Land and democracy, according to Detroit

If you follow the Google trail related to the Hantz farm deal in Detroit, several times you will come across the statement about how this land sale is transferring public land into private hands, and only those private hands will profit from it. It may have been public land (the Hantz deal squeaked by City council approval a couple of months ago), but it needed a healthy dose of capital to turn it into anything useful to the public. The non-profit sector may not have enough to do this on a large scale, all by itself – the City sure doesn’t.

Robert Anderson, the relatively new director of planning and development, supports Hantz Farms because, he says, it will help increase property values and much-needed tax revenue for the City, and while this isn’t a slam-dunk solution, “the key is to find ways to have good things start bleeding into neighborhoods.”

As I waded through the internet reading more about Hantz Farms (Hantz Woodlands now, actually), I thought about Dan and Ben Miller again – the ones who established the working framework for local residents to invest in their own neighborhood’s real estate (“The Real Estate Deal that Could Change the Future of Everything,” The Atlantic Cities). What if Hantz started a crowdfunding scheme and sold shares in his farm to the local residents?

Can Detroit at least get more democracy and community involvement out of this deal, while keeping it a for-profit (tax revenue-generating) venture? The answer is yes.

Shea Howell of Detroit has asked for the City to develop Community Benefit Agreements, already used by other cities, which would democratize private land sales by, for example, requiring that a certain percentage of the work done on the land be contracted to local companies.

There are also other opportunities to mold the project into something that can benefit the larger Detroit community. Michigan State University might initiate research projects on Hantz’s land that could lead to job creation. The City could develop an ordinance within a few years that could allow for growing food on the land. Hantz is a long way from owning all the blighted Detroit land that is available at rock-bottom prices – the City could still put some into a public land trust, and there is still plenty of vacant land available for non-profit groups. Another idea becoming reality: a non-profit urban farm (including fish) that would train and employ ex-addicts and ex-convicts.

All said, my opinion (outsider that I am) is that the Hantz farm deal has already been a good thing for Detroit, if only for this reason: it has clearly sparked a collection of new, creative ideas for what to do with the vacant land, and created a much-needed sense of urgency around the issue. And the rest of the country is watching.

Yes, we need more dirt!

Yes, we need more dirt!

I want a farm on my rooftop, too. The Sierra Club magazine recently reviewed two competing philosophies – high-tech hydroponics and good old-fashioned dirt, in the middle of New York City. I’m with the dirt guy. I’m happy to see that Seattle has some, too.

May I please also get a dog park up there?

Anyway, I thought the two articles about urban farming in Detroit were fascinating. I’m still not sure what to think of that guy – whether he’s land-grabbing or innovating. I do know that I agree with him – we need solutions. When I worked at a social service agency in Chicago, we had a food pantry where we provided free groceries for our clients. We had boxes and boxes of corn grits and powdered milk – almost no one wanted them, they wanted strawberries and other fresher stuff, some of which I’ve been able to grow on my own little apartment balcony (sugar snap peas are also really easy to grow). Our country produces so much corn and other subsidized food that we had to compel our clients to lug this stuff home on the bus, and probably throw in their trash for the garbage trucks to deliver to the landfill. UGH.

It wasn’t all frustrating, though. Just down the street, while I was still working there, a new urban farm was started, serving primarily low-income residents. Maybe if the profit farm idea in Detroit doesn’t work out, at least the situation will spark more movement in this area.

Credit: http://www.chicagolights.org

The Chicago Lights Urban Farm in downtown Chicago.

Teeny tiny and/or really cool

I’d love to build my own cabin, but I wouldn’t know where to start, especially as I live in and have to earn my living in the city. I’d look forward to the day where I could buy a small lot and build my own cool tiny house… maybe just kinda small? I’m not sure my family and I could do teeny tiny like the Tumbleweed homes. Of course, for those who aren’t interested in tiny home living (eg, families with children), we can still encourage responsible (and awesome) housing construction.

I think we should create a whole industry of home builders and renovators that salvage building material otherwise headed to the landfill, and make it into new (or retrofitted) homes that people would be excited to live in (like I would). I found at least one guy, Dan Phillips, who is really good at this (in the first couple of minutes in the 20 minute TED Talks video at the link, you can see some images of the innovative stuff this guy has done). The first thing we’d need is large materials exchange facilities like those suggested in Chapter 5 of The Carbon-Efficient City. Mr. Phillips and his parent group Phoenix Commotion support low-income singles and families in designing and building their own affordable homes. We need this framework to be the new normal.

Photo credit: www.lowimpactliving.com,

Here’s to SEPA

Wind farm country near the Deschutes River, sans wind turbines (there are lots nearby)

In the last few years, I’ve worked on proposed wind farm sites doing natural resource surveys in support of permitting. We know that if every inch of space available for wind energy production was used, we’d have lots of good wind energy, but still not enough to cover our needs. We’d also probably be living with other negative environmental consequences, like fewer threatened and endangered birds. Residents weren’t always thrilled about the landscape being gobbled up by turbines (and the view is beautiful). Other times they were thrilled by the dollars coming their way from the lease. Opinions varied, as they will of course, but especially after talking with cattle ranch owners who have been stewards of the land for decades, it was very clear to me that they should be able to have their say.

The SEPA and NEPA processes are there to ensure that projects can’t just appear without the community’s input. Yes, they might delay good things sometimes, and the reporting burden can be a pain, but the overall benefit of the accountability these regulations provide outweighs these occasional negative consequences – just like the overall benefit of wind energy can outweigh the negative effects on wildlife and aesthetics, given that these are arguably less harmful than environmental effects from other energy sources. I didn’t get the sense that Chapter 3 of The Carbon-Efficient City was suggesting we just scrap SEPA (perhaps just modify or streamline for some cases) but I still felt afterwards that the program was missing some positive credit.

As we streamline regulations, we need to remember that “good” projects also have the responsibility to take an objective look at their impacts on the human and natural environment. And so far regulations are the most predictable and consistent framework to make that happen. A new wastewater treatment plant that will reduce pollution to Puget Sound can be a great thing for the environment, but the project should still replace the trees they cut down to make room for the pump station, just like anyone else who wants to build something. It surprised me to encounter resistance to that. Thanks to SEPA and other local environmental regulations, the public may bring to light a real and important effect that project proponents hadn’t seen.

I believe that the occasional delays for good projects will just have to be part of the game – projects can still get built and they may be more successful in the long-term if the approval process provides strong justification and credibility. Thank goodness we have the EIS process with the prospect of the Cherry Point coal terminal project. And given the amount of opposition and public comments on the SR 520 bridge project EIS, sometimes I’m surprised it even went through, but it sure did. Here’s to better things that also will.

-E. Thatcher

Photo credit: Peteforsyth, Wikipedia

More about this energy-water nexus

You could describe my job as an environmental engineer as getting clean water to people and dirty water away from people. As mentioned in Chapter 2 of “The Carbon Efficient City,” this takes some energy, and so it can be expensive. We try to take advantage of the fact that water goes downhill – especially on the Columbia and Snake rivers, from which the Pacific Northwesterners get the majority of our energy (followed by coal and natural gas).

Wikipedia defines the water-energy nexus as “the relationship between how much water is evaporated to generate and transmit energy, and how much energy it takes to collect, clean, move, store, and dispose of water.” Some quick Google searching turns up some cool emerging technologies to extract energy from water, such as ocean thermal energy conversion.

“The Carbon Efficient City,” the Water Efficiency online journal and others that are for aligning water resource management with climate change action cite strategies such as: public and private investments in water conservation and recycling; increasing the value of a gallon of water in the market; and providing consumer choices that reduce our individual water footprints.

It seems like most of what we hear about increasing water efficiency relates to domestic supply and use. But what about agriculture? Agriculture makes up a much larger portion of our total freshwater use – 70 percent is often the number cited. Running irrigation equipment, creating and transporting fertilizers and pesticides all require water, as well as energy. High-pressure jet sprinklers can be replaced with low-pressure and microirrigation systems, which reduce the amount of water lost to evaporation and use less energy. Sometimes wastewater can be recycled (reclaimed) and used for irrigation –which increases water efficiency, but costs more energy for treatment and distribution.

Agriculture’s efficient water and energy use directly impacts food security, especially with the uncertainty of climate change and the price of fuel. So it seems reasonable to prioritize water use efficiency in agriculture, as well as in domestic water, particularly in developing nations. The Huffington Post Water Blog recently explored this global issue, and calls on the U.S. to take a leading role in the solutions, which could include growing specific crops to make the best use of water and energy resources to meet global and local food needs.

Photo credit: U.S. Geological Survey

 

Shared value across a blurred line

As I read about the idea of creating shared value in the Harvard Business Review, I kept thinking of the book “Uncharitable” by Dan Pallota. I picked this up a couple of years ago after I got home from a year volunteering at a social service agency, where I worked with the homeless in Chicago. I read the book trying to make some sense of my at-times frustrating experience working for a charity.

In the Harvard Business Review article, Michael Porter mentions is that creating shared value would start to blur the profit-nonprofit line. Right now non-profits are constrained by very strict standards meant to maximize efficiency which translates to low overhead spending, limited ability to make capital investments, and limited compensation for staff (low salary and benefit incentives). Charities are heavily scolded in the media for, say, spending $400k to raise $1 mil, or paying their executive director a salary competitive with the rate in the for-profit world. These things are unappealing to a donating public attached to the idea that at least 90% of their donation goes “directly” to helping the poor, saving the polar bears, etc. In Chicago, this ideology meant that I had to use ancient, slow computers and outdated software to teach job skills to our clients, and it felt pretty pointless.

In “Uncharitable,” Mr. Pallota  argues for releasing charities from these constraints, allowing them to attract top talent to solve our immensely complex social problems, take greater financial risks hoping for greater rewards, and compete for consumers’ attention and money with advertising. It seems to me that this alternative philosophy is an essential part of the strategy for a sustainable society, given that we’re also a capitalistic society.

Maybe the for-profit world, as it redefines “value”, could meet a liberated non-profit world somewhere in the middle.

Dan Pallota advocates for “equal economic rights for charity” – http://www.uncharitable.net/

-Erin Thatcher