Our cities can make these jobs by remaking their places. Every St. Patrick’s Day, I think of my grandmother, who was not at all Irish and almost never wore green. I make the association because my sister and I escorted her out of Manhattan on March 17, 1989 to a family reunion in Connecticut. My sister, ever the cautious one, convinced a pal of hers to print buttons for us to wear on the commuter train that read: “I Condone No Vomiting on my Grandmother.” And none happened.

Look, we know that St. Patrick’s Day at its core is a valuable celebration of ethnic honor. We also know that, as an economic event, it’s a tired routine of selling booze and cynical ads. The point is that urban rituals of forced shitfacedery are opportunities to think up new paths to a new economy.

To see what I mean, just think of a “big-city parade” cottage industry. A  graphic-design professional could make a fair trade with buttons like the ones my sister got. And more broadly, landscapers and retailers and event producers could rework urban space into parks, plazas, paintball fields and whatever else the city can afford. They’d hire people to do unskilled tasks like pruning and cleaning, and high-training tasks like event programming, security and insurance. And they’d make a new deal for New York and Boston and every other city that too often experiences public life as a barrage of corporate posters and puke.

My grandmother, who grew up in a coldwater flat on the Lower East Side, would raise a glass of Fresca to the prospect.

So here’s my candidate: round up all the snide big-city bloggers and put them to work at entry-level tasks in low-income neighborhoods. These bloggers, who talk about how they miss the “dangerous” big city that thrived before elite people like themselves came along, are obviously so clever they would have no trouble turning the chronic problems of poverty into amusing but tart businesses.

One New York blogger, which I won’t name or link to because I don’t want to publicize it, reveals how any city habitue with enough credit can exist in an iPod-Starbucks-sublet haze that fails to distinguish one city from another. This fellow mordantly charted the rise in incomes in the East Village of Manhattan- a place with a big share of public housing, seniors, children on a school lunch program- and claimed to compare it with Brownsville, a low-income section of Brooklyn. Brownsville, the blogger declared, would soon follow a predictable pattern of rising rents, proliferating Thai restaurants and tiresome trust-fund bloggers.

The day an acquaintance of mine posted a link to this blog on Facebook, I heard from a friend that a man was shot in front of a barbershop in a New York City neighborhood not mentioned on the blog.  Children and old people routinely pass the spot of the murder. It’s unclear what caused the crime, but it’s clear that people who saw it have to worry about who saw them.

What does any of this have to do with the green economy? Think about what this blogger needs: not solar power, not turbines, not all the local kohlrabi he can eat. He needs to understand that cities prosper when everyone gets a chance to compete, to learn and to engage. And he needs to see what goes on a few miles away from his well-padded chair if he really wants to “save New York” from decay. Because as the climate changes and the global economy runs increasingly on ease of contact, cities that don’t invest deeply in hope and broadly in public safety will deteriorate in ways less suited to blogs than to epic poetry.

Next time you read about how a city is “dying” from gentrification, get up and go to a neighborhood you’ve never seen. You may see a business opportunity I haven’t even dreamed.

In perhaps the hippest section of the most populous part of the biggest city in the richest nation in the world, big crowds line up to observe a process that doesn’t work very well. People line up to watch someone pluck a sandwich roll from a bin on a counter, walk around to open a creaky display case of cheeses (knocking other customers aside), move to a rickety marble board, cut the roll in half, slice off a few pieces of cheese, put the slices on either side of the roll put a piece of cheese on each side and press them together, then wrap the sandwich in paper and tape the paper with little snatches of tape three, four and five times. The person handwrites on the wrapper and charges $6, and the customer digs slowly through pocket or purse to find change. Ask the hipsters why they stand -distracted, often texting or emailing - and wait for a sandwich they could make themselves, and the answer usually varies on this: I like to see where my food came from. But these same people generally don’t know where their neighbors came from or want to go.

For a few years, I believed in “being environmentalist” and wrote about “green living” as worthwhile things to study. Along the way, while I learned about systems that can make us live more prosperously while burning less carbon, I learned that we often slack off on assigning meaning to what we see. Most buildings where I saw architects talk about the need for more client cash wasted tons of carbon in indiscriminate overhead lighting and air conditioning- and people who worked on a/c or building systems hardly ever get lecture gigs. Landlords don’t tell tenants how the energy use works in a building. Dignitaries travel by private car to “ecological summits.” The problem is not that we don’t care, or that we don’t understand what’s happening. It’s that we don’t see each other in ways that force us to confront how we could make our shared experience work more efficiently.

Global warming prophets frequently invoke as-yet unconceived sentencing judges - as if the argument about the change in the weather amounts to one that will be resolved in the future. But this clashes with our experience of reality. The climate will be different, as our climate is different from the one that preceded the onset of industry. But most of us don’t walk around chortling over or cursing forebears who set up the industrial economy. We tend to think about what we can see and hear, not what we can abstract. (Unless we’re politicians, or forcibly retired ex-vice-presidents.)

Our children and their children will not ask us why we stood slack while we spoiled the atmosphere, because inheritor generations do not put predecessors on trial. They may ask us, while we’re alive, if we can see things the same way that they do. The idea of shaming our way into mass redefinition never tracked well to how we actually respond. We respond to things not when we fear them, but when we see them.

Which brings me back to the inefficient cheese sandwich. We are so starved for community in this moment that we consider it heartwarming to buy something  that takes too long and costs too much, if it lets us feel they can talk about something “real” that they “saw,” that’s not “processed.”

And so if we really want to be honest about our relationship with climate, let’s put it in full view. Equip houses with compost bins the way you equip them with mailboxes. (In 2010, we may begin producing more compost than postal mail. Color-code factories’ smokestacks for how efficiently they run. Fit every home with a smart meter that shows how much energy a room uses at a given time (and how much money an occupant could make selling power back to the electric company.)

If you like to see where your food came from and you don’t want to see where everything else came from, you need to take a harder look at your habits.

Where?

To deploy new energy technologies, you need a lot of households and businesses to use it so it gets to scale. To wrest lots of people from unemployment, you need places where they can herd in quickly for training and you need them to be able to get easily to work and to interviews. To get people to afford community college, you probably want to spare them the cost of garaging or feeding meters every time they go to class. And to play jujitsu with the big insurers requires big clumps of customers, as well as rules and trends that convince insurers that continuing to screw people over will erode their customer base.

Where have I described? Cities with tight cores, mixes of use and income, and unpopular things like factories right alongside vote-generators like shiny academic centers.

And what kinds of habitat prosper from the network effects of high-speed rail, which the president also touted? Dense ones with lots of culture and intellectual capital.

The president, straining to convert the Republicans’ Billy Sunday spirit and mollify a population that he described as rattled by change, perhaps chose (prudently if so) to decline to announce that the windshield view of life to which most voters have grown accustomed is about to change. Telling people that the future lies in cities where people walk, bike and telecommute their way to prosperity might have been too jarring for a speech all about pacification.

But it’s true. Some groups, notably the Drum Major Institute, grumble that cities were “absent” from the State of the Union. I say they were everywhere.

And I bet they’ll figure even more prominently next year.

To see how, imagine an analogy from the 1950s, our last era of technological disruption in the home. Let’s say Rubbermaid sold a new self-cleaning oven. Let’s imagine the oven cleans itself, but blows out its machinery on every third cycle, leaving lugnuts that sear the Formica floor and fleck every pot with a candy-like goo. Imagine a homemaker or wage-earner, as Don-Draper-perverse or Ozzie-Nelson-conventional as you wish, shrugging and saying: “well, it’s Space Age, so I guess we’re stuck with it!”

The consumer-product industry evolved from a series of contracts with government agencies, meaning a devotion to product reliability and integrity went into each offering. If only that devotion had a match in a commitment to creating healthy products for people and the atmosphere, we’d be hearing less from nations that are afraid of disappearing in tidal waves and James Inhofe would not be a household name.

Today, while lots of government agencies stoke the market by retrofitting their buildings or buying more-efficient products, too many companies get away with using a green label as a cover for sloppy production. Twice in the past two months, I’ve wasted money on purchases that I chose over more convenient competitors because I wanted to buy green. A vendor of reclaimed-wood countertops used his niche to justify a slacker’s schedule: despite repeated requests to meet an agreed-upon deadline, he shrugged that taking the old nails out of the wood would take as long as it took and he couldn’t really see hustling. Now I have Ikea countertops (and I can cook at home, reducing my consumption of takeout cartons and surplus plastic cutlery).

And Toshiba sold me a laptop with a screen that can work in “ecoUtility mode,” dimming itself after a few minutes’ work. This screen, immature in Toshiba’s product line, also contains a mysterious circuit board that blows out twice in 45 days- and that only a Toshiba depot can fix, because it’s an LED screen rather than the more common LCD and the manufacturer perhaps doesn’t trust resellers with the secret formula. Now I’m typing on a borrowed HP laptop that belongs to a guy in my office. It wheezes and makes me want sunglasses, but it works.

If the government set green product standards, companies would compete to meet them and Americans would face a range of clever, innovative, targeted and price-aggressive products that feel exciting and use energy efficiently. Instead, suckers like me buy self-labeled “green” goods for artificially inflated prices- making green look elitist and flaky.

And if green keeps looking elitist and flaky, old-fashioned petroleum-based lifejackets and paddles will become the smartest buy of all.

The service economy that gorges itself from “black Friday” to “hangover Saturday” relies on stable transportation and stable cities.  Now remember that climate change will bring instability- not steady warming to turn Manhattan into Miami one palm tree per year, but a bombardment of storms and floods and freak weather events that will shut our schools and roads and communications networks in messy ways throughout the year. Blizzards like the one visiting the Midwest as I type have everything to do with climate change, because they reflect a more volatile weather pattern.

Now. We can safeguard our cities and our economy from the dumbbell ends of disaster by building more redundant telecom networks, which are backups to backups, and by building our trains and buses out of sturdier stuff. But we can only slow down changes in the atmosphere if we reduce the waste of fuel that trails our daily lives. We need to share more buildings, transportation, public space and services. If we do, we’ll spread the cost of new technology and spread the pain of remediation. If we don’t, we’ll lose control even of the power to track how much we’re wasting.

So the ambassadors to cities- the people at the airport, the bus terminal, the UPS dropoff and the food court- exact a potent spell, less vital than teachers and cops and mayors but no less resonant. If people make cities warm and genuine, if they encourage cooperation and good humor, they will induce other people to spend more time at the margin in cities.

Can working-class people shoulder this burden, to steer each other toward high-density living in a time of high confusion?

Track your moments on your journeys this holiday season and let me know. Then think about what a little more real investment in education and public life would mean for the cities, white or green or black, of our future.

The gimmick, legible on chalkboards around the languid baristas and laptop jockeys, posits that you are a smarter customer for taking your coffee from shade-grown and fair-trade farms and mixing it with local, hormone-free milk. As indeed you are, in a narrow sense. You’re smarter than you used to be. But are you smarter than the underpaid bus driver who buys coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts or the working mom who buys milk in bulk at CostCo? Or are you just more leisurely? You can’t be that smart if you don’t know the value of what you’re buying.

And what you’re buying here has to stretch to qualify as green. Incandescent bulbs line the ceiling, each one attached to a rotating fan, burning much more fuel than the space needs. The baristas brew the coffee in big urns that must use more electricity than a kettle and a series of Bodums would. So my carbon footprint per gulp of  shade-grown coffee may be higher than that of the folks outside, drinking factory-grown coffee from a small truck.

The calculations are easy to manipulate, of course. And I’ll keep visiting Think Coffee because I’m lucky enough to get to choose ethically grown coffee at the cost premium it brings- and because it’s on my way to work.(The drip coffee’s been running watery lately, though, which makes me suspect the managers are using more water than they need too.)

The point is that we build a green economy by challenging everyone to make everything work more efficiently. Trotting out a set of status symbols you can buy at retail limits ingenuity.

Are you absolved for the wasted electricity because you’re drinking shade-grown coffee? Or are you drinking shade-grown coffee because it tastes better?

Put another way:  if we’re building an economy that capitalizes on human ingenuity without wasting natural resources, shouldn’t  we think a little more expansively about everything we do?

More power to Think Coffee for encouraging me to think about these riddles. But more power to the consumers, and entrepreneurs, who resist the fake claim that “thinking green” stops at the cash register.

Doing things sustainably means rigging our economy to grow peaceably in the global South and efficiently in the rich countries. It means a lot of competition over intellectual property, international policy and attention. It requires a lot of coffee and a goodly amount of light.

But its winners will be those who never stop thinking.

The green lease, as the Natural Resources Defense Council and local players are hashing it out in New York and elsewhere, would replace talk of green-tinged amenities or mandatory efficiency improvements with a rational economic contract. (Sean Neill, an entrepreneur with a firm called Cycle 7, makes his bones training landlords and tenants on this idea and has informed my take on it.) Landlords would pay for improvements that affect an entire building, tenants would pay for controlling their own utility costs, and capital would flow to each party in legible ways.

The details of the lease get technical and will vary across markets, but the impact plays out across the economy. Greening a building becomes a capital project, not a compliance routine or a charade.It also becomes more attractive to lenders and investors of varying risk appetites. Clarity creates capital.

And capital is what landlords and tenants need. When New York passed a green-building law but declined to force landlords to undertake efficiency improvements after auditing their energy use, some derided the law as toothless. In fact, the law became more credible, because it recognized that landlords and tenants cannot yet legibly split the cost of fixing their structures. In a situation with shared space and fragmented costs and rewards,policy must involve incentives rather than fiats. You can no more feasibly oblige a landlord to wrest better performance from a mutable collection of tenants than you can force a teacher to extract higher test scores from roomfuls of students.

Which gets us into another policy foxhole.

]]> http://thefastertimes.com/greeneconomy/2009/12/14/green-property-the-lease-you-can-do/feed/ http://thefastertimes.com/greeneconomy/2009/12/09/zoning-the-planet/ http://thefastertimes.com/greeneconomy/2009/12/09/zoning-the-planet/#comments Wed, 09 Dec 2009 16:34:15 +0000 Alec Appelbaum http://thefastertimes.com/greeneconomy/?p=368 Our climate is changing in ways we can’t control largely because we’ve divided our economies without thinking about the costs of what we all share.  We all share the heat (and cold and ocean currents and tremors) that arises when carbon sticks around in the air. So as  climate realists and climate opportunists meet in Copenhagen, let’s imagine adapting a local technique to a global setting. I’m thinking about zoning the planet.

It’s not a stirring word, evocative of cranky civic officials squinting at plat plans, but give it time. When a city creates zoning laws that put shops and offices and parks and homes close to each other, it creates the space for creative services.  Such a zoning law enables investors to attract people who want what people have always wanted: the chance to be with other people.  This principle, reduced to the shorthand term “smart growth,” has caught on with policymakers around some of the sprawliest parts of this country. There’s reason to hope it informs investment in the developing world and regeneration in Western Europe, too, with committed developers like Hines leading the charge.

Mixed-use zoning harmonizes with free-market precepts. It suggests built-in grievance procedures when people disagree. It bends with creative investment and provides incentives for players with different am0unts of capital. It encourages incentives, like the location-efficient mortgage, which in turn release creative forms of financing.

So why don’t we try it for a whole country? Or for the whole world?

I’m sure the trade experts can sling objections, but intuition says they can also create workable rules. Imagine a World Trade secretariat that considers the mix of walkable neighborhoods skilled clean manufacturing, waterfronts and retrofits in each country and targets the trade of goods and intellectual property to goals that affirm economic growth and ecological intelligence. Some nations would specialize in transport, others in heavy production, others in food. David Ricardo’s economic principle would shine through: some countries would have comparative advantage in stoking some kinds of efficient places- say, places like Hamburg. And they would trade goods and brainpower with countries whose topography and tradition impute other kinds of places- say, like Curitiba.

(Sorry, Objectivists: we would need democratic governments to keep this system from becoming a plunder-fest of natural resources…somewhat like the one in place now.)

This can be at most a sprinkle of seasoning in the stew of trade policy. But if we want to put a price on the pollution we all share while liberating our separate geniuses, it can linger. Imagine that instead of wrangling about quantities of tires or calibration of Champagne, we figured out who in India could help Miami build a waterproof downtown, and who in San Diego could help Hong Kong build even higher towers. And imagine trade agreements that made overcrowded cities less crowded, and shrinking cities less despondent.

It’s enough to make you imagine that smart growth in America could lead to smart maintenance around the world.

I’m surer than ever that we delude only ourselves when we think that discretionary purchases can pace us toward a  low-carbon building sector. Or an innovative one.

We didn’t rely on the private market, much less the luxury market, to build any prior industry to scale. The Defense Department built the Internet, and the Treasury built the modern banking system. So why pretend the high-end consumer can transform how Americans outfit their buildings?

The renovation industry is one of the country’s most fragmented and least coordinated. The few vendors I’ve encountered who sell zero-carbon particleboard or reclaimed-wood countertops can’t produce the volume to make them competitive on cost or responsive on customer service. You can’t demonize people in this industry for charging a lot and placating a little- they have enough on their hands trying to maintain supply. If we want a building industry that weans us off foreign oil and reaps value from underused places (and we do, even the Republicans among us), we need some massive investment to speed R&D, staff customer service, and firm the promise of secure income for employees.

That investment will come from an array of targeted, disciplined government tax incentives or from a silent army of philanthropists dismayed over the recent demise of Domino.

I’d rather turn to the government.