Where should green planning efforts come from?

Photo of Portland bike lane courtesy Flickr user Eric Fredericks

This week's post for High Country News's "A Just West" blog explored discussions that came out of last week's Ecodistricts Summit in Portland. Check it out here or read it -- and many other great stories -- on HCN.

Hundreds of urban planners, architects, developers,  environmentalists, entrepreneurs and policymakers danced around this  question last week as they convened on Portland for the second annual Ecodistricts Summit.

Hosted by the Portland Sustainability Institute (PoSI), the  event complements a maturing experiment to make five of the Oregon  metropolis's neighborhoods into "Ecodistricts," neighborhoods designed  to be more sustainable.

Though the ecodistricts concept is defined differently in different  cities, in Portland they are built around developing ambitious  sustainability goals that stakeholders in a strictly designated  neighborhood commit to meeting. These goals might include capitalizing  on district  energy to limit the need for power generation from outside the  neighborhood, encouraging transit oriented development and walkability,  or establishing neighborhood-wide building efficiency standards.

But backers of all sustainable growth projects need to focus more on  building community support, said John Knott, the president and  CEO of Noisette LLC, which is working on a sustainable restoration  project in the lower-income area of North Charleston, South Carolina.  Ambitious energy efficiency goals and other high tech solutions to  environmental problems will fail if they come without the buy-in from  communities who are just trying to make ends meet.

"We have a huge social mess we have created in the last 40 years,”  Knott said in the event's opening panel, referring to the segregation of  communities by income, lack of access to environmental amenities by  many low-income neighborhoods, and the problems of gentrification and  urban flight. “If we don't fix that, we will have a revolution and it  will be justified.”

It's rare to hear a developer publicly stress the need to  rearrange underlying social structures. As Knott noted, the problem of  poor planning and design doesn't just face urban areas. He believes  people will flee suburbs, putting further strain on central cities without solving growing economic imbalances.

Portland's own proposed ecodistricts weren't identified internally by residents clamoring for greener planning.  Among other motivations for their selection, each is already part of an  urban renewal area set for infusions of redevelopment funds.

One of them, the largely commercial Lloyd  District, will be one of the first to experiment with an ecodistrict  designation. It will model its efforts on the success of a previous  project, a transportation management association that corralled  investments in mass transit infrastructure and developed incentives that  encouraged office workers to take transit or ride bikes to work, said  Rick Williams, the TMA's executive director. Now the district wants to  replicate the TMA's success with a “sustainability management  association” to set the new ecodistrict's goals.

The first steps toward defining sustainable development goals for  the neighborhood won't include everyone who lives and works there,  though. Instead, Williams said, the first step requires targeting major  land owners to sign “declarations of collaboration” on the ecodistricts  project.

“We believe we have to start with developers because we know them  and because they have bigger checkbooks,” Williams said. “The real key  to this is getting key stakeholders in the room and defining targets  before we start talking about solutions.”

Williams is right. You can't solve a problem without defining it.  When we're talking about sustainability, though, are property owners and  major institutions really the only “key stakeholders?”

Probably  not. Green initiatives don't mean anything if behaviors don't change,  and it's hard to change behaviors among people left out of the  decision-making process. Some of the organizers of Portland's ecodistrict movement get this. Tim Smith, a principal and director of  urban design for Portland Architecture Firm SERA touts a concept of a  “Civic Ecology.”

“We're in danger as an expert class of creating a bunch of great  green hardware where we have an ignorant citizenry that is obliged to  buy this stuff, as opposed to having citizenry own their  sustainability,” Smith said.

Most people in the sustainability and environmental movements  know there's a need for equity, justice and economic opportunity, but  they don't have clear models for providing opportunities to marginalized  communities, said Alan Hipólito, the executive directory of Verde,  which works in the Portland neighborhood of Cully to build links between  economic health and sustainability though job training, employment and  entrepreneurial opportunities. Cully is not included among the five officially designated ecodistricts.

Hipólito was the first to explicitly discuss the risk of  gentrification, though it was implied by others during the three-day  event (a point also discussed in a post about the summit in  the Portland Architecture blog).

“Our sustainability movement makes investments in certain people and  places,” Hipólito said. “This movement has not prioritized diversity.”

He  said residents of his neighborhood have joined together at a grassroots  level to address Cully's lack of environmental wealth, mostly from  within, without being directed by outside organizations.

“From our perspective, it means investing in assets that meet  community needs as an anti-poverty strategy first that's going to  automatically build environmental benefits in an area,” Hipólito said.

Statistics  from the Regional Equity Atlas, a project organized by the Coalition  for a Livable Future, reveal that 18 percent of the neighborhood's  residents live in poverty, about twice the regional average. Access to  parkland is far below the regional average, and access to natural  habitats is even worse. That's why Verde gets developers to sign  community benefit agreements that provide well-paying jobs – many to  minority and women owned businesses – on projects that keep what  resources – even unconventional ones like district heat – in Cully.

“When you put all this together we suddenly discover we're making an ecodistrict, so we've decided to call it that,” Hipólito.

Portland  isn't alone among cities toying with ecodistricts. Denver's Living City  Block and the Seattle 2030 District, for example, share ambitious goals  to slash energy usage and promote economically revitalized urban  districts. Each also relies on partnerships with property owners, and  that top-down focus leaves me wondering how engaged those cities'  citizens will be in positioning their communities as models for global  change.

I'm not suggesting that large property owners and developers  shouldn't be engaged. Clearly they're important stakeholders, but it  seems like the most successful approaches – like the one already  underway in Cully – secure the participation of the entire community  first.

Photo of Portland bike lane courtesy Flickr user Eric Fredericks.

A Renter's Market?

My latest post for High Country News's"A Just West" blog explores why it isn't easy being green if you're a renter

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?

Ducking the Elephant in the Room

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 too 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.

Koreatown's sign language

This afternoon I ran an errand a couple Purple line stops away. It was such a beautiful day that instead of taking the subway I decided to meander home on foot. Fortunately, before I left the house I thought to grab my camera. I took the opportunity to look around a bit and capture some of my favorite signage and guerrila art in Koreatown. Note Kim Jong-Il's appearances. Guess at which point my sense of humor turned a little juvenile. Also, pay close attention to the heart on the banner outside Mr. Pizza Factory, where, apparently the choices among the pies include beef, fish, chicken and "love for women." Click on the arrows or individual thumbnails for a peek at what I saw.

Mr. Pizza Poster in Koreatown

A vinyl sign on a building advertises the restaurant Mr. Pizza in Los Angeles’s Koreatown neighborhood. It has pictures of fish, chicken, and beef pizzas and text that reads “When pizza met Taco. Amigo Pizza Special Event.” A red heart in the corner has more text that reads “Love for women” in white lettering. The Mr. Pizza logo is in the upper right corner with the name written in red letters and a picture of a white hand flipping a brown pizza dough.

Young Dong Restaurant Sign in Koreatown

A sign in the foreground of this image features text in English and Korean. The English, written in white against a blue background, reads “Young Dong Restaurant” and fill a small strip at the sign’s top. Large white Korean characters make up most of the rest of the sign and are printed against blue yellow and red stripes. The sign appears in front of a large blank wall of a tall building viewed at an angle that makes the building appear somewhat phallic.

Kim Jong-Il

Ten identical stenciled images of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il are printed in dark gray alongside one another on a lighter gray sidewalk, with the red paint of the sidewalk’s curb just at the edge of the image. Most of the images are parallel and aligned vertically in pairs, but the third and fourth pairs are turned 90 degrees rightward from the rest.

Korea Thumbs Up

A close up of a drawing from a sign in Los Angeles’s Koreatown neighborhood. The drawing features a man with a red shirt that reads “Korea” in white letters across the chest and green pants with a black belt. The man’s clothes are too small for his large belly, which is white in color and exposed. He gives a thumbs-up gesture with his left hand and holds a large spoon almost as tall as his body in his right. A soccer ball rests next to his foot.

Jr. Market Liquor in Koreatown

A painted awning of a liquor store and bar in Los Angele’s Koreatown neighborhood features images of Korean personalities, politicians, and the South Korean flag at its center, as well as extensive Korean lettering. In the middle of the right third of the image is a sign that reads Jr. Market in small red letters on a yellow background and Liquor in large white letters on a red background, with an unlit arrow comprised of lightbulbs pointing downward at the far right side. A clear blue sky fills the upper half of the image.

What it's like - In transit through L.A.

After an evening in Pasadena I board the Gold line at Fillmore Station. I complete a phone call as the train heads southwest, away from the San Gabriel Valley toward Downtown Los Angeles. As we stop at the Lincoln Heights/Cypress Park station I see the lights of thousands of East L.A. homes twinkling out the window beside me, as if Christmas had lingered a little into the New Year. A green half moon hangs heavily in the sky above the 10, so close to the ground it seems one could reach it by car. A minute or two later I look out the opposite window of the narrow train to see the blue and red neon outline of pagodas marking the next neighborhood I will travel through.

“Approaching Chinatown Station,” a man's recorded voice announces, the volume on the car's speakers too loud for the last train of a midweek evening. Riders hold their ears and momentarily interrupt phone calls. In one corner, a woman, who for the past three stops bobbed between slumber and what seems a trance-like state jolts awake, her hands grasping the white, curved handlebars of the bike she has propped in front of her.

In the same moment a wave of familiarity washes over me here alongside the L.A. River. As the street lamps and billboards and taillights fade into the darkness I slip away from the Los Angeles I know, jostled into a new awareness by the thought of the path I am threading through the urban fabric.

I find myself all over the world. Now I am headed toward downtown Portland, Maine aboard the #6 bus, gazing at the B&M Baked Beans factory standing starkly against the gray skies and grayer waters of the Casco Bay. A moment later I find myself on Portland Oregon's MAX, where I see a net of concrete and steel and iron bridges crossing the same Willamette River I ride above. Then my thoughts shift and I cross the Rhine, I cross borders and history on the bus from France's Strasbourg to Germany's Kehl to buy Turkish Doner Kebab and American peanut butter. I find myself back in Strasbourg, listening to Tunisians and Moroccans joking in the center of Le Tram, the wide steel tube they ride day and night from the banlieues of Meinau and Neudorf and Elsau toward the broad Place Kleber at Strasbourg's heart.

Familiar memories vector across my neural network, stitched together to form my life, as has begun to happen here, where I left my car at home, here, in L.A., the supposed Eden of automobiles. I reach my destination, spill out of the train and linger in Union Station as I finish my phone call. This night the station is falling asleep, like the quarter-dozen overladen travelers waiting for the late night bus to Bakersfield. Janitors mop the day away between the old tan leather and wood chairs, the solid, welcoming remnants of a grand past.

Just yesterday I lingered on one of these chairs watching dust dance through streams of sunlight. I gnoshed on a messy bagel sandwich as I processed a Metro committee meeting I had just visited.

There, Metro board members brimmed with impatience and frustration, frustration that grand plans to clear the stifled circulatory system of this creature sprawled across hills and valleys and long forgotten scrubland. As I watched the workday wander by, the wide-eyed midwestern families, the men in suits, the women in silk blouses and heels, the tired college students, even the silent, red-faced man who furiously stuck a flier about aliens in my face or the young Asian-American movie star surreptitiously posing for a magazine photo shoot I thought I felt a pulse. A light shudder here, a straining beat there as I watched the station catch its rhythm.

“I'm here,” I tell the woman I'm speaking to on the phone. I grope for change in my pockets and descend beneath a sign reading “Metro Red Line.”

“I have to get on the train now.”

Rearranging Our Pieces, Playing With Our Future

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 house guest 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.

Landings

Lately I’ve been thinking a tremendous amount about places I’ve been, places I am and places I may be going. Since Friday I’ve been in Portland, Oregon. While here, I’ve had the opportunity to connect with a number of old friends, beloved members of my family and a city I am finding so full of meaning to me, even though I've only lived here a few months. 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."

Adaptive Reuse: Parking Meters to Bike Racks

I'm in the midst of preparing some posts about the Expanding Vision of Sustainable Mobility summit hosted this week by the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. In doing so, I'm semi-procrastinating by skimming long-ago bookmarked blog entries and websites I set aside for reference in my master's project exploring the possibility of a transit revolution in the Los Angeles area. This might be a bit late, but I was impressed by this January post from StreetsBlog LA about the Los Angeles Department of Transportation's (LADOT) plans to convert old parking meters to bike racks.

Some readers may know I'm working on a magazine-length news feature exploring the opportunities to change transit behaviors, policies and infrastructure in Los Angeles given the constraints of current resources, technology and politics. I'm most interested in what steps can be taken to permanently change how people move about the region. One thing I'm learning and hearing from others is that a crucial reaction to our economic and environmental crises is to effectively reuse, redeploy and repurpose the infrastructure and materials we already have available to us.

Although the piece is already drafted and I’m just putting some finishing touches on a rewrite, it seemed the Pasadena conference would be a tremendous opportunity to either augment my reporting or begin thinking about further stories on the topic.

Overall, the energy and motivation at the conference was inspiring. Yet, I was struck that the visions at the conference were not largely expansive. Perhaps it’s because Art Center’s industrial design programs feed the automotive industry, but there really seemed to be a focus on redesigning the automobile, rather than transportation infrastructure as a whole.

This effort by LADOT is a great example of simple creative thought. When it begins, it could be a model for how institutions can participate in adaptive reuse and the department is worthy of at least a brief note of recognition for this project.