Monday Mailing
Year 26 • Issue 8 28 October 2019 1. How Housing Wealth Transferred From Families to Corporations 2. "A High School Education and an Hour of Your Time" 3. This Ancient Fruit Holds Secrets for How to Farm in Climate Change 4. Rural Food Insecurity: Dramatic Differences from County to County 5. Sea Urchins Are Chomping Their Way Through Oregon Coast Kelp, ‘Uncharted Territory’ For Marine Ecosystem (Katie McFall) 6. Locations Close To Public Transit Boost Residential, Commercial Real Estate Values 7. In California, More Than 340,000 Lose Wildfire Insurance 8. Tribal History Curriculum Comes to Oregon Schools 9. RESOURCE & WEBINAR - Is Your Website Accessible To Those With Disabilities? Should It Be? 10. WEBINAR – Improving Resiliency Through Planning and Investment in Place-Based Food Systems: Lessons Learned from the Mid-Atlantic
1. How Housing Wealth Transferred From Families to Corporations Quote of the Week:
Walking, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands. - Linda Hogan
Oregon Fast Fact #30
High above the city of Portland the International Rose Test Garden features more than 500 varieties of roses cultivated continuously since 1917.
When most people think of housing, they separate it into two types: single-family suburban homes that people own, and apartments, largely in cities and urban centers, that people rent. Until recently, the popular image was more or less correct. Most single-family houses provided homes for the families that owned them.
But more than 12 million single-family homes are currently being rented in the United States. Those homes, valued at more than $2.3 trillion, make up 35 percent of all rental housing around the country. In the past, the great majority of single-family homes that were rented out were done so by their owners or small real-estate companies. But today, a large and growing share of single-family rental homes are owned and managed by large corporations, realestate firms, and financial institutions. The percentage of home owners is at its lowest level since the 1960s. Those are the big takeaways of a recent study by Andrea Eisfeldt of UCLA’s Anderson School of Management and industry expert Andrew Demers, published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). This is yet another of the economy-shifting consequences of the financial crisis of 2008. To access the full story, click here.
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2. "A High School Education and an Hour of Your Time"
On Tim Corcoran's first day as South Bend, Indiana's planning director, back in 2016, he met with staff from the Area Plan Commission talking about an obscure landscaping rule buried in the city's zoning code: “Why is it even in there? It makes no sense to require somebody to put evergreen trees fronting an alleyway.” “It’s always been there. We always give it a variance.” Corcoran thought, "If this rule keeps coming up and we just exempt people from it every time, then why don't we get rid of it?" In software engineering, there's a concept called technical debt. It refers to the high cost of retrofitting code that has become bloated and complicated over time to make it simpler and more legible. These revisions get put off, sometimes for years, in the face of more pressing deadlines—and stopgap fixes may compound the problem by addressing one issue while creating three more. Cities, too, have all sorts of technical debt problems, as anyone who's cracked open a local zoning code knows. There are provisions that might have made sense at the time they were enacted, but now nobody remembers why they were enacted. There are rules that might make sense in isolation but interact with each other to produce unwanted consequences. One of these consequences is often to make it more expensive, risky, and time-consuming to get any sort of development project approved—no matter how modest, no matter how compliant with the spirit and intent of the city's rules. In fast-growing places, the effect of a complicated tangle of zoning regulations is to privilege very large-scale developers and projects over small ones: the big boys are the ones who can afford land-use lawyers and absorb the costs of months or years of delay. To access the full story, click here.
3. This Ancient Fruit Holds Secrets for How to Farm in Climate Change
Cloverleaf Farm, a small produce operation in Davis, California, managed to do okay during the extreme drought that lasted from 2012 to 2016. But in the first wet year after the long dry period, the farm lost its entire apricot crop to disease—$40,000 to $50,000 down the drain.
Researchers predict that as climate change worsens, there will be more frequent shifts between extreme dry spells and floods. As Cloverleaf learned the hard way, the phenomenon is already taking a toll on growers in the country’s largest food producing state. During the drought, California’s agricultural and related industries lost $2.7 billion in one year alone. Big cash crops like almonds and grapes are at particular risk in the future, unnerving farmers and vintners already taking hits from erratic and extreme weather. Katie Fyhrie, a grower at Cloverleaf Farm, worries that the farm won’t be able to keep producing stone fruits—which depend on the timing and duration of winter chill—in the long-term. “It can Page 2 of 6
be confusing to figure out how to move forward,” Fyhrie says. “Where we’re at right now, versus where we’re going to be 10, 20, 30 years down the line. It’s a really tricky thing to balance.” Ancient plant species might hold important clues about which crops will survive in a harsher climate. With that in mind, Fyhrie and her team have started growing elderberries. An indigo pearl-sized fruit that grows on a big bushy plant, the elderberry is relatively unknown in the United States; the majority of the commercial market comes from an imported European variety. But Native American communities have been using a Western elderberry subspecies for centuries. To access the full story, click here.
4. Rural Food Insecurity: Dramatic Differences from County to County
Experts on rural America will tell you again and again that there’s no such thing as one single, monolithic rural America. That point gets made forcefully in a new report from the Urban Institute. The report, which comes in the form of an interactive data dashboard, looks at food insecurity across America. Urban Institute: Disrupting Food Insecurity Tapping data for strategies that tackle the root causes Food insecurity on average tends to be a bit higher in rural counties versus urban ones. But there’s a tremendous variety in food insecurity across rural counties – and even within the same states. This map shows that clearly. The map is a rural subset of the Urban Institute’s dashboard. Here, we’re showing just the counties that the report flags as rural or mostly rural. The counties here (defined by the percentage of Census-defined rural population they contain, not the metro/nonmetro system) show the variety of food insecurity across rural and mostly rural counties. To access the full story, click here.
5. Sea Urchins Are Chomping Their Way Through Oregon Coast Kelp, ‘Uncharted Territory’ For Marine Ecosystem
NEWPORT — Tens of millions of voracious purple sea urchins that have already chomped their way through towering underwater kelp forests in California are spreading north to Oregon, sending the delicate marine ecosystem off the shore into such disarray that other critical species are starving to death.
A recent count found 350 million purple sea urchins on one Oregon reef alone — a more than 10,000% increase since 2014. And in Northern California, 90% of the giant bull kelp forests have been devoured by the urchins, perhaps never to return.
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Vast "urchin barrens" — stretches of denuded seafloor dotted with nothing but hundreds of the spiny orbs — have spread to coastal Oregon, where kelp forests were once so thick it was impossible to navigate some areas by boat. The underwater annihilation is killing off important fisheries for red abalone and red sea urchins and creating such havoc that scientists in California are partnering with a private business to collect the over-abundant purple urchins and "ranch" them in a controlled environment for ultimate sale to a global seafood market. To access the full story, click here. 6. Locations Close To Public Transit Boost Residential, Commercial Real Estate Values WASHINGTON (October 14, 2019) – Neighborhoods located within a half mile of public transit services outperformed those in areas farther from public transit based on a number of factors, according to a report released today by the American Public Transportation Association and the National Association of Realtors®. “The Real Estate Mantra – Locate Near Public Transportation” highlighted the critical role public transportation plays in determining real estate values, revealing that commercial and residential real estate market sales thrive when residents have mobility options close by. The report explored seven metropolitan regions – Boston, MA; Eugene, OR; Hartford, CT; Los Angeles, CA; Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN; Phoenix, AZ; and Seattle, WA that provide access to heavy rail, light rail, commuter rail and bus rapid transit. Residential properties within these areas had a higher median sale price of 4-24% between 2012 and 2016, the report found. Commercial property values also experienced gains in the studied cities, where four of the regions saw median sales price per square foot increase between 5 and 42 percentage points in areas close to public transit. Data also showed that residents of transit-oriented areas experience lower transportation costs, have higher access to jobs and are less likely to own cars. Transportation costs in transitoriented areas are significantly lower than other regions, with an average annual savings of $2,500 to $4,400 for the typical household. One in four households in close proximity to transit do not own a vehicle, according to the study. To access the full story, click here.
7. In California, More Than 340,000 Lose Wildfire Insurance
California’s relatively quiet 2019 fire season ended in October. Just days after Pacific Gas & Electric cut power to half a million customers in Northern California during high-wind conditions, the Saddle Ridge fire in Los Angeles County exploded in size overnight, burning some 8,000 acres.
There are many things Californians can do to prepare for these blazes, but one option – taking out wildfire insurance – is out of reach for many of them. For example, after massive fires in 2018, an estimated 350,000 Californians could no longer get property and casualty insurance that also covered fire.
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Over the past several years, premiums have risen significantly – as much as 300% to 500% in many cases. And in many high-risk areas, insurers are increasingly opting not to renew coverage. In the past four years insurers have dropped more than 340,000 policyholders in fire-prone areas. Owners who can’t find private wildfire insurance must rely on California’s FAIR plan, a state-backed pool of insurers who provide basic coverage for a high price as a last resort. To access the full story, click here.
8. Tribal History Curriculum Comes to Oregon Schools
SALEM — Decades of hard work by grassroots activists, native educators, state agencies, tribes, and legislators is paying off with the long awaited introduction of a Native American curriculum into Oregon’s schools this year. Senate Bill 13, also known as Tribal History / Shared History, directs the Oregon Department of Education to create a K-12 curriculum focused on educating students about federally recognized tribes in Oregon.
“This is Oregon’s history, and it’s important for all our students to learn, but it will be especially amazing for our native students to finally see themselves reflected in the classroom in ways that acknowledge their tribe’s history and current contributions to society,” says Angie Morrill, Program Director for Title VI Indian Education at Portland Public Schools (PPS). Angie, a member of the Klamath Tribe, grew up in Portland in the 1980s and attended Jefferson High School. The Klamath Tribe was terminated with the federal Indian policies of the 1950s and wasn’t restored until 1986 — which means she essentially grew up as a member of a tribe that, by federal standards, didn’t exist. “When I was in school, there was no framework to understand the tribes in Oregon. I would go to the library and all I could find was history about the Klamaths and Modocs, and a war that happened in 1872,” she says. “It was like we didn’t exist, like we were walking ghosts.” To access the full story, click here.
9. RESOURCE & WEBINAR - Is Your Website Accessible To Those With Disabilities? Should It Be? (Wednesday, November 6, 2019 11:am-12:30pm PT) In a surprising move, the Supreme Court declined to hear a case that many thought would provide some guidance on what needs to be done to make websites compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
The case, Robles v. Domino’s Pizza, LLC, involved a blind man, Robles, who sued Dominos’ after he claimed that he was unable to order pizza from the company’s website. Robles won, with both the district and appellate courts finding that that the company failed in its duty to make the services provided on its website accessible to those with disabilities. Domino’s appealed to the Supreme Court, and most legal observers expected the Court to take the case to provide some clarity on whether the ADA requires companies to make their websites accessible to those with disabilities, and if it does, what those companies need to do. So it was surprising when it declined to do so. Page 5 of 6
The argument that websites must be accessible to those with disabilities comes from Title III of the ADA, which mandates that all “places of public accommodation” are required by law to remove any “access barriers” that would inhibit a person with disabilities from accessing the businesses’ goods or services. When the law was passed in 1990 the Internet was on very few people’s radars, so Title III was meant to apply to brick and mortar establishments. Similarly, Title II, which requires governments to make their services available to those with disabilities, only was meant to apply to services the government provided in person at government facilities. To access the resource and register for the webinar, click here. 10. WEBINAR – Improving Resiliency Through Planning and Investment in Place-Based
Food Systems: Lessons Learned from the Mid-Atlantic (Wednesday, November 6, 2019 10:am PT)
How can the planning of and investment in place-based food systems help improve local businesses and address concerns about food security, equity and resiliency? Join the Smart Growth Network at 1 p.m. Nov. 6 to hear lessons learned from two studies released this year, the Chesapeake Foodshed Assessment by the Harry R Hughes Center for Agroecology and What Our Region Grows from the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. Lindsay Smith, Regional Food Systems Value Chain Coordinator at the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, and Philip J Gottwals, Principal, ACDS, LLC and Adjunct Professor at the University of Maryland, will discuss how these studies are helping to change the conversation on planning for food and agriculture in the urbanizing region of Washington, D.C. The panelists will also share their observations on how the studies’ findings are echoing trends in other parts of the country. This session will look at how much food is grown, raised and sold in the Mid-Atlantic, which sectors are growing, and what policymakers, investors and community members can do to support a more secure and resilient food future. To register for the webinar, click here.
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