HAMILTON, Mont. — As small towns elsewhere saw prosperity pass them by in favor of the big cities, something unusual happened to this rural hamlet tucked in the Bitterroot Valley: It flourished.

Two local boys came home from college and launched a microbrewery that takes in more than $1 million in annual sales. Retirees arrived in droves, drawn by affordable land and recreation opportunities in the area’s snow-frosted mountains and trout-filled streams. And the federal government’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories opened a state-of-the-art biosafety facility to investigate the deadliest viral diseases, including Ebola.

As U.S. economic growth in the past decade assumed an increasingly urban character, that diverse set of strengths enabled this town to defy a pervasive narrative of rural decline.

Hamilton’s population of 4,728 is up more than 10 percent since 2010, reflecting a Western renaissance that contrasts with the experience of small towns in other regions.

“It’s a pretty sweet spot to be in,” said economist Ray Rasker, of Headwaters Economics in Bozeman, Mont. “You can have the same job you’d have in Seattle and go fly-fishing in the afternoon. . . . It’s the quality of life. It attracts talent. Pretty soon, talent builds on itself, and word gets out.”

To access the full story, click here.

5. Why Is One Of Oregon’s Top Polluters Asking For A Clean Energy Reward?

A bill moving through the Oregon Legislature would give one trash incineration company a financial reward that's intended for clean energy producers. Environmental advocates are calling foul on the bill, and fighting to kill it before it goes to a vote.

Senate Bill 451 would allow companies that produce electricity from trash incineration to receive renewable energy credits, or RECs. Companies that earn RECs can sell them to utility providers—like Portland General Electric, for example—which are required to meet statemandated renewable energy goals. Essentially, SB 451 would make it possible for trash incinerators to cash in on incentives designed to reward clean energy producers like wind turbines and solar farms.

And there’s only one trash incinerator in Oregon that would qualify under SB 451: Covanta, a national company with a facility near Salem. In fact, Sen. Lee Beyer, a Democrat from Springfield, introduced the bill on behalf of Covanta.

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“We’re talking about rewarding a trash incinerator,” says Damon Motz-Storey, a clean energy organizer with environmental advocacy group Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility (Oregon PSR). “Burning plastic… could be rewarded and defined as a renewable energy source.”

Oregon PSR is part of a coalition of Oregon environmental advocates who see the legislation as backwards. They argue that because Covanta produces greenhouse gasses that contribute to climate change—as well as toxins associated with burning plastic—the company shouldn’t receive any benefits that are intended to encourage clean energy production.

To access the full story, click here.

6. Why One City Stopped Asking “How Are We Going To Move Cars Across Town”?

The hardest—but also most important—part of making public policy is making sure that you’re asking the right questions.

Cities and societies are complex systems, and every moving piece within them affects a thousand other moving pieces. It’s impossible to grasp all of this complexity at once, so to get things done, we necessarily deal with a series of much simpler questions. These simpler questions usually try to isolate one problem and a set of possible responses to it. But define the problem too narrowly, and you’re going to find that your “solutions” are futile, because all you’re doing is moving it around, or creating a new problem by solving an earlier one.

The Problem With "How Are We Going to Move the Cars”?

The business-as-usual approach of the traffic engineering profession is an example par excellence of this. We define the problem of traffic congestion as, “Not moving enough cars through Point X,” or "Not moving cars through Point X fast enough.” We quantify the problem using a measure like Vehicle Level of Service (LOS), which defines free-flowing traffic as desirable (grade “A”) and tightly spaced traffic that causes drivers to slow down as a problem (grade “D” or below), regardless of context or the effects of the road on the surrounding environment.

And worst of all, optimizing for Level of Service never solves our traffic problems. At best, it removes congestion temporarily from one location, while increasing it somewhere else. Even if a city undertakes a comprehensive campaign to widen roads throughout town, it’s likely to find that traffic will return to its previous congested levels before long—a phenomenon called induced demand—because the city has now given people every incentive to drive more often and to live farther away.

To access the full story, click here.

7. The Secret History Of The Suburbs

Back in the early 1960s, Malvina Reynolds wrote a song called “Little Boxes,” inspired by a drive past rows of lookalike pastel-hued houses in a new suburban housing tract in the Bay Area. (Her friend Pete Seeger had a hit with the song in 1963.) Reynolds saw the cookie-cutter houses as both symbols and shapers of the conformist mindset of the people who lived in them—doctors and lawyers who aspired to nothing more than playing golf and raising children who would one day inhabit “ticky-tacky” boxes of their own.

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But Reynolds was wrong about who lived in this suburb, Daly City, just south of San Francisco. It was not originally home to the martini-chuffing doctors and lawyers she imagined, but to working-class and lower-middle-class (white) strivers who were the last group to get in on the postwar housing boom.

Then, only a few years after Reynolds wrote the song, Filipinos and other immigrants from Asia began arriving in Daly City. The “ticky-tacky” architecture that Reynolds scorned proved amenable to them remodeling and expanding homes for extended families, and Daly City became the “Pinoy capital” of the U.S., with the highest concentration of immigrants from the Philippines in America.

Clichés and misconceptions still define suburbia in the popular imagination, and it drives me crazy. I live in Montgomery County, Maryland, outside of Washington, D.C. I’m a suburbanite, but my life doesn’t revolve around manicured lawns, status anxiety, or a craving for homogeneity. My suburban experience is riding the bus as people chat around me in Spanish and French Creole. It’s having neighbors who hail from Tibet, Brazil, and Kenya as well as Cincinnati. It’s my son attending a school that reflects the diversity—and stubborn inequality— of America today.

To access the full story, click here.

8. Why Wild Salmon Remains King In The Pacific Northwest

Patrolling the front of his shop in bright orange deck pants, the fishmonger drums up a little impromptu drama for tourists fingering their wallets. “What’s the matter?” he asks the crowd, putting his hands on his hips. “Never been properly introduced to the king before?” He extends an open hand.

At Seattle’s Pike Place Market, where a ragtag collection of produce, meat, and seafood stalls overlooks the city’s downtown waterfront, crowds gather around comforting displays of food.

Stacked like treasure on cushions of ice, several king salmon stare blankly back, their thick sides burnished with a silver sheen. As one of the top three favorite seafoods globally (along with tuna and shrimp), salmon isn’t a tough sell. A couple on vacation from Kalamazoo, Michigan, giggles and points to a 10-pounder. The fishmonger closes the deal with a pretend shake of the fin and tosses the fish theatrically to his colleague behind the counter, who makes a backhanded circus catch before brandishing a large fillet knife that gleams in his hand.

Each spring, as the dogwoods begin to bloom, salmon leave the deep-blue pastures of the North Pacific and return to their natal streams to spawn and die. For millennia, people in salmon country—from Alaska to California and inland to Idaho—have celebrated this miraculous gift from the sea.

To research my book on salmon culture, I traveled the region and spent time with those who know salmon best, from commercial and tribal fishermen to scientists, anglers, and chefs, all of them connected in one form or another to the ultimate wild food in North America.

To access the full story, click here.

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9. Why Grocery Co-Ops Build Strong Towns And How To Start Your Own 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.

Say you live in a neighborhood where residents have poor access to groceries, such as produce, meat, and household necessities. You have the liquor stores and the fast-food spots—but no establishment where you can purchase items to prepare a meal or grab an apple.

What solutions come to mind to solve this problem?

Likely, only one: do whatever you can to lure a grocery corporation to your town. Sadly, no matter how many online signatures you generate, it’s highly unlikely that a corporation—putting projected profits above all—will move to your neighborhood.

And even if they do, it will likely mean your local government has to give the corporation subsidies and other corporate tax incentives—a risky bet that makes your city or town less financially resilient.

This is discouraging. You know your neighborhood needs better access to groceries, but the obvious solution is likely out of reach.

Thankfully, there’s another solution that, with a clear vision and buy-in from your peers and local government, can fill this much needed void: starting a neighborhood grocery co-op.

To access the podcast, click here.

10. Forests Are A Low-Tech But High-Impact Way To Fight Climate Change

Climate change disproportionately affects the world's most vulnerable people, particularly poor rural communities that depend on the land for their livelihoods and coastal populations throughout the tropics. We have already seen the stark asymmetry of suffering that results from extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, floods, droughts, wildfires, and more.

For remedies, advocates and politicians have tended to look toward cuts in fossil-fuel use or technologies to capture carbon before it enters the atmosphere—both of which are crucial. But this focus has overshadowed the most powerful and cost-efficient carbon capture technology in the world. Recent research confirms that forests are absolutely essential in mitigating climate change, thanks to their ability to absorb and sequester carbon. In fact, natural climate solutions such as conservation and restoration of forests, along with improvements in land management, can help us achieve 37 percent of our climate target of limiting warming to a maximum of two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, even though they currently receive only 2.5 percent of public climate financing.

To access the full story, click here.

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