The Big Questions

Waste streams are not unalterable

An interesting point, in light of Albany's landfill woes:

"The London Borough of Ealing issued a contract for a total waste minimisation solution, not simply a contract for refuse collection and another one for recycling. In this instance, the Council was buying an outcome, waste minimisation, with the precise approach to meeting that outcome left up to the contractor."

Although a lot of what they are doing (MS Word file) is education stuff or lobbying for legislative changes, there's some interesting concrete items in there, such as delivering free composters to households and schools; subsidizing cloth diaper ("real nappies") purchases and laundering services; and conducting its own waste audit and waste reduction plan for government operations.

This shouldn't be news, but it's worth repeating

From the new report from CEOs for Cities on how "the gas price spike popped the housing bubble":

The new landscape of housing prices and high fuel costs has important implications for public policy.  Cities that offer attractive urban living opportunities in close-in neighborhoods, enabling people to drive shorter distances and make convenient use of alternatives to car travel, are likely to be more affordable and economically successful than places that continue to follow sprawling development patterns.

Something to keep well in mind as we commence to plan.

And all the rest is implementation: SDAT report

I had a good bus day getting to and from the final presentation of the SDAT team at St. Rose tonight (you bus riders know what I mean), so I'm in an optimistic mood. I'm not going to try to report all the details of the presentation, since the power point will be available to link to shortly and a more full report done in a few months.

Overall, I was impressed. This is with caveats—I thought the quality of the presentation was uneven and unusefully vague in spots, and I still haven't shaken my feeling that a lot more use could have been made of the collective brain power of the people who showed up with more focused, facilitated charettes. However, the good news is that there was a lot of good stuff in this presentation that I haven't actually been hearing said elsewhere, some of it that we clearly need to hear, and some of it very concrete about what we can do.

As before, I'm going to make several smaller posts roughly by theme. Please chime in, add, disagree, etc.

SDAT team members

I didn't have room for it in last week's column, but so far the members of the team that are known include:

Alan Mallach, FAICP- Team Leader
Research Fellow, National Housing Institute
Author, most recently of Bringing Buildings Back: From Abandoned Properties to Community Assets
Mallach has worked in "business, government, and academe."

Grace Perdomo, Assoc. AIA, Urban Design
Wallace + Perdomo, Inc.
Coral Gables FL
Experienced in public housing redevelopment and New Urbanist/traditional neighborhood design.

Michael Clarke, Community Development and Vacant Properties
Program Director, LISC Buffalo
Buffalo NY

Paul Lambert, Market Specialist
Managing Principal, Lambert Advisory LLC

John Hager ASLA, RLA, LEED AP, Open/Green Space
JACOBS CONSULTANCY Advance Planning Group
St. Louis, Missouri
In case all those letters mean nothing to you, Hager is a landscape architecture, open space specialist, and certified in green building principles.

Carletta Singleton, Transportation Planner
Principal, Singleton Consulting Group, LLC
Member, Regional Planning Commission
Birmingham, Alabama

There will (may?) also be a  community visioning expert and/or green building architect. (It seems obvious to me that it should be the visioning expert, what with the comp plan coming up, much as I like green building, but I guess visioning folks are in high demand.)

Pine Who?

I just gave the city's application for the SDAT grant another read. It is full of exciting and important issues and ideas, from bus rapid transit to green building standards.

But there is nonetheless one rather glaring omission. Under a list of issues that covers air & water quality, energy efficiency, transportation, housing, revitalization, public policy/planning/land use and public spaces, there's not a single mention of the Pine Bush. Not one. In fact, the only time the Pine Bush is mentioned in the whole application is when the Pine Bush Preserve Commission is listed as participant in the process. It doesn't even show up in the discussion of the city's geography. If I'd been the Pine Bush Preserve Commission, I'd've had some words to say before signing off on one of the identically worded letters of support attached to the application.

Now, there's already far more in that application than can be addressed by the SDAT process. Still, it's rather stunning to have within your borders an extremely rare ecosystem that is a draw for biologists all over the country and home to rare and endangered species, and which has been the subject of a massive decades-long conservation effort, dozens of lawsuits, and a bitter controversy over the expansion of the city landfill, and not mention it at all. (For that matter, it's also pretty crazy to have an impending waste crisis and not mention it in a sustainability assessment beyond one euphemistic line about evaluating "landfill efficiency.")

If the tension between landfill and preservation in the Pine Bush isn't a sustainability challenge, I don't know what is. I'm sympathetic to the idea that improving the rest of the city in all the ways that are listed is one important piece of reducing the development pressures on the Pine Bush. But even if that works in the long run, that alone won't ensure that we reach the goal of an ecologically viable preserve.  It needs direct attention. And if done right, it could support the overall economy and revitalization of the whole city. The Pine Bush is an asset, not just a challenge.

This is an issue that screams for some outside perspective. Though it shouldn't be the only thing we talk about, it would be great to have a member of our SDAT team who could bring some expertise to bear on this thorny issue.

Unfortunately, it is hard to imagine that it's not precisely the political thorniness of the issue that kept it out of the application. Could admitting that protecting the Pine Bush needs serious discussion be too much like conceding a point for some in the city administration? If so, that's sad, and a bad portent.  If we're going to make a solid plan for revitalizing this city, we can't avoid major topics because they've become hot potatoes. Yet another reason that the agenda should be set by a public process.

I was glad, at least, to hear that while they didn't actually get to visit the Pine Bush on their preliminary SDAT visit, Alan and Erin "heard a lot about it" and are considering at least the landfill question to be one of the items on the agenda. I know I'm not the only one who is eager to get into that conversation.

First impressions

In the middle of their preliminary SDAT visit, I asked Alan Mallach and Erin Simmons for some first impressions of Albany. Obviously it was something of an unfair question, given that they hadn't even gotten to see all of the city yet, but I thought their responses were interesting to ponder:

• It's easy for those of us who know what we've lost to bemoan the state of historic preservation in the city. But apparently we're still doing better than many places. Mallach noted that many parts of the city "the quality of the buildings and the fabric is unbelievably good" and he was surprised how much was left. Simmons, whose background is in preservation, agreed, saying "this is like heaven."
• In a related point that feels like it should be obvious but I might have forgotten to list it if I were coming up with a list of the city's assets, Mallach praised all the panoramic vistas that result from our topography.
• A model of diplomacy, Mallach did also note that he had been trying think of any other city he knew of that was "blessed with two monuments to misguided '60s and '70s modernism" (the Empire State Plaza and the uptown SUNY campus).
• He also observed how strikingly the city is cut off from its waterfront, calling the pedestrian bridge "a gesture" that no one would end up at unless it had been their specific intended destination. Though he was not in the business of making recommendations—that will be up to the charette attendants and in conjunction with the team they assemble—Mallach did note that there is a nationwide movement to take down elevated waterfront highways and make boulevards out of them. (Though it's counter-intuitive, this does not actually automatically create traffic congestion. Often the opposite. In fact, in a San Francisco neighborhood that took down a highway they joke about all the previous traffic disappearing into a hole in the ground.)
• The Harriman campus is also an unusual opportunity for large-scale in-city development that many cities don't have.
• In terms of Albany's similarities to other cities, the obvious major issue is our concentration of vacant and abandoned properties. Luckily, Mallach wrote the book on dealing with them, so he should be able to offer some good advice.

Clearly, this is not exhaustive or even necessarily representative of what they will decide the SDAT's can focus on. But it's always interesting to hear people's first thoughts. If you're not a lifelong resident, what were your first impressions of Albany? What would you show a visitor if you had only a couple hours and wanted them to appreciate the city?

Sustainable Design Assessment Team: Overview

Last November, Albany's planning department applied (pdf file) to the American Institute of Architects' Sustainable Design Assessment Team program.

The AIA describes the mission of the program like this: "The collaborative SDAT program brings together architects and other professionals assembled from across the country to provide a roadmap for communities seeking to improve their sustainability - as defined by a communities (sic) ability to meet the environmental, economic, and social equity needs of today without reducing the ability of future generations to meet their needs."

The program consists of three major steps. First, there's an initial visit with an AIA staffer and a nationally recognized expert. They tour the city and meet with a bunch of folks to get an idea of what kind of expertise the city could use. (For example, do they need a hydrologist or a transit planner or . . .)
A couple months later the assembled team makes their own visit, which mostly centers around a charette for the public to attend and generate solutions with the help of the experts. The team then delivers a final report and some follow up consultation based on the charette. Nothing binding comes out of it, but the idea is that it allows the city to draw upon some ideas from elsewhere and have some help figuring out to apply them here. Albany, like many small cities, can be astoundingly parochial when it comes to learning from the successes (or failures) of others, so this is a Good Thing.

Of course if it were just that, it wouldn't be very likely to create much change. But when it's used in conjunction with/as a kick-off for a comprehensive planning process, as Albany intends, the potential to carry that momentum forward into implementation gets much higher. Two of our western Massachusetts neighbors did this recently.

Not surprisingly, skepticism of outside experts coming in an giving their opinion has already been expressed. "I'm interested, yet skeptical, will need to push for more grassroots and community involvement, not just corporate and political leadership. But sounds hopeful either way," wrote Jessica Oppenheimer of Youth Organics! in an e-mail message responding to the announcement of the grant.

Alan Mallach, research director of the National Housing Institute, made the SDAT preliminary assessment for Albany on April 11.  (Disclosure: NHI is a client and former employer of mine.) He emphasizes that they use the charette format, which is basically an intense working meeting in which participants generate ideas and engage in back and forth discussion, rather than just listening and commenting, to ensure that the results come from the community and the experts together, rather than being imposed from outside. If they follow through with that promise, it could perhaps be a model for the comprehensive planning process.

They expect the charette to be some time this summer. I will post the details as soon as I know them.