This just in…
Yes! Out of the 50 biggest cities in the U.S., Charlotte ranks number 34 in “sustainability,” according to SustainLane.com. Who is number one? Why the People’s Republic of Portland, of course. Portland officials on their secrets:
No less than Michael Armstrong, deputy director of the city’s Office of Sustainable Development (OSD), opines, “There are no cities in the world today that are anywhere close to sustainable.” This from the man of the agency that has helped certify more buildings through the LEED process than any other metropolitan on the continent. That’s no mean task. The U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) standards are famously rigorous, but Portland’s OSD has managed to assist numerous developers through its G/Rated green-building program. When pressed, Armstrong admits “that Portland does a good job of taking steps to move [towards sustainability].”
Such modesty might be expected from bureaucrats, but echoes are heard among the citizenry. “We’re not even close to being sustainable,” says Wes Kempfir. An applications engineer at Nike, Kempfir participates in various sustainability efforts funded by the city, such as the former “Eco Teams,” and while he agrees that Portland is moving in the right direction, he, like Armstrong, qualifies the city’s achievements: “Portland can only go so far because the world we live in is so unsustainable. Really, all we can do is start building the models.” …
Robert Liberty, council member at Metro, the regional government that presides over three counties (one includes Portland) sighs. “I always said in my speeches that Oregon began like everyone else,” he says. “We started down a path and we developed policies and saw some results and became more invested in them and then it began to take a life of its own, which is a way to say that any place can do this with effort.”
What exactly is “this”? If any burg can replicate Portland’s success, what’s the formula?
He’s not endorsing it necessarily, but Liberty does appreciate the value of conflict. Recalling the state’s contentious political environment in the 1970s when many of its pioneering initiatives—its land use laws, its legislation for glass recycling—were passed, Liberty says, “It came out of fights. There’s nothing more empowering than having a victory. The battles forced each side to articulate its values and advance them, and that built a lot of social capital.” …
Nowadays relations are more amicable. “I don’t think there’s the level of disagreement over the nature of the future that there was twenty years ago,” says Liberty.
Portland’s climate protection plan (the first from a local government in the US when it passed in 1993), the free public transit in its downtown core, its curbside recycling—“None of these things happened overnight,” Armstrong says. “When you put in your first bike lane, that’s great. But it only really helps people going from some place on the bike lane to another place on the bike lane.”
He and Liberty promote the long view, which Liberty worries is foreshortened by the attention paid to the city and region’s successes. Addressing the ethos of sustainability that permeates Portland’s community, he says, “You have a whole cohort of people who believed in it because they went through struggles to implement policies and then you have newcomers to it who already share those values. The difference is newcomers don’t understand what it took to get there.”
Now do you understand what Pat Mumford, Debra Campbell, and friends are shooting for? Do you understand that part of the plan is to attract newcomers to Charlotte who share those “sustainable” values while driving away anyone who does not? Does any of this bother you?
