Monday Mailing 062419

Monday Mailing

Year 25 • Issue 39 24 June 2019 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

Depaving Paradise: Grassroots Portland Group Reclaims Parking Lots By Hand (Gabriel Leon) Mixed Water Supply Conditions Affect Hydropower Outlook In Pacific Northwest (Michael Hoch) Google Will Devote $1 Billion To Try To Tame Housing Costs in SF Bay Area (Emily Bradley) Feds Should Modernize Payments To Forest Communities, Groups Say What Is Traditional Development? (Gabriel Leon) Americans Need More Neighbors (Emily Bradley) Work-Life Balance Is A Myth. Do This Instead (Corum Ketchum) Cap And Trade: What Could Oregon’s Carbon Policy Cost You? (Michael Walker) The Case For A Fareless TriMet (Ariel Kane) Impossible Foods And Regenerative Grazers Face Off In A Carbon Farming Dust-Up (Bayoán Ware)

1. Depaving Paradise: Grassroots Portland Group Reclaims

Parking Lots By Hand

A little less asphalt. A little more greenery.

Quote of the Week:

" Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time.”

- John Lubbock

Oregon Fast Fact #19

In 1876 the University of Oregon opened in Eugene.

Deady Hall was the first building on campus and still exists.

That’s the mission of Depave Portland, a volunteer group that is deconstructing parking lots all across the Oregon city, replacing them with water filtration gardens, or playgrounds for children.

Since its founding in 2008, the organization has deconstructed some 75 parking lots across Portland, removing 150,000 square feet of pavement by hand with the help of more than 3,000 volunteers. Its projects have diverted more than 3.5 millions gallons of stormwater runoff from local watersheds.

The movement is spreading; Depave groups modeled on Portland’s are now active in Canada, Cincinnati and Tennessee.

Carlos Nuñez, a member of the board, spoke with Streetsblog to explain the motivation and how it all works.

Streetsblog: So how did this idea for an organization get started?

Nuñez: It started in 2008. I don’t think the folks who started it [Arif Khan and Kasandra Griffin] planned on starting an organization.

There were just two people who wanted a garden. But the backyard was all paved. It was a parking lot for the people who lived there before.

Page 1 of 7

They took it out and planted a garden a pomegranate tree. They thought, “Oh, this is really cool, we should do this in other places.” They went ahead and did it at a friend’s house. Somehow they got an opportunity to do it at an actual parking lot in Portland.

To access the full story, click here.

2. Mixed Water Supply Conditions Affect Hydropower Outlook In Pacific Northwest On June 6, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northwest River Forecast Center (NWRFC) released its final Pacific Northwest water supply projection of 2019. The forecast through September, the end of the current water year, shows above-average water supply in the southern half of the Columbia River Basin and below-average supply in the northern half.

The Pacific Northwest is home to nearly one-third of the country’s hydroelectric capacity.

Hydroelectric supply in the Pacific Northwest can have implications for the use of other electricity-generating fuels in the region and electricity trade with neighboring areas.

Snowpack, or accumulated winter snowfall, can indicate how much water will be available to power hydroelectric generators throughout the year as meltwater flows through the river basin.

Regional snowpack patterns in the Pacific Northwest help to drive the NWRFC forecast. The southern half of the Columbia River Basin developed an above-normal snowpack earlier this year following above-normal snowfall in February 2019.

Conversely, snowpack in the northern half was near or below normal. These differences in regional snowpack are reflected in the regional differences in the water supply forecast for April through September.

To access the full story, click here.

3. Google Will Devote $1 Billion To Try To Tame Housing Costs in SF Bay Area

Google is committing $1 billion to try to provide more affordable housing in the San Francisco Bay Area, where big tech firms have been blamed for putting home prices out of reach for anyone without a rich stock-option plan. Google says the money should result in 20,000 new homes added to the local market, over 10 years.

"We hope this plays a role in addressing the chronic shortage of affordable housing options for long-time middle and low income residents," Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a statement unveiling the plan Tuesday.

As Google and other big tech companies have thrived, many people have struggled to find housing in the region or have been forced into lengthy commutes — 90 miles in at least one case.

People earning $100,000 can afford to live in only 28 percent of the Bay Area's neighborhoods, member station KQED reported last month, based on a review of housing costs and median rent

Page 2 of 7

rates. And a study published in April found that the Bay Area had the third-largest population of people experiencing homelessness in the U.S. Google's announcement comes one week after Mountain View's city council postponed a move to ban RVs from parking overnight on the city's streets — a phenomenon that made headlines last month when reports emerged that hundreds of people were living in RVs to escape high rents.

To access the full story, click here.

4. Feds Should Modernize Payments To Forest Communities, Groups Say Counties with large tracts of public lands depend on federal payments to help make up their property-tax revenue shortfall. A proposal to create a “National Resources Trust” would get these communities off the payment treadmill and onto firmer footing, says one of the fund's proponents.

Many rural counties containing U. S. Forest Service lands depend on federal revenue-sharing payments from commercial activities to pay for schools, roads, law enforcement and other public services. While that arrangement has historically encouraged aggressive timber harvest for lumber, new research and a push from rural conservation groups is pointing to a new approach that will stabilize county revenues.

“It’s not all about timber production anymore,” said Mark Haggerty, a researcher at Headwaters Economics who focuses on rural counties and their relationship with federal public lands and local economic development trends.

Haggerty spends much of his time comparing U. S. Forest Service Timber Cut and Sold Reports with Gross Receipts from Commercial Activities. “The first thing to point out on gross receipts is that this revenue earned by the Forest Service for activities on public lands. That’s what becomes the basis for the revenue-sharing payments back to local governments,” Haggerty said.

County governments and schools are paid by the federal government for the tax-exempt status of federal public lands within their boundaries. These payments often make up a significant portion of county and schools budgets, particularly in rural counties with extensive public land ownership.

To access the full story, click here.

5. What Is Traditional Development?

The traditional development pattern refers to the approach to growth and development that humans used for thousands of years across different cultures, continents and latitudes. Preautomobile cities, big and small, in countless societies, share an eerie similarity of design. Public spaces are built to a human scale, where a person on foot can feel comfortable and safe. Most of a person's day-to-day needs are accessible by walking. Finally, traditionally-developed towns and cities are built incrementally over time, rather than all at once to a finished state.

Page 3 of 7

When we look back at the way prior human civilizations built their places, when we study the way they assembled their streets, designed and placed their buildings and phased their infrastructure, we can start to appreciate the wisdom embedded in this approach, understanding that it was developed over thousands of years of trial and error experimentation.

This is why Strong Towns refers frequently to the "traditional development pattern." We are describing not just a physical form but an approach to growth and development that history has revealed to be resilient and financially productive.

Four key features of the traditional development pattern are the following: 1. Traditional development is remarkably consistent in its design across societies and continents.

Visit cities around the world that existed before the advent of the automobile, and you'll find a clear commonality in these and other urban design features: Human-scaled design: Streets and public spaces provide a sense of enclosure, like an outdoor room, that makes people feel safe and comfortable. A space that is too expansive and imposing is uncomfortable to linger in.

Walkable distances: The prevailing transportation technology for most of human history was two legs, and so traditionally-developed cities are compact enough that many daily needs can be met on foot.

A fine-grained mix of uses: Homes and businesses are not strictly separated the way they are in many modern cities and suburbs. A common pattern found worldwide is a store on the first floor of a building, and an apartment upstairs in which the shopkeeper lives. This type of arrangement has persisted because it is cost-saving and flexible, and makes it easy to balance running a business with needs such as child care.

To access the full story, click here.

6. Americans Need More Neighbors Housing is one area of American life where government really is the problem. The United States is suffering from an acute shortage of affordable places to live, particularly in the urban areas where economic opportunity increasingly is concentrated. And perhaps the most important reason is that local governments are preventing construction.

Don’t be misled by the construction cranes that punctuate city skylines. The number of housing units completed in the United States last year, adjusted for the size of the population, was lower than in any year between 1968 and 2008. And the problem is most acute in major urban areas along the east and west coasts. Housing prices, and homelessness, are rising across the country because there is not enough housing.

Increasing the supply of urban housing would help to address a number of the problems plaguing the United States. Construction could increase economic growth and create blue-collar jobs. Allowing more people to live in cities could mitigate inequality and reduce carbon emissions. Yet in most places, housing construction remains wildly unpopular. People who think of themselves as progressives, environmentalists and egalitarians fight fiercely against urban development, complaining about traffic and shadows and the sanctity of lawns.

Page 4 of 7

That’s why a recent breakthrough in Minneapolis is so important. The city’s political leaders have constructed a broad consensus in favor of more housing. And the centerpiece is both simple and brilliant: Minneapolis is ending single-family zoning.

Local governments regulate land use by chopping cities into zones, specifying what can be built in each area. This serves some valuable purposes, like separating homes from heavy industry.

But mostly, it serves to protect homeowners. In many cities, including Minneapolis, more than half of the city’s land is reserved for single-family homes.

To access the full story, click here.

7. Work-Life Balance Is A Myth. Do This Instead

If you think about it, work-life balance is a strange aspiration for a fulfilling life. Balance is about stasis: if our lives were ever in balance — parents happy, kids taken care of, work working — then our overriding thought would be to shout “Nobody move!” and pray all would stay perfect forever. This false hope is made worse by the categories themselves. They imply that work is bad, and life is good; we lose ourselves in work but find ourselves in life; we survive work, but live life. And so the challenge, we are told, is to balance the heaviness of work with the lightness of life.

Yet work is not the opposite of life. It is instead a part of life — just as family is, as are friends and community and hobbies. All of these aspects of living have their share of wonderful, uplifting moments and their share of moments that drag us down. The same is true of work, yet when we think of it as an inherent bad in need of a counterweight, we lose sight of the possibility for better.

It seems more useful, then, to not try to balance the unbalanceable, but to treat work the same way you do life: By maximizing what you love. Here’s what we mean.

Consider why two people doing exactly the same work seem to gain strength and joy from very different moments. When we interviewed several anesthesiologists, we found that while their title and job function are identical, the thrills and chills they feel in their job are not. One said he loved the thrill of holding each patient hovering at that one precise point between life and death, while he shuddered at the “pressure” of helping each patient get healthy once the operation was complete. Another said she loved the bedside conversations before the operation, and the calm sensitivity required to bring a sedated patient gently back to consciousness without the panic that afflicts many patients. Another was drawn mostly to the intricacies of the anesthetic mechanism itself and has dedicated herself to defining precisely how each drug does what it does. Each one of us, for no good reason other than the clash of our chromosomes, draws strength from different activities, situations, moments and interactions.

Think of your life’s many different activities as threads. Some are black, some are grey and some are white. But some of these activities appear to be made of a different substance. These activities contain all the tell-tale signs of love: before you do them, you find yourself looking forward to them; while you’re doing them, time speeds up and you find yourself in flow; and after you’ve done them, you feel invigorated. These are your red threads, and research by the

Page 5 of 7

Mayo Clinic suggests that doctors who weave the fabric of their life with at least 20% red threads are significantly less likely to experience burnout.

To access the full story, click here.

8. Cap And Trade: What Could Oregon’s Carbon Policy Cost You?

Debate over the controversial proposal to enact a carbon cap and trade scheme in Oregon has intensified, with a solid wall of Republicans and a few stray Democrats criticizing the bill’s hefty impact on fossil fuel prices, jobs and the state economy.

At the heart of that criticism, and likely to be the most evident day-to-day impact of the policy is the price Oregonians would pay at the pump as transportation fuel providers pass on the cost of “emission allowances” they would be required to buy.

For drivers, that means higher gas and diesel prices -- significantly higher as time goes on.

This is the no-pain-no-gain reality at the heart of the “market-based” cap and trade policy. If businesses and consumers don’t feel it in their wallets, they won’t change their behavior and reduce emissions.

It’s also true that the price impact would fall heaviest on rural residents. That’s because they travel longer distances, drive vehicles that are less fuel efficient and have fewer public transit options. They also have lower incomes, on average.

Likewise, truckers and businesses that rely on heavy vehicles may be hard hit, and that cost could easily show up in higher prices at the grocery store, etc. – cost impacts that would also likely be higher in rural areas of the state.

“The bill makes the urban-rural divide stronger than ever because the biggest polluters are in Oregon’s large cities,” said Senate Republican Leader Herman Baertschiger, Jr., R-Grants Pass. “It is fundamentally inequitable to put the responsibility of cleaning up their pollution on the backs of rural Oregonians.”

The contentious debate has gone far beyond the cost of transportation fuels, as opponents point to potential increases for electricity and natural gas that could hurt both households and businesses.

To access the full story, click here.

9. The Case For A Fareless TriMet

Until recently, Tristan Isaac considered a bus ride an extravagance.

Since moving to Portland four years ago without a car, Isaac has found the cost of regular adult TriMet fare—$2.50 for a two-and-a-half-hour pass, $5 for a day pass, or $100 for a monthly pass—too expensive to be a daily option.

“If I had to go somewhere on budget, I’d use my bike, but if I were going somewhere special, I’d take the bus,” Isaac says. “Because $5 a day really adds up.”

Page 6 of 7

Last November, Isaac’s bike was stolen. Having lost his job, he couldn’t afford a new one, but he knew TriMet had recently introduced a low-income fare program, wherein people who earn around $24,000 or less a year can qualify for a monthly TriMet pass for $28.

Isaac enrolled, and it instantly changed the way he gets around the city.

“I don’t worry about taking the bus anymore—it’s the last thing I think about,” he says. “It’s relieved a lot of stress.”

Isaac is an organizer with OPAL Environmental Justice Oregon, an activist organization that focuses on the intersections of transportation and environmental policy. OPAL played a key role in pushing TriMet to adopt the low-income fare program, but its members are now eyeing an even more ambitious goal: a completely fareless TriMet. That idea is just one piece of a new transportation platform—a sweeping slate of goals OPAL intends to campaign for—that the organization announced on June 19. Other goals include additional dedicated bus lanes, expanded transit service, and the return of a program to help riders navigate the system. But an enirely fareless public transit system is the most aspirational, big-picture goal of OPAL’s new platform.

To access the full story, click here.

10. Impossible Foods And Regenerative Grazers Face Off In A Carbon Farming Dust-Up Rancher Will Harris says he was “stunned” when he got wind last week that Impossible Foods, the makers of the plant-based Impossible Burger, called regenerative grazing “the ‘clean coal’ of meat” in their 2019 Impact Report.

Speaking by phone from White Oak Pastures, his 153-year-old farm in Bluffton, Georgia, Harris said, “I think there were many mistruths in that attack.”

The feud is the latest in an ongoing discussion about whether regenerative meat production and high-tech plant-based alternatives can co-exist. And for holistically managed animal operations like Harris’s, the suggestion that all meat production should be seen as having the same impact on the environment constitutes a battle cry.

Addressing Climate Change “We emulate nature,” Harris says in defense of the 2,500-acre farm where he raises 10 species of livestock in a vertically integrated cycle. At White Oak Pastures, Harris’s “100,000 beating hearts” are born on the farm, reared in its plentiful pastures, and slaughtered on site. The property’s vegetation soaks up sunlight, water and—importantly—carbon dioxide in nature’s perfect process of photosynthesis. The cattle graze on this plant life, given the protein, energy, and fat they need to thrive.

To access the full story, click here.

Page 7 of 7