Modeshift

Two items caught my eye today. World oil prices reached $93 a barrel this week, which is why gasoline at the Wesco down the road is $3.07-a- gallon tonight. The other news is the announcement on Monday that city leaders in Oregon want to dramatically expand the number of neighborhoods served by Portland’s spectacularly successful streetcar.

The two developments are related, of course, because as fuel prices rise the sanity and fuel-efficiency of streetcar lines makes ever more sense. 

Dallas opened a 2.8-mile streetcar line in 1989, and since then eight cities have built new streetcar lines, including Memphis, Little Rock, San Francisco and Tampa, all serving growing numbers of riders using restored cars or replicas.

Portland, which opened the first section of what is now an eight-mile loop in 2001, was the first to use modern streetcars, designed and built in the Czech Republic.

A new 2.6-mile streetcar line is scheduled to open in Seattle in December; a new line is to open in Washington in 2009; and a four-mile line is to begin operating in Tucson in December 2010. Miami, Columbus, Cincinnati, Phoenix, Missoula, Grand Rapids and some 70 other American cities are studying the feasibility of opening lines, according to Reconnecting America, a national nonprofit transit research group in Oakland, Calif.

Not since the turn of the 20th century, when metropolitan regions built elegant urban-rail networks, which were later dismantled, have streetcars generated such intense interest, according to the American Public Transportation Association, a Washington trade group.

Much of the reason lies in what happened after Portland decided that a streetcar, operating on fixed tracks and sharing the right of way with cars, was not only a new option for getting from one end of town to the other, but also a boon to developers as a new rail corridor for building homes and offices downtown. The Portland region also has a 44-mile network of light-rail lines, using faster and larger cars, that runs through the center of the city to the eastern and western suburbs. An 8.3-mile, $575.7 million extension is under way, scheduled to open in 2009.

John Carroll, a local home builder who is on a committee that oversees the streetcars, told me earlier this month, ”All I can say is that the stars lined up the right way for Portland. The Portland streetcar demonstrated that the city was serious about developing downtown at a time when the core was much quieter than it is now. Our last seven or eight projects have been within a block, block and half of the streetcar line.”

The city-owned streetcar line, which cost $100 million to build, has helped sweep in $2.4 billion in new commercial and housing development, with 7,248 new housing units, according to city statistics. A former vacant railway yard and grimy light-industrial sector on the line’s northern end was transformed into a hip area called the Pearl District. On the other end, industrial ground along the Williamette River has become the South Waterfront, a neighborhood of high-rise condominiums, town houses, offices, parks and a tram with spectacular views.

Although riding the Portland streetcars now seems like a logical step to urban prosperity, getting the line built took 11 years of promoting the idea.

A major task included convincing residents that pedestrians, bicyclists, drivers and streetcars could co-exist in the same right of way. Miami, which plans to open a line in 2012, put the problem to rest by producing videos of Portland streetcars as they operate without a hitch, and posting them on a Web site, miamigov.com/MiamiStreetcar/pages/Videos.asp.

Another challenge was raising money. Portland financed its line almost entirely with local taxes.

Two years ago, Earl Blumenauer, Democrat of Portland, convinced his colleagues in the House of Representatives to approve a new funding provision called Small Starts in the federal transportation bill to help pay for the line. This year the program is providing $100 million for building streetcar lines and bus rapid transit systems. Portland wants to use $75 million in Small Starts money to partly finance a 6.7-mile, $146 million extension of its streetcar line.

Portland’s streetcars carry nearly 10,000 passengers a day, almost four times the number it anticipated when the line opened, said Rick Gustafson, executive director of Portland Streetcar, the nonprofit corporation that operates the line. “There’s no question that we are part of the combined investment over the last 20 years that produced the infrastructure that made it possible for people to park their cars and turn Portland into a walking environment,” Mr. Gustafson said. “When you create that, amazingly enough the market responds.”

According to the Portland Oregonian, about 140 miles of the city’s busiest streets show potential for new streetcar routes. Streetcars could make more neighborhoods resemble the popular retail corridor along Southeast Belmont, built originally along a streetcar line in the early 20th century.

John Bebow, an active member of the association of newsies-who-became-public-interest-advocates, sent an interesting item in his weekly email alert about the emergence of online news organizations in the Midwest. John diverged from a decorated daily news career,  that included stops at the Detroit News and Chicago Tribune, to become the executive director of the Center For Michigan, a nearly two-year-old non-profit that focuses on state economic and competitiveness issues that was founded by Phil Powers, the founder and former owner of a successful chain of newspapers in southern Michigan.

Mr. Bebow notes that “traditional newspaper newsrooms continue to shrivel. In Michigan this year, the Booth papers closed their Lansing bureau. Gannett papers in cities ranging from Battle Creek to Detroit are cutting staffs with buyouts and, in some cases, layoffs. And Detroit News Business Editor Mark Truby, widely respected as one of the very best journalists in the state, left for a corporate job at Ford and, in the process, became the latest in a long line of veteran journalists (including your newsletter author) to leave newsrooms for other opportunities. In the face of these declines in traditional media, new kinds of journalism — funded by philanthropy — are cropping up all over the place. Michigan is ripe with great stories waiting to be told and meaty issues deserving of in-depth coverage. Journalism funded by philanthropy is a great hope for the future of public discourse in Michigan.”

Part of John’s post is personally satisfying. Of the five independent online news organizations he cited, I’ve been deeply involved in two, the Michigan Land Use Institute and Circle of Blue, both based in Traverse City. They reflect the ability of talented journalists, editors, producers, and graphic designers to make the complex simple — land use and economic policy in the Institute’s case, the global freshwater crisis for Circle of Blue — and produce consistently compelling work that is reaching large audiences. The 21st break-up of mass — mass media, mass audiences, mass marketing — has opened the opportunity for news organizations to be small, nimble, very good, attract significant numbers of visitors, have influence, and be financially successful. 

The other side of that trend, of course, is that the large news organizations of the 20th century, designed to reach the masses, are struggling to develop the new business model. 

The New York Times, which literally shrunk the size of the pages of its print edition a few months ago, is likely to survive as a global news organization because it is great, and it is building an exceptional Web presence that attracts seven or eight times more readers to its online report than its print newspaper. But it’s only a matter of time, probably sooner than later, before the Times decides that all that infrastructure — forests, paper plants, printing plants, delivery trucks and the rest — needed to deliver a paper edition to roughly 1 million readers a day is just not worth the trouble. About 20 percent of what I write for the Times now heads to what editors call the “web-only”  report. 

Regional daily newspapers and many general interest magazines, though, may not survive in print or online. The cost of maintaining 50 or 100-member newsrooms at roughly $100,000 a person (including taxes and benefits) is just too high.

The other intriguing portion of John’s alert concerned a number of prominent old-school journalists in Minneapolis who say they’ve raised over $1.2 million to open Minnpost.com, a new online daily set up as a non-profit.  The roster of staff and contributors numbers 45 people. Though just a handful are full or part-time payroll employees, and the rest freelancers who will earn from $100 to $600 per piece, that looks to me like a sizable weekly and monthly churn. I have no doubt that what Minnpost.com publishes will be useful. Journalists love adventure and challenge and Minnpost.com is both. I wish the group great success. 

But as an observer of new models I have a question. Will this distinctive mixing of strategies — large numbers of reporters seeking to succeed financially in an online news world that rewards compact newsrooms — survive? And if it does, will Minnpost.com have invented something important for readers and their communities?

The new online journalism models that have been successful – Grist, Alternet, MLUI, Sightline, MetroMode, Truth Dig, Talking Points Memo, Newwest.net, Voice of San Diego, and others — thrived because they were good and small. A few editors, a small number of journalists, a graphic designer or two, a Web producer, a multi-media producer. That is especially important for the online non-profits because attracting donors and foundations is hard work. Though foundations say they admire communications, and call on their grantees to pay attention to what they say and how they say it, grants for communications are some of the toughest money to find. The measurements of success, as defined by philanthropies and donors, can be murky. Is it readership, page views, changes in policy? 

One small news operation that became large is Slate, which operates on a profit model, is owned by the Washington Post, has 59 editorial staff members, and was fortunate to have Bill Gates’ money to get started in 1996.

I don’t know of any independents, especially a startup online non-profit daiy news operation set to launch on November 8, that ever had as many journalists ready to go as Minnpost. com. It is for that reason alone that if they’re still here a year from today it’s a potentially enormous breakthrough for regional media. I join a number of my colleagues in the online news world in wishing our friends in Minneapolis the best.

Cheap oil was, arguably, the most important driver of prosperity in the industrial world during the 20th century. Expensive energy is one, but not the only significant driver of the economic Mode Shift occuring in the 21st. 

Today, just in time for gas prices here in Benzie County to edge close to $3.00 again, and with news of $90 a barrel oil this week, comes the latest independent assessment of global oil stocks. The conclusion that the German-based Energy Watch Group reaches in its new report is that the world reached the peak of oil production last year, and that oil production and supplies will steadily decline by 2 percent annually for the time being. 

Energy analysts were wrong earlier this year when they predicted that gasoline prices would reach $4 a gallon last summer. But I’m sticking by my prediction that gas could climb to $5 a gallon next year and if it does that issue alone will dominate the 2008 presidential election.

The United States, much to everybody’s amazement, has been responding to the peak oil threat, rising gasoline prices, or other features of the swiftly changing landscape of energy use, supply, and price, but not in ways we expected. Nor have the changes occurred with sufficient speed.

For one, more people, especially young professionals and empty nesters are moving to city centers, which have become the hottest housing markets in an otherwise slumping national sector. The South Loop along the lakeshore in Chicago, which I visited last week, is a soundscape of heavy equipment, saws and hammers, and diesel motors. Hundreds of new townhouses and apartments are under construction, and two of the projects — see eco18 – market their green qualities as competitive features.

The number of new rail transit lines grows annually. Seattle is building a light rail and a streetcar line to serve the 680,000 residents expected by 2022, according to city planners, 100,000 more than today, and the 50,000 new downtown jobs.  Transit ridership nationally is reaching levels not seen in 50 years.  Even KansasCity voted last year to build a new light rail line.

States and the federal government are pouring research dollars into the science of developing fuel from cellulosic ethanol. Michigan State University is a center of that research, having attracted a $125 million federal grant last summer that it is sharing with the University of Wisconsin. 

Those who can afford it are changing out their gas gulping vehicles for higher mileage cars. The hybrid Toyota Prius is among the most popular cars in the country now.

But there is a dark side, and that is the influence of expensive fuel in contributing to the suburban and ex-urban housing depression. The problem is tied not only to interest rates adjusting up in the subprime market, it also is linked to declining incomes and higher costs associated with transportation, now the number one or two expense in most American homes. More people are having a harder time paying their mortgages, and not just here in the strapped Midwest. 

The result is that homes set far from jobs just aren’t as attractive as they once were. During the 1990s, a boom time, the Detroit metropolitan region was spreading out at a rate three to ten times faster than growth in population. Today, many of the people having the hardest time selling their homes in Detroit, mid-level auto industry managers who’ve been systematically displaced from their jobs, are those who bought in the new and distant subdivisions.  

What is so worrisome is that the people hurt most by this transition are the very same folk who voted for the narrow-minded, do nothing, government-is-the-problem candidates. Those guys, abetted by weak Democrats, have been so successful that neither the federal nor the state governments really are capable or confident that they can make some difference. 

There is a policy response here to speed the transition to a much more energy efficient, transit-friendly, compact community, affordable way of life in the era of fast rising fuel prices. The federal government can leverage its vast treasury for research, infrastructure, and investments to do such things as speed the development of high-mileage vehicles and construct regional high-speed rail networks. 

We’re  going to get there. Americans will finally demand it. But we’ll be years behind, chasing ever-escalating gasoline prices. 

Most days I’m optimistic that innovation and hard work will help us avoid the worst. Today I’m not. I worry about the hard time that awaits us.  

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When it came to reaching large numbers of people in the 20th century, it was all about mass. Mass marketing. Mass audiences. Mass communication. Journalist David Halberstam published an important book in 1979, The Powers That Be, that documented the influence of a handful of large publishers — Time, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times — and a broadcast company – CBS — in setting the cultural, political, and social agenda in the United States. 

One of the primary trends of the 21st century Mode Shift is that mass has been replaced by groups, communities, individuals. Hastening that development, of course, is the advent of the Internet and all of the attendant global dissemination platforms, readily accessible to individuals and small groups, that the Web spawned. It’s no accident, for instance, that solving global climate change is now the first or second most important international priority.

From 1988, when James Hansen appeared before Congress to alert the nation that global warming was in progress, until 2003, when broadband became widely available, the discussion about global climate change was largely confined to the elite media, the scientific press, academia, environmental organizations, and right wing radio. Broadband made it possible for tens of thousands of new voices, many of them just as nuanced and knowledgeable, to report additional facts and draw more penetrating conclusions about the climate, often accompanied by video and motion graphics. Online audiences were huge. Al Gore used that independent communications infrastructure to help market his message and turn An Inconvenient Truth into a global phenenomen, so much so that the Nobel committee cited the online communications strategy in awarding Mr. Gore the Nobel Peace Prize earlier this month.   

Mr. Gore made an appearance at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York last month. And while he warned of the awful consequences that await people and the planet if we waste more time studying and not acting, I noticed that my good friend, writer Bill McKibben, was involved in an intriguing and promising national civic action to do just that. It is called 1Sky, and it is intended to “galvanize a national movement to deliver real climate solutions and launch a sweeping transition to a clean, secure energy future.” One of 1Sky’s primary tools is the online media — mainstream and new, chatboards, forums, email, video sharing, social media, blogs, and Web sites. The idea is to ”assemble a broad cross- section of American constituencies and leaders in an unprecedented campaign to move the US federal government to deliver policies that will create 5 million new green jobs through a massive efficiency program, cut emissions 30% from today’s level by 2020, and put a moratorium all new coal plants.”

Bill McKibben’s involved because he’s already tapped the online world. Last April he used the Web to  help organize 1,400 ”Step it Up” rallies across the country to pressure Washington to begin aggressively cutting carbon emissions and protect America’s right to an optimistic future.

Bill and his Step it Up organizers are planning another day of rallies on Saturday, November 3, and this time they have a novel theme. Step it Up is asking people to organize rallies at a spot in their communities that commemorates great leaders of the past. Bill writes that people have committed to climbing Mount Washington in New Hampshire, and rallying outside the Rhode Island church where John F. Kennedy was married. There will be a rally honoring Navajo elder and activist Roberta Blackgoat, who inspired the fight against coal development on tribal land.

Organizers are asked to register their rally on http://stepitup2007.org

Step it Up says it will help gather crowds and invite politicians to local rallies. And mindful of the collaboration with 1Sky, political leaders will be made familiar with the 1Sky priorities. “Basically,” writes McKibben, “we want to find out who is simply a politician and who’s ready to be a leader.”

We’ll also discover once again the power that ordinary people are acquring through adept use of online media to set global priorities.

Mode Shift’s faithful readers know how interested the author is in work that is occurring in metropolitan regions, at the grassroots, in nimble businesses, and the non-proft sector to help institutions be more responsive to the unique requirements of our time. The 20th century’s institutions, particularly government, which built the Interstate highway system, sent men to the moon, enacted enforceable protections for civil rights and endangered species, have turned out to be wholly incapable of meeting today’s needs. That’s due, in large part, because change  occurs so fast.

The most significant new strategy that I’ve reported on to respond to this need is ”convening organizations,”  which have formed serendipitously here in Michigan and all over the United States. Convening organizations are generally a volunteer confederation of untraditional allies — greens and farmers and church leaders and executives and governments  and non-profits and philanthropists — who find the time to regularly gather, talk through their differences, and form a comfort zone from which they can collaborate to solve big problems. The intent is to persuade each other and a community’s other major institutions to revise their strategies about how to do such things as provide more neighborly housing, develop alternatives for moving people and goods, clear the air of global climate change gases, develop more sustainable sources of financing for local schools.

Here in Traverse City, a convening organization spent well over two years deciding how to replace a proposed highway bypass with a process for a regional plan to change sprawling patterns of development and produce a new community design that could help people drive less.

Late last month, former President Bill Clinton held his three-day Clinton Global Initiative in New York, which attracts world leaders from government, business, non-governmental organizations, philanthropists, and academics. Thought it’s just three years old the Initiative is one of the largest and most influential convening organizations in the world because it has figured out a way to harness the vitality and promise of capitalism in a way that produces real outcomes for solving global climate change, poverty, AIDS in Africa, and how to educate the world’s poorest children.

I crossed paths this week with several of the West Coast’s leading philanthropic program officers, active participants in stretching the boundaries of business, government, and the foundation community, who said all of this is coming to fall under a new umbrella term called the “fourth sector.”  Last May, the New York Times published one of the first good articles on the subject, describing the fourth sector as ”composed of organizations driven by both social purpose and financial promise that fall somewhere between traditional companies and charities. The term “fourth sector” derives from the fact that participants are creating hybrid organizations distinct from those operating in the government, business and nonprofit sectors. But because the types of participants vary widely and much of the activity is nascent, no single name for what is occurring has gained broad use.”

Carl Frankel, a journalist, wrote a smart piece for Green@work  that described the fourth sector this way: ”In all three major sectors—business, government and the social sector—people are trying to goad, tweak and otherwise persuade institutions to revise their strategies and aspirations. It’s rough going, but progress is occurring. The boundaries of business are stretching as concepts like “sustainable business,” “socially responsible business,” and “cause-related marketing” let in fresh air. Similarly for governments, which are trying to get less bureaucratic and more effective, and for the social sector, too, where innovations such as venture philanthropy and economic sustainability are emerging.”

Those working to establish a more cohesive definition and work scope for the fourth sector also built a rudimentary Web site, fourthsector.net. 

All of this is more evidence of the speed of the transition we all are involved with, the inability of too many institutions to keep pace, and the work so many of us are doing to develop more responsive forums for making decisions and managing our lives. 

On October 4 Democratic presidential candidate Bill Richardson, who also happens to be the governor of New Mexico, essentially committed a personal political drowning here in the Great Lakes region. Mr. Richardson, who is campaigning hard to win the Nevada’s presidential caucus on January 9, the nation’s second such contest, told the Las Vegas Sun the following:

“I want a national water policy,” he is quoted as telling the newspaper. ”We need a dialogue between states to deal with issues like water conservation, water reuse technology, water delivery and water production. States like Wisconsin are awash in water.”

The thirsty desert Southwest, which has suffered through a years-long drought, may be one of the fastest growing regions in the nation, and most profligate users of fresh water, but when it comes to voting numbers, especially electoral college voting numbers, it is quite literally a political drop in the bucket compared to the Great Lakes region. And the voters of the Great Lakes states aren’t about to easily turn over management of the world’s largest source of clean freshwater to either the water-wasting cities of the Southwest or to the ideological and donor-driven legislators who run the national government.

Here in the Great Lakes states we understand the value of freshwater in a world where one-third of the population does not have access to enough water to comfotably live, and where so much water is being polluted, drained, and mismanaged that two-thirds of the world’s population could suffer the same fate by 2025, according to a recent United Nations report. 

So Governor Richardson may have made some political friends, and courted some votes in Nevada and the Southwest with his remarks. But his ability to court support in the Great Lakes region, and win the White House, just ended. The evidence of that statement is told in the numbers.

A presidential candidate must marshal 270 of the 538 electoral votes to win. The total 2006 population of Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado was 17.4 million, and the number of electoral votes for that region was 34. The total population of the eight Great Lakes states — Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — is 83 million, or 28 percent of all Americans.  And though it’s experienced grave difficulty making the transition from the 20th to the 21st century, five of the 10 largest states are in the Great Lakes region. That is why these eight states collectively retain 141 electoral votes, or more than half of the votes needed to win the White House. 

Wisconsin may be, as Mr. Richardson asserts, awash in water. But when he comes courting votes there and in the other Great Lakes states, he’ll find his wellspring of support bone dry. 

I visited South Bend earlier this month to join a group of students from Notre Dame and several more of the nation’s best universities who held the first Congress of the Students for New Urbanism. The University of Notre Dame School of Architecture, it turns out, was an apt choice for the gathering. Notre Dame reframed its architectural curriculum several decades ago to concentrate on traditional neighborhood and urban design, one of the few architectural schools to do so. When a group of nationally-renowned architects stepped away from the land-consuming, oil-soaked, dispiriting strip mall and subdivision design juggernaut to form the Congress for New Urbanism in 1993, Notre Dame was waiting for them. The weekend conference  not only featured the ideas and energy of young architectural students fully aware of the need for their skills in a coming age of transformational change, it also focused on several presentations that made clear how central the practice of New Urbanist design and planning has become across the United States.

One important measure of the New Urbanist influence is the market, which increasingly looks to traditional neighborhood and town designs to meet buyer expectations and solve some of the long-standing economic, environmental, and cultural challenges faced by communities. New Urbanist town centers, housing developments, and commercial districts are under construction in at least 40 states now. The South Lake Union neighborhood in Seattle, once an underutilized light industrial sector, is redeveloping along a traditional urban street grid with homes and shops and offices mixed together, and served by a new streetcar line scheduled to open in December. Harbor Town in Memphis, a city that has attracted nearly 10,000 new downtown residents in recent years, and which also boasts a baseball district featuring hip streetlife and mixed residential and business uses, is another of the formative projects gradually changing how American cities redevelop.

Both Seattle and Memphis, and so many others — Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Boston, Charleston, Atlanta, Grand Rapids, – benefit from what James Kunstler, the movement’s chronicler, said was the “the most valuable things that the New Urbanists recovered along the way: the knowledge required to create a human dwelling place with a future.”

Another measure of New Urbanist influence is that two national architecture and planning firms, Torti Gallas and Partners (based in Silver Spring, MD, and Los Angeles) and Looney Ricks Kiss (offices in 7 cities nationally) embraced New Urbanism as central to their business strategies. Both have emerged as very large multi-dimensional players in American design and development practices.  

J. Carson Looney designed much of Harbor Town, which started in 1989 and was one of the first large mixed-used new urban developments in the United States. Torti Gallas has amassed a similar collection of important projects. It just won a $250,000 contract from Ocean City, Miss., to develop a master plan for an area hammered by Hurricane Katrina along Biloxi Bay. The firm’s designs have collected a showcase full of awards from the Congress For the New Urbanism, the EPA, and other organizations. One of their most recent honors is the Governors’ Smart Communities Award for a mixed-use affordable housing project in Tacoma, Wash. A principal, John Torti, spoke at the weekend conference and is a graduate of Notre Dame’s architectural school.

As the new narrative of the 21st century unfolds, there is so much for architectural students to worry about — peak oil price shocks, global climate change, soaring population, flat personal incomes, financial market turmoil, diminishing government wealth, scarce natural resources. But the skills they are developing also offer some measure of hope. The walkable, beautiful, energy-efficient, land and resource-conserving, culture-enhancing places they are poised to design and build offer so many of the solutions.