For the first time in decades it’s cool to be a renter. So why is it so hard to rent a home and still be “green”?

This week, as news outlets across the board reported a steep decline in home sales and prices in July, especially in the West, some reported increased preferences for renting, especially with the added uncertainty wrought by high unemployment levels. Particia Orsini of AOL’s Housing Watch reported Aug. 26 that Americans, particularly homeowners, are now more likely to think that renting a home is more prudent than buying one. Other news outlets, such as Forbes and the Real Estate Channel and Time’s “Curious Capitalist” blog, also recently dissected the growing preference for renting.

Orsini cited statistics from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. I took a glance at that report – titled State of the Nation’s Housing 2010 – and found it shows that rental vacancies grew from 2006 to 2009, even though the renter pool was growing at the same time. In fact, U.S. Census Bureau housing vacancy survey data cited by the report shows that fewer people own homes in the West compared to any other region in the nation. The same numbers also show that nearly three-quarters of white Americans own homes while fewer than half of minority populations do.

So, what does this all have to do with the environment?

Everything. When we discuss incentives for energy efficiency we often focus on homeowners. Doing so leaves out millions of Americans, who by necessity or choice, rent their homes instead of buy. These renters may not be paying property taxes, but they still often pay for utilities such as electricity, gas and garbage disposal. As fewer Americans own homes, more will rent. Since they’re more likely to be renters, minorities are less likely to have access to financial incentives for making their homes more environmentally friendly. (The same could be said of residents of any ethnicity living in the West, where home ownership rates are low.)

In an Aug. 18 Palo Alto Online article, Ryan Deto points out that the thousands of dollars in upfront costs for homeowners to install solar systems or edible gardens are out of reach for low-income renters. Those costs would be even greater for a multi-unit property owner who, in many cases, isn’t the one who would see the savings of efficiency measures on utility bills.

That’s why it was encouraging to read Willey Staley’s Aug. 24 “Urban Nation” column in Next American City. In the piece, Staley described how an 81-unit senior housing complex in Boulder, Colo., was one of 100 affordable multi-family housing complexes to receive a share of $112 million in stimulus grants and loans from the Department of Housing and Urban Development for green retrofits such as solar panels and new, more efficient appliances.

In lauding the grants, Staley captures some of the early drama and, dare I say it, hope for a possible “Green New Deal” that surrounded early coverage of the economic stimulus.

“In a sense, this is a perfect example of what the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act was supposed to accomplish,” Staley writes. “It saves money both for property owners and tenants (emphasis mine), the federal government, creates domestic green jobs, and will contribute to reducing carbon emissions down the road. It’s hard to imagine a program that better encapsulates the Obama Administration’s policy goals: public spending that attracts private investment in more sustainable technologies, and helps ensure long- and short-term prosperity.”

Staley’s optimism is great, but there’s a problem. The West – which is being hit harder than anywhere else in the country by the shifting housing market – received far less than other regions from HUD’s recent series of green retrofits. Of the 100 green retrofit awards announced by the department (the department’s press release about the retrofits includes a link to a PDF copy of the list), only 17 were directed at projects in the region. In fact, money was doled out for projects in but five states in the region – California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada and Colorado. Of the nearly $112 million in awards, only a little more than $15 million, or about 14 percent, went to these states.

Even so, the grants only serve low-income renters who live in federally assisted housing. Millions of low-income renters don’t, as detailed in the Harvard housing study.

“Despite federal support for rental assistance of about $45 billion per year, only about one-quarter of eligible renter households report receiving housing assistance,” the report’s executive summary said.

If we want lasting economic and environmental prosperity shouldn’t we as a nation be investing in everyone who is participating in our economic system and interacting with our environment?

The day takes shape slowly. Getting out the door just happens. Once you do the bus is ten minutes late. Then so is the MAX, but you don’t mind. You’ve been quietly extricating yourself from time. You wait in the chill beneath an interstate, listening to teenagers gossip. Staring at the spikes lining the steel beams beneath the roadway you think perhaps a bit too long about pigeon deterrence.

Boarding the wide slick new cars of the Green Line, you laugh occasionally at a Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me podcast and take another stab at the crossword you started two days prior. Disembarking in Lents, you pass a crop of green, swirling, solar panel-topped sculptures, walk beyond cold, new planters toward Foster Road and gaze on Lincoln’s giant face on the side of the New Copper Penny.

This landscape is neither foreign nor familiar, a domestic banlieue swept to the edge of the green movement’s model city.

The mission is murky at best. You walk west under another freeway, looking for a well-reviewed video game merchant you found online. It’s not clear why you went this far. You don’t play games often enough to make them a destination, though you suspect the entire point was to ask just such questions. Wedged next to a 7-11, the store is smaller than you imagined, as cluttered and cramped inside as the clamoring chaos of the intersection between which it’s squeezed. A man lingers at the counter, trying to squeeze pennies from the business as he sells old games. There are two many people in the store. Despite nostalgia stirred by the pile of old NES games all you want to do is leave. Asking a quick question of the clerk, he assumes you’re there to make a trade and for some reason won’t look in your eyes when he talks with you. Nothing in the store interests you enough to make a purchase.

Not quite ready for lunch, you head the other way beneath the freeway to see if you can find some sort of treasure to justify the journey. Past a barber shop and tiny antique shop and a handful of businesses closed for the weekend, all you can see in the distance is a long road.

You turn back toward the MAX line, but can’t ignore a taqueria down a side street. Inside, fake pepper and onion and garlic plants line the ceiling. Elephant statues raise their trunks from every surface behind the counter. They’re outnumbered only by ducks. Rubber ducks. Ceramic mallards. Wooden drakes and plastic hens. Ducks. Everywhere.

Everything else is as traditional as taquerias seem anywhere. Staticy TV stations play spanish-language music videos. Hand-written specials fill a dry-erase board. A dozen bottles of hot sauces and salsas sit on the edge of every table. The red, white and green of the Mexican flag on the wall mirrors the facade’s paint job.

You make your order quickly, and simply. Tacos. One pollo, one pastor, and one cabeza.

You sit down at a middle booth, ponder discoveries and road trips and that burning itch to travel. When you pull from your bag the latest issue of Harper’s, it opens to an excerpt from a writer who spent five weeks in residency at London’s Heathrow Airport. He describes arrivals. Expectancy. The cultural filters thousands of us pass through each and every day. Crunching tortilla chips and hot salsa you sink into the words, wishing you wrote that way, or that you could be there, documenting the everyday, spinning it into lush, rich language.

A family comes through the door, led by a girl of no more than seven hobbling on a cane. She’s dwarfed by the boisterous entry of her oversized relatives. They settle into the larger table in the middle of the room. You find yourself inching away as one sits near you, the slightly unpleasant odor of her exhaustion hitting your nostrils just as your meal arrives.

Embarrassed by your quick judgment, you let the discomfort pass and eavesdrop on their cheerful Saturday afternoon conversation. They plan errands. The mother recalls a long-passed uncle’s favorite foods. The boys and girls chirp. A man, a boyfriend or brother or son, sits at the head of the table and doesn’t utter a word. Not one. The women talk about an 18-year-old niece’s thwarted hopes to hire a male stripper. The $150 cost of the house-call is too high and she’s too young to go to the 21-and-over club in town with male exotic dancers. Mother and daughter and aunt discuss the situation as the younger kids laugh and joke, oblivious. It doesn’t seem anything is resolved, except the family’s decision to include tacos with breaded fried beef in their order.

You sprinkle a little too much habenero sauce on top of your second taco, the chicken. A middle-class couple walks in. The woman is cute, blonde, maybe mid-30′s and wearing a long, knit sweater-jacket. Her partner is about the same age, with a meticulously cropped red beard around his chin and a tight, pastel green t-shirt from another Northwestern metropolis. They ponder the menu and make their orders. They’re loud, somehow more so than the sum cacophony of the family, which somehow seems to have gained even more members in the fifteen minutes or so they’ve been in the restaurant.

You turn your attention away and sip your lime Jarritos. A waiter offers more tortilla chips. Though you decline, on each of your remaining five or six you carefully dab a few drops of a different sauce to find just the right one for your last taco. The name of the favorite escapes you now, but you sprinkle it carefully on the taco, only a touch so as not to overpower the pork.

Taking a bite, you sit back in the booth and notice another herd of elephant figurines in the corner.

Click on the thumbnails for a peek at what I saw.

When I was a kid, Legos were quite possibly my number one toy. Sure, I spent untold hours in front of our 13 channel Sony Trinitron with a gray plastic controller in my hand exploring pixelated worlds on my Nintendo Entertainment System, but it was the Legos that best stirred my imagination. It was the Legos that were everywhere.

That’s just what Jonathan Glancey of The Guardian captured in an article last week in which he wrote about the resilience of the toys, of their persistence, the way Lego

“seems to breed in boxes tucked under beds or in the recesses of spidery cupboards. It’s a game that generations add to. And one that children and grandparents can enjoy. From the child’s viewpoint, Lego is simply there, like St Paul’s Cathedral (a bit tricky to model in right-angled plastic bricks), the Empire State Building or St Catherine’s College.”

Last weekend, in between an afternoon in Santa Barbara with former colleagues of mine from the Pacific Coast Business Times and an evening with a freelancer who wrote for me when I edited the Ventura County Reporter , I passed a night at my childhood home. I arrived at my mom’s in the early evening. She was out watching a close friend perform in a play. A houseguest staying over while completing a residency at one of the city’s hospitals was also out. I had the house to myself.

Much as i might have done returning home from school, I dropped a bag off in my bedroom — now painted a rather cheerier color than it ever was during my childhood — and walked straight to our family room. That room really hadn’t changed much in the 11 years since I graduated high school and wandered out into my life.

Sprawled across the coarse carpet of mottled dark and light greens were winding feet upon feet of wooden train tracks assembled by my three-year-old niece more than a month earlier. I smiled, both at the reminder of how the frenetic pace of my family’s life sometimes keeps such clutter unchecked, and at the memory of spending a lazy holiday weekend playing with my niece.

She enlisted me in building an elaborate network of railroad tracks and bridges and boat docks. Nearby, the surprisingly elaborate complex of building blocks she had constructed still stood. Wrought by her own imagination and design it looked like a modern civic center any city would be proud of. I smiled at how she had determinedly created her own world that weekend (my only role was to take instruction from my young forewoman and occasionally solve vexing engineering struggles such as the proper support for a railway bridge).

Instantly I remembered my own years in that room, a room I probably spent far more time in than my own bedroom, perhaps even counting the time I spent asleep. I remembered building similar train networks, sometimes spanning multiple rooms. Along the back wall of the room were stacked crates of Legos and I wondered how many adventures and landscapes and universes I had conjured up with them, and how many more would still be conjured up with the very same pieces by my niece and her sister at some future point, not to mention any other children that might join our family.

I’ll interrupt myself here to note the lingering privilege I have to share this description. Scandinavian building toys, whether colorful Lego sets or simple Brio trains, are not the most affordable toys, nor are video games. To have had the opportunity to choose between the three is a liberty not all children have (or, perhaps, need). But I can’t deny or lament a truth like that. I can only acknowledge it and move on.

As I think one can extrapolate from the following excerpt from Glancey’s article, though, some form of this imaginative play is important to most kids’ lives, wherever they’re from, whatever background they have.

“One of the first things we draw as children is our home, which, in many cultures, is an elemental four-square house, of the kind you might make with Lego, although I’m not sure if Lego makes pitched roofs,” Glancey writes. “And, from wooden bricks to sophisticated plastic toys, children will go on, quite naturally, to build. There is a homemaker, brickie and even an architect in most of us.”

Glancey is on to something, particularly because the core message of his piece is really less about Lego specifically and more about the rise in do it yourself culture in many forms, of the “value for lasting things” that we so desperately need to learn.

I think about this often these days. As we seek a path out of our economic malaise, too often I hear that positive signs will come in the form of new housing starts or increased consumer spending. How can that possibly be the answer? How can creating yet more seas of unimaginative little boxes filled with yet smaller boxes ever satisfy us?

One might say “But we need these boxes to put people back to work. How will the construction crews and architects and engineers and road builders survive?”

I wonder, is our imagination so limited that we think anyone will survive by doing the exact same thing we’ve done for half a century? Why can’t we take the same simple wonder of an afternoon of play and build a new world with the pieces we already have? Why can we not take our bricks and track and blocks and rearrange them, as we did countless times as children, into new buildings, new cities and new transportation networks? Why can’t we put our architects to work redesigning the decrepit spaces that already pepper our world? Why can’t we put builders to work reconstructing our destroyed communities? Why must we mine new materials and continue the urbanization of our wild lands when so much unused housing stock and other structures sit vacant?

Why can’t we rearrange the pieces we already have? If we could do it endlessly as kids, we really can do it now.

Meanwhile: is this comment from the Guardian page with the article not one of the funniest things you’ve read or what?

Thanks to the always amazing commondreams.org for tipping me and other readers off to the Guardian story.

]]> http://lascheratlarge.com/2009/08/24/rearranging-our-pieces-playing-with-our-future/feed/ 0 http://lascheratlarge.com/2009/03/31/take-offs/ http://lascheratlarge.com/2009/03/31/take-offs/#comments Tue, 31 Mar 2009 08:52:36 +0000 Bill http://lascheratlarge.com/?p=345 The thing about L.A. before you even land is the lights. Everywhere. Like a circuit board. Beneath or at least near each is a story, a life, a world. Only a glance and I’m reminded of that.

It’s late, but I know the way it would look in the sunlight, the circuit boards stretching between

Read the rest of Take offs

Yesterday morning I drove along Lombard Street. Stopped at a light where Lombard intersects with Albina, I pondered a craft store in a small house on the north side of the road. A large shingle hanging in the yard read “Yesterday and Tomorrow.” From the road I could see through the windows to view what looked like vases and sculptures and other knick-knacks, but the store’s name and the fact the sign featured a dragon (See postscript) made it hard not to think it catered to lovers of fantasy novels and science fiction. I thought of Renaissance Fair fans and Trekkies and how the two groups share a category somewhere in my brain.

Something dawned on me. Fans of these genres spend so much of their entire lives concerned with either what has been (in a loose sense, since we’re talking about fantasy), or what might be (as fanciful as such visions may be constructed). I don’t say this out of judgment, for I admittedly enjoy a great deal of science fiction and the odd medieval-themed book or movie. Still, it’s an unsettling thought. What about the beauty of the present?

I’d rather not delve into a cultural/literary critique, especially because I don’t want to discount the power and beauty of imagination. Nonetheless, these thoughts arose as I’ve pondered the intersection of my own present with my past and future. Here in Portland this week I’ve seen how so many paths have intersected. I’m always awed as I drive East and West by the 10 bridges spanning the Willamette River, and only now am realizing that Portland itself has been the backdrop for so many transitions across my own life.

Over the past year I’ve flown into this city three times. There’s something about landing here that stirs a tremendous amount of nostalgia. When I land in Portland, it feels like home. I understand where I am. I see where I’ve been. It feels like a real arrival, unlike any other city I’ve been to. It makes a certain amount of sense.

Whether it’s mist dancing through City Center skyscrapers or bursts of green splashed across the outskirts of town, everything seems to fit together. Certainly, Portland isn’t quite the emerald masterpiece it’s cracked up to be. Like most American cities, Portland displays the scars of sprawl. As I landed, I saw huge swaths of recently-sprung developments. From the air, the foreclosure signs and anxious faces that surely populate many of the capillary-like cul-de-sacs were invisible. All I could discern were patches of conformity spreading around the city. Visible evidence of turn-of-this-century greed that left this and all of America reeling.

It’s so jarring, because on the ground Portland proper, if not its suburbs, swirls with the pot luck attitude of a true community, although strong, valid critiques exist of redevelopment within the city as well. Far more than any place I’ve been in the United States except perhaps, as a matter of fact, the original Portland, this is a self-determined city, including the blemishes of its modernity.

As I land and swirl through so many past worlds of mine, I remember I can move about the city without thought. However, I’m still constantly discovering more beneath Portland’s surface. The only time I ever had a similar sensation was at my five-year college reunion last year, and that feeling was aided by the presence of so many others who had experienced that period of my life with me. But where the grounding I find among my undergraduate peers is most firmly rooted in a mindset, there seem to be physical roots here in Portland.

It’s strange as well because if my sense of home has something to do with the experience of landing in a city, I’d imagine my ties to L.A. would be stronger. Where I can count the number of times I’ve flown into PDX on my fingertips, my journeys to and from LAX are innumerable and stretch back to my youngest days. But the meaning carried by a descent into Los Angeles is far different, likely because until last summer I had never resided there. I’m still forming my understanding of Los Angeles and the placement of that megalopolis into my mindset. I’m still defining what it means to me. As much as I’ve come to love the city and begun to understand its layered intricacies, I am far from knowing it, from internalizing it the way I’ve internalized Portland.

And the thing is, i don’t know if I ever will, and not just because Los Angeles is such a massive place by comparison. It’s something deeper. When I am in Portland I feel little more than the now. Like the city, I’m not perfect when it comes to finding serenity, but, I think importantly, I don’t feel rushed to find it. In L.A., as I did in Ventura, I feel I’m constantly trying to get my footing. To get settled.

That divergence might be stronger now, when I feel myself trying to pack an entire life into a one-year graduate program, then find myself this week coming to understand perhaps more deeply than I ever have just what it means to be on vacation. I am aware there are thousands struggling to live in Portland. Thousands without the luxury I’ve had this week of time and loved ones and treasured friends with whom I can reconnect. Thousands standing at the precipice of an uncertain future, as there are across the world. But I also am finally at a point in my life where I’m finding it’s pointless to fight the way I feel about anything so I will savor this sensation.

This weekend, a couple days after I landed in Portland and first started forming these thoughts, I thought about what Portland and the other parts of Oregon that have been a part of my life really mean to me. In my life it has been not just a place of respite, but something of a transitional zone. A buffer. I move through lives here. Most of the major phases of my adult life have been book-ended by travels, sometimes quite literally, through the state. These journeys have been moments of re-centering, of rediscovery.

At many instances I find myself upon bridges traversing two sensations. I have rebuilt myself, found esoteric escapes and torn down shells of myself here even as I have simmered amid apprehension and self-doubt and pushed myself beyond my limits. When I’m here, I find myself chasing the faintest of distant lights and simultaneously fighting to stand firm against the over-exuberant facets of my personality. I find myself wandering through semi-charmed moments of surreality as if amid dreams yet feeling incredibly alert.

Again, I’m still here. My words still get tied, get excessive, they get me in trouble and go too far. Somehow, though, Somehow even if I resist, I know there is comfort and rest here. I know myself here. I can free myself, I can be myself here, whether the “here” is this moment, this place or neither.

Postscript:

I took a few moments to peruse the Web site of the Yesterday and Tomorrow store after I Googled its name. I didn’t get too far, but I did notice this hilarious description of one category of their products.

“Our Gargoyles & Dragons are only visiting us, while they are waiting for just the right person and place to call home.  A few stay only a day and some are much more picky and stay a while. So we never know who will be here moment by moment, but it seems that as one moves out another moves in. There always seems to be a number underfoot. Big & Little, they come in all sizes, some like to be tucked in small places and some like to be the center of the show.”