Modeshift

NEW YORK – The day after Thanksgiving it was as though no one had ever eaten a square meal, judging from the lines that formed at Zaro’s Bread Basket or the Little Pie Company or Two Boots Pizza. Like everyplace else in midtown Manhattan, the ground floor, the “dining concourse”  of Grand Central Station was mobbed.

Some of what New York City presents to the world these days is familiar to those of us raised there in the 1960s and 1970s. Men and women, wrapped in cardboard or blanketed in grimy carpeting, huddle against the cold and sleep in doorways. Street vendors, their tables heaped in knock off pocket books and designer watches and gloves and hats, line 34th street where Macy’s is located. The spire atop the Empire State Building is lit in the colors of Christmas.

But much about New York is new, like the dining concourse at Grand Central. Many of the roughly 700,000 people who visit Grand Central every day spend at least a few minutes drinking coffee, or eating sushi, or salads, or fresh fruit in the company of hundreds of other New Yorkers. They sit without fear of the stranger.

In the 1970s, this airy and classic space beneath the main waiting room, defined by arched entrances and marbled walkways, was a place of gloom and loitering. Working people hurried through — collars up, eyes straight ahead– on their way to meet a commuter train to the suburbs.

The great terminal, like the city itself,  was a dying place full of decay and crime and fear.  Grand Central’s dire condition reflected what happens when a rich nation fueled by cheap energy and a national dream of cars and highways and picket fences, directs its people to seek refuge in its suburbs.

Two generations later Grand Central remains a potent symbol for a way of life that is fast changing again. In an era marked by high energy prices, high land values, growing population density, and remarkable constraints on time, the American Dream looks a lot different than it once did. The old train station as a result is a rare study in how and why people gather in public places in the 21st century, as well as an example of energy and time efficiency, two of the new operating principles of the era.

First and foremost, the station is about moving people. Nearly 600 trains depart daily and carry over 500,000 commuters to communities in two states. About a third of that number also find their way into the subway system.

Secondly, it is a grand building that fascinates and satisfies. In 1998, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority completed a $259 million renovation that turned Grand Central into a glittering market. Fresh food is a big draw. There’s a market full of good stuff, almost half a dozen fine dining restaurants and bars, nearly a dozen specialty food shops and bakeries, and more than 20 restaurants on the dining concourse.  The station has become a destination, even for the commuters who once did nothing more at Grand Central than hurry through. 

Third, people feel safe because they are. New York City is safer today than almost any big city in the world. According to the New York Times, the city will likely record fewer than 500 murders in 2007, the fewest since record-keeping began in 1963. To date, just 35 of those killings involved assailant and victim who were strangers to each other. The rest were perpetrated by murderers who knew their target. 

The crowds of people eating lunch at Grand Central are players in a story of a city that cultivates diversity and has found strength in community. That, too, is a new idea.

With as much Midwest fanfare as they dared to muster, nine governors last week announced a regional compact to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. It was the third such multi-state climate change agreement. States in the Northeast and the far West have already ratified similar pacts.

Midwest governors also agreed on an economic development plan for our increasingly wintry and troubled region that focused on promoting biofuels, wind energy, efficiency, conservation, and other measures to reduce costs and clear pollutants. Michigan Governor Jennifer M. Granholm established a Climate Action Council to make recommendations.  

But before the optimistic progressives among us get all weak in the knees about the hopeful gust of 21st century energy and environmental reality that suddenly blew through the state capitals of the Midwest, it’s important to note a much more powerful gale that’s also twisting across the region. That is the burst of new coal-fueled power plants permitted or under construction in the Midwest, and the dozens that the Energy Department says are planned by utilities.

The short course here. Midwest governors have taken a significant step to reduce future greenhouse gas emissions, gaining plaudits from the press and several environmental organizations. But utilities are building new coal-fired plants and racing to get many more permitted. The levels of greenhouse gases produced by these new plants is likely to outpace the limits set in the new agreements. Five new coal-burning power plants are proposed in Michigan.

This one-step-forward-two-steps-back approach epitomizes the Midwest’s energy schizophrenia. The region hears the voices of reason in its universities, farm sector, high-tech companies and urban centers calling for new economic development strategies that take advantage of the Midwest’s inherent strengths. The University of Wisconsin and Michigan State University, for example, were recently awarded a $125 million grant to establish one of three national centers of biofuels research. Michigan State also is becoming a leader in promoting wind energy.

But the Midwest, arguably more than any other region of the country, also is terrified of change and eager to withdraw to the comfortable and familiar, like coal-burning power plants. The Michigan Chamber of Commerce, allied with its dues paying members in the utility and fossil fuel industries, steadfastly defends coal as the only sound and cost-effective way to produce electricity for its other dues paying members in the state’s dwindling manufacturing sector. Any effort to regulate greenhouse gas emissions is seen by the state Chamber as an attack on jobs and business profitability. 

The gambit works really well in the Midwest, which has the highest collective unemployment rates, and since 2000 the largest decline in median income in the country. The National Energy Technology Laboratory produced a report last month that said 41 coal-burning power plants are currently in various stages of permitting or construction in the United States. Thirteen of those greenhouse gas emitting plants are in the Midwest, the very same region that vowed last week to begin dealing with climate change. 

On Monday night Michael Moore, the Academy Award-winning director, best selling author, and one of the nation’s most vociferous detractors of the Iraq War and the Bush White House, was in the newly renovated lobby of the State Theatre in downtown Traverse City complaining about the lights. “It’s all wrong,” he said, pointing to the ceiling where fluorescent lights shined brightly from fixtures where he wanted dimmer incandescent bulbs. ”They didn’t have bright fluorescent lights in 1949.”

On Saturday night, November 17, after being largely shuttered for the past quarter century, the State re-opens as a daily movie house with a gala dinner and a showing of the “Kite Runner.” As in all of his other work, the vision and the details of the renovation are all about Moore. He commissioned Glenn Wolff, a renowned Traverse City artist, to paint two murals depicting the State and its predecessor, the Lyric Theater, from early in the 20th century. The floor of the entrance way is white, black, and red inch-square tile. In the main theater he’s hung draping gold and red curtains alongside Romanesque columns to improve the acoustics. The balcony was significantly enlarged. And patrons can lean way back in their red Greystone theater seats to gaze on a fiber optic ceiling, designed by a local astronomer, that is a replica of the Milky Way over northern Michigan. 

Anybody who’s ever worked with Moore know of his enormous energy, fealty to the public interest, and considerable devotion to his own personal narrative. It’s all worked beautifully.  A native Michiganian, he ran as an 18-year-old and won a seat on the Davison School Board which made him the youngest elected officials in the state at the time. His entrepreneurial career in letters — he founded the weekly alternative Flint Voice, serving as its editor for ten years before briefly taking the editor’s post at Mother Jones magazine — was supplanted by a remarkable career in documentary film making in which he and the story he was telling shared top billing. His 1989 breakthrough film about how General Motors and its chairman Roger Smith wrecked Flint was aptly titled “Roger and Me.” It’s the same for the strong political views that have made him a hero of the left and a scourge of the right. It’s an unusual mix of intelligence, confidence, spirit, nerve, ego, and career branding to simultaneously accept an Academy Award, as he did in 2003 for “Bowling for Columbine,” and denounce a “fictitious” invasion and president.

Still, given all of the towering achievements in film direction, as a best-selling non-fiction author, as a television producer, and as a political figure of international stature, Michael Moore’s most enduring achievement may very well be taking shape on Front Street on the east side of the central business district of a Great Lakes city of less than 15,000 people. 

Ten years ago he and his wife, Kathleen Glynn, built a home in Antrim County, a 40-minute drive from Traverse City. In 2002, Michael and Kathleen moved from New York to become full-time northern Michigan residents. And in 2005, he and two Traverse City natives, best-selling author Doug Stanton (In Harm’s Way), and well-known photographer John Robert Williams (who took the pictures accompanying this post), founded the Traverse City Film Festival. In the spirit of a grand country hoedown, the three recruited hundreds of volunteers to help manage a four-day event at the end of July that attracted 50,000 people. The next year the festival expanded to six days in the first week of August and attracted 70,000 people. Last summer, the festival solidified its position as a don’t miss event in northern Michigan, counting 80,000 admissions.

Among the many highlights of the festival was how Moore oversaw the installation of state of the art projection equipment to turn existing auditoriums downtown into wondrous places to see great films. One of those venues has been the State Theatre, which dates to 1916, and since the 1980s has largely been a Front Street eyesore, like so many of America’s other downtown movie houses.

But for a week in each of the last three summers the classic State Theatre marquee awoke, a bright constellation visible everywhere on Front Street.

Earlier this year Moore and his colleagues worked their way through some very complicated ownership details and deed restrictions and managed to get control of the State. Last month, they launched a six-week, top to bottom renovation that will cost just $850,000 because at least that much was donated in volunteer time, materials, and equipment. Michael Fitzhugh, the architect who designed the interior and drew up the blueprints, and Thom Darga, the general contractor who managed construction, worked without compensation.  

The idea is to duplicate the look and feel of the theater in 1949 when it opened as the State, while also taking pains to incorporate comfortable seating, a 60,000 watt Dolby sound system, a super-size screen, and cutting edge technology in the projection booth. We had a chance to talk on Monday, and Moore told me he had two goals. One was to add to Traverse City’s downtown economy. While other regions in Michigan are trying and largely failing to attract new plants, Traverse City is leveraging its coastal location and strong downtown as a destination. The Traverse City Film Festival adds over $5 million to the economy during its week-long run. The State Theater, a new icon of Front Street, is owned and will be managed by the festival, showing movies seven days a week. Moore said he will personally choose the films.

The other goal was to produce a great place to see movies. “I’ve been in enough theaters watching my own movies to see how poorly they are exhibited,” he said. “How terrible the conditions for watching a movie can be. The decorum. The cell phones ringing. I just had this feeling, like what if I created a great experience, great conditions, to experience great movies.” He paused a moment and then looked up. “This is going to be Blackberry free zone,” he declared, smiling.  

Smart Growth continues to flourish at the ballot box. With the exception of the defeat of a disputed highway and transit measure in the Seattle region, voters on Tuesday this week again overwhelmingly approved candidates and strategies that make their places cleaner, greener, more neighborly, and much more efficient consumers of land and resources. Voters across the country approved 34 of 55 conservation measures on the ballot, generating $1.4 billion in new conservation funding.

The election results also indicate that the ideological attack from the right on growth management measures and candidates probably peaked, maybe in 2004, when libertarians and property rights groups passed Measure 37 in Oregon. That initiative restricted the reach of the state’s 35-year-old growth management practices, and produced a legal mess in the state.

Last year, Arizona was the only state that approved a property rights ballot initiative, the Private Property Rights Protection Act. It called for state restrictions on land use regulation that ensured that Arizona citizens do not lose their home or property or lose the value of their home or property without just compensation. As in the three other states that considered similar ballot initiatives in 2006 — Idaho, Washington, and California — Arizona citizens were inundated with competing messages about the consequences of the act, known as Proposition 207.

But a careful reading of the ballot language clearly indicated that its primary purpose was to limit cities from initiating eminent domain actions to convert private land to private uses, a response to a 2005 United States Supreme Court ruling. In that case, authorities in New London, Connecticut had used their authority under eminent domain to take property from an unwilling seller and make it available for private development, a transfer of private property that the High Court said was Constitutional, but which generated a wave of public opposition.

Michigan also was among the states that responded to the Supreme Court decision. By a margin of 80 percent to 20 percent Michigan voters in 2006 enshrined in the state Constitution a provision that forbids local governments from using eminent domain to turn over condemned private property for development purposes. Seven more states that year — Florida, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oregon, and South Carolina — also approved prohibitions by similar margins.

Robert Liberty, former executive director of 1000 Friends of Oregon and now an elected Metro Council member in the Portland region, reports from Oregon (see pix) that state voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved Measure 49, to repair the damaging effects of Measure 37 by limiting the large-scale developments that measure had permitted. Measure 49 also will clarify the right of small landowners, so-called “moms and pops” to build homes, as well as protect farm, forests, and groundwater. Under Oregon’s growth management laws, urban growth boundaries reined in sprawling development and are credited with conserving 16 million acres of farm and ranch land.

“Measure 49 passed by huge margins not only in the Portland area. Multnomah County voted yes by a margin of 79% to 22%, and it passed by 2:1 margins in the suburban counties,” said Liberty. “It also passed by 60-plus percentage margins in many other counties. It won in important parts of Central and Northeast Oregon — ranch country — such as Wasco, Umatilla and Hood River counties. It won by wide margins in Yamhill and Polk Counties, the home districts for Senator Gary George and Representative Larry George. George was the Executive Director of Oregonians In Action when OIA developed the property rights measures. This is significant because not a single Republican in the Oregon Legislature voted to refer Measure 49 to the voters, not one, including many Republican in whose districts the voters supported the measure solidly.

“The Yes on 49 Campaign pulled off a solid and very impressive victory,” added Liberty. “That is important not only in Oregon but for the nation, because it reaffirms our state’s commitment to a long-term strategy that balances rural conservation and urban revitalization.”

It’s important to note that just one property rights initiative appeared on an American ballot this year, and that was in Alaska’s Mat-Su Borough earlier this year. It was soundly defeated.

In Virginia’s Loudoun County, the fourth fastest growing county in the United States and a center of a clash over development on the rural edge, voted overwhelmingly for smarter growth candidates. Eight of nine seats went to growth management candidates, reports Stewart Schwartz, executive director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth in Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, in Fairfax County, the chairman was reelected along with other key incumbents who have supported strong transit-oriented development policies. “It showed that the backlash from some residents over the amount of growth near transit, is actually very limited in scope,” said Schwartz. “Chairman Connolly has been very strong on TOD, affordable housing, energy and global warming.”

Growth issues also dominated in about a dozen other counties in Virginia from the Shenandoah Valley to Richmond, and the Fredericksburg region, with smart growth candidates winning many races.

In Charlotte, an attempt to repeal the existing half-penny sales tax for transit was soundly defeated, 70-30. The decision means that the Charlotte Area Transit System will continue collecting the half-cent tax, which generated $70 million last year. Charlotte plans to build a commuter rail line to the Lake Norman area and to extend its existing light rail northeast to University City. It also wants to build a streetcar through central Charlotte and either a busway or light rail down Independence Boulevard. “The margin of victory stunned even transit supporters,” reported the Charlotte Observer. ” With all but one precinct counted, 70 percent voted against repeal, with 30 percent in favor of stopping the tax. The number of people voting for repeal — roughly 37,000 — fell short of the 48,000 signatures collected that put the tax back on the ballot.”

In Seattle, an $18 billion package of investments in roads and rapid transit was defeated. The Sierra Club and Ron Sims, the influential and respected executive of King County, opposed the measure because it included too much money for roads and not enough for transit.

If you’ve had the chance to visit America’s big cities, you’ve no doubt noticed that almost without exception they’re pretty terrific places to be these days. The revival of America’s big city downtowns and neighborhoods, the development that’s occurring in the inner ring suburbs, all portend something very useful to the nation’s well being in this century. The prosperity that’s occurred in American cities represents one of the great achievements in the United States in the last decade.

Today, the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program launches a multi-year initiative, the Blueprint for American Prosperity, that urges candidates in the 2008 presidential election to not only take note of how American cities secured their well-being, but also that the nation would do well to mimic those steps. Making places better involved protecting natural resources, investing in transit and other infrastructure, promoting housing, curbing sprawl, securing institutions like museums and universities, improving public safety, conserving open spaces. It also involved welcoming and providing opportunities for young entrepreneurs, and prompting civic excitement. 

“The assets that matter in today’s global and knowledge economy are innovation, infrastructure, human capital, and quality places,” according to the Blueprint’s developers. And what’s good for cities is great for the country. “The top 100 metros take up just 12 percent of our land mass but make up 74 percent of our college graduates, originate over 80 percent of all patenting, and therefore generate 75 percent of the nation’s GDP,” said Amy Liu, the deputy director of the Metropolitan Policy Program. 

The initiative’s launch marks the 10th-year of the Metropolitan Policy Program, one of the great idea laboratories in urban affairs. The director is Bruce Katz, a former Clinton Administration housing official and the winner of the Heinz Award for Public Policy.

Whether presidential candidates take note of the Blueprint is far from certain. They should.

Among the important helpings in the data feast that Mr. Katz’s crew fed to reporters today was this chart outlining how critical metropolitan health is to every state. In Michigan, for example, the Detroit, Grand Rapids, and Lansing metro regions account for 56.5 percent of the state’s population, 60 percent of all jobs in Michigan, and $247 billion in annual economic activity or 66 percent of state GDP. 

Even in Michigan, which has the highest unemployment and the largest state budget deficit, metropolitan regions are holding their own because they’ve developed and embraced a new development strategy.  Health Hill in downtown Grand Rapids, which in the 1990s grew for the first time in 40 years, is the scene of $1 billion in new medical research, training, and patient facility construction, the largest such concentration of health-related construction in the United States.

The Economist magazine last week reported on signs of revival in Flint and Saginaw. Ann Arbor, which also grew in the 1990s, is engaged in an intense civic conversation to establish a new rapid transit line that links the city with Detroit and to build new housing and offices downtown. The Traverse City region has undertaken a two-year, $1.3 million federally-financed transportation and land use study intended to draw up a multi-county plan for guiding development and building transportation infrastructure over the next generation. Several of Detroit’s inner ring suburbs – Ferndale, Royal Oak, Birmingham, to name three – have raised and invested resident taxpayer dollars in schools, central business districts, parks, housing, and transit to stabilize neighborhoods and attract new residents downtown. 

Similar far-reaching growth initiatives are occurring in nearly every other metropolitan region of the country. Last November, for instance, voters in Salt Lake County, Utah approved spending $45 million to protect open space. Residents in Salt Lake and neighboring Utah counties also raised the sales tax to add 23 miles to the 19-mile regional light rail system that opened eight years ago, and to double the length of a new commuter rail system set to open next year. When the construction is finished by 2015, the Salt Lake City region will have spent roughly $3.1 billion to build a 45-mile light rail system, and a 88-mile regional commuter rail network, the West’s second largest regional rapid transit system next to the 172-mile system that Denver is now building.

In Salt Lake City itself, equally impressive projects have occurred. The city was one of the first in the nation to require municipal buildings to achieve the highest standards of energy efficiency. It allows owners of energy efficient low-emission cars to park for free. The city enacted zoning and permitting changes to encourage much more dense downtown neighborhoods, and to discourage strip malls. Salt Lake City also constructed a public library that is a showcase of technology and architecture, and is doing everything it can to support a downtown construction boom that is adding a light rail extension, millions of square feet of new energy efficient retail and office buildings, and more than 1,300 new homes.

In Chicago, Mayor Richard M. Daley has instituted a wave of growth measures that fostered a cultural and economic revival unmatched by any city in the Midwest. The Daley administration has planted 500,000 trees, is putting up the most energy-efficient and environmentally sensitive municipal buildings in the country, has agreed to provide developers with much faster permits if they construct green buildings, and instituted a $600-million-a-year program to repair neighborhoods and city parks. The showcase of Mayor Daley’s program is Millennium Park, a 24.5-acre, $475 million expanse of lawn, wild-grass prairie, sculpture and gardens that joins the fast-growing neighborhoods along Michigan Avenue to Lake Michigan. The park is credited with prompting construction of more than 10,000 new units of downtown housing.

Chicago’s transformation has been striking. Indeed, when the results of the 2000 census were published, the magnitude of what Chicago accomplished became clear. The city’s population increased by 112,000 people, the first time that happened since the 1940′s. Chicago’s downtown neighborhoods grew by 16,000 residents during the 1990′s, according to the Metropolitan Policy Program. The city’s median income increased 12.6 percent in the 1990′s, 2 percent higher than the median incomes of the state or the six-county metropolitan region.

In the Pacific Northwest, Seattle (see pix) has developed new zoning provisions to reduce the vehicle population in an increasingly jammed downtown. Earlier this year, the city established an ordinance that requires its Transportation Department to give walking, biking and transit equal priority with cars and trucks before it improves existing streets. The directive is leading to more bike lanes, wider sidewalks and fewer car lanes, thus making room for rail lines and buses on some of Seattle’s major streets and boulevards.Seattle just completed a master plan intended to sharply increase the number of miles of bike lanes painted on city streets, or bike paths separated from traffic. A pedestrian master plan is in development. The city is also reworking its parking policies. Last year, Seattle eliminated a provision that required a minimum number of parking spaces for every 1,000 square feet of new construction. It is possible now for new buildings in several downtown districts to be constructed without any parking.

And Seattle is developing alternatives for its residents and workers. A 2.6-mile, $49 million streetcar line that serves downtown opens in December 2007. A 15.6-mile, $2.3 billion light-rail line that links the city’s center with the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport is scheduled to start in 2009. Today, Puget Sound residents vote on a $10.8 billion transportation bond measure, more than half of which is devoted to improving public transit. All of these initiatives have helped to make Seattle one of the most popular and prosperous cities in the world. Over the next 15 years, the city’s population is expected to grow to 680,000 by 2022, about 100,000 more than in 2004, and Seattle will generate 84,000 new jobs, 50,000 of them downtown.

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.

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.  

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. 

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.

NEW YORK – The X Prize Foundation, which developed a new philanthropic idea called “revolution through competition,” told participants today at the Clinton Global Initiative that it would commit $300 milion in the next  seven years to help solve global crises in each of the four CGI focus areas. The foundation said it is developing new prizes to increase access to renewable fuels, improve energy efficiency, and promote use of cleaner fuels. It also will have new competitive prizes to improve cancer detection and treatment, improving schools and curriculum, and stimulate market-based strategies to produce jobs in poor nations.

The announcement was among the stream of innovative ideas, fully funded, designed to respond to global problems that defy government’s abiity to solve. Other commitments described by Mr. Clinton today include the Sabin Global Health Institute’s $25 million commitment to treat neglected diseases, the Dell Foundation’s $25 million commitment to improve education in poor countries, and Intel’s $300 million five-year commitment to expand and improve its online curriculum to train teachers in developing countries.

The clear priority and focus this year is action to impede climate change, illustrated by multi-billion commitments made by big players. Yesterday Florida Power and Light announced a $2.4 billion energy efficiency and clean energy initiative that includes constructing a solar-powered electric plant. Today Standard Chartered Bank committed to spend the next five years underwriting $4 billion to $5 billion in debt for renewable energy projects with a total project value of $8 billion to $10 billion. The bank said it will target clean energy projects in Asia, Africa and the Middle East and focus its  efforts in areas such as wind, hydro, geothermal, solar, biomass and coal bed methane.

Duke Energy and a coalition of other utilities – Consolidated Edison, Edison International, Great Plains Energy, Pepco Holdings, PNM Resources, Sierra Pacific Resources and Xcel Energy – pledged to increase their collective investment in energy efficiency to serve 22 million customers in 20 states. The collaboration was valued at $3 billion over three years. Mr. Clinton said it will  lead to the elimination of 30 million tons of green house gas emissions per year-the equivalent of taking 6 million cars off the road. With the Edison Electric Institute, the companies also will establish the Institute for Electric Efficiency, enabling them to share and promote best practices in energy efficiency.

I’ve attended a lot of conferences over the years, and elements of this one mimic those. Panels of leading figures in industry, academia, business, and the non-profit communities regularly convene in panel discussions that occasionally divulge some interesting tidbit that you’ve never heard of seen before. Jane Goodall’s chimpanzee greeting yesterday was priceless. 

But I’ve never been to a conference devoted so thoroughly to making things happen, and so much money committed to supporting change that will make a difference. The competition for ideas and attention here is fierce, and the players, particularly the industrial executives, are unexpected. Many of these same suits — Wal-Mart chief executive Lee Scott, for instance, devoted all of the previous years of their careers leveraging the status quo to make billions and contribute mightily to the global environmental crises they seek to solve today. Many of these same people voted for George Bush, no friend to energy efficiency he, and some of them did so twice.   

Redemption, though, is a powerful motivator. And we’ve been told this week, most pointedly by Ted Turner, that there’s money to be made in solving any one of the global problems discussed here — energy and climate change, education, poverty, and health.  

I’ve also never been at an event, national or international, so closely tied to the personality of an individual. The spirit of collaboration and intelligence and adventure that distinguishes the Clinton Global Initiative reflects its founder. Mr. Clinton was on time this morning for a news conference in the press room here at the New York Sheraton and responded this way to a question from a French journalist who wondered “what drives you?”

“I think I should spend my life trying to give back to my country and the world for the great life I’ve had,” said Mr. Clinton. ”I owe it to future of the world, children, and my country. I didn’t lose interest in these matters when I stopped being president.  And, frankly, I like it. The reason I do it is I find it immensely rewarding. It’s more interesting than anything I can imagine doing.”