A Housing Project in Victoria That Embraces Nature

Linda Baker, reporting for the New York Times, writes about Dockside Green, in Vancouver Island, B.C. We also featured Dockside in our book, Living Green.

Read the article here.

Citizens Housing to Close

We just learned that Citizens Housing, the management company responsible for running the Folsom/Dore Apartments featured in Living Green will close and be taken over by the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation (TNDC). Economic issues forced this closure and while we congratulate the reputatble low-income housing developer, TNDC, for surviving the economic crisis facing the housing industry, this is nonetheless sad news for us.

Above all, we hope that TNDC will work hard to ensure a smooth transition including excellent continuum of care for the residents at this property and the others run by Citizens. We are concerned that the social justice mission of enhancing the lives of residents, not merely sheltering them, that has been at the heart of Citizens' mission, may be at risk.

Citizens Housing has been a model for providing people's right to housing with a strong commitment to residents' health, wellbeing, and overall life success. When we interviewed Nina Berkson and Kevin Edelbrook we were touched by their personal commitment to the staff and residents at Folsom/Dore: These two staff members have worked relentlessly to build a management team from janitors, desk clerks, to office staff who understand they are part of an innovative program designed to enhance the lives of formerly homeless, at-risk of homelessness, and market rate tenants; they are part of the solution to a world that is increasingly apathetic to those in need; segregated by socio-economic status; and aware that environmental concerns must take center stage to reverse local environmental health exposures and global climate change.

The Sharing Solution

This morning I had tea with Janelle Orsi, co-author (with Emily Doskow) of the book, “The Sharing Solution: How to Save Money, Simplify your Life and Build Community.” I already knew I liked the idea of the book when we decided to meet—the promotion of the values of environmentalism via sharing resources is one which resonates with Living Green. But, boy was I in for a treat when I sat down to read the book after our tea was over.

The Sharing Solution is a well-written, straightforward and inspirational book, overflowing with great ideas for ways we could all share with each other. There are chapters on specific things that can be shared: sharing food, sharing housing, sharing household goods, sharing care for children, family and pets, sharing transportation, sharing work; and, along with inspiration, the book provides concrete steps for forging connections with like-minded sharers and steps to making it happen.

The authors are attorneys and the book includes agreements, check-lists, forms and sample contracts that provide the average person with the tools they need to create protected, mutually beneficial sharing relationships. It also highlights the triple bottom line benefits for each type of sharing—benefits like reducing consumerism, forging community as relationships begun for practical sharing purposes grow into trusting bonds, and saving money.

I could feel my own excitement mounting as I read the book and couldn’t help thinking, “I can do that!” The Sharing Solution should be required reading for all.

Vlogger discusses Living Green

Margaret Fabrizio, the land artist featured in our book, Living Green, has posted a Vlog on YouTube and Vlogger Heads. In it, she says, "I don't know how I got into this book." It's the sub-title, 'Communities that Sustain' that most puzzles her. Why include an artist living lightly on the land? Why use the term "community"?



Community is a concept that is quite undertheorized in North American cultures and scholarship: It is largely taken-for-granted. It can be used to signal kinship, affinity, proximity, inclusion, and to erect borders and boundaries. We use it in our book to demonstrate that "community" is many things to many people. It can emerge from the concrete or the ephemeral; it can be shared through virtual or "real" place and time, or through ideas and dialogue. There is no single or correct use of this term or ways to be a community.

As soon as Margaret posted this Vlog, many people left comments. This technologically-mediated set of contacts is another way in which Margaret participates in bringing people together whether or not she intends to. And it is not only sharing that signifies community: Margaret communes with the trees, the animals, the meadows, and all things that pass through, plant seeds, or spend time on the land. Her Nature and Art Conservancy is a form of living on and with the land that inspires human emotion, creativity, and action. Treating the earth with respect and love is not new, but it is something that often goes unrecognized as a significant and important way of acting that is a form of "living green," providing a lesson for how to stop some of the destruction done to the climate and the earth. Thank you Margaret for making this comment and, for creating another work of shared art.

Living Green Book Launch

We had a great time last night celebrating the publication of our book, Living Green, at the San Francisco Center for the Book. It was a thrill to see the book in print and to have so many of our friends show up to mark the occasion. Margaret Fabrizio was our honored guest and we were thankful she was there to talk about, and show images of, the amazing land and art featured in the book.

Book Parties!!

We are excited to announce three upcoming Bay Area events to celebrate the publication of our book, Living Green: Communities that Sustain.

On June 2nd, we will be celebrating at the San Francisco Centre for the Book where we will be joined by local artist, Margaret Fabrizio whose art and land are featured in the book. There will also be wine, cheese, good friends and good times.

On June 25 at 7:00, we will be at the Green Arcade in San Francisco. The Green Arcade is a new and fantastic resource specializing in books on the environment, politics, sustainability, the slow food movement, organics, urban planning nature, and children's books. Even if you can't make our event, we highly recommend making a trip to this fabulous independent bookstore.

And, speaking of fabulous bookstores, on June 29th, we'll be across the bay at Berkeley's amazing Builder's Booksource. An institution on fourth street since 1982, the Builder's Booksource was at the very cutting edge of the green building movement and continues to be a vital resource for anyone interested in green buildings or sustainable living. We'll be there June 29th at 7:00.

Linking Communities and Built Environments

Building Magazine has just released our first web exclusive promoting our forthcoming book, Living Green: Communities that Sustain. Building magazine is a leading voice on the news and issues of Canada’s building development industry. We are thrilled they have chosen to discuss our book on their website. The excerpt selected summarizes the scope of the book and our effort to sketch the best practices for enhancing community through the built environment. We, at Social Green , are currently explanding this research with a specific focus on the ways community + built environment influence health. A place based approach to health and health inequality, we believe, needs to be understood and incorporated into current building designs to best meet our 21st century goal of environmental, economic, and social sustainability.

Obstacles to Living Green: Illegal Clotheslines

Photo by Willow Poppy

On our recent trip to the High Point neighborhood in west Seattle, one of the folks we talked to pointed out a significant way his capacity for green living was hindered: local ordinances that forbid the use of clothes lines. It turns out that High Point, like many planned communities, cities and muncipalities across North America is a place where line drying clothes outside is banned as an unsightly nuisance to neighbors.

The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that close to 6% of electricity generated in the United States comes from clothes dryers. Project Laundry List estimates that the average resident could save up to 15% on their utility bills by line drying instead of electric drying. Their website features a calculator where you can see for yourself how much money you could save by greening your laundry practices. Using the power of solar energy and wind to dry clothes seems like such a simple way to live greener in our everyday lives. Why would it ever be restricted or banned?

The restrictions may come from citywide architectural regulations or, more commonly, from Homeowner's Associations (HOA) which are charged with protecting the value of homes in planned communities and condominiums. Restrictions on line drying stem from the perception that laundry on a line is an eyesore. And that isn't the only thing that's being restricted: many HOAs forbid the use of solar panels, forbid small houses, large vegetable gardens, native gardens or require the use of lights from dusk to dawn, the use of water and/or pesticides on your yard. It seems HOAs may be acting as significant barriers for many people to improve their carbon footprints.

Luckily, slowly, governments are taking action to ensure that every citizen has the right to live green, regardless of what their HOA says. In Florida, for instance, legislation ensures the right of all of its citizens to erect solar panels on their homes and also, happily, to dry their clothes outside.

The Commons, Part I

In our forthcoming book, Living Green: Communities that Sustain, we describe ten principles, derived from our research, that are key to making a community sustainable: We call these the Ten C’s of Social Sustainability. One of these is the principle of the commons.

The model of the commons understands the Earth and its resources as shared gifts, rather than private property. Perhaps the most practical and specific lesson we learned about what makes a community sustainable over time is the way that sharing resources enables each person to live higher quality lives with less of an environmental impact. From shared spaces and car shares to clothing swaps and shared infrastructures, the possibilities for commons abound and the impact on people’s everyday lives can be profound.

We found this video on YouTube and it inspired us to investigate a bit more the ways activism around the idea of the commons is emerging at different sites.

Many of the planet’s natural resources--water, forests, wildlife--have traditionally been commons, shared resources. Historically, in Europe, the commons were shared agricultural, grazing and open lands and they were steadily enclosed and privatized over the course of many hundreds of years. The privatization of public resources is not new, but it is expanding through regressive politics and policies and as new technologies enable different kinds of enclosures: patenting seeds, genetic materials, claiming parts of outer space and cyberspace and probing more deeply into the earth’s core.

Protecting the water commons has become a particularly intense site of activism. Many believe that as a non-renewable, essential resource, water should exist outside the realm of private property. But, as the planet’s water supply dwindles, private sector interest in it grows. The Blue Planet Project asserts that over one billion people do not have access to safe drinking water and more than one million children die each year of diseases caused by unsafe water and lack of sanitation. In response, the organization and others like it around the world are working to protect water from commodification and maintain free access.

For an excellent articulation of the water commons, the group On the Commons has published an extensive report which you can download here. In it, they describe some of the ways private interests have encroached upon the water commons. One of these is the bottled water industry which has taken, virtually without limits, from the water commons and then sold it back to us at enormous profit. Also at a signifiant environmental cost. Another pathway to privatization is through the industries that have emerged around cleaning and reclaiming water--these provide an expensive and easily privatized solution to the water crisis, which might also be addressed by stopping pollution and ensuring the safety of the water commons for all.

Champions of the commons argue that if we see water as a commons, we are more likely to feel shared ownership of it and be invested in keeping it clean or cleaning it up. This is evidenced in the many victories of the Waterkeeper Alliance, an alliance of organizations that empowers citizens to get involved in protecting lakes, rivers and streams in their own communities.

The air we breathe, the atmosphere, the sky, outer space can be seen as another commons. In his recent book, Who Owns the Sky, Peter Barnes proposes the idea of a “sky trust” to protect this commons. The Sky Trust would require companies to pay for the right to release their carbon emissions into the atmosphere. The money would then be placed into a Sky Trust owned by all citizens--thus providing financial incentive to reduce emissions. The money from the sky trust would belong to the public to be used for common benefits.

Perhaps the most powerful example of protecting the commons can be found in the work of Vandana Shiva and her organization Navdanya (which literally means, nine seeds). Central to their work has been protecting the rights of farmers to freely use seeds, protecting seeds from patents and privatization at the hands of large corporations and in the process, protecting farmer’s rights to earn their livelihood as well as protecting all of our rights to biodiversity.

Living Small

“Better living through simplicity” is the motto for the small house society, an organization dedicated to the promotion of smaller homes. Their mission is “to support the research, development, and use of smaller living spaces that foster sustainable living for individuals, families, and communities worldwide.”

Jay Shafer, one of the groups founders, has lived in tiny houses (all less than 100 square feet) for over ten years now. On his website you can view videos of some of these remarkable spaces and hear Shafer describe what motivated him to embark on this small living adventure. Sustainability was high on his list of reasons: recognizing the impact any sized house has on the environment and wanting to minimize that impact by minimizing the space to what was absolutely necessary. He also hates vacuuming.  Shafer’s philosophy is “dream big, build small” and his company, Tumbleweed Tiny House Company, creates an array of models of truly tiny houses.

We saw how living in smaller spaces makes a huge difference for environmental sustainability at many of the sites we visited for our book Living Green: Communities that Sustain. Places like Los Angeles Eco-Village emphasize higher quality lives with less space. When you live in less square footage, you consume less energy and, importantly, by necessity, have less stuff. At a place like an Ecovillage or a co-housing community, the downsides of having less space (i.e., no guest room for when Aunt Mildred comes to visit) or less stuff (i.e. no table saw when you need one) are tempered by the ample shared space and shared stuff.

And, the benefits of living with less are not only environmental. A growing number of people are finding themselves drawn to the “small house movement” because of the economic implications. Less square footage and less stuff is cheaper to maintain.

Andy Thomson, founder of Sustain Design Studio has created the miniHome. In an interview by David Suzuki’s The Nature of Things, Thomson described how the fact that we in North America currently consume so much energy that we would need ten additional planets to sustain ourselves, led him to try and create a house that would use one tenth of the energy of a standard house--thereby reducing our consumption to a sustainable, one planet level. The result is the miniHome.  It's an off-the-grid, prefabricated, modern home that stands at just 325 square feet.  Thompson lived in one (may still live in one) with his wife and two young children. Check it out on the Sustain Design Studio website.

Welcome Michael Meneer

We are pleased to welcome Michael Meneer to our Social Green team as our communications consultant. Michael brings to Social Green over ten years of public affairs, strategic communications and political experience in Vancouver and Washington D.C. Michael will be spearheading the book launch of Living Green: Communities that Sustain the first book to be published in our Social Green series. We look forward to working together to share our research findings about the best social practices of green building design and developments.

Living Green due in stores in May 09

We are thrilled to report that the copy edits are in and Living Green: Communities that Sustain is now in press. Living Green showcases communities across North America that are living in ways that protect the environment and contribute to social justice.

The green building movement has incorporated the concept of the triple bottom line to assert that sustainable long-term progress in terms of environmental quality, economic development and social well-being needs to be balanced: One aspect cannot be emphasized over another. Yet the factors that best promote social well-being are the least understood. Living Green: Communities that Sustain, identifies and describes the ten mechanisms we found to be most central to a successful sustainable development. These mechanisms are built into communities and enhance social along with economic and environmental concerns. In this book we outline these best practices of social sustainability along with specific examples from our field research.

Through stories of extraordinary communities across North America, Living Green examines the impact living in these communities has on personal health, well-being, and the capacity for pursuing sustainability. It includes interviews with developers, architects, and residents, highlighting personal ideals and efforts to pursue a sustainable lifestyle. The book’s three parts explore:

• How community is central to sustainable living in everything from cohousing to communes (Takoma Village Community Co-Housing, Eastern Village Co-housing, Ouje-Bougoumou, Twin Oaks Commune);

• Communities that specifically integrate green building design components with social justice politics such as racism, poverty, and urban alienation (L.A. Ecovillage, Chez Soi Green Energy Benny Farm, Folsom Dore);

• Housing options geared toward mainstream living that offer individual choices to those who wish to live green (Michelle Kaufmann Designs, Cazadero Nature and Art Conservancy, Dockside Green).

This is the first book in our co-authored Social Green Series. It is being published by New Society Publishers, a publishing house that not only brings to press fantastic books on sustainability and social justice, but operates by those principles itself: it is in its third year of being a carbon-neutral operation. You can pre-order the book now at New Society Publishers. We will keep you posted about upcoming book events this Spring and Summer.

Sustainable West Seattle

This week we traveled to the High Point neighborhood of West Seattle to begin our new research project.  The project is an NSF funded qualitative research project in which we will be investigating the mechanisms by which people are able (or not) to live in more sustainable ways in various communities and neighborhoods.  Taking off from what we learned in our book about sustainable communities (Living Green: Communities that Sustain, forthcoming in June 09 from New Society Press), we are interested in learning more about how one's built environment and community promote or prevent them from taking actions in their everyday lives that contribute to sustainability. 

High Point is a new neighborhood, a redevelopment in a Seattle suburb that has a history of vibrant cultural diversity as well as economic hardships.  It is designed to be the most progressive, environmentally friendly community in the country and is Seattle’s first Built Green™ neighborhood.  It is situated on 120 acres in the middle of West Seattle, about ten minutes by car to downtown Seattle.  When we went, we took an express bus that buzzed us into downtown Seattle in no time.  

Wandering through the streets of High Point on a spectacular Seattle Fall day, we were glad we chose it as our first site to visit. The native landscaping includes big old trees and newly planted ones lining the wide streets and many were still a-blaze in Fall color. The reds and yellows and oranges made even more brilliant thanks to the clear blue of the sky and bright sun that began to glow orange as it set on our walk.  

The neighborhood includes a wide variety of housing types--single family attached, detached, apartments, townhouses--each sharing a distinct style and most including front porches and a neighborly atmosphere. Already active and well-lived in, High Point is also still under construction: the final of its phases is slated to be complete in 2010. It is expected to accommodate over 4,000 residents in approximately 1,600 homes, about half of which will be owned and the other half rented. The housing targets a multiple range of income levels, but with an emphasis on affordability. In addition to standard single-family residences, there is a seniors' residence and an assisted living home on-site. All homes meet a minimum of Built Green 3-Star standards, with many achieving 4-Star level and ENERGY STAR® certification.

In addition to the homes, the neighborhood also includes a beautiful public library and a community health center. A grocery store and other retail stores are in the plans. These will be an important addition to the social sustainability of the neighborhood.

Interspersed amongst all of these buildings there are large areas of greenspace: grassy lawns in front of and between houses are larger and more communal than in most neighborhoods, multiple well-appointed playgrounds pepper the site, a protected greenbelt hugs one side, there is a lovely pond and wetland populated by birds, and intertwined in all of this are multiple community gardens.  As we walked, we noticed signs explaining some of the green features of the neighborhood like the porous concrete that made up the ground beneath our feet. We look forward to learning about what these and other sustainable features of the High Point community mean to the residents and what other, less visible elements are also impacting their lives.