The announcement arrived as I was researching and writing about the global spread of urban greening at multiple city scales, from building sites and streets to neighborhoods/districts and citywide, the urban ecology. The Liuzhou forest city, which is supposed to be ready for living by 2020, is more the size, by population, of a large, compact urban neighborhood, akin to some of the “low carbon” districts in a few cities. Stockholm’s Royal Seaport district, under development for several years, is designed for 50,000 housing and office units.

Few, if any, new district designs have pushed so far toward incorporating greenery into the newly built environment. To get a sense of how much of a stretch this might be, I compared the Liuzhou statistics to those of Central Park in New York City. The forest city will contain twice as many trees as Central Park, but will only use 40 percent of the park’s size–on which it will host buildings, people, roads, a railroad, an entire city neighborhood. Many more trees on much less land; that’s what going vertical can get you.

Highly engineered urban green space is not new. Central Park was precisely that 160 years ago when it was designed, 1,600 residents were cleared off the land, steam-powered equipment and masses of unskilled laborers moved 10 million cartloads of material out of the park, and 4 million trees were moved in. But greened settlement at this scale–green and large enough, perhaps, to form a dynamic ecosystem–is an evolution of modern urban design. And it may be a life saver for China’s future as a nation with 1-billion people living in cities. Project architect Stefano Boeri says the forest city offers China a new model for accommodating its rapidly growing urban population: build “a system of small, green cities” instead of just expanding and extending existing urban centers.

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How often do we hear New York described this way? A lot. I grew up in the Connecticut suburbs in the 1960s and 70s and count myself among the Big Apple’s biggest fans, but having moved west a decade ago, I experience New York today largely through its airports. So you can understand why “greatest” isn’t the first word that comes to mind when I arrive at JFK or La Guardia for my occasional visits on business or to see family, like I did last week for the Thanksgiving holiday.

Both airports are a mess, a disgrace, really, considering the wealth that’s concentrated in the New York metropolitan area and the importance of both facilities as major gateways to the region for businesspeople and tourists alike. It’s a brutal first impression.

JFK is bad, but LGA, where I was last week, is worse. The airport is decades behind in its planning and operations and is now trying to catch up, all at once. At best, LGA is a case of poor planning. At worst, it’s an example of a metro region that largely undervalues, if not outright ignores, its infrastructure until it’s too late.

The city’s subways and buses, operated by Metropolitan Transportation Authority, are another case in point, with recent headlines declaring the “MTA is completely out of touch,” and the MTA Chairman Joseph Lhota warning that the city’s failing subway system threatens not only the city’s, but the region’s, financial future.

Here’s the thing. Ever since I can remember, the region’s infrastructure has been in a colossal state of disrepair. In my mind’s eye, I can still picture the blighted lots in the South Bronx, the graffiti-covered subway cars, the man-eating potholes on the FDR Drive, all circa 1970s.

Meanwhile, for decades, the area has been gentrifying, with once impoverished, crime-ridden neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Central Harlem now among the most desirable, and super-luxury, super-tall “pencil” skyscrapers popping up across the Manhattan skyline, their apartments selling for as much as $7,000 per square foot.

It’s the triumph of private over public space, of winner-take-all over the common good, and it’s not unique to New York City. We see it all across the United States but, as befitting the world’s greatest city, the disparity between the gilded and dilapidated is most pronounced in New York.

In his 1982 book, “Shifting Involvement: Private Interest and Public Action,” the noted political economist Albert O. Hirschman described the 20-year cycles in which American society oscillates between intense concern for the public interest and an eclipsing focus on private gain. Hirschman argued that every couple of decades people tire of the pursuit of material things, throw off consumerism and individualism, and turn their attention outward to pot holes and public policy, to civil rights and social issues. In turn, their interest in the common good wanes as their frustration with collective action grows, leading them back to their private preoccupations.

While my experience with New York’s infrastructure would suggest a longer cycle than Hirschman describes, I sure hope he’s right. I hope that the pendulum will shift back to a kind of civic awakening, where investment in forward-thinking, socially-responsible and even beautiful public infrastructure will carry the day, as it did at the turn of the 20^th century with the City Beautiful movement, whose reforms aimed to make American cities not only more attractive but more functional and humane.

That’s over a hundred years ago, or about five of Hirschman’s cycles.

Better late than never.

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Oh yea, I forgot. I also helped Pete and John launch the Innovation Network for Communities and Urban Sustainability Associates a decade ago, which later gave rise to the Urban Sustainability Directors Network, Nupolis and eventually their latest project, Life After Carbon (I’ve registered my complaint about their title; carbon is, after all, essential to all living things. . . Enough said). Full circle.

When I turned 50, almost three years ago, I decided that, if and when the opportunity arose, and with sustainability now more or less mainstream, at least as an idea, I would try my hand at the for-profit world, take what I have learned and taught and apply it as a sustainable real estate developer, believing this is no oxymoron but instead, given the state of things, a mandate, a call to action. Words into deeds, this time with an equity stake.

My friend and colleague David Zucker, a Denver-based developer whom I had met in 2009 at a conference I co-hosted at CU Boulder on urban development and climate change, gave me my opportunity when he invited me in early 2016 to help him take on an ambitious development project in Boulder, a 15-acre site that lay vacant for decades along East Arapahoe, a major commuter corridor chock full of employers and a morass of light-industrial uses but lacking workforce housing or thoughtful urban design, hardly a problem unique to Boulder.

At East Arapahoe we propose to build 340 units of housing, 40 percent of which will be below-market rate, plus 16,000 square feet of affordable commercial space targeted at small businesses and non-profits who, like so many Boulder residents, are being priced out of the market. Of course, the project aims to be green and climate-friendly, with bike racks and PV panels aplenty. In Boulder, this almost goes without saying.

Some experience under my belt, and only a few battle scars, last spring I helped organize a large team to compete for another Boulder project, the redevelopment of the 5.5-acre, city-owned Pollard Jeep site at 30th and Pearl in the heart of Boulder Junction, the city’s nascent transit village, across the street from Google’s brand-new Boulder headquarters. In August, our team was notified that we won the project, beating out three other teams from around the country.

Like the East Arapahoe project, the Pollard project will be green, transit-oriented, mixed-income and mixed-use, with more than half of the 304 housing units priced below-market and 20,000 square feet of permanently affordable commercial space. We also hope to make the project fossil-fuel free — all-electric with near net-zero building design. From Pollard’s SUVs to Boulder’s showcase TOD. It’s almost poetic.

With two large projects underway, my experiment in for-profit real estate development has begun in earnest. I plan to use this blog as a chronicle of my and others’ experiences, a place to reflect, reveal and occasionally rant regarding what I see as both the challenges and opportunities, risks and rewards, of joining a social entrepreneur’s mission, values and ideas with the hardscrabble reality of getting good projects built in places like Boulder.

More Shutkin: Affordability is the New Sustainability and All Things Are Connected

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