Monday Mailing 070819

Monday Mailing

Year 25 • Issue 41 8 July 2019 1. Why Building Walkable Cities Is The Key To Economic Success 2. Oregon Legislature Passes Nation’s First State-Wide Ban On Single-Family Zoning In Cities (Michael Walker) 3. Should We Say Goodbye To The School Lunch Milk Carton?

4. Parking Has Eaten American Cities (Michael Walker) 5. Microsoft’s Ebook Apocalypse Shows The Dark Side of DRM 6. Oregon Is One of Only Five States With No Campaign Caps. Voters Could Change That in November 2020. (Michael Walker) 7. Why FOMO Is The Enemy Of Good Urban Mobility Policy 8. The Other Oregon – Summer Issue (Bayoán Ware) 9. Renegotiating the Columbia River Treaty, Six Decades Later 10. Rural Anxieties Derailed Oregon’s Climate Plans 1. Why Building Walkable Cities Is The Key To Economic

Success

What if I told you there was a way to develop U.S. cities that was better for social equity, created more jobs and economic activity, resulted in better transit access, and improved the environment, all while guaranteeing better economic returns for developers and investors?

Quote of the Week:

“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality.

Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.”

- Lao Tzu

Oregon Fast Fact #26

There are nine lighthouses standing along the coastline.

Five are still being used; the others are designated historic monuments.

According to “Foot Traffic Ahead,” a new report that provides an indepth look at the impact of walkable urbanism on U.S. real estate, that method exists. On nearly every metric, walkable developments perform better for their citizens, especially economically, which makes it that much more disappointing that so many established policy decisions fly in the face of this data.

A joint project between The Center for Real Estate and Urban Analysis (CREUA) at the George Washington University School of Business, Smart Growth America/LOCUS, Cushman & Wakefield, and Yardi Matrix, the report found substantial growth in such areas—defined via a formula that looks at office and retail density as well as Walk Score—as well as substantial value increases and increased educational attainment and economic vitality.

Researchers examined real estate development and performance in the nation’s 30 largest metros, which contain 150 million people, or 47 percent of the total U.S. population The bottom line? Walkable urban places, what the report calls WalkUPs, demand roughly 75 percent higher rent over the metro average, a gap that’s increasing, having grown 19 percent since 2010 alone (the report believed that growth will only continue).

That includes 105 percent higher rent for office space and 121 percent higher rent for retail.

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This may all seem obvious; space in dense superstar cities costs more than land in spread-out exurbs. But researchers found this type of development is becoming the preferred and prevalent model across nearly all categories.

To access the full story, click here.

2. Oregon Legislature Passes Nation’s First State-Wide Ban On Single-Family Zoning In

Cities

The Oregon Legislature took the dramatic step of passing a bill on the final day of the 2019 session that will require at least duplexes be allowed in city neighborhoods where previously only one home was allowed per lot.

House Bill 2001 applies to cities of at least 10,000 people. For cities of 25,000 or more triplexes and duplexes will also be allowed.

Supporters of the bill hope it will provide one more way to increase housing supply. Some supporters have also backed the proposal as a way to provide economic and racial diversity, reversing what the intended effects of single-family zoning.

Larger cities will have until June of 2021 to officially revise their plans for allowing diverse housing types, and smaller cities will have an extra year.

The bill was the second piece of high-profile housing legislation successfully championed by House Speaker Tina Kotek (D-Portland). The first was a statewide cap on rent increases.

No other state has either policy in place.

The 17-to-9 vote for the bill by the state Senate in the late afternoon came hours after the bill narrowly failed.

To access the full story, click here.

3. Should We Say Goodbye To The School Lunch Milk Carton?

Every school day some 30 million students eat meals subsidized by the National School Lunch Program (NSLP). Each of them is entitled to eight ounces of milk, and that milk almost always comes in a carton. The issue? Those students leave behind a lot of leftover milk—almost 30 percent, according to new United States Dept. of Agriculture data—not to mention tons and tons of empty cartons. There’s a lot of waste.

Enter the bulk milk dispenser, colloquially known as a “steel cow.”

Dispensers replace cartons with bulk milk sacks and reusable cups, allowing students to pour only what they’ll drink, and avoid all the wasteful individual packaging. It’s a pleasingly simple waste solution—with unexpectedly dogged hurdles in the way. Tight budgets, outmoded infrastructure, confusion about NSLP rules, and basic logistical issues have made dispensers surprisingly tricky to implement.

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But in a handful of districts in the Pacific Northwest, cafeteria workers, custodians, school administrators, and students are working together to bring steel cows into their schools. If their efforts are duplicated across the country, the environmental benefits could be massive. Each district looking to adopt milk dispensers would have to overcome their own set of challenges, but the work being done could create a roadmap for others to follow.

To access the full story, click here.

4. Parking Has Eaten American Cities Parking eats up an incredible amount of space and costs America’s cities an extraordinary amount of money. That’s the main takeaway of a new study that looks in detail at parking in five U.S. cities: New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, Des Moines, and Jackson, Wyoming.

The study, by Eric Scharnhorst of the Research Institute for Housing America (which is affiliated with the Mortgage Bankers of America), uses data from satellite images, the U.S. Census, property tax assessment offices, city departments of transportation, parking authorities, and geospatial maps like Google Maps to generate inventories of parking for these five cities. (The inventories include on-street parking spaces, off-street surface parking lots, and off-street parking structures.)

It not only estimates the total number of parking spaces in these cities and their overall estimated replacement costs, but develops interesting metrics such as parking spaces per acre, parking spaces per household, and parking costs per household—as well as providing maps of parking densities across these cities.

In sum, it provides additional empirical confirmation for parking guru Donald Shoup’s idea that American cities devote far too much space and far too many resources to parking.

To access the full story, click here.

5. Microsoft’s Ebook Apocalypse Shows The Dark Side of DRM

Your iTunes movies, your Kindle books—they’re not really yours. You don’t own them. You’ve just bought a license that allows you to access them, one that can be revoked at any time. And while a handful of incidents have brought that reality into sharp relief over the years, none has quite the punch of Microsoft disappearing every single ebook from every one of its customers.

Microsoft made the announcement in April that it would shutter the Microsoft Store’s books section for good. The company had made its foray into ebooks in 2017, as part of a Windows 10 Creators Update that sought to round out the software available to its Surface line. Relegated to Microsoft’s Edge browser, the digital bookstore never took off. As of April 2, it halted all ebook sales. And starting as soon as this week, it’s going to remove all purchased books from the libraries of those who bought them.

Other companies have pulled a similar trick in smaller doses. Amazon, overcome by a fit of irony in 2009, memorably vanished copies of George Orwell’s 1984 from Kindles. The year before that, Walmart shut down its own ill-fated MP3 store, at first suggesting customers burn their Page 3 of 7

purchases onto CDs to salvage them before offering a download solution. But this is not a tactical strike. There is no backup plan. This is The Langoliers. And because of digital rights management—the mechanism by which platforms retain control over the digital goods they sell—you have no recourse. Microsoft will refund customers in full for what they paid, plus an extra $25 if they made annotations or markups. But that provides only the coldest comfort.

To access the full story, click here.

6. Oregon Senate Republicans Will Return To Work Saturday Senate Republicans will return to work Saturday following a nine-day walkout, setting the stage for a weekend where lawmakers sprint toward adjournment.

As expected, Senate Minority Leader Herman Baertschiger Jr., R-Grants Pass, announced in a press conference Friday morning his members would be in the building at 9 a.m. Saturday. That comes after Democratic leaders offered assurances a sweeping climate change bill, House Bill 2020, will not pass this session.

“The Senate president says it will be dead, the governor says it will be dead, and members of the Democratic caucus will be voting ‘no,’” said Baertschiger, in his first public appearance since Republicans walked out last week.

Baertschiger had strongly suggested in an interview OPB earlier Friday his members were prepared to get back to work.

With Republicans’ presence seemingly assured, the question becomes how quickly lawmakers in both chambers can pass more than 100 remaining bills before they are forced to adjourn Sunday at midnight. Baertschiger said Friday that his party would decline to grant a blanket rules suspension that would allow all legislation to be fast-tracked.

Though he repeatedly professed to believe Democrat promises the bill was dead, Baertschiger said Republicans worried such a suspension could lead HB 2020 to be brought forward at the last minute. He said his party would grant suspension for a portion of bills.

Baertschiger also signaled his party wants the Senate to take up budget bills first. That’s not likely to be warmly received by Democrats, who have insisted that remaining policy bills be passed before the Legislature takes up bills to complete a state budget. They say giving up those bills would amount to another concession, in a year when Democrats have already scuttled bills on climate change, guns and vaccines in the face of Republican walkouts.

To access the full story, click here.

7. Why FOMO Is The Enemy Of Good Urban Mobility Policy

There are a handful of policy phrases that reliably trigger outrage among urban mobility wonks.

“Sharrow” is one; “parking minimum” is another. I’d like to suggest a couple more: “first in the country” and “staying ahead of our rivals.” If you hear either spoken by your mayor or governor, head for the hills (or the next community meeting). More likely than not, your elected officials

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are basing mobility policy decisions not on cost-benefit analysis or strategic foresight, but on a classic modern insecurity: FOMO. For the uninitiated, FOMO stands for “Fear Of Missing Out,” and it’s a common abbreviation in texts and social media chatter. If you’re frantically visiting stores to get your hands on the hot new smart phone that everyone is talking about, blame FOMO. Same goes if you feel a pang of envy when you see your friend’s gorgeous social media posts of her tropical vacation—and then hop online to check flights to the Caribbean.

What does FOMO have to do with urban mobility policy? Ideally, nothing. But in reality, quite a bit—especially with state and local officials swooning over autonomous vehicle technology and eager to show it off.

Consider Arlington, Texas, where in 2017, city officials unveiled an autonomous shuttle called Milo that transports people on a fixed route through its entertainment district. During the launch, a planning official seemed more excited about the novelty of the program than its potential value to citizens, gushing, “[Milo] will go down in history as the first time that a government, a municipal government, has really offered this as a service to the general public."

No mention was made of whether the general public actually wanted the service in the first place.

To access the full story, click here.

8. The Other Oregon – Summer Issue

It’s finally summer, a time when tourists flock in earnest to the coast, the mountains and the high desert to enjoy all that rural Oregon has to offer.

Who can blame them? Summer was made for a walk on the beach, fishing in the Metolious River, a hike on the South Sister Trail, windsurfing on the Columbia, and any of the hundreds of other adventures that await around every bend.

But there’s more to rural Oregon than spectacular scenery and outdoor recreation. Our summer edition, which should be in your mailbox shortly, will take you around the state to see what else is going on.

If you drop by Maupin for some rafting or fishing you’ll also find some of the fastest internet in the Pacific Northwest. Dick Hughes reports that after years of work this small Wasco County community can offer visitors uninterrupted streaming video. Great for tourists, but a real gamechanger for local businesses and year-round residents.

Wander down the coast to Coos Bay and you’ll find a town still reeling from the closure of a lumber mill that put 111 relatively high-paid employees out of their jobs. In this edition George Plaven writes how the community is working to land on its feet.

High in the Wallowas in Enterprise they’re celebrating the centennial of the OK Theatre, a community treasure that has been reborn. The farmers of the Willamette Valley are embracing hemp, a new cash crop that is becoming one of the state’s hottest commodities. And

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throughout rural Oregon you’ll find families struggling to find and pay for end-of-life care for their loved ones.

Take a closer look beyond the scenery and you’ll see real people living in real places and dealing with the real issues and opportunities life throws their way. We hope this and every issue of The Other Oregon provides an insight into their world.

To access the full story, click here.

9. Renegotiating the Columbia River Treaty, Six Decades Later

On Memorial Day 1948, as Oregonians traveled home from holidays on the coast and the Cascade Mountains, the Columbia River breached a dike at Vanport, an industrial suburb north of Portland. Swollen by abnormally deep snowfall, rapid melting and region-wide rainstorms, the river submerged the town, displacing some 18,000 residents (one-third of them African American), killing at least 51 and damaging property valued at more than $100 million.

In addition to those immediate, devastating effects, the Vanport Flood also catalyzed changes in international relations in the Columbia River Basin — an area roughly the size of France — hastening plans to build three flood-control dams in Canada and authorizing another in the United States. Those projects were codified in the Columbia River Treaty between the U.S. and Canada, in 1961.

Now, with parts of the treaty due to expire in five years, the two countries are renegotiating it.

But the political landscape has vastly changed since 1961. The original treaty was implemented before the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act, the 1973 Endangered Species Act and a host of legal shifts that bolstered Indigenous rights in both countries, including 1974’s Boldt Decision, which affirmed Pacific Northwest tribal nations’ right to co-manage salmon. These hallmarks of change emphasize the need to include environmental protection and equity in an updated treaty.

Over its 1,243-mile course to the Pacific Ocean, the Columbia River squeezes through several narrow spots, ideal for hydropower generation. In 1927, Congress directed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to survey American river basins and create plans to fully exploit their power potential via dams that would also offer navigation, irrigation and flood-control benefits. The Corps’ Columbia River and Its Minor Tributaries, published following the directive, forecast a future river full of dams, capturing energy and transmitting it through wires to light homes and power industries throughout the Northwest.

To access the full story, click here.

10. Rural Anxieties Derailed Oregon’s Climate Plans As Oregon moved toward joining an international market to cap carbon emissions in late June, truckers, loggers and farmers chugged into the capitol in Salem. With horns blaring, they protested a proposed bill to rein in greenhouse gases, rallying behind slogans like “Timber Unity” and “Cap Kills Jobs.”

As demonstrators gathered, Oregon’s Republican state senators absconded to Idaho in a lastditch effort to prevent a Senate vote on the bill. Political wrangling over the emissions-reducing legislation was punctuated by arrest threats, menacing remarks aimed at state police, and Page 6 of 7

pledges of support for the senators from militia members. More than a week later, the Republicans returned — once Democratic leaders declared that they didn’t have enough votes to pass the climate bill.

After the climate legislation was shelved, lawmakers passed more than 100 bills in a frenzied weekend before the legislative session ended on June 30. But the battle over the carbon emissions legislation revealed a deepening political chasm between Oregon’s conservative rural areas and liberal population centers. Republicans held firm to their base, aligning with legacy industries and the rural jobs they support, rather than engaging in restructuring the economy to address carbon pollution. While the potential costs of the climate legislation took center stage, a deeper economic truth went unspoken — that the issues that hamper the fiscal well-being of rural Oregon have less to do with environmental regulations than with broader market forces, from international policy to demographics.

Since 2018, Democrats in Colorado, New Mexico and Washington have followed through on promises to limit carbon emissions. For environmental activists, Oregon’s legislation was the cream of the crop of the new bills, with its cap on greenhouse gases extending across all sectors of the economy, not just transportation or electricity generation.

But, at least initially, the climate bill would have cost rural Oregonians more. According to an analysis by The Oregonian, fuel taxes would hit wallets harder outside urban centers, where people drive longer distances in less fuel-efficient vehicles and lack access to public transportation. Higher energy costs also raised concerns about milling and manufacturing jobs leaving the state for friendlier economic conditions.

To access the full story, click here.

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