43 mm 072814

Monday Mailing

Year 20 • Issue 43 28 July 2014 1.

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White House to Begin $10 Billion Rural Investment Fund Chalk a Sidewalk, Go to Jail More Paver Power How to Rediscover Your Motivation Oregon Pipeline Petitions Review with Court of Appeals Free Books Online!

Webinar: How Federal Policy Can Support Equitable Food Access Rubbee Turns Any Bike Into an Electric One in Seconds Physicists One Step Closer to Explaining How The Universe Began Editorial: Court Ruling a Blow to Land Use Collaboration What ‘Urban Physics’ Could Tell us About How Cities Work

1. White House to Begin $10 Billion Rural Investment Fund Wall Street is looking for ways to invest in America’s heartland, and the government is ready to play matchmaker.

Quote of the Week: “Like water, be gentle and strong. Be gentle enough to follow the natural paths of the earth, and strong enough to rise up and reshape the world.”

-- Brenda Peterson Oregon Fast Fact: Haystack Rock off Cannon Beach is 235 feet high and is the third largest coastal monolith in the world.

The White House Rural Council will announce plans on Thursday to start a $10 billion investment fund that will give pension funds and large investors the opportunity to invest in agricultural projects. Those include wastewater systems, energy projects and infrastructure development in rural America.

“We’re the eHarmony.com of infrastructure and business investment,” the agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, said, referring to the online dating service.

“We’re going to be a connector,” he added. “This is a new role for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.”.

To access the full story, click here 2. Chalk a Sidewalk, Go to Jail "I draws what I like and I like what I drew!" sings Bert, the affable sidewalk artist in Disney's Mary Poppins. He doesn't know how easy he's got it. If Bert lived in one of a dozen American cities, his colorful chalk drawings of boats and circus animals could very well land him in jail.

Take the recent example of Susan Mortensen, 29-year-old mom in Richmond, Virginia. In March, Mortensen was arrested for allowing her four-year-old daughter to draw on rocks at a local park with sidewalk chalk. This month a judge sentenced her to 50 hours of community service helping to strip and repaint 200 boundary posts on a bridge.

Mortensen told a local TV station that her daughter is now "very nervous around cops" and "very scared of chalk.

To access the full story, click here.

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3. More Paver Power Landscape architects in Europe are doing really innovative things with pavers, perhaps more so than in the United States. Some recent contemporary urban plaza projects from Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Barcelona show the amazing visual effects that can be achieved with bold paving patterns.

In a barren lot where there used to be a railway station, just west of Amsterdam’s city center, LANDLAB created Funenpark, a new courtyard for a residential complex. The standard Dutch courtyard, which usually has separate streets, pavement, parking and front and back-gardens, instead gets a contemporary take, created as one “continuous, luxurious” place. This Dutch landscape architecture firm purposefully kept things simple in order to create a distinct space residents and passers-by can easily wander through.

To access the full story, click here.

4. How to Rediscover Your Motivation Companies spend a lot of time and money trying to motivate their employees.

But when was the last time a mug with your company’s logo or a coffee shop gift card made you truly excited? Real motivation doesn’t come from external rewards--it comes from making some shifts in how you think about your situation, says San Diego, California-based personal empowerment expert Susan Fowler, author of Why Motivating People Doesn’t Work . . . And What Does: The New Science of Leading, Energizing, and Engaging.

“Give a whale a fish and it’ll jump as high as you want. Give a pigeon a pellet and it’ll turn 360 degrees. That whole animal behavior theory is what the workplace is built on. We’ve got to get away from that because we’re not pigeons and we’re not whales,” she says.

If you’ve lost your motivational mojo recently, take heart. Changing the way you think and adding a few key habits can help you get it back To access the full story, click here.

5. Oregon Pipeline Petitions Review with Court of Appeals A Clatsop County land use hearing to reconsider the Oregon LNG pipeline has been canceled following news of an appeal by the company through its affiliate.

Oregon Pipeline Company filed a petition for review Friday with the Oregon Court of Appeals to review two recent rulings from the Oregon Land Use Board of Appeals: a remand of the Clatsop County Board of Commissioners’ October decision rejecting the company’s consolidated land use application, and the dismissal of an appeal filed by project opponent Columbia Riverkeeper against the board’s original November 2010 ruling approving the application.

To access the full story, click here.

6. Free Books Online!

In case you haven’t discovered it yet, IDRC (International Development Research Centre – Canada) has a bunch of books free for download or to read online.

For more information, click here.

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7. Webinar: How Federal Policy Can Support Equitable Food Access What does a transformed food system look like? To start, it provides everyone with good food—that is, food that is healthy, affordable, and produced sustainably and fairly. However, current federal policies favor junk food instead of the healthy food we all need. What's more, low-income communities are hit hardest by these broken food policies, which often results in greater occurrences of diet-related diseases.

Join us for a webinar that will discuss the inequities in our current food system, highlight two inspiring examples of work that is already happening to overcome these inequities, and identify innovative policies that can help bring about change.

An Apple a Day, For All: How Federal Policy Can Support Equitable Food Access Date: Wednesday, July 30 Time: 3:00-4:00 p.m. EDT Speakers: • Ricardo Salvador, program director and senior scientist, Food & Environment Program, Union of Concerned Scientists; • Jeffrey O'Hara, agricultural economist, Union of Concerned Scientists; • Maritza Owens, founder and director of Harvest Home Farmer's Market in New York City; and • Rebecca Wiggins-Reinhard, Farm Fresh director at La Semilla Food Center in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

To register for this webinar, click here.

8. Rubbee Turns Any Bike Into an Electric One in Seconds Electric bicycles are a lot like regular bikes, but the trade-off for getting an electrical assist is usually a heavier and more expensive ride. The Rubbee on Kickstarter is a clever take on the concept of electric bike conversion kits. Everything is in one compact package that attaches to a bike's seat post.

A friction wheel sits on the back tire while a built-in electric motor turns it, giving you up to a 15mile range. The device weighs 14 pounds and can be attached and removed quickly. A handle lets you carry it around and stash it inside, out of sight.

To access the full story, click here.

9. Who Lives in Subsidized Housing?

As I wrote in this space last week, HUD’s Office of Policy Development and Research (PD&R) has released detailed data about households receiving Federal housing assistance. According to the new data, in 2013 there were over 5.2 million HUD-subsidized housing units in the United States serving over 10 million people. Who is receiving Federal housing assistance?

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The majority of households receiving assistance are either families with children, seniors or households with a disabled person.   

39 percent are families with children 33 percent are seniors age 62 and older 34 percent are non-senior disabled

To access the full story, click here.

10. ZoningCheck Puts Computable Municipal Codes to Good Use Innovation can and should be defined simply: making a product or process better, faster, or cheaper to manufacture or operate. Like "disruption," innovation has now been vastly overused in business, government, and technology, but the need for improvements to balky, dodgy, or broken processes or systems is no less real. Government agencies, regulatory processes, and the technologies that support them are often in dire need of genuine innovation.

That's especially true for bureaucracies that serve residents who do not possess the power, influence, or funds to hire advocates or circumvent the systems, or those that hinder the economic development that cities and states are relying upon to provide new jobs for those residents. I'll address the issues surrounding broken e-government in future columns.

To access the full story, click here.

11. What ‘Urban Physics’ Could Tell us About How Cities Work What does a city look like? If you’re walking down the street, perhaps it looks like people and storefronts. Viewed from higher up, patterns begin to emerge: A three-dimensional grid of buildings divided by alleys, streets, and sidewalks, nearly flat in some places and scraping the sky in others. Pull back far enough, and the city starts to look like something else entirely: a cluster of molecules.

At least, that’s what it looks like to Franz-Josef Ulm, an engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ulm has built a career as an expert on the properties, patterns, and environmental potential of concrete. Taking a coffee break at MIT’s Stata Center late one afternoon, he and a colleague were looking at a large aerial photograph of a city when they had a “eureka” moment: “Hey, doesn’t that look like a molecular structure?”

With colleagues, Ulm began analyzing cities the way you’d analyze a material, looking at factors such as the arrangement of buildings, each building’s center of mass, and how they’re ordered around each other. They concluded that cities could be grouped into categories: Boston’s structure, for example, looks a lot like an “amorphous liquid.” Seattle is another liquid, and so is Los Angeles. Chicago, which was designed on a grid, looks like glass, he says; New York resembles a highly ordered crystal.

To access the full story, click here.

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