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Monday Mailing

Year 23 • Issue 35 12 June 2017 1. Free Report: The Best Complete Street Policies of 2016 2. Stormwater Innovations Mean Cities Don’t Just Flush Rainwater Down The Drain 3. Webinar: Using Form-Based Codes to Create Vibrant, Walkable Communities - Wed, Jun 21, 2017 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM PDT 4. Revisiting: What's The Matter With Portland?

5. Why Old Trees Matter 6. Frontier and Remote (FAR) Codes Pinpoint Nation’s Most Remote Regions 7. “Blueprint for a National Food Strategy” Coffee Talk Webinar & Follow Up Videoconference 8. Free Report: Preservation for People - A Vision for the Future 9. The Hidden Ways That Architecture Affects How You Feel 10. These Google StreetView Cars Are Now Mapping and Measuring Pollution 11. Communities Question Risk of Expanding Fossil Fuel Corridor Along Columbia River 1. Free Report: The Best Complete Street Policies of 2016 As of the end of 2016, more than 1,000 jurisdictions in the United States have made formal commitments to streets that are safe and convenient for everyone—no matter their age, income, race, ethnicity, physical ability, or how they choose to travel—by passing a Complete Streets policy.

Quote of the Week: “This activist loves Oregon more than he loves life.”

-Tom McCall

Oregon Fast Fact: Oregon grows 98 percent of the hazelnuts in the United States. There are more than 3,755,000 hazelnut trees in Oregon, worth $49.5 million, grown on 30,000 acres, mostly in western Oregon.

More communities passed these policies in 2016 than ever before.

Communities adopted a total of 222 new Complete Streets policies that year. Nationwide, a total of 1,232 policies are now in place, in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia, including 33 state governments, 77 regional planning organizations, and 955 individual municipalities.

The 2016 policies are the strongest ever passed. When the Coalition first analyzed Complete Streets polices in 2006, the median score was 34 and by 2015 the median score had risen to 68.4. In 2016, the median score leapt to 80.8. Before 2012, no policy had scored higher than 90. And it wasn’t until 2015 that any policy score a perfect 100. In 2016, 51 policies scored a 90 or higher, including 3 policies that scored a perfect 100. These gains are a testament to communities’ commitment to passing strong, impactful policies.

To access the full report, click here.

2. Stormwater Innovations Mean Cities Don’t Just Flush Rainwater Down The Drain This article is part of The Conversation’s series on drought. You can read the rest of the series here.

More than half the world’s population lives in metropolitan centers. The built environment of a city is very different from that of rural and natural areas. When it rains over a rural landscape, much of the rainwater sinks into the ground or is evaporated or transpirated by trees, crops and other plants.

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Transpiration is the biological process in which plants pull moisture out of the soil by their roots and release water vapor to the atmosphere through small openings in their leaves. Every day, plants release large quantities of water vapor. Growing plants can transpire up to 10 times as much water as they hold in their stems and leaves. These slow, natural processes allow precipitation to replenish groundwater and sustain vegetation, leaving only a small amount of water as overland flow or runoff.

To access the full story, click here.

3. Webinar: Using Form-Based Codes to Create Vibrant, Walkable Communities - Wed, Jun 21, 2017 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM PDT Join this Smart Growth Network webinar to learn how communities are using form-based codes to create vibrant, walkable places.

Chris Zimmerman of the Form-Based Codes Institute and Smart Growth America will draw upon his experience in Arlington, Virginia to explain what form-based codes are, how they work and, most importantly, why they matter to planners and public officials who want to create walkable communities.

Arlington County used FBC as part of an effort to transform Columbia Pike from an auto-oriented corridor into a lively Main Street lined with restaurants, retail and attractive public spaces. Chris will use this example and others to explore the basics of FBC for planners and others who are familiar with the concept and want to learn more.

To register for this webinar, click here.

4. Revisiting: What's The Matter With Portland?

In October 2016, we ran a series of articles from Charles Marohn about Portland's housing challenges—inspired by a Strong Towns trip to Portland. This week, in light of a new series we're running about incremental development, we felt it was time to revisit this Portland housing series and continue this important discussion about affordable housing, incremental growth and what it all means for modern American cities. If you'd like to skip ahead and read the whole series, you can do that here, but if you'd like to join the conversation this week (and we hope you do) please read on and comment with your thoughts. - The Strong Towns Team Last week was my first experience with Portland, Oregon. We've been trying to schedule a Strong Towns event there for some time so a trip has been long overdue, but still. When I was in graduate school pursuing a degree in urban and regional planning, it seemed like one out of four lectures contained Portland as a case study and that at least half of my class intended to move there upon graduation. It has a certain lore in my mind.

From an urban design standpoint, downtown Portland didn't disappoint. It's a planner's Disneyland.

Block after block of the consistently best urban form I've experienced in North America. I spent a lot of time just walking around and taking it all in. Very impressive.

To access the full story, click here.

5. Why Old Trees Matter Restoring our landscapes to more resilient conditions requires us to consider the mixture of tree species, spacing of those trees, and diversity in age class present across a landscape. A multitude of mid-seral closed forest conditions and overly dense forest stands across the Blue Mountains pose risks to the valuable ecosystem services that the forests provide, especially in the face of a changing Page 2 of 5

climate. Restoration treatments in priority watersheds present an opportunity to be thoughtful about where we conduct active management. This includes mechanical thinning and prescribed fire to conserve and promote wildlife habitat, increase tree species diversity, and improve spatial pattern and variation to create more resilient forests.

Addressing degraded forest conditions and improving forest resilience will only be effective if there is an intentional effort to promote the re-establishment of large, old trees. The Blue Mountains Restoration Strategy and Forest Resiliency Project strives to retain old trees as part of the existing large tree structure in restoration planning because they are underrepresented in many subwatersheds To access the full story, click here.

6. Frontier and Remote (FAR) Codes Pinpoint Nation’s Most Remote Regions To assist in providing policy-relevant information about conditions in sparsely-settled, remote areas of the U.S. to public officials, researchers, and the general public, ERS has developed ZIP-code-level frontier and remote area (FAR) codes. The aim is not to provide a single definition, but to meet the demand for a delineation that is both geographically detailed and adjustable with reasonable ranges, in order to be usefully applied in diverse research and policy contexts. This updated set of codes, based on urban-rural data from the 2010 decennial census, provides four FAR definition levels, ranging from one that is relatively inclusive (12.2 million FAR level one residents) to one that is more restrictive (2.3 million FAR level four residents).

The term "frontier and remote" is used here to describe territory characterized by some combination of low population size and high geographic remoteness. FAR areas are defined in relation to the time it takes to travel by car to the edges of nearby Urban Areas (UAs). Four levels are necessary because rural areas experience degrees of remoteness at higher or lower population levels that affect access to different types of goods and services. A relatively large number of people live far from cities providing "high order" goods and services, such as advanced medical procedures, stores selling major household appliances, regional airport hubs, or professional sports franchises. Level one FAR codes are meant to approximate this degree of remoteness. A much smaller, but still significant, number of people find it hard to access "low order" goods and services, such as grocery stores, gas stations, and basic health-care services. Level four FAR codes more closely coincide with this much higher degree of remoteness. Other types of goods and services—clothing stores, car dealerships, movie theaters— fall somewhere in between. Users are able to choose the definition that bests suits their specific needs.

To access the full detail of FAR Codes, click here.

7. “Blueprint for a National Food Strategy” Coffee Talk Webinar & Follow Up Videoconference The Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law School and Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic teamed up to create an interactive Blueprint for a National Food Strategy. Check it out and join the CFN and the Blueprint authors for a national webinar and a follow-up regional discussion to learn more and contribute to the dialogue! Details below.

Click here to register for the the June 15, 2-3PM national webinar to explore the recently released “Blueprint for a National Food Strategy” a collaborative project between the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law School and Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic.

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Click here to register for the June 26, 1-2PM regional videoconference. Join us for this follow-up regional videoconference about how the Blueprint for a National Food Strategy may impact the Chesapeake Bay region and how the Chesapeake region can lay the groundwork for a National Strategy. Everyone welcome! Please note that participation is limited to the first 50 registrants to logon, so sign up and hop on early.

For more information, click here.

8. Free Report: Preservation for People - A Vision for the Future This report from the National Trust for Historic Preservation represents the culmination of more than a year of aspirational thought and discussion among preservationists, scholars, and others closely aligned with or affected by their work, including architects, artists, community advocates, developers, and municipal leaders. After 50 years of achievement under the National Historic Preservation Act, this report takes stock of the current direction, strengths, and shortcomings of historic preservation; and develops a vision to guide efforts for the next 50 years.

To access the full report, click here.

9. The Hidden Ways That Architecture Affects How You Feel “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us,” mused Winston Churchill in 1943 while considering the repair of the bomb-ravaged House of Commons.

More than 70 years on, he would doubtless be pleased to learn that neuroscientists and psychologists have found plenty of evidence to back him up.

We now know, for example, that buildings and cities can affect our mood and well-being, and that specialised cells in the hippocampal region of our brains are attuned to the geometry and arrangement of the spaces we inhabit.

Yet urban architects have often paid scant attention to the potential cognitive effects of their creations on a city’s inhabitants. The imperative to design something unique and individual tends to override considerations of how it might shape the behaviours of those who will live with it. That could be about to change.

To access the full story, click here.

10. These Google StreetView Cars Are Now Mapping and Measuring Pollution If you stand next to an experimental Google StreetView car in Oakland, you’ll hear whirring. On top of the vehicle–below the usual cameras taking photos of the street–a mechanical system with pumps is pulling in the outdoor air, feeding it through a set of tubes to air-pollution monitoring equipment in the trunk, and then pumping the exhaust back outside again.

The car is one of two from Google Earth Outreach that Aclima, a San Francisco-based company, equipped with a mobile air-quality platform. Over the last year–as each car drove six to eight hours a day around Oakland, repeatedly sampling every street in one section of the city–researchers collected the largest-ever set of urban air pollution data, and studied how the system could be used to better understand city air quality. The project was convened by the nonprofit EDF. To access the full story, click here.

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11. Communities Question Risk of Expanding Fossil Fuel Corridor Along Columbia River On June 3, 2016, a 96-car Union Pacific train loaded with crude oil originating from the Bakken Shale region was headed to a refinery in Tacoma, Washington. The train derailed on the route, causing a fire, an oil spill, and serious disruption to rural Mosier, Oregon (population 433).

Interstate 84 was closed. Mosier’s wastewater treatment plant and the Columbia River were inundated with leaking crude oil. Residents of the small town were evacuated.

Though no lives were lost, residents of the area say the Mosier derailment demonstrates the serious risks posed by rail transport of fossil fuels through the area.

“We really feel like the whole region dodged a bullet at Mosier last year,” said Paul Blackburn, mayor of Hood River just a few miles west of Mosier. “There were kids standing at the windows of the schoolhouse, just a few hundred feet away. They were looking out over the fire. Thank God it wasn’t windy that day.”

Blackburn’s town, and the Columbia River Gorge region more broadly, is known as the “windsurfing capital of the world” due to its normally high wind-speeds and access to open water. The region’s economy is highly diversified featuring agriculture from local fruit orchards, grape production, fishing, water-based recreation, manufacturing, and tourism.

To access the full story, click here.

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