Monday Mailing - 071619

Monday Mailing

Year 24 • Issue 39 16 July 2018

1. Upper Floor Housing Sparks Investment in Downtown Reedsport 2. Stop Playing Public Hearing Bingo 3. Global Public Space Toolkit: From Global Principles to Local Policies and Practice 4. Meet The Foodies Who Are changing The Way Americans Eat 5. Rural by Choice: Seeing Another Side of the Story 6. Is Striving for Inbox Zero Really Worth It? 7. I-Tree Tools for Assessing and Managing 8. Should Development Be Extinguished on California’s Fire-Prone Hills?

9. In Portland, A Neighborhood Designs Its Own Solution to Displacement 10. Special Report: How Autonomous Vehicles Could Constrain City Budgets 11. Webinar: ReClaim Ambassadors: Empowering Residents through Vacant Lot Projects – Thursday, July 26th @ 9AM PST 1. Upper Floor Housing Sparks Investment in Downtown Reedsport The City of Reedsport has gone through many changes in the years since it was incorporated in 1919. Originally a boardwalk town built on the banks of the Umpqua, then a crucial site of lumber transportation and processing, and now it is a place where one can enjoy a small town lifestyle in the bucolic setting of Oregon’s Coast Range. While many things have changed in the past century, it has always been Reedsport’s Downtown that has embodied the heart of the City. It was out of recognition of Downtown’s core importance that the Reedsport Main Street Program was created to utilize citizen volunteers to make Reedsport a more livable, sustainable, and effervescent place to live.

Quote of the Week: “Keep your face always toward the sunshine – and the shadows will fall behind you.”

-Walt Whitman Oregon Fast Fact: The northern Oregon Coast Range can receive up to 200 inches of precipitation per year, versus as little as 8 inches in the eastern deserts.

Also, the Willamette Valley typically receives between 30 and 50 inches of precipitation yearly, while the Cascade Range can get well over 100 inches of total precipitation, which includes snowmelt.

In 2017 the Main Street Program had the opportunity to apply for the Oregon Main Street Revitalization Grant to rehabilitate the Burdick Building. The Burdick Building in many ways exemplifies Reedsport’s heart and the changes the town has undertaken over the years. It is located in the center of Downtown and bears the name of a historical resident. It has also endured the ups and downs the economy and the wear and tear of the wet, coastal, weather. To address this deterioration, Reedsport Main Street devised a plan to rehabilitate five upstairs apartments and bring the facilities up to a condition in which they could be rented.

To access the full story, click here.

2. Stop Playing Public Hearing Bingo If you’re a civic-minded nerd like me, you’ve probably been to a lot of public meetings: planning commission meetings, city council meetings, advisory board meetings, board of adjustment meetings, neighborhood meetings, town hall meetings...

After a while, you start to notice a pattern. The archetypal players in a public meeting are as predictable as the characters in a Hollywood romcom. There’s the Long-term Resident Opposed to Change; the Humble Businessman Just Trying To Make a Living; the Passionate Neighborhood Activist; the Developer Who Has Already Bent Over Backwards; the Developer’s Buddy Who Thinks It’s a Great Idea; the Historic Page 1 of 4

Preservationist Fighting To Avoid Catastrophe/Incompatible Design; and a Guy Who Bicycled To access the full story, click here.

3. Global Public Space Toolkit: From Global Principles to Local Policies and Practice Despite its importance in promoting sustainable urban development, public space has not been given the attention it deserves in literature and, more importantly, in the global policy arena. Yet there is a growing body of principles and sound policies for improving access to good public space in our cities, as well as a growing patrimony of good practices from different urban settings around the world.

This toolkit will be a practical reference for local governments to frame and implement principles, policy recommendations and development initiatives on public space and for central governments to aid their efforts with material support and enabling legislation. It will also serve the purpose of demonstrating the value of the involvement of the citizenry and civil society in securing, developing and managing public space in the city.

To access the toolkit, click here.

4. Meet The Foodies Who Are changing The Way Americans Eat As residents of idyllic Eugene, Oregon, with its culture of local food, we might be forgiven for assuming all Americans are “locavores.”

The rich volcanic and glacial soil deposits of the Willamette Valley are irrigated by a splendid river system and tilled by farmers who raise everything from goats to hazelnuts. These farmers make Oregon the seventh-best state in terms of the availability and consumption of local foods, well ahead of neighboring California and Washington. The people of Oregon have access to an exceptional variety of local foods and take great pride in eating local, to the point that the comedy series “Portlandia” made a sketch about it.

To access the full story, click here.

5. Rural by Choice: Seeing Another Side of the Story I live down the street from a dilapidated barn and home. The house was once beautiful, and I can tell from the broken-down shell it is now. The barn looks like it may topple over any day now, and sometimes after it storms I’m surprised it hasn’t. This is what I think of when I think of rural. Maybe that’s because in high school, I always heard my friends talk about getting out of this “s*** town.”

Maybe it’s because I tend to watch heartbreaking documentaries at an alarming rate, and I have seen that the worst conditions some children live in are in rural areas.

Listening to [the lecture] I began to feel ashamed that this was the first image that popped into my head. I was ashamed because I am a part of the problem. I think of these rural areas as dying, and I use it as motivation to go to school, to get out of my town. I don’t think of the ways I could help these towns. I don’t think of the opportunity there is to create. I only see the falling barn. I only see the arrests for meth. I only see one story.

To access the full story, click here.

6. Is Striving for Inbox Zero Really Worth It? I’ve often felt there are two types of people in the world: those who have hundreds or even thousands of unread emails, and those who break out in hives just thinking about that first group. In Page 2 of 4

recording the latest episode of Secrets of the Most Productive People, I learned that my cohost Anisa falls into that first group, while I’m squarely in the second.

I have long believed a clean inbox is critical in order to get things done and make sure nothing gets missed. But after talking to organizational expert and productivity coach Janine Sarna-Jones, I learned that it’s less about how many emails you have than how you manage them. That means your strategies for combing through your inbox every day, but it also means how you manage your time and set expectations for the ways you want other people to email you to begin with.

To access the full story, click here.

7. I-Tree Tools for Assessing and Managing I-Tree the resources needed to understand and utilize the i-Tree suite of software tools in your community. Below are links to training opportunities, presentations, reports, technical papers, research and other I-Tree initiatives.

To access this resource, click here.

8. Should Development Be Extinguished on California’s Fire-Prone Hills?

Lars and Ulla Tandrup finished plans for their dream house on the wild western edge of Northern California’s wine country late in the summer of 2015. The 4,200-square-foot boxy, modern home would perch on a ridge over Santa Rosa. With two stories of floor-to-ceiling glass on its western face, it would sit open like a dollhouse facing a field of golden grass.

Sonoma County officials took a few months to review the project. Between the drainage review and fire inspection, a warning sounded just over the mountains, a few dozen miles away.

To access the full story, click here.

9. In Portland, A Neighborhood Designs Its Own Solution to Displacement Portland, Oregon, is celebrated for its urbanism and charm. From its natural beauty and bikeability to the Portlandia brand of over-earnest hipness, Portland has plenty of reasons to be listed among the most livable cities in the country. Alt-weekly Willamette Week spoofed the city’s international fame with an article earlier this year, “Portland is Still No. 1 in Semifactual Superlatives.” (“Reason no. 23 to love Portland right now”).

While Portland is lauded for its livability, historian Karen Gibson asks “livability for whom?”

Gibson’s 2007 paper, “Bleeding Albina: A History of Community Disinvestment, 1940–2000,” remains a canonical text for exploring the city’s small African-American community, and how its members have suffered from accelerated gentrification and subsequent displacement.

To access the full story, click here.

10. Special Report: How Autonomous Vehicles Could Constrain City Budgets Governing surveyed the 25 largest U.S cities for revenues that could potentially be hindered by the proliferation of autonomous vehicles.

In all, cities took in a total of nearly $5 billion in fiscal year 2016 from parking-related activities, camera and traffic citations, gas taxes, towing, vehicle registration and licensing fees. That amounts to about $129 per capita for all 25 jurisdictions. The reported data, however, suggests the introduction

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of self-driving cars could have drastically different effects, with some cities experiencing far greater potential reductions in revenues than others.

To access the full story, click here.

11. Webinar: ReClaim Ambassadors: Empowering Residents through Vacant Lot Projects – Thursday, July 26th @ 9AM PST Drawing from 11 years of experience of working on the ground in the Pittsburgh region, this session will look at a model for engaging communities in the transition of vacant lots from liabilities to assets while at the same time using the process to empower residents. Through Grounded’s ReClaim Ambassadors program, residents receive micro-grants and technical assistance for on-the-ground projects on vacant land. Ambassadors learn a range of topics -- from soil sampling and site analysis, to outreach activities, presentation, budgeting, and volunteer management -- all applied to their own greenspace project. The Reclaim Ambassadors program is 18 months long and includes 10-12 Ambassadors focused on various projects throughout the city. Grounded will walk through the Ambassadors’ established community organizing process that translates community capacity into community action, and help participants understand how to apply the program’s model in their own communities.

To register for this webinar, click here.

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