Holding Patterns - interim uses for stalled project sites

Seattle's Design Commission is looking for creative ideas to turn empty lots into something good while they wait for development to restart. Here's their press release:

What if you could feed wallabies in downtown Seattle?

Have you noticed how many lots have been left empty or partially developed due to the stalled economy? These vacant project sites are all around us. Unattractive and unbecoming of our city, we pass by them every day: empty holes, barren plains of gravel, voids in the city fabric. How can we convert these eyesores to opportunities?

The Seattle Design Commission wants your ideas for Holding Patterns, interim uses for stalled project sites. We are seeking your concepts to transform the following types of stalled project sites around the city:

holes in the ground surface lots ongoing construction above or below street level

Whether a concert space or a bumper car track, basketball hoops or a fleeting performance stage, from temporary to semi-permanent, wacky, practical or both, the Design Commission is welcoming any and all ideas. Artists, designers, non-profits, businesses, developers, students, astronauts, everyone is invited to contribute ideas. Interdisciplinary teams are encouraged.

Deadline: Monday, May 24th, 2010 Your submission should include the following:

a brief narrative including rationale, goal, purpose, program, and design intent the location, if specific (all city-wide locations are acceptable) a site plan and/or images that communicate your ideas Maximum of four 8.5” x 11” single-sided pages per site category

There will be a follow up implementation workshop for selected ideas, so please be prepared to make a two minute pitch for potential partners who are able to help make your ideas a reality.

Submit via e-mail to Valerie.Kinast@seattle.gov a pdf formatted file and in the body of the email the names/backgrounds of participants and contact information for one person. Please put “Holding Patterns” in the subject line. 6 MB maximum file size.

Personally, I love this idea, because it sounds like the city is opening up the possibility of quite diverse, off-the-wall land uses, and I find a lot of what's been built in the last couple of years a bit bland and overregulated.

Professionally, this fits several of Sustainable Seattle's priorities, because it makes land use more efficient, adds a very open piece to the city planning process, lets the community say more about land use, and has the potential to make some currently blighted parts of the streetscape much more attractive. And of course, any entry to this competition would be good source material to start an entry to our Dream a Sound Future competition from.

Environmental Justice and the EPA

Sustainable Seattle is making a conscious effort to reinvent ourselves, and one of the key aspects of this has been to pick social justice as a central principle of our work. We did this for at least three reasons: no system that serves only some people well is truly sustainable; sustainability groups haven't historically done as well as we should in reaching out to minority communities; and the impacts of unsustainable practices have tended to fall most heavily on minority communities. It's this last issue that I want to focus on today: why unsustainable practices have tended to affect some communities far worse than others, and what's being done to fix the problem now.

At heart, the problem is that poorer neighborhoods tend to bear the brunt of problems such as pollution, poorly designed & maintained infrastructure, and limited access to resources including jobs, open space and healthy food. This is not usually an issue of cartoon villains rubbing their hands together and saying "mwahaha we can dump all our PCBs over there and punish those people", but of systemic reasons why some communities have been better able to protect themselves than others. Each individual decision--the siting of a new road or landfill, or whether to spend the extra money putting power lines and railways underground--is made independently and rationally, but the end result becomes discriminatory.

One of the reasons for this is that poorer neighborhoods have historically fared less well at organizing themselves and speaking up for their interests in the planning process. Simply having money to spend can help directly by opening access to politicians, but it's not the only mechanism. The rich are more likely to have the time to do this, while people with less money have to focus on immediate needs. Neighborhoods with a range of first languages have a harder time co-ordinating internally as not everyone can communicate directly, and neighborhoods with large immigrant populations may simply lack the collective knowledge of who to approach to influence public policy.

We are working to address these issues: we are building on our historic community development projects with a renewed emphasis on the neediest neighborhoods in Seattle. Several of our staff are working with the neighborhoods along the Duwamish river, in partnership with 7 other non-profits to develop a neighborhood-led sustainability plan, and we will keep building on this work.

Another key issue, for all the same background reasons, is that poorer neighborhoods have tended to attract less attention from government bodies that can serve them by preventing and cleaning up pollution. Enforcement of environmental law tends to be complaint-driven, which unintentionally but inevitably leads to a bias in favor of neighborhoods that complain louder and more effectively. This is far from the only area where this happens--we have the idiom about squeaky wheels getting greased for a reason--but it's a significant one. Not being an enforcement agency ourselves, there is less we can do on this front, so it's very reassuring to hear that the EPA has decided to focus more of its efforts on environmental justice. Here is a press release we received from Charles Lee of the EPA's Office of Environmental Justice last week (emphasis added):

EPA Enforcement Goals and National Enforcement Initiatives Fiscal Year 2011-13

EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance (OECA) has adopted three goals and announced national enforcement initiatives that put special emphasis on environmental justice in our enforcement work.

The Enforcement Goals clearly identify what we are doing to advance the Administrator’s priorities to make a real difference to people where they live and work, and will guide our work beginning now and continuing into 2011 and beyond. The goals themselves are simple and straightforward:

· Aggressively go after pollution problems that matter to communities; vigorous civil and criminal enforcement that targets the most serious water, air and chemical hazards; advance environmental justice by protecting vulnerable communities;

· Reset our relationship with states: make sure we are delivering on our joint commitment to a clean and healthy environment, and

· Improve transparency.

The national enforcement initiatives announced today also emphasize the importance of protecting over burdened communities and advancing environmental justice. With your help, we held an unprecedented National Environmental Justice Advisory Council Public Teleconference to take comment on candidates for national enforcement initiatives. The goals and national enforcement initiatives we have adopted demonstrate how we have heard the message that it is important to make advancing environmental justice an integral part of our enforcement efforts. We have also heard that vigorous enforcement depends on the effectiveness of all of EPA’s regulatory tools, including rules, permits and monitoring. Environmental justice will inform our work in all the national enforcement initiatives, but I particularly want to draw your attention to our Air Toxics in Communities initiative, which will employ all our tools to address excess emissions caused by failure to comply with EPA’s “leak detection and repair,” requirements, restrictions on flaring, and excess emissions during start up, shut down and malfunction events, particularly in communities burdened by multiple pollution sources. Impacts on overburdened communities will also be central to our work to address concentrated animal feeding operations, emissions from the largest sources of air pollution and pollution from sewer overflows and stormwater in urban waters.

More information on the Enforcement Goals and the National Enforcement Initiatives announced today is available on the internet at: www.epa.gov/compliance/ .

We have many challenges ahead, but I look forward to working with you to protect health and the environment and to advance environmental justice and protect vulnerable communities across the nation.

This is hugely important work, and we applaud the EPA's new emphasis on it.

Further reading: these two sites are great sources for more information about environmental justice:
Environmental Justice Network
The Environmental Justice journal (one whole issue available free online)

Act now to encourage sustainability in neighborhood planning

Calling all Seattle neighborhoods! We have a unique opportunity to send a consistent message about the importance of sustainability to our neighborhoods!

The city of Seattle Department Of Neighborhoods and Department of Planning and Development are working on updating neighborhood plans in those neighborhoods that have light-rail stations. In addition, they are working with neighborhoods outside of the light-rail station areas to gather information for Status Reports, or “snapshots” of the current condition of these neighborhoods relative to the 1990s vision. The Status Reports will help inform decisions about where and how to update Neighborhood Plans in the future.

There are two ways you can participate NOW.

1. You can attend a meeting in your neighborhood, held throughout July

2. You can submit your thoughts via on on-line survey. See this webpage: www.seattle.gov/dpd...

This is a great opportunity for Seattle residents to bring sustainability to the forefront of these discussions. Below are the four questions included in the online survey, and some suggestions for how you may want to answer for your own neighborhood. These are suggestions from Sustainable Seattle, and we definitely encourage each person to answer individually. But we also believe in the power of numbers and a consistent message.

Online Survey Questions with Suggestions for Possible Answers:

1. How has your neighborhood changed in the last decade?
Sustainable Seattle (S2) suggestions:

• Development of a SCALLOPS or other sustainability-minded group and development of a sustainability consciousness among individuals
• Note changes to the sustainability of your neighborhood, including in topics like
• Clean and Sufficient Water (Is there more or less impervious surface? How is stormwater managed?)
• Habitat (Are there more native plantings? Has tree coverage changed?)
• Climate Protection (Has vehicle usage changed? What about electricity consumption?)
• Transportation (Is there improved walkability in your neighborhood? Is there good access to transit and bike routes?)
• Responsible Land Use (Has there been an increase in density? Is this increase leading to an appropriate level of density to support local business, a walkable neighborhood, and transit access? Is a good percentage of the land used for public amenities?)
• Responsible Resource Use (Are businesses and households using more or less energy? Is your neighborhood on the way to achieving the kind of energy reductions needed to protect against climate change? Do all households use efficient appliances, have weatherized homes, and practice conservation?)
• Affordable Housing (Would you call housing affordable? Are there diverse housing options for various population types like seniors, student, young professionals, low and moderate income people, etc?)
• Food Systems (Are there opportunities for people to grow their own food? Is there access to fresh and local food?)
• Quality Educational Opportunities (Are there good and accessible educational opportunities for children and adults in the neighborhood? Are there good local schools?)
• Healthy Living Choices (Are there opportunities for physical activity?
• Community Involvement (Are there opportunities to make change in the neighborhood? Are citizens involved in local decision-making and place-making?)
• *** For information about regional trends in any of the above categories, visit www.b-sustainable.org.

2. What changes are you pleased about? What changes are you dissatisfied about?
S2 Suggestions: Remark on the same above list.

3. How well are the Vision and Key Strategies being implemented? Are they still priorities?
S2 Suggestions: As for how well the Vision and Strategies are being implemented- this differs neighborhood by neighborhood and is up to your own discernment. As an example, in the Aurora/Licton Springs neighborhood, I commented how the Vision and Strategy of providing a robust neighborhood-focused commercial zone has not really been implemented in any way. I also noted that there have been some improvements in biking and walking connections around the neighborhood, but there need to be more. As for whether they are still priorities, reflect on: Do the vision and Key Strategies contain a commitment to sustainability? Will they lead to improvement in any of the above-mentioned areas of sustainability?

4. What should there be more focus on? What should there be less focus on? What are the important gaps?
S2 Suggestions: There should be increased focus on targeted strategies to improve neighborhood-scale sustainability- including in areas of importance like those mentioned above in Questions 1 and 2- such as habitat, climate protection, sustainable transportation, walkability, and affordable and diverse housing options. It is helpful to be as specific as possible. As an example, in the Aurora/Licton Springs neighborhood, I commented that there needs to be improved focus on reducing driving, reduction in energy use, and reduction in garbage production, among others. There should be less focus on… this depends on each neighborhood plan and your own opinion. The important gaps, again, may include those areas related to sustainability. I identified the lack of the word sustainability, and the lack of specific strategic actions to improve sustainability, as major gaps.