Rail-Volution 2010 Recap Part One

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I am not much of a conference attendee. Preferring to immerse myself in books and lectures, conferences have seemed to me to be more about preaching to the converted, venues for vendors to hawk there wares, and a plethora of examples of how not to use PowerPoint; all coming at the expense of being a really useful way to become educated on a topic. Sloganeering and well rehearsed positions abound, unfortunately at the expense seeing a provocateur or hearing contrarian thinking. That being said, however, conference tours are usually a highlight, and, should one be fortunate enough, attending a presentation with an impassioned malcontent can add spice to otherwise banal fare. I must admit, however, that after attending Rail-Volution 2010 in Portland last week, my cynicism has abated; or, perhaps I am gaining a critical eye and am better at divining what the  larger lessons are.

The sessions I attended seemed to be predominantly peopled by land use and transportation planners, transit agency staff and directors, and transit advocates – architects (and urban designers) - were in the minority. Regardless of background, all attendees shared a passion for transit and transit oriented development (TOD), with presentations sharing strategies on how to best plan, design, and finance transit to increase our quality of life, be that reducing CO2 emissions or lessening our reliance on the automobile and its negative impacts on the public realm. To achieve these goals, the sessions approached transit from a compelling number of perspectives, including public health and safety, the role grant writing effects route planning, and just which parameters really should define a transit overlay district. Although most of the positions taken were safe, the sum total of them (the gestalt, as it were) represents progress in urban policy. More of this in future post, for today I wish to focus on first of two field sessions I attended.

The first of two field sessions I attended was a tour of the emerging South Waterfront/North Macadam District (it goes by either name), just southeast of Portland’s downtown. Zoned the same as the city’s central business district, this neighborhood is an example of how a city’s direct investment in transit was instrumental in developing an entirely new neighborhood, one where only vacant industrial land existed until less than 10 years ago. Built on former steel and ship building sites (a small barge building operation still exists), this brown-field is the area where Oregon Health Sciences University (OHSU) will (and has) expand their current land-locked campus. OHSU is the anchor for the re-development of over two dozen acres, and the school’s decision to expand in this area is attributable to the city’s building and financing of two forms of transit: an aerial tram connecting the new campus to the existing (located on Marquam Hill, about a mile west and 500 feet up), as well as a new streetcar line, connecting the OHSU campus to Portland State University and downtown. The city, university, and developers entered into an agreement that bound each party to a scope of work. Essentially, the city paid for the transit improvements, and private developers paid for a good portion of the development of the streets and the new buildings (which, in addition to OHSU include mainly luxury housing). Each party’s commitment was essential for this area to be developed, with the most crucial being the construction of an 80 person aerial tram. Beyond its aesthetic triumphs and novelty, the tram delivers a highly efficient form of transit, for instead of a 15 to 30 minute commute time that a bus would have entailed (Marquam Hill is too steep for rail), connections between the OHSU South Waterfront and Marquam Hill campuses is only three minutes for doctors, patients, students, and staff. Of almost equal importance in creating the backbone for the emerging neighborhood with the tram, was the extension of the city’s streetcar line, which provides a clear and direct connection through a maze of streets and changing topography from South Waterfront to Portland State University and downtown. Unlike connecting to Marquam Hill, a bus line may have worked made the connection, but a bus would not have had the same deliberative action and financial, aesthetic, and operational commitment rail transit provides in order for this nascent neighborhood to develop.

Given the state of our economy, assessment as to the success of South Waterfront needs to be made in the future. Portland, as is the case nationwide, is in an economic slump that has curtailed the previously rapid pace of development at South Waterfront. Still, the transit aspects are impressive -- if not down right exciting (nail biting?) -- and robust applause to all party's involved in creating South Waterfront's vision is in order. Taking derelict land, and reviving it with groundbreaking (air-breaking) transit solutions, will doubtlessly reap huge dividends for many years to come.

Next: Developing Trends in Transit Oriented Development, FTA Financing, and Low Income Housing

For Further Information on South Waterfront:                    http://www.pdc.us/ura/sowa_n-macadam.asp http://www.southwaterfront.com http://www.ohsu.edu/xd/about/facts/history.cfm

What does affordable housing look like?

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[caption id="attachment_541" align="aligncenter" width="700" caption="Petaluma Avenue Homes"][/caption] When I was in architecture school at Washington State University, architect Michael Pyatok came to do a lecture on affordable housing and mentioned that he had experienced comments in public hearings that his proposed project "didn't look like affordable housing" - and this was perceived as a bad thing by the commenter.  That's a poor reflection on our society - when design for poor people (the people who have the least means and face the most social inequity) should be inferior.  Luckily that was almost 20 years ago and a lot has changed in the arena of affordable housing.

I'm proud to be a participant in Washington State's affordable housing industry during a period of time when HUD is making significant structural changes through it's Sustainable Communities Initiative.  Finally, the silos of our federal government are being dismantled to recognize the synergies between housing, the environment, and transportation systems.  And the possibility for education and food (nutrition) to be added to that mix is even more revolutionary (for government, not reality).

Washington State is home/host to an amazing annual conference called Housing Washington.  It brings together 700-800 people that work to create and manage affordable housing in the state - bankers, developers, social service providers, housing authorities, attorneys, government entities, and of course a handful of architects. (I'm sure I missed someone in there).  http://www.wshfc.org/conf/

And cohousing can be a part of that solution.  As a board member for the Cohousing Association of the United States, I have been chairing the Affordable Cohousing Task Group.  We are developing/implementing an advocacy plan that will reach out to allied organizations and policy makers to share how cohousing can be a solution to creating healthy mixed-income neighborhoods that provide moderate income families with positive role models for achieving financial independence. 

The photo pictured above is a Petaluma Avenue Homes, a 45 unit cohousing-inspired community developed by Affordable Housing Associates in Sebastapol, CA.  The rental community was designed by McCamant & Durrett Architects - the architects who coined the term cohousing and introduced cohousing to North America after extensively researching it Denmark.  Petaluma Avenue Homes is a great example of how cohousing principles can inform the physical design to be an armature for building community.  It doesn't hurt that the architects convinced the developer to provide funding for a community facilitator to help develop community norms and structure during the first 2 years of occupancy. 

This will be one of many examples Mike and I will share during our presentation tomorrow at the 2010 Housing Washington Conference entitled Affordable Cohousing - Making it Work for Low Income Families.  Please come by and say hi!  To see what other sessions are being offered, visit http://www.wshfc.org/conf/HW2010.Glance.pdf.

The Architecture of Commerce on Capitol Hill

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Commerce is the foundation upon which urbanism is built. And, as a city is the highest cultural achievement of humankind, commerce is certainly one of humankind’s greatest pursuits. Hannah Arendt defined in her classic book The Human Condition that our existence is defined by our labor, work, and action. Labor are the travails we go through to sustain ourselves in the most fundamental ways: bathing, eating, or the making of shelter. Work is the means we employ to sustain our labors, and can be seen as the physical activities we endure to achieve the security of the former. To the ancient Greeks, action was solely the undertaking of the citizen, the man of means (a landholder) who because if his wealth, had sufficient resources to not engage in work, thereby freeing the intellect to speculate. Action was the time citizens spent exchanging ideas on politics, the arts, and culture; or, more succinctly, time spent on discussing how man ought to live. Action was therefore the noblest undertaking of the citizen, and the place that action was undertaken in ancient Greece was the Agora, the place for citizens to debate. The market place was also in the Agora, however, this was an almost incidental use as it involved work. Centuries after its founding in Greece, the Agora became the model for the Forum of ancient Rome. The key building typology of the Roman Forum was the basilica -- the market hall, and the most important building typology in Western architecture its forms  including the cathedral (St Peter’s Basilica, for example), various houses of governance, as well as the great covered markets of Italy and England (Covent Garden, for example), the nations that during and after the Renaissance founded our modern market economy.

In the British colonies of the New World, urban centers and markets were slow to develop, for settlers were pre-occupied with both labor and work, leaving little time for action. First the town green was established, if only for pasturing livestock or to afford a suitable landscape to front the meetinghouse (the place for action). As life became settled and progressed beyond substance farming, markets and then towns developed, centered about the original town green, hence forth known as the market square. The market square would have buildings of commerce as well as governance defining its boundaries, both being built in an architectural style imported from the Old World. Later, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the first American (domestically generated) ‘school’ of architecture emerged, the Chicago School, whose first practitioners pioneered the use of the iron frame in high-rise construction. Buildings by Louis Sullivan, Burnham and Root, and H. H. Richardson in turn inspired the early modernist architects of Europe, who praised their functional and performance driven design (qualities that were inherent in designing buildings for a speculative office and markets). Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Adolph Meyer held as exemplary other commerce-based buildings found in the United States as well, such as the concrete-framed warehouse and grain silo. While some contemporaries derided an architecture whose main drivers were economy, expediency, and capitalism, these first truly American buildings had a profound impact on early modernist practitioners, who at that time were the architectural arbiters of taste for both the Old and New Worlds.

Although not entirely within the Arendtian sense, today commerce falls increasingly within the realm of action, and less so in that of work. Purchasing petroleum for one’s Vespa does not put one on the same plane, as say debating the future form of the Broadway TOD sites, but there is much commerce that engages in the transaction of more than commodities. If the commerce includes a direct transaction of ideas – whether directly through conversation between merchant, or, if the item transacted includes the stuff of ideas, of action, we have made the shift from work to action. And in the case of commerce, the new place where this expanded understanding of action takes is the market. In a (much) more inclusive society than that of the ancient Greek (although by no means one that is free form its own forms of societal exclusion), a society such as our founded on commerce,  an evolution of ancient ideas is taking place by merging work with action, overlaying larger societal pursuits that parallel and advance commerce to a higher level.

At the dawn of the 21st century, consumers (townsfolk) have (rather belatedly) begun to incorporate cultural values as a metric (along with the traditional price, convenience, value metrics) with which to measure not only an item’s intrinsic value, but also its extrinsic value. Concerns for environmental stewardship and social justice are growing in the consciousness of the market place as witnessed by the so-called Triple Bottom Line, a term coined by John Elkington in his late 20th Century book Cannibals with Forks: the Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business. With the introduction (into a larger, cultural context, although many had already made this association) of values into commerce, discourse about those values -- while engaged in commerce -- necessarily follows. The formerly traditional marketplace is now not only one of goods and services, but increasingly of ideas, whether spoken of otherwise. And what of that market as place, has it changed to reflect these values, and if it has, what is in evidence of these changes? How have these values informed the design of the place? In addition to aesthetics (of interest to an architect, such as myself), what other values come to bear on the formation of these places for commerce? Collectively, how do these marketplaces define how we do and ought to live our lives on Capitol Hill? How do they reflect our values?

On Capitol Hill evidence abounds in this blending of work and action; or, commerce and values.  How does the present and how will the future urbanism of Capitol Hill be informed as one looks at these places of commerce? I have written of several places where value driven commerce is in evidence, although not necessarily within the framework identified above. As residents of Capitol Hill, many of us doubtlessly engage in a progressive, value based commerce, so this may not be new to you. Even if it is not new, what I hope might be (to both you and me), is speculating about value based commerce, and how the spaces where this activity occurs, spaces of both work and action, blend values and aesthetics, with future posts building upon those already made on Melrose Market, Volunteer Park Café, and Molly Moon’s.

Transparency, Curiosity, and Compassion

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I live at Daybreak Cohousing (http://www.daybreakcohousing.org/). Daybreak is an intentional community of neighbors who want to know each other and interact with each other on a daily basis. See our website or the national cohousing website: if you want to know more about us or cohousing in general. As with most communities, we have adopted a process/guide to help us effectively communicate with one another. We have adopted the “Mutual Learning Model”.

Transparency, Curiosity, and Compassion are the three key elements in the “Mutual Learning Model”. I find them to be invaluable in having clear, useful and productive conversations. They are particularly useful when having difficult conversations, which all of us have in life – be it with your partner, your family, your neighbors, or your colleagues.

Tuesday night, Emily Newberry with Wizense, Inc. (http://www.wizense.com/Wizense/Welcome.html), came and talked to our community about these concepts. She helped to make this way of communication more present for us once again as it has been quite awhile since our community has focused on how we communicate. I found it to be a wonderful  reminder of how to be together and what is important to us.

These are the guiding principles underlying Roger Shwarz’ 9 ground rules (http://www.schwarzassociates.com/content/products/1708), which we have also adopted. Ground rules are ways of talking and communicating with each other that are mutually agreed upon. They help groups talk in a way that supports each other and furthers communication to get to joint decisions.

“Transparency is being fully who you are and being honest about what you know and believe and how you see things.”

“Curiosity is being genuinely interested in what others have to say and what they know.”

“Compassion is temporarily suspending the belief that you have the right answer and putting yourself in the other person’s shoes to get what it is like to know what they know and reason the way they do.”

When you do all this, you can ‘play in the sandbox’ together. You begin by inviting the person/people you want to have a conversation to join you. This is much more effective than arm wrestling and being in the place of the “Unilateral Control Model”.

Thank you Emily and Daybreak for a great presentation and reminder! May we all continue to learn together!