NRDC: Top Community Sustainability Stories of 2012

The NRDC looked back on the year that was and honored some of the outstanding
issues and accomplishments for community sustainability that came to light
during the year. As explained in their preface to the article “In many cases, naming a particular item one of the best of
2012 may be a bit (not completely) arbitrary: by definition,
sustainability is seldom a single “event” that occurs wholly within one calendar
year.”

Best community sustainability issue that reached critical mass this
year: water. The NRDC water team has
become invested in community solutions in a big way. They published the
second edition of their major green infrastructure report, Rooftops to
Rivers, late last year, celebrating the efforts of cities across
the country in solving serious runoff pollution problems with smart landscaping,
green roofs, permeable paving and related approaches that also make dense neighborhoods healthier and more beautiful.
This year, they followed up with another (and seriously wonky) report detailing
how local and state governments can potentially stimulate billions of dollars in private
investment in these solutions. And, as the year drew to a close,
superstorm Sandy had demonstrated with terrible ferocity the importance of
urban water management to a resilient future.

But, beyond NRDC’s work or individual storm events, a lot of good things
happened in 2012 to mark significant progress in using soft approaches to
cleaner watersheds. In particular, the federal EPA approved Philadelphia’s plan
to deploy the most comprehensive green infrastructure program found in any US
city; New York City announced that it, too, was embarking on a major green
infrastructure program to reduce runoff and resulting sewage overflows; Washington, DC proposed a comprehensive zoning update that will
include, among other things, green infrastructure requirements for new
construction, and settled a lawsuit by agreeing to tighter deadlines for
waterway cleanup.

Meanwhile, the city of Chicago announced a program of small grants to help individual homeowners
adopt “backyard” projects such as plantings and rain barrels that help clean the
watershed; and, in Seattle, long a leader in these issues, Washington State
University and the non-profit Stewardship Partners are working to install 12,000
rain gardens in Puget Sound communities by 2016. If you’re working on city
sustainability and aren’t including clean water solutions in your portfolio,
you’re not just overlooking a critical set of concerns but also missing a lot of
creativity and excitement.

Best regional plans for thoughtful land use and transportation
investment: the Southern California and Sacramento Sustainable Communities
Strategies. The best work to emerge so far from the implementation of
California’s SB 375, the state’s landmark smart growth legislation,
these two plans tackle climate change by placing a majority of new homes and
jobs in transit-accessible locations, reducing traffic and related carbon
emissions, preserving single-family neighborhoods, and saving hundreds of square
miles of farmland and open space. Now the plans must be carried out, of course,
but the law’s mix of carrots and sticks makes me hopeful.

Best provocative new book: The Space Between. This
one was a very tough call, given The Walkable City, Jeff Speck’s definitive work on how to shape cities
that put people, not cars, first, and Chuck Marohn’s burning fiscal indictment
of sprawl, Thoughts on Building Strong Towns. But my nod goes
to Eric Jacobsen’s Christian case for cities, The Space Between,
because of its freshness.

Best expansion of the green city vocabulary: Walk Appeal.
This one comes from Steve Mouzon, who also gave us the apt phrase “original green” to describe buildings and communities
that respond to environmental issues naturally rather than with technological
add-ons. “Walk appeal” describes the extent to which a street or
community induces us to use our feet simply because it’s enjoyable. (Honorable
mention: Scott Doyon’s “pub shed.”)

Best well-deserved recognition for a sustainability leader: Dr.
Richard Jackson’s Heinz award. Long a champion of safe, walkable, clean neighborhoods,
Dick Jackson is chair of the department of environmental health sciences at
UCLA. He’ll be the first to tell you that he’s far from the only one who is
showing us why we need to improve our built environment to protect human health.
But no one does it with more conviction and authority. This year Dick’s
fantastic work earned a prestigious Heinz award; I can’t think of
anyone more deserving.

Best new idea in community revitalization: use of LEED-ND as a
planning framework for recovering neighborhoods. OK, I’m (very) biased
on this one. But many of us involved in the creation of the green rating and
certification system LEED for Neighborhood Development hoped from the beginning
that the system would find multiple informal uses for citizens and planners in
addition to its formal application in honoring worthy new development with
certification. Constructed as a logical, ordered framework of standards
measuring neighborhood characteristics that affect sustainability, LEED-ND also
provides a structure for guiding the thinking of community development
corporations and other leaders of distressed city neighborhoods as
they plan improvements. It is now being used for just that purpose in
Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Boston, Los Angeles, and perhaps elsewhere.

Best municipal blueprint for changing an unsustainable community
into a sustainable one: Plan El Paso. This superlative city
plan could just as easily have been picked as one of the best in 2011, when it
was preliminary and EPA recognized it with a national award for achievement
in smart growth. But, in March of this year, the city council formally adopted
it and, in November, El Paso voters approved the issuance of $473 million
dollars’ worth of bonds to begin funding it. These actions give us another
opportunity to salute the city’s leadership – and the skill of its planning team
– in moving forward with what may well be the nation’s best-articulated commitment to a more sustainable
future in a community not previously known for environmental
aspiration.

Best
continually improving and evolving sustainability tool: Walk Score. The
genius of Walk Score is its simplicity: enter an address and you get a numerical
rating from zero to 100 instantly. Walk Score isn’t perfect, particularly
because it relies on imperfect databases and also because it attempts to
quantify something – walkability – that is partially subjective. But it’s
incredibly good in approximating the relative completeness and convenience of
locations. Best of all, its keepers don’t rest on their laurels but continuously
tinker with the system’s underpinnings to make it more reliably
accurate. (Honorable mention in this category goes to the
ever-improving and highly useful Housing + Transportation Affordability Index from
the Center for Neighborhood Technology.)

Best accumulated body of recent work by a federal agency:
HUD. As I wrote earlier this month, I have been seriously impressed by the community-building work of the federal Department of
Housing and Urban Development since its Office of Sustainable Housing
and Communities was created almost three years ago. Working with an extremely
limited budget (as federal programs go), HUD continues to assist cities and
towns all over the country as they develop commitments and investment for a more
resilient, greener future. It’s a remarkable portfolio of accomplishment.
(Honorable mention to the work of the National Endowment for the Arts, including its Our
Town program, and to EPA’s always-impressive Office of
Sustainable Communities.)

Best little-known work by a community-based non-profit that deserves
a pat on the back: The Boston Project. A faith-based organization in
the city’s Talbot Norfolk Triangle district, the Boston Project embodies “a passion for seeing renewal in urban neighborhoods.”
It was founded by Paul and Glenna Malkemes, who run the organization’s
activities out of their house; the first floor serves as a free, pleasant and
safe drop-in center where youth can come and go at their leisure to do homework
or enjoy fellowship. With its affiliate TNT Neighbors United, the project is
working, with some success, to create “a multi-site urban garden” with a
walkable route that connects community green spaces such as planned play areas,
passive parks, vegetable gardens, and orchards.

Best body of educational work by a national non-profit: American
Society of Landscape Architects. With a relatively small staff, ASLA is
quietly doing incredibly innovative work that improves city communities. Go to
the organization’s web site and see, among other
things, 30 (mostly urban) case studies that illustrate the transformative
effects of sustainable landscape design; animations of the possible, using
Google Sketchup to show how to build parks out of waste, design neighborhoods
for active living, create smart landscaping that saves energy, transform ugly
transportation infrastructure into attractive people spaces, and design
wildlife-friendly neighborhoods; a guide to the beautiful hidden spaces of Washington, DC; a study
on the economic benefits of green infrastructure; an interactive tour of the
Society’s own innovative green roof; materials on brownfields transformation;
and much more. Not to mention the Sustainable Sites
Initiative, a partnership undertaking that seeks to do for landscapes
what LEED has done for buildings and neighborhood development. Very, very
impressive. (Honorable mention: Project for Public Spaces.)

Best sustained excellence in writing about people and community:
PlaceShakers. The hard-to-define, geographically dispersed
firm PlaceMakers does a lot of things, but what I like best about them is their
writing, in the
PlaceShakers blog. Scott Doyon, Ben Brown, Hazel Borys and
company are kind of all over the place in what they think and write about, and
that’s a very good thing. While it all comes back, one way or another, to a
decidedly new urbanist view of community design (form-based codes, the transect,
skinny streets, and so forth), it’s a refreshingly broad and very well-written
take on that approach. Scott, for instance, explains walkability by reference to
where the bars are in his community; Hazel links neighborhood feel to Christmas
carols and a meditation on the Ode to Joy that most of us know as the
last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; when Ben discusses the intricacies
of housing market trends, you feel as if they are being explained by your
favorite uncle. And, yes, the rest of them write, too. Their articles aren’t
lectures so much as stories told by interesting and fun people who, in the
process, tell you as much about themselves as about their subject matter.

Best architecture/planning firm of the year: Mithun. There
are firms that design outstanding urbanism. And there are firms that design
outstanding green buildings and community features. But there is none that
integrates those two important concepts – both critical for sustainability –
better than Seattle-based Mithun. I reported on
two of its projects during the year: the firm was the guiding force behind
Denver’s award-winning Mariposa project as well as the master planner for the
excellent green revitalization concept for the Sunset neighborhood of Renton, Washington. Late
in 2012 Mithun added significant talent and capacity by merging with the highly
accomplished, San Francisco-based Daniel Solomon Design Partners, long a leader
in urbanist design solutions. It will be exciting to see how the firm’s work
will continue to evolve.