Gentrification and its Discontents
Apropos of the recent brouhaha over dense development in Seattle's downtown (a few opinion columnists in the city have decided that high-rises are pricing out the middle class) here's an interesting op-ed by John Norquist, president of the Congress for the New Urbanism, on gentrification in US cities. The gist...
[T]he gentrification issue is best understood as nuanced with costs and benefits. It's also better understood in local context, i.e. it is genuinely a debatable issue in San Francisco or Manhattan, but a totally phony issue in Detroit or Buffalo. Some places fall in the middle of the spectrum. Faint signs of gentrification can be detected in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Milwaukee and Memphis, but there is so little of it that concern about it should logically be among the lowest priorities. Yet it isn't. The hot rhetoric spewed (perhaps appropriately) in San Francisco gets mindlessly repeated in cities that desperately need investment in their building stock.
I don't know where Seattle, Portland, Vacnouver, etc. would fall on Norquist's spectrum. But in general I think that that his perspective on the issue is worth giving a fair hearing.
Talking the Talk vs. Walking the Walk
Via Planetizen News, here's an interesting sustainability ranking for 25 US cities. The Northwest fares pretty well: Portland ranks #2, and Seattle #4. (The Bay Area beats the Northwest by a nose: San Francisco and Berkeley, CA rank #1 and #3, respectively.)
I haven't had time to look through the methods thoroughly. But my first impression is that it gives undue weight to intentions, and not enough to actual performance. For example, Portland does exceptionally well in climate and energy policy, while New York City's rank on energy policy is only middling. But this only measures what cities say about energy, not what they actually do. In fact, at least in terms of transportation efficiency, Portland eats The Big Apple's dust: New York has by far the most energy efficient transportation system in the country, largely because higher residential densities let many New Yorkers get around on public transit or on foot. So even though Portland is doing a good job of talking the talk on energy efficiency, in New York City they're (literally) walking the walk.
That's not to say that Portland's energy policy is irrelevant, or that rankings like these aren't a useful exercise. Far from it. Still, actions speak louder than words -- and any attempt to measure sustainability should look far more closely at what cities actually do than at what their leaders say.
BC's Resource (In)dependence II
In January 2005, we published a piece by guest contributor and University of Montana economist Thomas Michael Power that took issue with a report by BC research center Urban Futures on the importance of natural resource exports to the province's economy. Power disagreed with Urban Futures' position, arguing that true economic development has little to do with exports and everything to do with creating a web of local economic relationships.
A lively debate over the role of natural resource exports has ensued. In May, Urban Futures responded to Power's piece with a report titled "An Introduction to Regional Economic Analysis" (pdf). Power then clarified his position with this most-recent piece, "Thinking About the Regional Economy" (pdf).
Here are a few excerpts from Power's rebuttal:
There are two alternative paths open to us to protect our access for the full range of goods and services we desire. We can expand exports so that we can increase our imports or we can develop locally-oriented activities that efficiently displace some of those imports. If we are successful at the latter, our dependence on exports declines.
Logging On
From yesterday's Mail Tribune in Jackson County, OR comes this news:
[F]orestlands in Western Oregon produced 3.8 billion board feet of timber in 2004...That marks an 11 percent hike from 2003 and the highest total harvest since 1992, when these 19 counties west of the Cascades pumped 4 billion board feet of timber into the wood-products industry.
Just to put the recent uptick in context: though the recent increase in logging certainly raises lots of thorny and troubling issues, timber harvests are still far below their highs in the 1960s through 1980s. Take a look, with data courtesy of the Oregon Department of Forestry:
