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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The key to sustainability and social impact, in the most practical sense, is housing. It all starts with “oikos” or “ecos,” the Greek word for house and the root of both ecology and economy, two legs of sustainability’s three-legged stool.

In 2003, when we launched a research project at New Ecology/MIT that culminated in the first comprehensive study of the costs and benefits of green affordable housing, we thought simply greening more buildings was a high-impact strategy.

We missed the point.

Especially now that green building is increasingly mainstream (though honest-to-goodness net-zero energy buildings remain a stretch goal), the real challenge when it comes to creating sustainable communities, and delivering social impact, I think, is building enough housing, of all types but especially for low- to middle-income earners, to achieve the right jobs/housing and supply/demand balance in any given place, which in turn allows for a socially and economically diverse community, to say nothing of a connected, transit-oriented one, without which there is, by definition, no true sustainability, no real smart, responsible, equitable growth.

Whether it’s Portland or Palo Alto, Denver or Detroit, Boston or Austin, affordable housing and housing supply are among today’s most wicked problems. And there will be 100 million more of us living in the US within the next 40 years. Where will we, where will they live?

In places like Boulder, where I live, rents are increasing at four and five times wage growth or more. Meanwhile, the state has a shortfall of 50,000 housing units. And Colorado is no different from any other fast-growing area. Unless and until we get closer to a reasonable balance between jobs and housing, supply and demand, the rest is commentary.

In 2009, I told an audience at the annual Boulder Economic Summit that “Density is the new open space” because I believed then, as I do now, that just as communities like Boulder, the Bay Area, Portland and so many other sought-after places were bold innovators in conserving land for agriculture and recreation 40 years ago, today we need a different kind of audacious innovation, one focused on creating livable, affordable, inclusive communities. In 2016, after I paid my last $5000/month rent check for 800 square feet in the Presidio, I changed my tune just a bit: Affordability, density’s flip-side, is the new sustainability.

More Shutkin: Prologue and All Things Are Connected

The post Diary of a Sustainable Developer: Affordability is the New Sustainability appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

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

The post Diary of a Sustainable Developer: Prologue appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

The Innovation Network for Communities proposes to map efforts to address the financial needs of U.S. cities adapting to climate change and to develop insights and hypotheses about how to accelerate development of the capacities and innovations cities and financial markets need to enact extensive urban climate adaptation.

 Project Purpose

 This research project by the Innovation Network for Communities (INC) and Meister Consultants Group (MCG) will produce two deliverables:

A map/matrix of existing efforts to address financial needs of cities adapting to climate change. The map will take a broad view of existing efforts, including, for example, insurance, legal liability, and climate-risk assessment, not just debt financing of infrastructure; adaptation services as well as physical infrastructure; additional community effects, not just specific adaptation purposes). Research will focus on U.S. efforts, but will also review prominent non-U.S. efforts. The map will frame efforts by at least these six characteristics:

1. Climate Effects–extreme heat, sea level rise, flooding, etc.
2. City Vulnerabilities—physical, public health, economic, etc.
3. City Financial Needs—capital spending, services purchasing, incentives, research, planning, etc.
4. Financial Sectors—private debt, public revenues, private and public insurance, climate risk assessment/disclosure, philanthropy, etc.
5. Financial Mechanisms within Sectors—green/resilience bonds, tax increment financing, “last resort” insurance pools
   1. Types of Adaptation Projects Financed–infrastructure, services, incentives, etc.
   2. Stage of Development of the Mechanism—concept, prototype, mainstream, etc.
6. Additional Community Effects—metropolitan regional collaboration, co-benefits produced, equitable development, synergies with GHG reduction efforts, etc.

A report that analyzes the map’s implications for accelerating and institutionalizing the development of urban climate adaptation financing. The report most likely will focus on three questions:

1. How might innovations under development be accelerated, for instance through collaborations between cities and financial institutions or between financial sectors?
2. What gaps are there in current urban climate financing efforts that warrant more attention and how might they be explored?
3. What capacities—technical expertise and institutional arrangements—will cities and financial sectors need to develop or enhance for large-scale, sustained climate adaptation financing?

An underlying hypothesis of the project is that this mapping and analysis across financial sectors may reveal trends and opportunities that are not visible to more narrowly cast research that looks, for example, at a specific city vulnerability, financial need, or financial mechanism.

Both of these deliverables will inform the various practice communities of cities, NGOs, private financial sectors, and governments seeking to develop capacities and innovations for urban climate adaptation. They will be packaged into digital publication and distributed through mailing lists and other means.

The post Financing City Climate Adaptation appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.