Another year, another staff retreat come and gone this week with time for reflection and energizing momentum. We shared good conversation, good ideas, good food and good fun as we planned for the future and took part in some community service – not too shabby for two days! Here are some of the highlights through photos…
Parks: A Natural Capital
Urbanization around the world continues to transform our landscapes, with urban areas expanding at twice the rate of their populations.1 A 2012 study estimated developed urban land will increase by 1.2 million square kilometers by 2030, tripling the amount of developed urban land from a 2000 baseline.1 With urbanization increasing, residents are becoming increasingly disconnected from nature. As this trend continues, it is important to not lose sight of the economic, social, and environmental values added by parks and green spaces. Services provided by parks include recreation, education, human health benefits, increase in property values, and environmental services. The presence of green spaces has also been shown to directly reduce mental fatigue, relieve feelings of stress, and have positive effects on mood.2
Building Blocks
A new urban landscape confronts urban planners and urban residents in the 21st century. This landscape—the legacy of decades of suburban sprawl linked to racial tensions, poor planning policies, and a cultural desire for home ownership— has left our cities with barren pockmarks of parking lots, vacant buildings, and aging infrastructure. As Baby Boomers reach retirement and Millenials enter the workforce, history’s two largest generations are returning to long-forgotten city centers. As people move back into the city center, planners and developers are racing to reinvent these downtown neighborhoods. In many cities, planners and courageous citizens are integrating park space into redevelopment plans—creating thriving recreational centers for downtown residents. In one of the largest and most audacious projects in the history of the United States, Boston replaced the elevated John F. Fitzgerald Expressway with an intricate series of tunnels. On the vacant area formerly occupied by the highway, a 1.5 mile linear park—the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway—opened in 2008. With the help of Design Trust for Public Space and the Friends of the High Line, New York City opened the High Line Park—the quintessential rails to trails success story—in 2009.
The High Line has quickly become one of New York City’s most popular attractions. (Image credit: Friends of the High Line)
Across the country in Los Angeles, a bold plan to create a continuous 51-mile greenway corridor along the LA River is underway. Just last week, a 2-mile stretch of bikeway opened in the San Fernando Valley. The new bikeway—equipped with concrete paving, bioswales, art, restrooms, lighting, and exercise equipment—joins sections in Long Beach, Downtown, Burbank, and Glendale. The LA River Corp hopes to complete the greenway and return the largely concrete river to parkland by 2020.
The Emerald Necklace
Here in Cleveland, our Cleveland Metroparks have provided an escape from the bustling city for almost a century. First opening in 1917, Alfred Stinchcomb’s dream of creating a chain of parks and connecting boulevards encircling Cleveland and its suburbs has largely come to fruition in 18 reservations spanning over 22,800 acres. A recent study by the Trust for Public Land values the annual benefits of this system at $855 million. As part of its Centennial Plan, the Metroparks is working to link our urban centers and extend park benefits to urban residents through “an accessible, regional greenway and trail network [as well as] transforming the Cleveland Lakefront to an icon of urban vitality, healthy urban ecology, and active outdoor lifestyles.”3 On September 19, 2014, the Cleveland Foundation announced a $5 million grant to the Trust for Public Land for a 1.3-mile trail connecting the Ohio & Erie Canal Towpath to Lake Erie. Named the Cleveland Foundation Centennial Trail, the trail connects the Metropark’s Lakefront Reservation to the 85-mile Towpath—providing a pedestrian linkage to the Reservation, which is currently obstructed by live railroads and the heavily industrialized old branch of the Cuyahoga River.
The prominence of Alfred Stinchcomb’s greenway plan is seen in this 1920 Cuyahoga County Road Map. (Image credit: Teaching Cleveland)
A few stories above the new Centennial Foundation Trail, the Rotary Club of Cleveland is hard at work creating the Red Line Greenway—a 3-mile linear park adjoining the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority’s Red Line. The trail—Cleveland’s answer to the High Line—would connect the Detroit-Shoreway, Stockyards, Clark-Fulton, Tremont, and Ohio City neighborhoods to Downtown. The trail can serve as a spine for alternative transportation in Cleveland, allowing residents complete and unobstructed pedestrian access from Downtown to the flourishing near-Westside. Together with Bike Cleveland’s Midway Project, these trails help realize Alfred Stinchcomb’s dream of connecting urban residents to green spaces , making Cleveland a model of healthy lifestyle urban living in the 21st century. 4
The Red Line Greenway would run alongside GCRTA’s Red Line for 3 miles. (Image credit: Steve Litt, The Plain Dealer)
1 Seto, K. C., Güneralp, B., & Hutyra, L. R. (2012). Global forecasts of urban expansion to 2030 and direct impacts on biodiversity and carbon pools. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1211658109
2 Kuo, F. E., Sullivan, W. C., Coley, R. L., & Brunson, L. (1998). Fertile ground for community: Inner-city neighborhood common spaces. American Journal of Community Psychology, 26(6), 823-851.
3 Cleveland Metroparks. Cleveland Metroparks 2020: The Emerald Necklace Centennial Plan.
4 For more on the Midway Project, visit Blurban Living, Issue 4.
-Blurban Living is a series by Jared Robbins, Analyst
An American Tale: The Rise of Sprawl
Post Second World War America was a place of prosperity and rapid economic growth. Government investment, in the form federal incentives—including the G.I. Bill and the Federal Aid Highway Act—allowed Americans to spread out from the city-center farther than ever before. With the environmental and social strife of the 1960s, threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, massive upgrades in suburban infrastructure, low mortgage rates, and affordable automobiles, these new suburbs offered a viable alternative to living in the central city—offering privacy, larger lot size, and the opportunity to own an individual housing unit.
Now termed suburban sprawl, this land-use pattern continues to encroach upon once rural areas at an alarming rate. About three quarters of America’s population now lives in metropolitan areas. Over half of metropolitan inhabitants live in the suburbs. Developers continue to use federal, state, and local money to expand infrastructure into rural areas. Oftentimes having a disastrous effect on the environments, such development replaces greenfields that may have been farmland, parks, or natural habitats with sprawling communities. A study by Edward Glaeser shows that suburban CO2 emissions in New York City are 14,127 pounds greater per average household than their central city counterpart.
As suburbs and exurbs flourish and tax dollars are funneled into these communities, most central cities continue to collapse. Cities such as Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia are littered with the effects of urban decay. According to the nonprofit Take Back Vacant Land (TBVL), Philadelphia, for instance, has more than 40,000 parcels of vacant land. These properties cost the city of Philadelphia $70 million in lost taxes, and $20 million is spent by the city, annually, for safety and upkeep.
The Sustainability of Space: A NEO Approach
With federal and state funds drying up rapidly, many communities are now on the verge of collapse. The bankrupt city of Detroit recently turned off water to 3,000 customers and at many times, only a few policemen are patrolling the city of 150 square miles. Detroit joins the likes of Stockton, California and Jefferson County, Alabama in filing for Chapter 9. Closer to home, Chagrin Falls recently reported a shortage of funds and an inability to maintain its roads. The City of East Cleveland has been in and out of ‘fiscal emergency’ since 1988.
These concerns have sparked the debate on regionalism—an approach in which neighboring communities share resources to lessen economic and environmental burdens. In November 2010, Northeast Ohio was awarded a $4.25 million federal grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to find the development of a regional sustainability plan. The Northeast Ohio Sustainable Communities Consortium (NEOSCC) was established to create an integrated approach to planning efforts for land use, transportation, economic development, and infrastructure investment for a 12-county region. After years of planning and interaction with local stakeholders, NEOSCC launched Vibrant NEO, a vision, framework, and action plan for Northeast Ohio. Vibrant NEO’s Vision includes nine recommendations, including:
Putting Words to Action
Recently, civic leaders including former Cleveland City Council President George Forbes have called for Cleveland and its east-side neighbor, East Cleveland to merge. A merger will bring Cleveland’s population back over 400,000 people, allowing it to qualify for a larger pot of federal and state funds. To East Cleveland, it will bring financial stability to a city State Auditor David Yost has said is “‘in a league all its own’ with respect to fiscal management.”2 On July 24, the Civic Commons ideastream, Cleveland Scene, East Cleveland Narrator, and the Cleveland Young Professional Senate (Cleveland YPS) hosted a salon-style discussion on the possible merger. Called “One Cleveland – Pros and Cons,” the salon included through leaders including Cleveland City Council President Kevin Kelley, Cleveland Councilmen Zack Reed, East Cleveland City Council-members Mansell Baker and Nathaniel Martin, and Cuyahoga County Next Generation Council members Michael Hudecek and Tara Vanta. The Salon was a first step in putting NEOSCC’s recommendations to action.
1 From Vibrant NEO; for more information on Vibrant NEO: http://vibrantneo.org/vibrantneo-2040/vneo-2040-full-report/
2 Councilman Jeff Johnson Publicly Supports Merger with East Cleveland. Cleveland Scene. March 19, 2014.
Blurban Living is a blog series by Jared Robbins, Analyst
Vitality in Diversity
A new study released by the Preservation Green Lab, a divison of the National Trust for Historic Preservation finds that neighborhoods with a mix of older, smaller buildings give rise to more diverse populations and more new businesses than those made up of newer, larger structures. The study, titled Older, Smaller, Better: Measuring how the character of buildings and blocks influences urban vitality, focused on three cities with strong real estate markets and rich urban fabrics: San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D. C. The report empirically weighed the age, diversity of age, and size of buildings against 40 economic, social, cultural, and environmental performance metrics.
The results provide the most complete validation of 1960s urban activist, Jane Jacobs’ hypothesis that “cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them.”
The Preservation Green Lab gives seven examples “that demonstrate how the character of buildings and blocks influence urban vitality in some of the nation’s strongest urban real estate markets.”
Sadly, many cities, regions, and states suffer from outdated zoning regulations, overly prescriptive building codes, misdirected development incentives, and limited financing tools that disincentivize the reuse of older structures in urban areas, while incentivizing new development in “greenfields.”
Cleveland Responds
Here in Cleveland, the Downtown Cleveland Alliance (DCA) released yesterday its strategic vision for “linking and enhancing development, public spaces, and destinations in Downtown Cleveland.” The plan has the double-purpose of knitting together Downtown’s various neighborhoods (i.e. Warehouse District, Waterfront, Theatre District) to guide future public and private investment decisions and aid the renewal of the Downtown Cleveland Special Improvement District (i.e. all the nice yellow-shirted DCA folks who clean the streets and guide visitors around town).
The Step Up Downtown plan demonstrates our City’s commitment to shaping the 21st century city as they “aim to achieve core values that include a vibrant, inclusive, green, connected, and innocative community.”
I am proud and happy to see our civic leaders’ forward-thinking in creating a vision built on the tenets of a mixed-use, diverse, and resilient community! It is more important than ever for us to appreciate their work and aid in its translation to Cleveland’s neighborhoods, surburbs, and our region at large.
To read more about the Preservation Green Lab’s study: visit http://www.preservationnation.org/information-center/sustainable-communities/green-lab/oldersmallerbetter/report/NTHP_PGL_OlderSmallerBetter_ReportOnly.pdf
To read DCA’s strategic vision, Step Up Downtown, visit http://issuu.com/ksucudc/docs/stepupdowntown_07-09-2014_issuu/1
What drives sustainable businesses today? Purpose. What will drive sustainable businesses tomorrow? Repurpose.
Repurpose means to reuse or alter something to make it more suitable for a different purpose. In a business sense, it means to think of resources that already exist in an alternate state. Repurposing broadens your perspective, provides new opportunities, and like the old saying, turns “one man’s trash into another man’s treasure.”
BrownFlynn took (re)purposeful thinking to heart in our recent office move to Terminal Tower in Downtown Cleveland. We converted a historic space from the Van Sweringen brothers into a modern office that fosters collaboration, innovation and “walking the talk” of sustainability. Our new location enables several employees and clients to travel sustainably, as we are located at the heart of the city with public transportation to the airport and local amenities.
“Clearly, we’re committed to the city and want to be part of its vibrancy,” says Principal Margie Flynn. “We’re committed to sustainability and want to make sure we’re walking the talk in what we’re doing. And the essence of sustainability is really historic preservation.” Learn more about our office move in our GreenBiz Shift Happens article, “A sustainable work environment breeds a healthy, happy culture.”
Throughout the move process, we gave old office furniture to employees to repurpose in their homes. We also donated office supplies to local charities, such as Super Heroes to Kids in Ohio and local schools. By repurposing our office items, we helped eliminate waste and gave back to our community.
Whether your company is creating a waste management plan, moving, or looking for new sustainability projects, below we have highlighted creative ideas to help you repurpose:
We encourage you to think purposefully and (re)purposefully both at your company and in your personal life, as this mindset empowers you to live sustainably.
By Brittany VanderBeek, Analyst
Looking like movie stars…
The City of Cleveland is evaluating the feasibility of a bike share program benefiting thousands of residents and tourists with an emissions-free, healthy and economical means of experiencing the city. Could a car-sharing scheme also be part of the future transportation mix for the City of Cleveland? We may only need to look west to Indianapolis, IN to observe their lessons learned.
Indianapolis is preparing to launch the first car share program in the United States. The Mayor of Indianapolis, Greg Ballad, and his administration will be working alongside Bolloré Group, who are the folks behind the Autolib project in Paris, as well as Indianapolis’ largest employers, universities, hospitality destinations and civic organizations to make the program a reality. Mayor Ballad is committing approximately $35 million to launch the as yet unnamed program in the city next year – perhaps as soon as next spring.
The program will feature 500 electric vehicles (most likely, the Nisan Leaf or the all-electric Ford Focus) and 1,200 charging stations at 200 car-share locations. The nuts and bolts of how this new car sharing service will work goes something like this:
Source: EarthTechling, Nino Marchetti
The City of Cleveland has completed an inventory of its GHG emissions and has produced a Climate Action Plan (CAP) to address how the City and its constituents will mitigate emissions and adapt to climate change. A few salient figures from the CAP include:
· Overall, Cleveland’s carbon footprint is estimated at 12.8 MTCo2e (million tons CO2 equivalent). This is greater than Cincinnati (~ 8.5 MTCo2e) but less than Chicago (~ 36 MTCO2)
· Of Cleveland’s total emissions, 36% emissions are from industrial production sources and 52% are from buildings (note how critical the built environment is to our emissions abatement solutions).
· Initiatives in the CAP could save $300M per year, cutting gas and electricity expenses by 20%
· Indeed, if completely implemented, the initiatives will generate $10M net savings/per year. Money that can be re-invested in other civic infrastructure and human capital projects.
Come to EnergyTech2013 in Cleveland, OH on May 21-23, to learn from and listen to industry experts, academia and regional policy makers discuss advances in energy systems and electrical energy technology, including generation, control, transmission, storage, and efficient use.
BrownFlynn’s Christopher Thomas will moderate a panel on Sustainable Solutions through Advanced Technology with regional business leaders Jon Ratner of Forest City Enterprises, John Vernacchia of Eaton Corporation and Jay Schabel of RES Polyflow. The advanced energy industry in NE Ohio is vibrant and poised to create dramatic new opportunities for economic growth in the region and beyond. Join this panel’s discussion to learn about the converging issues of cleaner, affordable and innovative energy technologies and sustainable customer solutions.
Click here for more details and registration. We hope to see you there!
Sara Kennedy had a very clear goal when she signed up for the Presidio Graduate School MBA program: to work with or consult large corporations on sustainability.
With one month left before she graduates, Sara is already acting on her vision working as a consultant at the boutique sustainability consulting firm BrownFlynn. Based in Cleveland, the firm is at the cutting-edge of helping clients understand how sustainability practices can transform their organization and how to move forward with implementing and communicating these responsible practices.
“It’s amazing. I’ve never wanted to work so hard and so long for any other job,” says Sara, on her new position. “It’s very inspiring to be able to do it every day. You’re changing the world.”
Sara credits her MBA education for helping her get the job, as BrownFlynn was familiar with Presidio’s MBA program.
She’s also drawing on skills she learned as part of her MBA. Sara says Presidio’s Experiential Learning Program gave her valuable hands-on consulting experience.
The Experiential Learning program aims to foster the collaboration between student teams and private or public organizations that are facing the challenges of practicing sustainable management. In each Experiential Learning course, student teams partner with external organizations to create a custom-made project based on the unique needs of their partner.
“The project management piece is so real life and so spot-on with what you do in consulting in the real world,” says Sara.
Presidio’s courses on organizational change and ethics also taught her how to identify the frame of mind clients have and how to help them shift and embrace change.
When looking to her future, Sara has big goals to promote sustainability as strategy including speaking at a major sustainability conference. Mostly, she wants to continue helping client achieve tangible impact in regards to sustainability, ranging from emission and waste reductions to enhancing their human capital.
“I just want to be a really big part of this shift,” she says.
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