Rochester and the “Let’s Pretend” Game, Part II – The Riverfront

The Main Street Bridge over the Genesee, 1922.

The “Let’s Pretend” Czar has been reading our blog, and based on suggestions from our other readers, has made a decree about one aspect of our urbanism that Rochester should now focus attention on – our riverfront. Great waterfronts have proven to be major economic factors in many cities: the Czar is resolute in his belief that ours is an asset in need of attention.

Rochester is a river city – the Genesee runs through it on its way to Lake Ontario. The city began at the High Falls,

where Ebenezer “Indian” Allen built a flour mill in 1789. Not long after, the Erie Canal arrived, and the two formed important economic engines for our early city.

As in most river cities, the river spent most of its life as a highway for commerce, and a sewer. No longer. Now we here, like Cincinnati, New York, Chicago, Milwaukee, Singapore, Shanghai, Portland, Providence, and a nearly endless number of other cities, have the opportunity to capitalize on the waterfront, converting a mostly forgotten asset into something wonderful, something memorable, something valuable.

A Rochester icon – Main Street Bridge, by Colin Campbell Cooper, 1908. The bridge was destroyed in 1969 – it blocked the views of the river….

And today, from the same spot:

Here’s another view of the old bridge, from a series of nine murals that used to hang in the Cafe Deluxe, a downtown eatery that closed in 1927.

Main Street Bridge, by Edward Selmar Siebert, painted sometime in the 19-teens.

Call me daft, and many have lately, but the buildings on the bridge were pretty wonderful, I think. Bridges with structures atop them are memorable in at least two other cities: the Ponte Vecchio, in Florence, and the Pulteney in Bath.

The Ponte Vecchio, Florence, Italy.

The Pulteney Bridge, Bath, England.

Anyway, as in many cities, we have wasted money and time and energy wrecking, or simply ignoring, the river. Now it’s time to make amends.

So. Here we go. The Genesee and the city from the south, in 1930.

      

And today.

There is a walkway and bike path on the east bank leading towards downtown, but it never quite gets there. On the west bank is a relatively new development called Corn Hill Landing (thank you, Roger), with apartments and shops and a nice walk along the river. Not long, but nice.

The arched bridge in the distance, carrying I-490, is fairly new, and has become a local icon. It’s the Frederick Douglass – Susan B. Anthony Bridge.

If you turned around from where Mr. Stone made his 1930 panorama and looked south, this would be your view up the Genesee (the river flows north).

And here’s a view looking south from the Court Street bridge. Please note that a percentage, albeit a very small percentage, of our local power is generated here (about 3 megawatts).

Downtown, the river is a mixed bag as well. Here’s a view looking north from the Main Street bridge.

Walkway on the west, no walkway on the east, but at least some greenery next to the hotel’s driveway.

Two blocks north of the photograph above is the High Falls (8.5 megawatts), which descends into a gorge and then flows seven or eight miles north past the Lower Falls (45 megawatts) into Lake Ontario. With the High Falls at your back, here is a view as the river heads to the Lake.

So there you have it. A look at the river south, through, and north of downtown. Access is discontinuous, patchy in places, non-existent in other spots, with plenty of bridges and falls as obstacles. Now what? Let’s compare and contrast.

Downtown we need to reclaim the river as an important feature of the public and civic realm, as has been done in other places.

Wacker Drive, Chicago. Full disclosure – I had a hand in this one. Chicago has a huge number of bridges, but it now has a continuous riverwalk on at least one bank. There are small plazas, memorials, statues, and places to sit and gather along the length of the river downtown.

Or here, in Milwaukee, years in the making (I worked a bit on this in Milwaukee’s Third Ward in the 1980s).

Or here, in Providence.

It would be great to see this many folks enjoying the Genesee in our downtown.

The Czar suggests that so many cities have reclaimed their waterfronts, and so now we must do the same. The river will now become a lively, continuous, attractive, bustling aspect of our city, allowing us to traverse the distance from the University of Rochester to the Lake, and through downtown, in one lovely, long experience.

If we were really ambitious, we could try to compete with some of the category-killers, or at least steal a lesson or two. Take a look.

BPC – photo by Wayne Chasan for EE&K.

Battery Park City waterfront, in New York, designed by EE&K.

Or this:

The Bund, in Shanghai.

Or this:

The poster child for urban river reclamation – San Antonio. A great model for creating intimate places downtown.

Or this:

Paris and the Seine. Photo by Beth Whitman.

I know, I know, that’s Paris, and we’re not. But there are lessons to be learned anyway, about establishing continuity – even under bridges and around obstacles.

We have our work in front of us, and our marching orders from the Czar. Waterfronts in many cities are major generators of economic, cultural and social value. Lots of folks here have spent time and energy working to improve the Genesee riverfront. Some work has been completed, but much work remains, especially downtown. Let’s get this done, people.

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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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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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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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Getting Off the Grids

I want to talk about scale and size in our urban infrastructure, but it will take me a few minutes. Stick with me.

I started off last week continuing to think about the grid, or grids, that make cities work. Kind of.

Actually, our cities don’t really work very well at all, and their grids are pretty much a total disaster. One of the biggest challenges we face in constructing the next city is in retooling our broken, outmoded, under-maintained, obsolete, inadequate infrastructure – our grids.

Here in Washington, as in most US cities, we have: water problems, when the Potomac is often drained of as much as 85% of its flow during hot, dry summer days;  extreme sewage problems, with 2 to 3 billion gallons of raw sewage dumped annually into the Anacostia River during major rain events; power problems, best understood when our electricity supplier, Pepco, declares their pathetic goal of hoping to produce 20% or our energy using renewable sources by 2020; and communications problems, because we have no fiber optics and very spotty wi-fi, mostly limited to the Public Library branches and local coffee shops (We had better wi-fi in the middle of an Egyptian desert than we have here at home).

Oh, and our vehicular grids don’t work either, though as non-car people we notice this less than most of our neighbors. And we don’t care much if all the cars can’t move – get rid of them. But it is true that DC has some of the worst traffic and congestion in the country.

As I thought about these grids and all their problems, I found myself wondering what it would take to get free of this mess. And how much it would cost.

Intuitively, I suspected that getting totally off the grids at the scale of our one Capitol Hill rowhouse here in Washington would be a difficult and expensive proposition. We certainly could mount a solar array on the roof for some of our power and/or hot water, convert to geothermal by drilling holes in the backyard, install composting toilets. But getting all the way off the grids? Probably not very achievable in our relatively dense urban setting.

So what about a scale shift in my thinking? What about trying to do this at the scale of our block – 57 rowhouses with an alley that is so narrow virtually no one can use it. Take a look:

If we used the alley space communally, we could install distributed combined heating and power (CHP), a kind of district CHP system like those used on campuses and in similar places, perhaps fueled by renewable biomass of various kinds. We could close the water loop, treat the gray water or use it in irrigation and sanitation, capture the sewage for compost, and maybe to augment the district CHP, build a solar array at a scale that would be useful and install a wind turbine or two. Now we’re making some headway.

As I did research into the technologies, systems and equipment, costs, and looked at problems or obstacles, I was really struck by something interesting: there is not a lot of discussion of problem-solving at the scale of a city block. The individual house, usually out in the country, yes – or at the scale of the nation. But not much about the block. There is a group called “One Block Off the Grid,” but it’s just about solar power, not about the larger issue of all the grids that are a mess.

Most of the discussion I encountered has to do with solving the grid problem, or grids problems, at a national scale. The costs are staggering, the time needed to transition way too long – we’ll all be swimming, in the dark, by the time any progress is made – and there are all kinds of fairly virulent arguments about how to proceed.

Just one example will illustrate. Some scientists propose that we transition from a carbon to a hydrogen economy. They propose replacing the national electrical grid with a super cooled hydrogen grid. By 2050. Other scientists say this is crazy, dangerous, dirty, infeasible, requires scores of nuclear reactors. Costs are in the trillions (the American Society of Civil Engineers says it will cost $1.5 trillion just to fix the grid we already have). I hear fiddle music and Rome is burning.

So what can we afford, what is feasible, what can we implement fast? Even thinking at the scale of our city is problematic. To fix the problem of sewage dumping in the Anacostia here will cost over $2 billion. That stops sewage going into the river, but it really doesn’t fix the sewage problem, use the sewage in any way, or close the wide open water loop. A desperately needed patch, but a patch nonetheless.

Coupled with an absence of local, city-block based thinking is another flaw in thinking: lots of talk about what constitutes THE solution, when in fact we will need all possible solutions. There is no one solution to any of this mess.

At the scale of our block, we can employ all the tools in the tool bag. District CHP, mini-CHPs per house, solar, wind, geothermal, distributed water treatment and management, waste handling and reuse.

Through a nearly endless number of visits to incredibly arcane websites, I think I have a ballpark order of magnitude estimate of what this might cost us and our 56 neighbors. I am going to guess that we can get pretty close to off the grids for something in the vicinity of $2 million or $3 million. This works out to between $35,000 and $50,000 per rowhouse.

I know, I know, you will pick me apart on all the details. That is where where the devil lives, after all. As far as I can tell, there are no models or templates to examine for answers. Some new construction, yes, like the Bedzed housing development in England (100 units, district CHP using biomass, zero-energy). But I can’t find anybody that has retrofitted a city block to get it off the grid.

BedZed, in London.

The technology is now present to do this. We will have to do a bunch of tinkering to find the right combination of tools to solve the problem. But if I can wrangle up a couple of million bucks, and convince my neighbors to give it a shot, perhaps we could at least get started trying.

And, in the long run, we wouldn’t need the national grids for much any more. So the scale problem of national infrastructure and trillions of dollars gets solved by being as local as possible – the city block.

In a time of 3,000 pound personal transportation devices, and access to the globe at any moment from our easy chair, it is hard to focus on the right scale of endeavour to make progress in shaping the next city. But I am going to stick with my intuition on this one – start thinking about city blocks. Not cities, not regions, not states, not the nation. Just stick with the humble city block.

Oh, and one last thing. Amy asked me if I could calculate the time it would take to pay back the $35,000 to $50,000 investment in savings from utility bills. My reaction: very, very soon, payback time will be irrelevent. Sorry folks, but if the lights don’t go on anymore, or if you have no water when you turn on the faucet, payback doesn’t mean much at all. And that’s where we’re headed, real soon.

Talk amongst yourselves.

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Cities, Scale and Economics

We hear every day now about the staggering sums of money being thrown at this and that sinking sector of our nation’s economy. It’s hard to understand the scale of all of this. I am just now starting to figure out what a toxic asset is, and I am struggling to grasp what $700 billion dollars means. Or $50 billion to the automakers. So I have been sitting here trying to think of ways to understand all this money talk.

Here is what I have calculated today, cast in terms that even a feeble minded architect can understand.

How much to build a real high-speed rail line from DC to New York? Gets cars off the road, shuttle aircraft out of the skies. Current estimates suggest that high speed rail costs about $50 million a mile to construct. You can quibble with me if you’d like, but I don’t think I am too far off.

                                 

Amtrak’s Acela, and France’s TGV High Speed Rail.

So the line between DC and NYC, around 200 miles, would run about $10 billion. That doesn’t seem so bad, when compared to the fact that we have just poured $50 billion down the carmaker sink hole, an amount that is clearly not going to be nearly enough to save them. DC to NYC in about an hour. Good.

Last year, Amtrak’s Acela carried about 3.2 million passengers. On a dedicated right-of-way, high speed rail could easily double this figure. So let’s say, for the sake of easy math, that the passenger count jumps to 10 million. That would mean that the system would cost $1,000 per passenger for a year. Or $100 per passenger over 10 years. Change the ridership calculations if you’d like, but the cost of the system seems pretty manageable even if I am off by an order of magnitude.

As an aside, the Eurostar high speed system in Europe carries 800 passengers per train, with 15 trains per hour. If you run this out, and figure that that capacity would run, say, 12 hours a day, that’s 144,000 folks per day. Now run that out a bit further, and figure 260 days per year, the number of work days at 5 days a week per year. That’s 37,440,000 passengers per year. 10,000,000 passengers per year doesn’t sound like much of a stretch.

Now this is sounding pretty good, after you figure out the additional cost of all the crud that wouldn’t be spewed into the atmosphere by the planes and cars that high speed rail could supplant. (High speed will save a couple of hundred million pounds of carbon dioxide pollution per year in the bargain).

Okay, what’s next. Let’s tackle energy, heat and power for homes, in lieu of repairing the national electrical grid. If we can generate all our power and heat at home, we can substantially decrease what needs to be invested in the grid. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) publishes a report card on our nation’s infrastructure every year, and most recently they estimate that we must spend $1.5 trillion dollars between now and 2030 to upgrade the grid. They give our energy system a D+ grade. Sounds high to me.

The EPA has issued a report that examines distributed CHP (combined heat and power) systems, a decentralized, local way of generating all of the heat, power, and cooling for an individual home with high efficiency, using a variety of different fuels and ultimately a fuel cell, taking the house off the grid. They are still expensive – about $15,000 per household. So do the math. That means that 100 million homes (there are about 105 million homes in the US) could install CHP in lieu of spending $1.5 trillion on the grid, and generate all the power, heat and cooling each house requires with a new unit in the basement. Not bad.

The Dachs Mini-CHP unit, manufactured in the UK.

Now what? Food. Here’s another good calculation to give you a sense of scale and economics. Scientists tell us that thanks to our system of industrialized agriculture, an average meal travels 1,500 mile to get to our plate. Now if a semi trailer truck gets about 7 miles per gallon (you can check me on this), then the 1,500 mile trip will use about 215 gallons of fuel. With diesel fuel at about $2.20 a gallon, the cost of your meal should be $473.

Of course there are 20,000 other meals on that same truck, which means that the actual fuel cost per meal is about 2 and 1/2 cents. To feed everybody in the nation for a day, say a billion meals a day, (lots of folks eat more than 3 meals a day) that comes to about $25 million in fuel costs. Per day. And requires about 10 million gallons of fuel. Now here’s the kicker.

CO2 generation for that one day of food: 22.2 pounds per gallon of diesel fuel according to the Department of Energy, thus totaling 222 million pounds. Hmmm – not so good. Average annual US CO2 generation per household: 40,000 pounds, the highest per-household average in the world.

I wanted to add something about water to finish, something that would give me some sense of scale relative to all four of the big issues facing the next city: energy, water, mobility and food. But when I got to water, I found a single fact and was so stunned, I figured I could quit.

Daily – DAILY – water usage in the US is 408 billion gallons, according to the USGS! To put that in some kind of focus, note that we use 390 million gallons of gasoline every day in this nation. So we use 10 times more water than gasoline. 65% of the water is used by industry, about 25% by agriculture, and about 10% for domestic purposes. Yikes.

I guess I am beginning to get a handle on what hundreds of billions of anything might mean. But the better I understand, the worse I feel. There seems to be a big difference between what we think we can afford, and what we can really afford.

I need a bigger calculator.

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American Urbanism: Shovel-ready

 Image from flickr.

“Once we accept that our cities will not be like the cities of the past, it will become possible to see what they might become.” Witold Rybczynski, City Life.

When he wrote those words in 1995, Rybczynski was actually “glimpsing the urban future,” and seeing it as a low-density and low-rise city, amorphous and sprawling, completely reliant on the car, decentralized. And, sadly, that is the city we live in today.

But in another way, Rybczynski was right. The city of the recent past, the 20th century auto dominated sprawling city, whose infrastructure alone we can no longer afford to maintain, is a failure, and obsolete. We must accept this, as he suggests. In fact, our cities and the way we inhabit them must now give way to an alternate vision: now we can begin to see what they must become. The existing American city is one stupendous shovel-ready project.

Image from flickr.

The oft stated goals are obvious: we need to inhabit a next city that we can sustain, and that can sustain us. A durable, useable city that we can afford, a city that actually works to heal the long list of messes we have made. A city that is based on energy we can generate locally, food that doesn’t come from a factory, or a semi, water from a well that won’t run dry, a city in which we no longer need a car for mobility and access to all of our needs. These are the basics, and are pretty easy to see as foundations.

But what may be most interesting about the shovel-readiness of the next city is the fact that it can all be done locally, neighborhood by neighborhood. The next city can be particular, circumstantial, based on what’s at hand, incremental. Based on systems of decentralized and locally installed elements of infrastructure, the next city could emerge block by block.

On our block of 59 rowhouses here in D.C., we could rip up the alley in our post-car, or shared-car, city and we could install a central heating, power and cooling plant there. And maybe a large solar array for all of us. We can gather all of our water, classify it, treat it, and reuse it on our own block. We can rip up a few of our defining streets and build some new buildings there, yielding an increase in mixed-use density for shops, offices, and homes, with room left over for garden plots and markets.

Image from flickr.

Across every city, we can reuse and reprogram and revise. We can renew and reinvent based on the rich array of found conditions available everywhere. Some call this micro-urbanism: a new market under the raised expressway, a town square in an old highway cloverleaf, gardens in old parking lots, malls converted to neighborhoods, parking garages as lofts. And we can recycle all the existing structures we can find, conserving both their narratives, and all the energy they already embody. They’re all shovel-ready.

Taking this approach to urbanism seems like a much better investment, and a stimulus to the economy and our urbanism, than new highway off-ramps. I guess what we need now, in order to see how possible this is to achieve, is a demonstration block. Somewhere where we could try things, discover the problems and pitfalls, find the right technologies and uses, and do so while everybody watches, and learns, as a new kind of community, and city, unfolds.

Time to get the new Urban Policy Czar on this – it’s shovel ready, after all. And what better place to demonstrate the next city than right here in the nation’s Capitol.

Image from flickr.

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