Daily Score Blog

Editor's note: Guest contributor Hans Peter Meyer writes on community development issues from Courtenay, British Columbia.

Saturday, November 19, is local government election day in British Columbia.

It's too late to nominate anyone, and it's too late to really organize. By the time British Columbians read this, there won't be much left to do but vote for whoever you think has the vision and the energy to put the pieces in place for a more 'livable,' more 'sustainable' future.

Why does local government matter? Joy Leach once said of her experience as Mayor of Naniamo, one of Vancouver Island's biggest municipalities, "Local government is the Hell's Kitchen of sustainability." It's at local council tables and regional board meetings that so many of the big issues become real. Garbage. Sewage. Town design for cars, bikes, pedestrians, and buses. Development applications to spread expensive infrastructure, or 'intensify' populations and reduce the ecological footprint. These are the nuts and bolts of community sustainability.

Some changes seem to take place overnight: All of a sudden there's a $1M highway connector between two small towns. Or a huge box store in the middle of prime agricultural land. But in fact, these land use decisions were made years, even decades before anything happens on the ground. Someone put the pieces in place so that when the time was ripe, the plan and the action unfolded.

We need people in local government willing to put the pieces in place for healthier communities and neighbourhoods in 10, 25, and 50 years.

An interesting bit of local history in the Seattle P-I.

By 1892 Seattle was crisscrossed with 48 miles of electric railway and 22 miles of cable railway, stretching from Georgetown to Ballard. According to state historian Walter Crowley, the construction of the streetcar routes segued into smart new development:

...developers platted new neighborhoods clustered around compact business districts at street railway intersections, built broad avenues such as Westlake, Madison and 15th Northwest, and opened attractive parks at Golden Gardens, Alki Beach and Guy Phinney's former Woodland Estate to lure residents and riders.

Unfortunately, the streetcar city was not long for this world. After losing money for years the city bought the lines--under circumstances so suspicious that a grand jury authorized an investigation. The city eventually ceded authority to the state and by 1941 Seattle was without streetcars, ushering in an era of auto-dominated transportation, with a small emphasis on buses.

And in that short history are a number of explanations for our current transportation problems.

Brookings scholar Eugenie Birch has an interesting paper on trends in downtown living in 44 major US cities between 1970 and 2000 -- finding that, on average, downtown homeownership, educational levels, and racial and ethnic diversity all increased over the period.  Also -- and unsurprisingly -- downtown residents tend to be younger than they used to be.  City living apparently developed a cachet among the 25-to-34 age demographic that it didn't have 30 years before. 

The worst news -- but also unsurprising -- is that downtowns are economically stratified, with some downtown census tracts having particularly high incomes, and others with particularly low incomes.

But most relevant to the Northwest is this:  in percentage terms, Seattle ranked second of all 44 cities in downtown population growth.  As a whole, the city of Seattle grew 7 percent total in 3 decades -- a fairly slow pace of growth.  But the downtown population grew by 86 percent.  Similarly, Portland ranks sixth on the list for downtown growth, with a population increase of 56 percent since 1970.  Meanwhile, Boise's downtown population fell by a quarter -- which is a bit of a surprise, given how quickly the city is growing. Overall, only 15 of the 44 cities saw their downtown populations increase between 1970 and 2000 -- this despite a fairly widespread increase in downtown populations in the 1990s.

NARAL Pro Choice America is supporting a bill in Congress to force FDA off the fence on Plan B. (Via TomPaine.com)

The bill is dubbed "Plan B for Plan B."

(Oh, and about the title, we've already used  "Plan B for Plan B" and "Plan C for Plan B," which left us with "Plan D . . . ")