The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

I’ll make this short.

For years now, the City and Paetec, a major corporation here, have been wrangling with each other. Paetec has wanted to build a new headquarters, and the City has wanted to woo Paetec downtown, to the site of a former enclosed, and failed, mall called Midtown Plaza (worth much further discussion, but I am quite sure you can grasp the basic story line of a failed downtown enclosed mall).

Midtown is now being demolished to make way for new development. The site is what was once the 100% location in downtown – Main and Clinton. Today Main and Clinton, but for the hordes of buses, is pretty much a ghost town.

Main and Clinton, 1925.

Yesterday the Mayor and the CEO of Paetec held a news conference. Paetec is moving downtown: about 1,000 employees,  bringing the number of jobs downtown to about 56,000 or so. Even though the City has handed Paetec an almost unbelievably sweet deal (somehow at the last minute the City managed to avoid meeting the Paetec demand for free parking for all employees, but they are kicking in something over $80 million: for themselves, Paetec will spend $55 million, but only $5 million of that is their own money), this is good. I mean having more souls downtown is good. Expensive, but good.

Now comes the bad and the ugly.

An office building that is straight out of the 1970s. I know – we’re supposed to be grateful for the greenery on top and such. There will be shops at street level, thankfully, but that won’t overcome the truly pedestrian architecture. An alert reader sent me a more recent elevation of the building, featured in the press conference yesterday, and it has developed somewhat, but it still looks like something that belongs in the suburbs, not in a bustling and robust downtown. 

Nothing said about the rich tradition of wonderful buildings on Main Street, the big arch notwithstanding (you can browse through A Town Square and see dozens). Nothing said about sustainability – as in not a word, but for what is being called a rooftop garden. No discussion of building a building that is truly of mixed use, but for a few shops on the street. Oh, and maybe a police station (!). Paetec will give us a huge picture window into their operations center – oh boy. The only real public discussion has been about – you got it – cars.

One bright idea did surface yesterday – the idea of putting very large electronic screens on the building – ala Times Square they say. I wish I could feel good about this – here’s a recent view of the site kitty corner at Main and Clinton. Why am I not excited about the rich possibilities? I guess we’ll have endless Kodak moments flashing at us 24/7. Just what we need.

Oh, and Paetec did spend time telling us who they don’t want to have as neighbors – no students (students have been essential and key to the revival of Chicago’s Loop, I note), no clinic patients, no surface parking (how did that get in there?), no casinos. Ah Paetec – the corporation with the big heart.

Rochester, like every cash-strapped, shrinking, frightened city in the US, is dealing with a very, very tough question here. The City will spend 16 times more than the corporation, and in the end we stand to get 1,000 jobs.

But will downtown be better for all this? The building itself belongs in an office park, not our downtown. We get a few shops at the street, and a chance to look at Paetec employees engaged in the edgy drama of their work in electronic communications. We get giant LED screens blaring images at poor Main and Clinton. We may or may not get a building that represents a zero carbon footprint, or is even LEED rated.

Time will tell if any of this can be redeemed. Let us pray.

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Rochester and Sustainability: A Report Card

Photo by David Mohney, City Hall Photo Lab, from the Monroe County Library Collection, c-0001910.

Rochester’s green grade: F. F for Fail. Failing. Failed.

I went looking around this morning at what cities are doing to become more sustainable. I went to a bunch of .gov web sites from a selection of municipalities to see how they talked about sustainability, and what they were doing about the subject.

On Rochester’s website, the city says that our recycling program, our graffiti removal program, and a clean up program called Rochester Clean Sweep are helping us to have a better environment. That’s it. Thus the grade.

Cleveland’s Mayor, Frank Jackson, has announced his intention to make that city a model of sustainability, through a city-wide program called Sustainable Cleveland 2019. There is broad support for the initiative, and they are using the catch phrase “Green City Blue Lake.” They see this initiative both as a way to construct a better city, and as a way to compete with other cities for jobs, young people, and economic development.

In Cincinnati, Mayor Mark Mallory has created the Green Cincinnati Plan, for similar purposes, and the City is planning for a new streetcar system to enhance transit options there.

In Washington, Mayor Fenty has a program called Green DC. The city has been very active in working with citizens to provide tax credits for updating residential water, heat and cooling systems. And DC is currently constructing a streetcar to enhance the Metro, bus, and circulator systems that make DC one of the most walkable cities in nation: 34% of residents do not own a car.

Monroe County, in which Rochester sits, has something they call Green Monroe. You can see what’s up in sustainable projects and initiatives - it’s pretty pathetic. But at least they talk about the issues a bit. Grade: D-. At least it’s not an F.

Here in municipal politics: silence. No word from leadership on green subjects.

End of story. Or worse.

Locals: tell me if I am missing something.

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Rochester: What Happened?

A reader here has just asked me a good question about Rochester urbanism and the character and order of this region: what happened? He noted that Rochester was once a dense, compact city, surrounded by neighborhoods of tree-lined streets and lovely homes, in a region rich with all kinds of natural resources – lake, river, countryside. And today – not so much.

East Avenue, 1917.

So, Daniel, here is at least part of what happened. Glad you asked – this will let me get a few things off my chest. I have said some of this before in earlier posts, but I feel like a good rant. Get comfy, because this is going to take a while.

First, the car. I once asked a curatorial colleague of mine, and a historian of technology, to try to tell me what the city of the horse was like – the city before cars, and trolleys. It turns out that that city was pretty dreadful – smelly, filthy, and crowded with big, sweaty, and often sick animals. So when the electric streetcar came along (thanks, Frank Sprague), and later the automobile, city dwellers were enormously relieved. They were happy to jettison their present ills for a horseless future, notwithstanding a blissful ignorance of the almost inestimable price we would pay for a total embrace of the car, and the mobility it provided. Now we know.

A city of horses – Chicago in the early 20th century.

Victor Hugo wrote, in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, “This will destroy that… The book will destroy the edifice.” In some way, he was saying that the new technology of printing would destroy old ways of story telling embodied in buildings, and cities. And today we can say: “This will kill that…  the car will destroy the city.”

Detroit. Plenty of parking.

For the sake of our convenience and in favor of the automobile, we have destroyed the city, and the countryside. I tried once to make a relatively precise estimate of how much of what was once downtown Rochester was now a parking lot. Once I got to more than 50%, I gave up.

Downtown Rochester, from Google Earth.

As another of our readers said recently, “In America we don’t solve social problems, we move away from them.” So the second thing that happened is that it got easier and easier to ignore the poor, the different, the minority, the other. We could just build highways by tearing down ‘their’ neighborhoods, create nearly impregnable barriers between “us” and “them” like the Inner Loop, and drive off into the sunset.

The moat. Photo from empirestateroads.com.

But unfortunately, there is no such thing as geographical salvation. (Who said that first? Not I). Avoiding our differences, and our varying needs, has proven to be both impossible, and almost unbelievably expensive. And still we have the inequities we had, now principally centered in increasingly abandoned inner city neighborhoods. To illustrate this indifference to social needs, and social equity, just take a look almost any day at the pages of our local paper, the Democrat and Chronicle.

There we find that if a crime happened in Rochester, it took place in the “city.” As in: “City man found stabbed.” Or: “City bank robbed at gunpoint.” And if the crime happened somewhere else, the place-name is given, in lieu of the word ‘city.’

From today’s D & C.

I am an outsider, and many locals may think I am lunatic for mentioning this (I may well be lunatic), but this pejorative use of the word city sums up how many in the region feel. I am more than surprised that I hear this quite a lot: the city is the place where crime is, where bad things happen, where poor people, and different people, live. The city is to be avoided, the city is crowded, the city is smelly, dirty, polluted, ugly, dangerous.

Come on folks – you’re talking about Rochester here! Get a grip. Cities are our future, and our friends, not cesspools. The best North American cities – Vancouver, Portland, Chicago, Manhattan, Toronto, others - are now seen as places where you MUST live and work downtown. Not in a suburb like Greece, or Webster, but downtown. And how many folks now live in downtown Rochester? About 4,000. But really people, all the rest of downtown is really safe – it’s parking.

Onward. The third thing that happened as we found it attractive to spread out all over the place is that we began to duplicate, then triplicate, then logarithmically multiply our infrastructure. More and more expressways and roads, sewers, waste water facilities, libraries, public safety forces, streetlights, signposts, gas lines – you name it. And we did this to the extent that today, we can no longer afford all this stuff. And it’s all falling apart.

The physical infrastructure of the civil engineers is crumbling and decrepit. And the attendant social and civic infrastructure is not sustainable either. Just look at your tax bill – we’re maxed out, and constantly arguing about it: what should we close, consolidate, abandon, do without.

Sadly, most of the old infrastructure isn’t worth anything anyway. Whether we are speaking of the need for digital infrastructure to support the life ahead, or sustainable systems of energy and water that will allow us to enjoy a secure and durable urban future, the stuff we need is not the stuff we have now, and the stuff we have now and argue about fixing isn’t worth a damn. Time to start over – get out your checkbooks. Headline: “City dweller scorns new subdivision in Gates.”

Painting by Eric Garner.

The fourth thing we did is to mistake innovation for progress. As I said in my most recent post, Rochester has always been a center for innovation – especially technical innovation. People who track such things point to the enormous number of patents that have been registered by Rochesterians over the last century or so. Good. But not enough.

It’s a bit like looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Innovation has to be about more than new stuff. Properly, innovation should be about preparing us to lead better lives. And here I mean that a better life is one that increases the common wealth, and the common well-being. Not just a new flat screen or iPhone, but a truly better life – a life that we can be sure will be available to our children’s children’s children. We no longer have that assurance – things are closing in on us pretty fast, and endlessly we read about the shrinking standards of living we can expect in the future. It’s past time to put on our real thinking caps and figure out how to prepare Rochester, or Anycity USA, for what lies ahead.

And now I’ll quit raving. But wait – one more thing happened, I think worth noting. Fifth, we abandoned the local. What local? Any local. Local food, local services, local artisans, local greengrocers, local butchers, local clothing shops, local lampshade makers, local anything.

I see this so vividly as I thumb through the absolutely extraordinary photo archive of local news photographer Albert Stone. I cherish his archive – it’s an exquisite gift to all of us. His images are powerful testimony to the city we have lost – a city bustling with energy and vitality, and filled with local everything.

Front Street, 1922.

Main Street, 1922.

Why did we abandon the local? Because the local seemed more expensive, slower, less reliable. And that’s how we have defined progress – progress, we say with our consumer dollars, is fast cheapness.

And thanks to all the subsidies we put in place, that definition is fulfilled. Subsidize roads, farmers, energy, any of a thousand things we do subsidize every day, and the national or transnational seems cheaper. But it turns out that this cheapness was and is really, really expensive. Much too expensive. How could we have traded Scrantom’s for Staples? Really nuts.

Scrantom’s last stand – Midtown Plaza. Photo from flickr.

So there you have it, dear reader - five things that happened to Rochester that created the city we have today. Aren’t you glad you asked?

I’ll bet you didn’t expect a full-scaled rant from a raving lunatic.

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Let the Innovation Begin

“Innovate: to start or introduce something new. To create.” Webster’s

Rochesterians enjoy a long tradition of creating the new: cameras, optics, copying machines, telegraphy, and today medicine and science, even corporate R&D (GM has its fuel cell research facility here, as an example). There is and has always been a lot of brainpower here.

Innovators here have always been good at developing the latest widget, and enjoying the resulting profits. And sharing them – thank you, Mr. Eastman.

But the challenges facing this city and its region now require more than the latest widget. The innovation Rochester needs now, in order to enjoy a durable and sustainable future, requires nothing less than redefining progress. Let me explain.

I read an extraordinary article the other day on resilience theory and cities at seedmagazine.com. In the course of the piece the writer, Maywa Montenegro, penned two very memorable and telling sentences. The first: “A city’s lifeblood is a continuous flow of stuff.” Energy, water, food flow in. Waste, carbon dioxide, and perhaps innovative widgets flow out. Hmmm. I have thought a lot about this – even written about it here – but that one sentence sums up city life with enormous concision – a continuous flow of stuff, in and out.

And the second, even more clear and potent: “No city today could survive on its own resources.” Not one? Nope.

So there it is. If Rochester wants to be the home of innovation, then let’s figure out how to become a city whose flow of stuff, both ins and outs, is completely the result of our own resources. Sounds like a simple challenge, but in order to approach success, this region would need to rethink and remake nearly everything. Let the innovation begin.

We hear every day about shrinking resources, so the need to move our city, and region, toward independence is not as screwy as it might sound. But getting even remotely close to independence, however necessary, would be a staggering task. One example: consider how a city like Rochester could get off the grid, and generate sufficient energy and food to securely and durably sustain itself. Imagine how different this city would be if we accepted this challenge. I suppose that lawsuits about wind turbines would probably cease pretty quickly….

I sit here in my studio trying to imagine what that next Rochester would be like. As I ruminate, I make lists of all the things that would have to change – and I consider how those changes would reshape the city. Here are just five ways this city, and region, would change if we became resource independent. An independent Rochester would be:

Carless. Obviously, no oil – no cars. Perhaps a local innovator will perfect some kind of personal transportation device that we can power without oil, and can be made from local resources. Otherwise it’s feet, folks.

But since mobility is a central requirement in any urban setting, we will need some local innovator to figure out transit options that can propel us from one neighborhood to another. Fuel cell street cars or buses? Solar powered jitneys? Wind powered land ferries?

Carless at Main and Fitzhugh, 1910.

Dense. In order to limit energy used for (wasted by) sprawling all over the landscape, we  will need to live closer together. There are almost unlimited numbers of studies that illustrate that increased urban density is central to an increase in sustainability – define that word how you will. And since Rochester has almost no alleys, where an increase in density is easy to achieve, I guess we can just start converting our garages into homes. Won’t need that car, anyway.

Rare in Rochester – Wentworth Apartments at East and Gibbs, 1925.

Nodal. Need a new flat screen? Hop in the car and trundle over to Best Buy. There are two here, both at huge malls. But in the next Rochester, no car, so no trip to Best Buy. Instead, we will gather in neighborhoods, or urban nodes, where there is retail and institutional redundancy – a diverse mixture of uses to support daily life. Maybe some innovator will figure out how to turn the malls and strip centers into sustainable neighborhoods – food markets, health care facilities, shops, homes, schools, and all the other places we need to live our lives. This will need to get repeated in each node or neighborhood.

A local neighborhood center – Versage Brothers Grocery and Philips Robbins Tin Shop, Roofing, Heating, 1919.

Walkable. If we are carless and dense and nodal, we must be walkable. Rochesterians pride themselves on the fact that they can get anywhere in the region in 15 or 20 minutes. It’s a kind of standing joke here, you hear it so often. But when we say this, we mean in a car. Imagine a Rochester where you can get anywhere you need to go in 15 or 20 minutes – on foot.

Most of us – not all, but most – can walk about a mile in 20 minutes. So this begins to give you a sense of the order of things in the next Rochester – nodes of about 2 miles in diameter. Maybe a wee bit smaller. But you will need to walk to all you need in about a mile in any direction.

If you begin to think like this, it’s fun to go to Google Earth and start plotting out the neighborhoods and their centers. Do try this at home.

Main Street vendors, 1927.

Green. If we must grow what we eat locally, then suddenly that vacant lot down the street becomes a coveted asset. Gardens will spring up all over the place, as will markets. We have a challenging climate here – winter is a bit long, and very white - so we will have to grow our own in the good months, and figure out how to store and distribute during the cold months.

Actually, Rochester has one of the oldest public markets in continuous operation in the U.S. It wasn’t that long ago that Rochesterians used the market, all year around, to purchase all their grub. What we need now is a handful of innovators who can teach the rest of us new ways to craft our seasonal menus with the stuff we have sprouting in the backyard.

The Rochester Public Market, 1905.

Innovators – commence innovating! Oh, but do try to remember that we have done most of this once before. What’s old is new again, I guess. Onward.

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Wind Wars

Maple Ridge Wind Farm, upstate New York – the largest wind farm east of the Mississippi. Photo by Jon R. Vermilye, Lakeshoreimages.

New York State ranks 8th in the U.S. for installed and operational power generation from the wind. 1,274 megawatts. This is enough to power over 500,000 households. Or a region the size of, say, Rochester. Good, but a long, long way from really good.

For a bit of perspective, there are 19.5 million people in New York State – about 8 million households. This means that about 6% of the state’s households are powered by the state’s wind farms. Obviously we have to build renewable energy sources at a very different scale and rate in order to become truly sustainable and secure as quickly as it is clearly necessary.

So it came as a bit of an unhappy surprise to read an article this week in the local paper. It turns out that residents of counties and towns in the region around Rochester, where a range of wind turbine projects are being proposed, are filing law suits like crazy to stop construction.

A lawyer for the opposition claims that he believes “opposition to wind developments is growing.” The most often cited complaint about wind turbines in all the lawsuits: noise.

Noise? Huh?

No acid rain, no burning coal, no noisy cooling towers, no railroad cars dumping mounds of coal, no tractors heaving the coal, no dumping residue into piles of slag. And no mountaintops being ripped off or blown up to mine the coal.

Just whoosh.

Come on, people. We have work to do here.

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What Does Growth Really Mean?

I’ll make this short. I am very cranky this afternoon, and I admit it. The lead from the AP wire, a few minutes ago: “Consumers are saving more than they’re spending, and that has investors worried.” What?!?!

Okay, so what, really, is the point of our economy? A rising GDP is the whole game? After a long swooning flirtation with seemingly unending profligacy, consumers are now chastened, are saving, and that worries investors? Nuts. Just totally nuts.

Investors, guess what? The growth you have in mind is not the growth anybody wants anymore. Sorry guys – the big banks are shot, the auto industry has tanked, homebuilders are dropping like flies, the malls are ghost towns. It’s over (at least I wish it was).

Hey, world of investors and makers of things, why not try investing in and making things that will help us? Local stuff, stuff that eases the frightening messes we face. Can we not replace GDP with something that makes sense, something that measures how we are doing in creating cities that are actually capable of sustaining us, and our children’s children?

What, in the end, is growth for? Riches, but then what? It’s easy to see that we have spent decades building an economy that has wrecked our cities, our countrysides, our air, our water, our food. (By the way investors, are you keeping track of how many films have been released in the last three months dealing with our food disaster? Opportunity?).

Can we get you to pay attention, please?

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Getting Off the Grids III – Local Utility

I have speculated here repeatedly about taking a single existing urban block off the grids. I have come to believe that the scale of a single city block may be the most affordable, and rational, way to retool existing urban neighborhood infrastructures: power, heat, water, gardens, all in the alley. And now it turns out that I am way, way behind the curve. Here’s what I mean.

Today my sister, in Salem, Oregon (her blog is on our blogroll, at the right – On the Way), sent me this image, and I instantly fell out of my chair. Take a look.

This is the day, in 1937, when the cornerstone was laid for the new Oregon State Capitol. Seems innocuous enough, right? Big crowd, speechifying – a memorable day.

Ah, but let’s zoom in to the neighborhood at the lower right of this image for a closer inspection.

A nice neighborhood of homes, across from the Capitol, right? But look more closely. See that building in the alley, the one with the chimney? That’s the steam heating plant for the whole block. All of the garages, and the heat source for all the homes, are pooled in the alley, in the center of the block. My sister’s 80+ year old neighbor remembers this well – his grandfather lived in one of those houses.

Could be that electricity for the block came from here as well, using a mini dynamo version of the one Westinghouse and Tesla used to electrify the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, in Chicago. It looks like a power pole at the left of the steam plant, but I can’t tell for sure.

Now let’s take an even closer look. I think the image will hold up for one more pass at an even lower altitude.

In the middle of the block, opposite the steam plant, is a huge garden.

So that makes all heat, some food, and maybe power managed for one city block. Not bad at all, for 1937. What’s old is new again, I guess. The block was torn down in the 40s to make way for what was at first a sunken garden (an area  that was used as a gubernatorial helicopter landing zone for awhile) and finally as the site of  Oregon’s cherry tree lined mall. And so this amazing and independent little community disappeared with only this photograph, and some memories, left behind.

For us here on Capitol Hill, perhaps the most telling fact that we will not succeed in reconstructing our infrastructure at the regional or metropolitan scale is a statement from Pepco, our power provider, that the utility plans to source a whopping 20% of our electricity from renewable sources by the year 2020. Hmm. Where did I leave my time machine?

Thanks, dear sister.

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A Little and a Lot

The largest city on earth – Tokyo. Image by Altus.

I have often found myself reflecting here on matters of scale – of blocks and streets, of cities and neighborhoods. Recently I have found myself thinking about the relationship between the really, really big, and the fairly tiny. Let me explain.

We lead our daily lives in familiar, and usually quite circumscribed, places: a neighborhood, a row of houses, a nearby bus or subway stop, an office in a corner of downtown. We don’t often find ourselves thinking of a whole city at one moment, much less the even larger regions surrounding our urban centers. It can be hard to imagine that the daily choices we make inside our tiny little bubbles mean anything very much in the really big picture. But let’s think about that for a moment.

Workday morning, sometime around 6:30am. The alarm goes off – ugh. Reach over and switch on the light, and prepare for another day. Ahh – the light bulb goes on.

But is it a Pharox bulb, a new kind of lamp that lasts 35 years and is 15% more efficient than even a Compact Fluorescent Lamp (CFL)? It should be – the manufacturer, Lemnis, tells us that if every Dutch home replaced 4 regular light bulbs with 4 Pharox bulbs, the energy saved would power Amsterdam for a year. I guess the little things add up pretty fast.

Amsterdam. Image by the City of Amsterdam.

Now let’s head downstairs to make coffee and look at the newpaper. Some of us do still read the newspaper.

Okay, got that coffee bubbling? That pound can of coffee you just opened will make something like 42 cups. How much water to make the pound of coffee? 2,650 gallons. Ouch! (Oh, and about 37 gallons of water for a pound of paper). Get out your calculator and start to do some quick math with me. Say there are 100,000,000 regular coffee drinkers in the U.S. And let’s stick with the average per capita coffee consumption figure offered by the World Resource Institute: 4.2 kilograms – 9.24 pounds. That means that we use over 2.5 trillion gallons of water a year on our coffee. Ahh – the little pleasures in life.

Time for a shower. Ten minutes? About 40 gallons of water. And think about this: 95% of all water consumed in an average American household goes down the drain. Since an average household uses about 128,000 gallons a year, that means that 121,600 gallons washes away. I’ll let you do the math on this one – 110,000,000 households in America.

Time to head for the office. Let’s say you’re 20 miles from work. Start up that Expedition on the driveway, and off you go. Weekly fuel consumption? About 17 gallons of gas. Let’s try the Vespa instead. Weekly fuel consumption: just shy of 3 gallons. Now you can use your calculator again – 115,000,000 commuters daily, times however many gallons of gas you burn to get to work. Big numbers, again. Really big. Maybe you should take the bus, yes?

After a morning of hard work, it’s time for some lunch. Stroll over to the local joint for a quarter-pounder, some fries and a diet. How much water to get that burger onto your plate? 3,000 gallons. On average, the entire population of the nation eats about 2 burgers a week. That would be nearly 610,000,000 burgers. Multiply again, please: 1.8 trillion gallons of water a week for our burgers. A week. Are you lovin’ it?

Time to head home. Did you remember to turn off your computer? If you leave it on every night, that electricity wasted would be equal to more than 912 kilowatt hours (kwH) over the course of a year. If there are 10 of you in the office, and you all leave your computers on, you will have wasted the annual power consumption of an average American household.

Now let’s say that 30% of the U.S. workforce uses computers, and leaves them on at night. That would be 45,000,000 workers. Wasting enough electricity to power 4.5 million homes for a year. Chicago plus Philadelphia, with enough left over to throw in Akron. Turn off your damn computer!

Quite a day, yes? The little things we do, the seemingly meaningless choices we make, have huge implications. A little does mean a lot when you do the math.

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Getting Off the Grids, Part II

In April (April 12th, to be exact) I wrote a piece that explored how to find a way to disconnect from all the infrastructure grids in a context of existing urban (and historic) rowhouses. I concluded that it would be very difficult, if not impossible, for a single rowhouse to wiggle free of all the connections: sewer, water, gas, electricity, communications.

But after some study, I realized that perhaps at the scale of a single block, it might be possible. In fact, perhaps working at the block-sized scale would be the best way to begin to create a new kind of infrastructural network. I used our block of 57 rowhouses as an example. Here’s our block:

Recently a reader wrote with a list of 7 questions about my proposed one-block demonstration project. And so, Part II of the inquiry. Here are his questions:

• What are the barriers to doing this? What would it take?
• Would local government support help?
• What building code changes would be required?
• How would it be financed?
• Could a charitable foundation help?
• What would the demonstration project cost?
• How would the knowledge gained be transferable?

Let me try and tackle these queries. First, to recap, for our block I proposed a District CHP plant, fired by biomass or something like that, as the main source of heating and power. And then a District Waste-water Treatment plant to recycle water. These technologies exist – nothing new here, really. Then I proposed augmenting those facilities with renewables- solar array, wind turbines, and added composting for a variety of solid wastes. All of this stuff gets deployed in the alley at the middle of our block. Perhaps with room left over for community gardens.

As far as I know, there is no demonstration project like this in an existing urban setting. Some new stuff, but nothing historic and retrofitted. But unless we tear all of our cities down and start over, we are going to have to learn how to remake the existing urban infrastructure into a sustainable set of systems. So: onward.

Barriers? Well, first I will have to achieve consensus with my neighbors. Every one of them. Since doing this new infrastructure will involve cost, disruptions during construction, a pooling of  private real estate for common use, and potential missteps as we figure this out, I suspect achieving consensus will be very difficult, if not impossible. Only when my neighbors can see and feel the compelling need for an alternate to existing infrastructure will they be inclined to sign on. It’s going to be a stretch.

While some of us feel strongly that we cannot do this fast enough, and have a pretty good idea what lies ahead for our obsolete cities, most of my neighbors don’t feel any real sense of urgency. For most Americans, as I said recently here, it’s just a matter of “Once we get through this.”

Then there are all kinds of legal barriers. Vacating the alley. Setting up some form of block-wide utility corporation to own and manage the infrastructure. Do we set the block up as some kind of condo-like legal arrangement? Lots to figure out here.

And of course, the local government, the City of Washington, could help a lot. There are utilities back in the alley underground, and these will need relocating. And all the overhead wires will have to go, once we’re ready. The City could offer financial help, too – incentives, tax breaks, grants and low-interest loans.

Washington has a program called “Green Energy DC,” set up to offer incentives for renewable energy improvements. But their whole allocation for 2009 is already spoken for, and the total amount available is $2,000,000. it will take more than that to get our block off the grids, so not this year, or next.

 The program, which passes through federal money, is aimed at solar and wind energy. Interestingly, they specifically bar utilities from participation, and since we are creating a block sized utility, this could be a problem. Programs at the municipal level really aren’t in place to assist with a project of this scope and kind. Not yet, anyway.

The biggest stumbling block of all: the building code. Here in DC every project must submit what’s called an Environmental Impact Screening Form. The form asks lots of questions about utilities, discharges, etc. Water flow in gallons per minute, sewage flow in gallons per minute, that kind of stuff. And questions about solid waste as well. And when you submit the form, it is routed to all kinds of city departments – health, police, fire, as well as the building department itself. Currently you cannot get a building permit without submitting, and review time is running about a year.

Essentially, any building permit can be issued once the city is clear that it is protecting the health and welfare of its citizens. Since nobody has ever tried this before here, and since the bureaucracy is in full bloom, I think we can either get some help and cooperation, or we can go home.

Financing the operation would be a trick too. Maybe we could try for some Stim funding. This is a pretty experimental undertaking, with lots of potential problems. Not exactly a slam dunk for yield-oriented capitalizers, I suspect. Banks? Probably not. Maybe we could find a lending institution interested in bolstering their “green” standing. Sounds like a pretty long shot to me.

Maybe the next avenue would be large corporations with an interest in or stake in our trial run. Maybe BP would actually like to demonstrate what “Beyond Petroleum” looks like, and how it works. And I guess the car guys are out.

It’s unlikely that the guys who make our packaged District heating, power, cooling and water units can afford to spot us the equipment, so that won’t work. Any other financing ideas, readers?

Of course the best route, and the most likely, is to get a charitable organization interested in the project. Since I think the cost will be in the neighborhood of $3 million plus, it will likely have to be one of the bigger charitable guys, but this seems like the best route.

Cost, as I said, seems to me to be north of $3 million. That works out to something like $53,000 per unit. I could be off by a lot – I worked up this estimate bysimply surfing the web, rather than calling my local green engineers. But if I am off, it is likely by less than a factor of 4 or so. I need to spend some more time with the numbers. Anybody got any thoughts?

As to transferring the knowledge, that’s the easiest part I think. Document every step, and misstep, and then put it up on a website, write a book, get published in magazines or newspapers (if there are any left), do a TV series, an indie film. I think many would be interested in the process of designing, constructing, and operating. 

One block of historic rowhouses in one of the largest historic districts in the nation – now off the grid. An existing city block, the most essential urban module, now free of the vicissitudes of the existing grids. Nice.

So thanks, readers, for the questions. Now, readers, answers?

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Speed of Light

Edison’s first lamp, by Robert Farrow.

I am not a luddite, but I do have a very healthy skepticism about technology representing our salvation. In the past 10 generations, we have succeeded in making an enormous mess, thanks to technology, a mess of such proportions that we are only now beginning to understand what we have done, and what the mess means for our future. Now we use technology to assess the damage, and the reports are grim.

Nonetheless, I was curious last week about technology and speed. How quickly can a new invention change our cities? So I took some time to do some fast research, in two categories. Take a look at this.

One. In September of 1878, the Wizard of Menlo Park, Thomas Edison, declared that he would provide incandescent light to New York City.  He did not have a workable light bulb, and only limited means of generating power, but he did have the financial backing of a handful of Wall Street tycoons. The race for illumination was on.

On New Year’s Eve of 1879/80, Edison demonstrated his lighting system – bulbs, fixtures, switches, wiring - to an amazed crowd of thousands, at his New Jersey laboratory. In 1882 his Pearl Street power station in Lower Manhattan came to life, and the lights went on in New York. The city, which had been in William Manchester’s words “a world lit only by fire,” would never be dark again.

In May of 1893, at the beginning of a worldwide economic meltdown of gigantic proportions, George Westinghouse’s installation of 250,000 light bulbs and 29,000 horsepower of electric dynamos (made possible in large measure by the patented inventions of Nikola Tesla) magically lit up the White City of the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, pumped water in great fountains, ran moving sidewalks, and dazzled 27 million visitors. The electric city had arrived.

That’s 15 years, from Edison’s cocky boast to a city of light.

The White City, from the Goodyear Archival Collection, Brooklyn Museum.

Two. Equally astonishing in speed, and nearly equal in its impact on our cities is, of course, the car. In 1900 there were 4,192 cars in the U.S. Today there are 250,000,000.

Henry Ford started The Ford Motor company in 1903. That year he built 1,700 cars. In 1908 he started production of the soon to be ubiquitous Model T. In 1910 Ford built 19,000 cars. In 1911 he produced 34,500. In 1924, the 10 millionth Model T rolled off the production lines.

And so our cities became places for cars, eventually at any and all cost.

Henry Ford and the Model T, 1921.

I suppose the moral of the tale is clear. We can change our cities, and how we live in them, at blazing speed – the speed of light, if you will. Perhaps not as quickly now as then, when there was very limited regulation of any kind on money, manufacture, materials, or consequences. But fast. Take comfort in this, since we now, again, must make huge changes to our cities in record time.

And perhaps the second part of the lesson is that neither Edison, nor Ford, nor pretty much anybody else during those, or any other, boom times, took much of a measure of the consequences.

Then as now, Edison burned coal to make electricity, in cities that were enormously polluted, even without cars. When Edison was at work in Manhattan, there were 150,000 horses at work in Manhattan alone. The city stank and waste was everywhere – about 2 or 3 million pounds of it a day.

So in 1887, when Frank Sprague invented the electric steetcar in Richmond, Virginia, city dwellers were elated, and the horse population dwindled quickly. Then Henry Ford sped things up even more with the mass-produced automobile.

Electricity and cars, two of the most powerful shapers of our cities, changed our cityscapes completely in just twenty years – one generation. And they set us on a course for the mess we face today.

I am certainly not eager to return to candles and horses. But I did hear something that caught my attention as I was writing today. A TV ad said that the sun provides enough energy for the entire planet’s day in just 30 seconds.

Inventors – back to your labs!

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