Local media publications that promote urban innovation

- Alternative newsweeklies are one such outlet. Papers like Chicago Reader, LA Weekly, Village Voice have been important journalistic outlets bringing attention to key issues, such as the Chicago Reader series on the parking meter sell off in Chicago, the education reporting by LynNell Hancock of the Village Voice, etc.
- Local foodways publications. A number of regions have publications that are part of the Edible Communities network. In the DC region, there is now Edible DC, which succeeds Edible Chesapeake, which closed down a few years. Not affiliated with the EC network is the magazine, published out of Virginia, called Flavor.
- Local sustainability publications. Grid Magazine in Philadelphia is an example of local freely distributed publication that covers sustainability.

- Urbanism. Baltimore's Urbanite is an excellent monthly covering various topics on urban design, sustainability, etc.

- Social innovation.  Philadelphia has an online publication called Philadelphia Social Innovations Journal, which I think is quite interesting, since so many cities claim they are world class, but don't really contribute much to best practice development and innovation.

- Community newspapers.  Are good to have, partly as a medium for local advertising, which generally is too expensive in the big city paper, at least for small businesses, they can provide additional coverage on land use and other issues that may be ignored by the big paper.

These are especially important because many big city newspapers have dropped or downgraded the quality of their local news coverage generally, and the additional publication of zoned local news sections (e.g., the New York Times used to publish special local news sections on Sundays, the Washington Post had more extensive local news inserts, the Detroit News dropped their zoned editions, the Philadelphia Inquirer used to include locally targeted editorials for New Jersey and the Philadelphia suburbs in their local news section, etc.

Solar panels and historic districts: not a simple decision

Left photo:  simple bungalows on the 800 block of Van Buren Street NW.  These houses are not in a historic district.

Middle photo: simple bungalow on the 800 block of Van Buren Street NW with the addition of solar panels on the front roof.

Earlier this week GGW reported in "Preservation staff reject solar panels on Cleveland Park home," that DC's historic preservation office rejected a project to install solar panels on the roof of the building, out of a belief that it would significantly impact the architectural style of the house, vis-a-vis its inclusion in the Cleveland Park Historic District.

The article cites a piece by Matt Yglesias, who makes an interesting (but obvious) point:

The preservation process narrowly excludes every single factor except for historic "compatibility." In most public decisions, officials weigh a variety of factors against one another. Here, the board must ignore the value of environmental sustainability, the economic impact, and even the owner's hardship or religious freedom. 

He thinks this is a bad thing.  I don't.

The reason I disagree with Yglesias is obvious.  Historic compatibility is the whole point of having historic preservation zoning to begin with.  Why else would you go through the trouble to document the cultural and architectural history of a neighborhood if your aim wasn't to preserve the neighborhood?

Part of this comes down to the "greater good."  Most religious objections to historic preservation regulations are spurious.  Most individual hardship arguments are personal, immaterial to the house so much as the owner's financial condition.

While I think there should be revolving funds and other support programs to assist people who can't otherwise afford maintaining a house to historic preservation standards, in my experience, most individual hardship arguments are spurious as well.

The same goes for "economic impact."

The reason that historic preservation guidelines work the way they do is to preserve the great economic value present in the historic district as a whole, a point that Yglesias seems to miss.  The reality is that in most communities with historic district regulations, the historic districts have significantly higher values than comparable undesignated areas.  In fact, historic preservation tends to be the most reliable urban revitalization tool, especially for neighborhoods.

Plus, most of the time, changes in buildings made as a result of "personal freedom" are not made with no impact on others.  Changes that reduce the architectural integrity and other place qualities and values of individual properties can reduce the value of neighboring properties significantly, such as how living next to an empty, foreclosed house has been found to have a negative effect on property value of abutting houses averaging $150,000 per property.  (Research I've seen on the impact of architecturally inappropriate changes shows a property value reduction of around $60,000 for abutting and nearby properties.)


By repositioning the value and identity of neighborhoods around historic preservation, neighborhoods are stabilized and become more competitive in terms of metropolitan residential landscape.

This has been an essential element of the "back to the city" population movement and can't be ignored by cities focused on maintaining the place and economic value of their communities.

The current policy with regard to solar panels, which I think is reasonable, considers addition of solar panels on the front, visible portion of the house to be out of character, and therefore requests for such changes are routinely denied.

Certainly, the images above, showing the same types of houses on the 800 block of Van Buren Street NW, one with solar panels, the others without, demonstrates that there is no question that the building with solar panels looks significantly different.

That being said, dealing with how residential energy generation impacts historic buildings needs to be constantly monitored and considered (even though generally, historically designated houses tend to be far more "sustainable" than non-designated houses), especially if you want historic neighborhoods to remain in demand and (somewhat) flexible as homeowner preferences change.  This was a point made a couple years ago in a Scientific American blog post, "Are old houses doomed? The conflict between historic preservation and energy efficiency."

Given the reality that "traditional solar energy" is still significantly subsidized (and frankly, probably geo-thermal systems make more sense economically, especially for single family detached homes with decent sized yards), it makes sense to not be overly hasty in taking up and approving new types of treatments impacting historic districts, without necessarily waiting for better alternatives.  

The more commonly available technology, the "traditional" solar panel may not be the best choice.  Clearly there are many newer alternatives that appear to be more historically-appropriate than products that are more typically available.  Our focus should be on supporting the historically-appropriate options and not supporting the inappropriate options.

Below left: solar tiles; below right: solar shingles.

 

Given how this Angie's List article, "Go green, save green with a solar metal roof," describes the installation of a metal roof with solar laminate panels in Louisville, Kentucky (image by Maggie Harmon), clearly the technological developments underway with solar electrical generation are significant and multiple and deserve careful consideration, with a focus on yielding historically-appropriate outcomes that ideally also work for homeowners interested in deploying solar energy applications.

 And I'd like to see Hardie board that works as solar panels (it would be great for west facing side of our house, which gets terrific sun in the afternoons, including in winter).

Another tricky issue by the way is the addition of house-appropriate wind turbines.  This was an issue in Baltimore County when I worked for the Office of Planning there in FY10.  And it is coming up more frequently in New York City.  Washington is a windier city than people realize, and small wind turbines could be worth considering.  They'd be easy to pop on top of office buildings, but maybe more out of place in residential neighborhoods.

Image: Skystream 3.7 residential wind turbine, Atlanta, Georgia, deployed in a neighborhood that is eligible for historic designation.  CityData photo.

Preservation NJ has a good blog post about these issues,"Solar panels & other renewables in historic districts."  

And I think it makes sense for the Historic Preservation Office to have a standing committee, including citizens, to advise the office on sustainability related matters, at the same time recognizing that haste makes waste.

"Bad editors" #1: op-ed comparing investment in innovation vs. private equity acquisition of extant businesses

The Post had an op-ed, "Forget Bain — Obama’s public-equity record is the real scandal," by Marc Thiessen, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, stating that Pres. Obama's re-election campaign has a problem vis-a-vis railing on Mitt Romney's track record in private equity, because of problems that have transpired with many of the federal investments.

The reason that I say this is a problem of bad editing, although I imagine that the op-ed page editors don't provide much "guidance" to the writers, who are already pre-approved, has to do with the fact that first stage investment in new technologies is completely different from buying and fixing existing companies, which is mostly what Bain Capital was doing under Mitt Romney, with some exceptions (like investing in new companies like the Staples office supply retail chain).

So Thiessen's piece isn't comparing the same kind of track record at all. Were I one of the editors of the op-ed page, I would have had serious reservations with the piece, I would have expressed them to the author, and I would have considered not running the piece without significant revisions.

(E.g., recently I had a friendly argument with a friend-colleague who writes a column for a community newspaper in DC about an article she was preparing, because by focusing only on the "now", significant issues that needed to be addressed to present a full story, were ignored by the story, so to my way of thinking it was substantively incomplete.)

It's the job of an editor to point out flaws in argumentation and to ensure that a published piece is complete.

By definition investments in new technologies are much more risky and involve much different processes--developing the technology, setting up production lines, buying new equipment, etc.--as opposed to what companies like Bain Capital mostly do, which is to buy companies through a process called leveraged buyouts.

Through LBOs, companies are acquired mostly with debt, and to pay of the debt and earn high returns relative to the invested equity, they rightsize companies, close plants, sell off parts of the company, layoff people, etc.

Bain Capital is a private equity firm, not a "venture capital" firm, although even venture capital tends to be somewhat conservative and doesn't invest in the development of new technologies with long development periods.

Federal investments in companies like ECOtality or Solyndra are venture capital investments, not leveraged buyouts. The respective firms are at much different stages in their development as businesses, and the "success rates" between these forms of investment are not comparable.

Besides, federal investments in new energy technologies aren't exactly playing on a level field, partly because of production cost differentials and other incentives present in other countries, such as China, and because competitive forms of energy, particularly gasoline and natural gas, are much cheaper, making scaling up and being competitive with new energy technologies especially relating to solar power and electric vehicles much more difficult.

Another way to think about this is in terms of the DARPA research funding arm of the Department of Defense. These days, with mobile apps and online shopping, it's easy to forget that the "Internet" was originally created as a redundant network to support communications between universities, funded to generate ideas and approaches to maintaining communications in the face of nuclear war.

It took about 25 years for the "Internet" to begin to become a platform for communications for everybody, after multi-threading and graphical capabilities were developed for the network (by Tim Berners-Lee) which were later extended into the "web browser" which Marc Andreassen gets credit for "inventing" but he was involved because it was a project he was assigned to do at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. The New York Times first published an article about the Mosaic web browser in August 1994.

Resources on technology development include:

- Diffusion of Innovations by Everett Rogers
- AnnaLee Saxenian's writings on differences in how technology firms and clusters are organized and how this impacts innovation
- Geoffrey Moore's work on the "crossing the chasm" between selective use of rew technologies versus widespread adoption

In short, Mitt Romney wasn't focused on developing new technologies and building new firms (and employment opportunities) so much as he was focused on wresting any vestige of profit out of businesses that had been around for decades.

That's fine, that's important (but bloody and comes at great human cost with extranormal financial returns for those placed to benefit) but it's not venture capital.

Opposition to smart meters

Smart meters are one piece of creating a "smarter" electricity grid, and provide more detailed information about demand and allow for timeshifting demand to periods of more ample supply, etc. According to the Los Angeles Times, in "Opponents of PG&E 'smart meters' stand firm," opposition to smart meters is present in California and Maine over concern about electromagnetic radiation.

From the article:

The meters transmit data about electrical use over wireless networks to the utility company, enabling it to assess power demands and make adjustments to prevent blackouts, and giving consumers real-time data to help them reduce consumption. They are an integral part of efforts to create a "smart grid" nationwide that uses electricity more efficiently and can better accommodate alternative energy sources.

Nonetheless, finishing the installation in California won't be easy. The new meters have galvanized an unusual alliance of environmentalists, city planners, private land owners and politically conservative activists worried about the health effects, accuracy and privacy of smart meters, as well as jurisdictional conflicts with PG&E.

The "tea party" recently hosted a gathering of smart-meter opponents in Santa Barbara.

Protesters also gathered this month in Sacramento and at PG&E's San Francisco headquarters. Joshua Hart, director of a group called Stop Smart Meters!, said participants included "people with heartbreaking personal stories to tell about sleeping in the parking lots of churches and department stores to escape the bursts of electromagnetic radiation that have made them ill and fearful."

Chattanooga Tennessee by the way is the first U.S. community to have a program to install smart meters uniformly across the utility district. (It also comes with broadband computer service.)

In a recent issue of the New Yorker, there is a fascinating story about mental illness, deinstitutionalization, and the inability to deal with people who do not acknowledge mental illness (25% of people in jail or prison have mental illness), the lack of adequate community care, and how some people "can't be helped" and die as a result.

In the same issue, seemingly unrelated, is a book review of a book on the history of vaccination including the opposition to vaccination in some quarters (some people say that autism is a result of vaccination, etc.), that this opposition has been present since the beginning of the development of vaccination programs out of a sense that people shouldn't be forced to do anything, and that how small numbers of people can still be safe without being vaccinated because of the "herd reservoir" effect that most people have been vaccinated, but that if this number increases only slightly, the prospect for reviving epidemics increases.

It strikes me that opposition to smart meters comes out of the same kind of thinking about individuality and the power to stay apart (seemingly). It's interesting because people become very selective about the type of government power and services that they are okay with or willing to consume--you don't see many people repudiating the value of the street network...

It's as if the more knowledge we have, the less we are willing to use it.