Living to leave a legacy
In Boulder, Colo., by law, every dwelling must get a minimum of four hours of sunlight on Dec. 21, the shortest day of the year. Known as a “solar access” law, the Boulder ordinance mandates that developers submit “a simple shadow analysis” to the city’s building department before they can lay the first brick.
That shadow analysis protects what the city calls a “hypothetical solar fence” of 12 or 25 feet, depending on the adjacent properties. Units in new developments that do not qualify for a “solar exemption” must feature a long axis within 30 degrees of east-west; roofs that are physically and structurally capable of supporting at least 75 square feet of solar collectors per dwelling unit and unimpeded solar access through the provisions of the ordinance itself or private covenants.
On Lopez Island, one of the small islands that make up the San Juan Archipelago off Washington state, a private, nonprofit organization called the Lopez Community Land Trust (LCLT) is working to make affordable housing available and to foster the respect for the land that should follow commensurately. The trust also is working with local farmers to create growers’ consortiums and push local produce. And, in a project called Community Nonprofit Recycling, the LCLT is attempting to cut the cost of recycling and create secure local jobs.
Except for the spectacular scenery that surrounds them, Boulder and Lopez Island could scarcely be more different. Boulder, with almost 96,000 residents, is a well-to-do college city less than an hour’s drive from Denver. Lopez, with a year-round population of just 1,800, is largely agricultural and famous for its 56 miles of coastline and the distinctive way its residents wave to each other and to visitors.
But Boulder, with its solar access law, and Lopez Island, with its affordable housing initiative, are examples of what has become a nearly indefinable term – sustainable communities.
The Beginning The first accepted definition of sustainability, as it applies to communities, was likely that published in Our Common Future, a 1987 report by the Brundtland Commission. The commission, under the auspices of the United Nations, was set up to reconcile the interests of economic development with those of environmental conservation. It concluded that sustainability was “development that meets the needs of those present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
Over the years, the Brundtland definition has expanded to incorporate virtually every function of a community, from providing open space to providing reliable transportation. During that time, it has burst the confines of city planning and become one of the hottest topics on the city council agenda.
In the beginning, however, sustainable development was not a local concept. The idea that it was something toward which cities and counties should and could strive was first proposed on a large scale during the 1992 meeting of the U.N.’s Commission on Environment and Development Conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Parallels between nations and towns were quickly drawn: Your rainforest equals my brownfield. It seemed like a stretch, but the towns bought it. So did the president.
In 1993, President Clinton created the President’s Council on Sustainable Development (PCSD), a cross-section of governmental, environmental and business leaders charged with creating a National Action Strategy for U.S. sustainability. Released in March 1996, the PCSD’s report, Sustainable America: A New Consensus for Prosperity, Opportunity and a Healthy Environment, made 38 policy recommendations and included 154 “action items” that addressed everything from wages to health care.
The president immediately asked for more: implementation of the recommendations, continuation of the PCSD and creation of a Joint Center for Sustainable Communities. The U.S. Conference of Mayors and the National Association of Counties took the lead in creating the Joint Center, which is designed to help local elected officials develop city/county partnerships as a way to address issues of sustainability.
Back at Home As it turned out, cities and counties across the country were already involved in sustainable development; they just weren’t calling it that.
In Chattanooga, Tenn., for example, local officials and business leaders had been stunned by a 1969 survey that accused their city of having the worst air pollution in the nation. That and problems of a deteriorating downtown and poor economy, prompted the creation of Chattanooga Venture, an organization of interested local residents that put together an ambitious plan to revive the city.
In 1984, Chattanooga Venture brought together 1,700 residents for a four-month city planning period. Community members were encouraged to describe their visions of the city’s future and to establish priorities for those visions.
Vision 2000, the result of their efforts, set 40 goals under categories such as “Future Alternatives,” “Places,” “People” and “Government,” which the city was to achieve by the year 2000.
Since environmental problems (air quality and proposals by three companies to site chip mills along the banks of the Tennessee River, which runs through the city’s heart) were at the core of what needed to be fixed, they were addressed first. The Environmental City, a joint project of the chamber of commerce and the city council, has been working to attract “clean industry” to Chattanooga and to retain environmentally sound businesses. Now, the city is fast becoming a nationwide clearinghouse for environmental information and businesses. (And clean air standards have been met consistently since 1988.)
Additionally, the local Tennessee River Gorge Trust protects 25,000 acres of ecologically, geologically and archeologically important land.
Chattanooga also boasts the largest fleet of electric buses in the country, possibly the largest in the world, a story in and of itself. In 1991, then-Mayor Gene Roberts charged the Chattanooga Area Regional Transit Authority (CARTA) with finding a pollution-free method of public transportation in the downtown area and the spot on which an aquarium would eventually sit. Joe Ferguson, an area businessman, was asked about the possibility of using electric buses.
“The technology was scattered all over the place, but it seemed doable,” Ferguson says now. “CARTA asked me if the city could buy electric buses anywhere, and the answer was no.”
Since buying was out of the question, Ferguson decided to build. The company that resulted from that decision, Advanced Vehicle Systems, is now the country’s largest single producer of electric buses.
Chattanooga’s original order – for 12 buses – remains the largest order the world has ever seen for battery-powered buses. The company now has nearly 70 buses operating throughout the United States.
To make the bus system work, Chattanooga in-vested $20 million in three interceptor garages where riders leave their cars before boarding the buses. The revenue generated by the parking lots keeps the buses free on the three-mile circulator route downtown.
Outside downtown, the Chattanooga Neighborhood Enterprise, funded by foundations and local financial institutions and businesses, is working to develop affordable housing for low- to moderate-income residents and eliminate substandard housing.
On the business side, mentally challenged adults help operate the Orange Grove Materials Recovery Facility, which handles the area’s recyclables. And Jobs 2000, a study undertaken by River Valley Partners, a public/private economic development entity, has identified business problems, targeting the minority community in an effort to reduce unemployment and recommending strategies for improving the local workforce.
Two-hundred and twenty-three projects and programs later, the city has become a model of sustainability. In all, Vision 2000 is responsible for 1,300 permanent jobs and more than 7,000 temporary construction jobs. It has triggered a total financial investment of almost $800 million.
Chattanooga now boasts a new riverwalk development, a new community stadium and an aquarium that hosts hundreds of thousands of visitors annually.
And Vision 2000 has evolved into ReVision 2000, which has set another 27 goals and made 122 recommendations for further improvements.
Chattanooga has become what its citizens like to call “a living laboratory” for sustainable development, and it has earned a national reputation as a leader in the movement. “People came in and said, ‘You may not know this, but what you’re doing is sustainable development,'” says Jim Fierson, director of strategic initiatives for River Valley Partners. “Now, when people want to find out about what cities are doing, they come here. Their itineraries always look interesting: Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York . . . Chattanooga.”
Everybody’s Doing It Still, sustainability is not a one-size-fits-all phenomenon. Cities as varied as Pattonsburg, Mo.; Red Lodge, Mont.; Annapolis, Md.; and Scottsdale, Ariz., have their success stories, too. So do Manatee County, Fla.; Racine County, Wis.; Alameda County, Calif.; and Marion County, Ore.
Additionally, companies like Monsanto, the St. Louis-based chemical manufacturer; Minneapolis-based 3M, and Home Depot, the Atlanta do-it-yourself giant, have received awards from the PCSD for sustainable business practices.
In fact, an involved business community can be critical to development of a truly sustainable local environment. In Berkeley, Calif., long a bastion of environmental activism, the Office of Economic Development (OED) is pursuing an aggressive plan to attract and retain environmentally friendly businesses.
The city, which banned polystyrene and introduced America to curbside recycling, aims to establish the nation’s “Green Valley” by providing services like permit assistance and low interest loans to target businesses. Currently, OED is offering those services to 125 businesses that provide more than 2,000 area jobs.
Ensuring a way of life In Chattanooga’s case, sustainable development was a way to bring the city back from its near-death. Often, however, citizens look to sustainability as a way to ensure the continuation of what they see as their way of life.
For instance, in Routt County, Colo., home of Steamboat Springs and its ski resorts, local farmers, ranchers and environmentalists, as well as tourists, were headed for a showdown over development pressures. Opposition to the building of a new ski resort, led by The Nature Conservancy and a group of grassroots activists was the catalyst for a series of meetings about the direction in which the county was heading.
Those meetings were initially marked by hostility between the groups present. Ranchers and farmers were wary of environmentalists, whose land protection policies often are viewed skeptically in the West. Environmentalists, on the other hand, argued that the farmers and ranchers were blurring the line between public and private lands.
However, over time, tension dissipated as meeting after meeting convinced the participants that everyone wanted essentially the same thing: A community that treasured its open space and valued its agricultural and ranching traditions.
Susan Dorsey Otis, co-founder and now executive director of the Yampa Valley Land Trust (YVLT), puts it this way: “What a dramatic mountain is to Telluride or Vail, our wide-open valley is to us. Some of us realized that we had to work cooperatively with the landowners. Public lands do not operate as a natural system unto themselves. They rely on private lands to complete the system.”
Ultimately, Vision 2020, a group meeting to plan the city’s birthday celebration in 2000, became a vehicle for creation of a master development plan. Once they began meeting, group members quickly decided that growth – not party – planning was the most critical issue the county faced.
Surveys and community outreach had convinced local officials that protection of open space topped the list of citizens’ concerns. The Routt County OpenLands Committee, chaired by Otis, worked closely with landowners to set forth a series of “tools” to guide land-use planning in the area.
Those tools included a statement signed by all the Routt County commissioners on the importance of agricultural lands and open space and a Routt County Right-To-Farm-And-Ranch ordinance. Ultimately, the committee came up with a series of financial initiatives allowing for both the purchase and the transfer of development rights and the institution of conservation easements.
Through the Purchase of Development Rights (PDR) program, landowners can sell development rights to entities like land trusts, which safeguard the property from development. “The PDR program allows a cash remedy for ranchers and farmers faced with economic challenges like retirement or college tuition,” says Steamboat Springs City Council President Kevin Bennett. “It gave them an alternative to selling their land.”
The program is funded with lottery money administered by Great Outdoors Colorado (GOCO), a state land protection entity created by popular vote in 1992, and a 1 mill property tax increase. The money allowed the city and the county to design specific programs to address a vast array of problems. The Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) program allows landowners to transfer development rights in areas that have been designated “no development” to other areas designated in the comprehensive plan as “developable.” (The county has not yet decided how to proceed with TDRs.)
Conservation easements provide tax benefits to landowners who agree to restrict development in certain areas. (The 1996 federal farm bill awarded the county $430,000 for easement purchases by the YVLT and the local Nature Conservancy.) Additionally, developers receive incentives for using as little land as possible in their projects, a policy that encourages high-density developments.
“It’s one thing to conserve the land,” Otis says, “but we need to make it economically rewarding for landowners to remain on the land.”
The county also is debating methods of encouraging local businesses to take advantage of the wool, beef, hay and wheat produced in the area. Officials hope to “close the loop” on the area’s economy and, at the same time, help out local farmers and ranchers.
Local efforts have been recognized by GOCO, which recently awarded the area $6 million to institute a 14-partner proposal aimed at protecting and enhancing “the ecological health of the Yampa River and the productive agricultural lands it supports while providing for appropriate recreational opportunities.”
Partners include Steamboat Springs, Craig and nearby cities; Routt and Moffat counties; the Forest Service; the Steamboat school district; several state agencies and the Steamboat Ski and Resort Corp. They have defined five major goals for what the partnership is calling the Yampa River Legacy Project. Those goals include the recovery of native cutthroat trout, public education and protection of 5,000 to 7,000 acres of riverside habitat and ranchland through voluntary conservation easements and other agreements.
“We’d like to see this valley as one that did things differently,” Bennett says. “We have found a way to preserve real-time, viable agriculture and encourage compatible economic development.”
“It’s a big challenge, a huge challenge,” Otis says. “Even now in our county, we are constantly threatened with inappropriate development. The thing is, we’re not perfect, but at least we’re trying.”
The Little Things For both Routt County and Chattanooga, what is now praised as sustainability was actually the result of a series of small actions that blossomed into an overall concept. Across the country, hundreds of cities, counties, towns and villages are beginning to take similar small steps.
In Maryland’s capital, the Annapolis Alliance is focusing on citizen summits to identify projects (like cleaning creeks and historic preservation) on which to concentrate. In Pattonsburg, Mo., a community of 400 hard hit by the Midwest flooding in 1993, officials have adopted objectives for a sustainable economy and ecology.
Seattle’s Cascade neighborhood has published a sustainable community profile that looks at the often isolated issues of land use, zoning, transportation and demographics.
In Scottsdale, Ariz., the Cityshape 2020 program seeks to guide preservation of open space and provide a framework for the city’s future. And in Sitka, Alaska, the loss of jobs that followed the closing of a pulp mill spurred citizens to look at economic diversification that includes sustainable forestry, habitat protection and environmentally sound methods of wood processing.
All of this – from the smallest community meeting to the grandest historic preservation commitment – is part and parcel of the definition of sustainability. It is also all the result of someone saying, “We need to plan for a future that won’t be a burden to those who must live in it.”
Steamboat Springs’ Bennett puts it best when he says, “Good planners make great ancestors.”
The World Resources Institute (WRI) has released “Exploring Sustainable Communities,” a practical guide for high school teachers and community leaders interested in exploring creation of a sustainable future for their communities. The guide draws on research in WRI’s 1996 – 1997 World Resources Report on the Urban Environment and on the work of the President’s Council on Sustainable Development, which was co-chaired by WRI President Jonathan Lash.
“Students are not only the leaders of tomorrow,” Lash says, “they can influence their communities today. We hope this guide will help educators enter the process underway in many communities to create a vision of how they want their communities to develop.”
Developed for secondary school teachers, the guide employs practical group exercises and case studies to help students understand the history and the possible futures of their communities, as well as the role they can play in those futures. It is indexed to the voluntary national learning standards for science, geography, civics, history and math so it may be easily adapted to a high school curriculum.
The guide is available from WRI, a policy research organization, for $8.99. An optional pack of 20 color transparencies keyed to lesson plans is $24.90. Portions are also posted on the web (www.wri.org/wri/ enved.) For information or to place an order, contact WRI at (800) 822-0504 or Kendall Hunt Publishing Co. at (800) KH-BOOKS.
* Sustainable Ecosystems and Communities: EPA office that focuses on integrated, geographic approaches to environmental protection, emphasizing ecological integrity, economic sustainability and quality of life issues. (http://www.epa.gov/ecocommunity/)
* Sustainable Communities Network: Site for information exchange that includes a range of issues related to sustainability and includes case histories. (http://www.sus tainable.org)
* Sustainable Communities Information: Project of the Nova Scotia Environment and Development Coalition that includes information, tools and resources on sustainable communities, as well as the Sustainable Communities Databank. (http://www.cfn.cs.dal.ca/Environment/SCN/SCN home.html)
* Center for Sustainable Communities: Sponsored by the University of Washington’s Cascadia Community and Environment Institute, the site offers an on-line library, a 10-session tutorial and case studies. (http://weber.u.washington.edu/edu~common)
* President’s Council on Sustainable Development: General information about the PCSD, including members, mission, etc., as well as the final report to the president outlining recommendations for a national sustainable development action strategy. (http://www.white house.gov/PCSD/)
* Sustainable Ecosystems and Communities: EPA office that focuses on integrated, geographic approaches to environmental protection, emphasizing ecological integrity, economic sustainability and quality of life issues. (http://www.epa.gov/ecocommunity/)
* Chattanooga web page: The city reports on its progress and shares information on sustainable development to encourage the long-term use of natural resources. (http:// bertha.chattanooga.net/SUSTAIN/)
* Sustainable Seattle: A volunteer network and civic forum aimed at promoting sustainable development on a local level in the city. The site features Indicators of Sustainability, which list methods to measure progress toward – or away from – sustainability. It also includes a Directory of Sustainability-Promoting Organizations. (http://www.scn.org/sustainable/susthome.html)
* Tahoe Center for a Sustainable Future: Offers information, resources, education and strategies for achieving a sustainable future. The site includes the project’s Sustainable Curriculum Program, its Information and Technology Program and an On-Line Resources Guide. (http:// www.ceres.ca.gov/tcsf/)
* Public Technology, Inc.: Information on sustainability efforts of the National League of Cities, National Association of Counties and International City/County Management Association. The site also provides a list of useful publications. (http://pti.nw.dc.us/)
* Urban Ecology: Non-profit organization that supports development of ecologically healthy cities. Information about projects such as the Blueprint for a Sustainable Bay Area and the Community Design Work project. (http://www.best.com/ ~schmitty/ueindex.shtml)
* International Institute for Sustainable Development: The site discusses issues related to sustainable development, including the concept of sustainability. It includes a chronology of sustainable development and offers sustainable development principles from the perspectives of different groups. It also includes a calendar of events, archives and a “Hot Topics” feature. (http://iisd1.iisd.ca/)
* Greenbuilder: Part of the Austin City Connection page (Austin, Texas), the site provides resources related to sustainable building practices, products and techniques. It also profiles publications, such as The Sustainable Building Sourcebook. (http://www.greenbuilder. com/general/ BuildingSources.html)
* Global Environmental Options: Organization supports sustainable design and communities through educational outreach, coalition building and integrated environmental design and planning. Its site features the Sustainable Design Center, which provides designers, planners and policymakers with print and on-line resources, and the link library includes links to and descriptions of 400 web sites. (http://www.geonetwork.org)
* Global Action and Information Network: A nonprofit organization that supports and encourages actions for a sustainable planet. The site includes environmental legislation and policy, sustainability issues and information on lifestyle changes that can help promote sustainability. (http://www.igc.apc.org/gain/)
* Florida Internet Center for Understanding Sustainability: A joint effort between the Florida Center for Community Design and the University of South Florida’s School of Architecture and Community Design. The site includes a information on transportation, population, energy and ecosystems. (http:www.arch.usf.edu/ficus/ default.htm)
* Center of Excellence for Sustainable Development: DOE office that focuses on community success stories. Includes information about model codes and ordinances. (http://www.sustainable.doe.gov/)