Auto plant vs. neighborhood: The Poletown battle

John Saber, one of the last residents of Poletown, sits on the front steps of his home on Kanter Street in 1983.

Click for more photos

By Jenny Nolan, Detroit News
January 27, 2000

In 1981, General Motors and the cities of Detroit and Hamtramck collaborated in a grand plan to bring industry back to what was perceived as a dying city, to add to the two cities' tax coffers and to keep the automotive business centered in Detroit.

In the process, the city lost a neighborhood, the Catholic Archdiocese lost the faith of some of their flock and 4,200 people lost their homes.

At the tail end of the once promising urban renewal movement of the 1960's, Detroit had not seen much improvement. Neighborhoods had been razed for expressways, or for 'new development' which never materialized. Stores and shops were closing down at a rapid pace, churches were losing their congregations to the suburbs, and industry was turning elsewhere, moving out to the far suburbs where space was not at a premium and crime and crumbling infrastructure were not issues.

And then General Motors and Detroit Mayor Coleman Young hatched a plan: If the city would get the land, the auto company would build a state-of-the-art plant, crossing the border with Hamtramck, employing 6,000 people and providing a glittering example of what the auto companies and their suppliers could do in the city of their birth.  READ MORE

Here's another article about Poletown that appeared in Time magazine on March 30, 1981.

Have things really changed?

Money magazine (September 22, 2009) did a follow-up on what happened to the Poletown plant and other GM plants as well.  Now that the Volt is slated for production there, the plant may have a second chance to fulfill the promise of jobs and prosperity.  Time will tell.

Preparing for climate change 'will boost economy'

An article on the BBC citing many shortcomings of current infrastructure in a future affected by climate change. They note how large sections of society are very energy dependent, specifically internet businesses, mobile phones, and transportation (incl. roads).

Preparing for climate change 'will boost economy'
"Early preparation for climate change impacts would bring economic benefits to the UK, say engineers in a report commissioned by the government."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12384389
BBC News, 7 February 2011

Slow Money

"Slow Money gets right to the heart of everything that's ailing our economy and corroding our culture....It offers a formula for a new kind of capitalism in which farmers' markets and stock markets both flourish."  Kerry Trueman, Huffington Post

Principles

In order to enhance food security, food safety and food access; improve nutrition and health; promote cultural, ecological and economic diversity; and accelerate the transition from an economy based on extraction and consumption to an economy based on preservation and restoration, we do hereby affirm the following:

I. We must bring money back down to earth.

II. There is such a thing as money that is too fast, companies that are too big, finance that is too complex. Therefore, we must slow our money down -- not all of it, of course, but enough to matter.

III. The 20th Century was the era of Buy Low/Sell High and Wealth Now/Philanthropy Later—what one venture capitalist called “the largest legal accumulation of wealth in history.” The 21st Century will be the era of nurture capital, built around principles of carrying capacity, care of the commons, sense of place and non-violence.

IV. We must learn to invest as if food, farms and fertility mattered. We must connect investors to the places where they live, creating vital relationships and new sources of capital for small food enterprises.

V. Let us celebrate the new generation of entrepreneurs, consumers and investors who are showing the way from Making A Killing to Making a Living.

VI. Paul Newman said, "I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer who puts back into the soil what he takes out." Recognizing the wisdom of these words, let us begin rebuilding our economy from the ground up, asking:

* What would the world be like if we invested 50% of our assets within 50 miles of where we live?
* What if there were a new generation of companies that gave away 50% of their profits?
* What if there were 50% more organic matter in our soil 50 years from now?

Sustaining Our Commonwealth of Nature and Knowledge

Herman Daly

by Herman Daly, The Daly News


Let’s start with this phrase: “sustaining our commonwealth.” By sustaining, I don’t mean preserving inviolate; I mean using, without using up. Using with maintenance and replenishment is an important idea in economics. It’s the very basis of the concept of income, because income is the maximum that you can consume today and still be able to produce and consume the same amount tomorrow – that is, maximum consumption without depleting capital in the broad sense of future productive capacity. By commonwealth, I mean the wealth that no one has made, or the wealth that practically everyone has made. So it’s either nature – nobody made it, we all inherited it – or knowledge – everybody contributed to making it, but everyone’s contribution is small in relation to the total and depends on the contributions of others. In managing the commonwealth of nature, our big problem is that we tend to treat the truly scarce as if it were non-scarce. The opposite problem arises with the commonwealth of knowledge, in which we tend to treat what is truly not scarce as if it were.

Clarifying Scarcity

There are two sets of important distinctions about goods, and they make four cross-classifications (see figure below). Goods can be either rival or non-rival, and they can be either excludable or non-excludable. My shirt, for example, is a rival good because if I’m wearing it, you can’t wear it at the same time. The warmth of the sun is non-rival because I can enjoy the warmth of the sun, and everyone else can enjoy it at the same time. Rivalness is a physical property that precludes the simultaneous use of goods by more than one person. Goods are also excludable or non-excludable. That’s not a physical concept, that’s a legal concept, a question of property. For example, you could wear my shirt tomorrow if I let you, but that’s up to me because it’s my property. My shirt is both rival and excludable, and that’s the case with most market goods. Meanwhile, the warmth of the sun is both non-rival and also non-excludable. We cannot buy and sell solar warmth; we cannot bottle it and charge for it. Goods that are rival and excludable are market goods. Goods that are non-rival and non-excludable are public goods. That leaves two other categories. Fish in the ocean are an example of goods that are rival and non-excludable. They are rival, because if I catch the fish, you can’t catch it. But they are also non-excludable, because I can’t stop you from fishing in the open seas. The management of goods that are rival and non-excludable gives rise to the famous tragedy of the commons – or the tragedy of open-access resources, as it’s more accurately called. Now, the other problematic category consists of goods that are non-rival and excludable. If I use the Pythagorean Theorem, I don’t prevent you from using it at the same time. Knowledge is non-rival, but it often is made excludable through intellectual property and patent rights. So those are two difficult categories that create problems. One is the tragedy of the commons, and the other we could call the tragedy of artificial scarcity.

The Commonwealth of Nature

Fish in the ocean are an example of the commonwealth of nature. I’ll ague that natural goods and services that are rival and have so far remained non-excludable should be enclosed in the market in order to avoid unsustainable use. Excludability can take the form of individual property rights or social property rights – what needs to be avoided is open access. For dealing with the broad class of rival but, up to now, non-excludable goods, the so-called cap-auction-trade system is a market-based institution that merits consideration.
In addition to its practical value, the cap-auction-trade system also sheds light on a fundamental issue of economic theory: the logically separate issues of scale, distribution, and allocation. Neoclassical economics deals mainly with the question of allocation. Allocation is the apportionment of resources among competing uses: how many resources go to produce beans, how many to cars, how many to haircuts. Properly functioning markets allocate resources efficiently, more or less. Yet the concept of efficient allocation presupposes a given distribution. Distribution is the apportionment of goods and resources among different people: how many resources go to you, how many to somebody else. A good distribution is one that is fair or just – not efficient, but fair. The third issue is scale: the physical size of the economy relative to the ecosystem that sustains it. How many of us are there and how large are the associated matter-energy flows from producing all our stuff, relative to natural cycles and the maintenance of the biosphere. In neoclassical economics, the issue of scale is completely off the radar screen.
The cap-auction-trade system works like this. Some environmental assets, say fishing rights or the rights to emit sulfur dioxide, have been treated as non-excludable free goods. As economic growth increases the scale of the economy relative to that of the biosphere, it becomes recognized that these goods are in fact physically rival. The first step is to put a cap – a maximum – on the scale of use of that resource, at a level which is deemed to be environmentally sustainable. Setting that cap – deciding what it should be – is not a market decision, but a social and ecological decision. Then, the right to extract that resource or emit that waste, up to the cap, becomes a scarce asset. It was a free good. Now it has a price. We’ve created a new valuable asset, so the question is: Who owns it? This also has to be decided politically, outside the market. Ownership of this new asset should be auctioned to the highest bidder, with the proceeds entering the public treasury. Sometimes rights are simply given to the historical private users – a bad idea, I think, but frequently done under the misleading label of “grandfathering.” The cap-auction-trade system is not, as often called, “free-market environmentalism.” It is really socially constrained, market environmentalism. Someone must own the assets before they can be traded in the market, and that is an issue of distribution. Only after the scale question is answered, and then the distribution question, can we have market exchange to answer the question of allocation.
Another good policy for managing the commonwealth of nature is ecological tax reform. This means shifting the tax base away from income earned by labor and capital and onto the resource flow from nature. Taxing what we want less of, depletion and pollution, seems to be a better idea than taxing what we want more of, namely income. Unlike the cap-auction-trade system, ecological tax reform would exert only a very indirect and uncertain limit on the scale of the economy relative to the biosphere. Yet, it would go a long way toward improving allocation and distribution.

The Commonwealth of Knowledge

If you stand in front of the McKeldin Library at the University of Maryland, you’ll see a quotation from Thomas Jefferson carved on one of the stones: “Knowledge is the common property of mankind.” Well, I think Mr. Jefferson was right. Once knowledge exists, it is non-rival, which means it has a zero opportunity cost. As we know from studying price theory, price is supposed to measure opportunity cost, and if opportunity cost is zero, then price should be zero. Certainly, new knowledge, even though it should be allocated freely, does have a cost of production. Sometimes that cost of production is substantial, as with the space program’s discovery that there’s no life on Mars. On the other hand, a new insight could occur to you while you’re lying in bed staring at the ceiling and cost absolutely nothing, as was the case with Renee Descartes’ invention of analytic geometry. Many new discoveries are accidental. Others are motivated by the joy and excitement of research, independent of any material motivation. Yet the dominant view is that unless knowledge is kept scarce enough to have a significant price, nobody in the market will have an incentive to produce it. Patent monopolies and intellectual property rights are urged as the way to provide an extrinsic reward for knowledge production. Even within that restricted vision, keeping knowledge scarce still makes very little sense, because the main input to the production of new knowledge is existing knowledge. If you keep existing knowledge expensive, that’s surely going to slow down the production of new knowledge.

In Summary

Managing the commonwealth of nature and knowledge presents us two rather opposite problems and solutions. I’ve argued that the commonwealth of nature should be enclosed as property, as much as possible as public property, and administered so as to capture scarcity rents for public revenue. Examples of natural commons include: mining, logging, grazing rights, the electromagnetic spectrum, the absorptive capacity of the atmosphere, and the orbital locations of satellites. The commonwealth of knowledge, on the other hand, should be freed from enclosure as property and treated as the non-rival good that it is. Abolishing all intellectual property rights tomorrow is draconian, but I do think we could grant patent monopolies for fewer “inventions” and for shorter time periods.

Some Interesting Books

In an age of erratic weather and instability, people's interest in growing their own food is skyrocketing. The Resilient Gardener presents gardening techniques that stand up to challenges ranging from health problems, financial problems, and special dietary needs to serious disasters and climate change.
Scientist and expert gardener Carol Deppe draws from emerging science in many fields to develop the general principles of gardening for resilience. Gardeners will learn through Deppe's detailed instructions on growing, storing, and using the five crops central to self-reliance: potatoes, corn, beans, squash, and eggs.Learn how to:

• Grow food in an era of wild weather and climate change
• Garden with little to no irrigation or "store-bought" inputs
• Garden efficiently and comfortably (even with a bad back)
• Customize your garden to deal with special dietary needs or a need for weight control
• Make breads and cakes from home-grown corn using original gluten-free recipes (with no other grains, artificial binders, or dairy products)
• Keep a laying flock of ducks or chickens, integrate them with your gardening, and grow most of their feed

And more . . .The Resilient Gardener is both a conceptual and a hands-on gardening book for all levels of experience. Optimistic as well as realistic, Deppe offers invaluable advice for gardeners (and their communities) to flourish.

Social trends are moving toward greater self-reliance, relocalization and sustainability.  A nation of 9-to-5ers is giving way to a spirited movement of innovators, searching for ways to make a life filled with prupose and meaning, instead of simply earning a living.  And they're triving in the place-based "honey bee economy" that restores, preserves and conserves the planet.

Part small business manifesto, part personal finance primer, ECOpreneuring is essential reading for small business owners, prospective entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs starting non-profit organizations and anyone who dreams of a livelihood based on independence, creativity, passion and a commitment to green practices and sustainability.

Mother Nature has shown her hand. Faced with climate change, dwindling resources, and species extinctions, most Americans understand the fundamental steps necessary to solve our global crises-drive less, consume less, increase self-reliance, buy locally, eat locally, rebuild our local communities.
In essence, the great work we face requires rekindling the home fires.Radical Homemakers is about men and women across the U.S. who focus on home and hearth as a political and ecological act, and who have centered their lives around family and community for personal fulfillment and cultural change. It explores what domesticity looks like in an era that has benefited from feminism, where domination and oppression are cast aside and where the choice to stay home is no longer equated with mind-numbing drudgery, economic insecurity, or relentless servitude.Radical Homemakers nationwide speak about empowerment, transformation, happiness, and casting aside the pressures of a consumer culture to live in a world where money loses its power to relationships, independent thought, and creativity. If you ever considered quitting a job to plant tomatoes, read to a child, pursue creative work, can green beans and heal the planet, this is your book.

Updated for the second time since 1992, this book, by a trio of professors and systems analysts, offers a pessimistic view of the natural resources available for the world's population. Using extensive computer models based on population, food production, pollution and other data, the authors demonstrate why the world is in a potentially dangerous "overshoot" situation. Put simply, overshoot means people have been steadily using up more of the Earth's resources without replenishing its supplies. The consequences, according to the authors, may be catastrophic: "We... believe that if a profound correction is not made soon, a crash of some sort is certain. And it will occur within the lifetimes of many who are alive today." After explaining overshoot, the book discusses population and industrial growth, the limits on available resources, pollution, technology and, importantly, ways to avoid overshoot. The authors do an excellent job of summarizing their extensive research with clear writing and helpful charts illustrating trends in food consumption, population increases, grain production, etc., in a serious tome likely to appeal to environmentalists, government employees and public policy experts.

 In this inconsistent but provocative analysis, James Howard Kunstler, a novelist and journalist, mixes memoir, historical essay and reporting to conden the car-dependent suburbanization of America. Kunstler, who writes ably, casts a very wide net: he finds the roots of American individualism in pre-colonial property ownership, decries the abstracting influence of modernism on city architecture and slams road-builder Robert Moses to support his contention that suburbia is a social environment without soul. He offers an intriguing history of the decline of Saratoga Springs, N.Y., his hometown, describes trips to failing Detroit and well-planned Portland, Ore., and dissects "capitals of unreality" like Disney World and Atlantic City. His worthy but sketchily described solutions--a sustainable economy, better neighborhood development and preservation of the countryside--could, however, each merit a book.

Commuters, here's some food for thought: collectively, Americans spend more than 8 billion hours each year stuck in traffic. This is just one of the horrifying statistics mentioned in Jane Holtz Kay's Asphalt Nation, an eye-opening look at the relationship between Americans and their cars. Kay asserts that the automobile is destroying our communities, our environment, and our economic competitiveness, and her supporting arguments are pretty persuasive. In addition to the billions of hours wasted in gridlock, Kay notes that our daily drives are becoming longer and more frequent, and that increased mileage has nullified any advances in emission controls. Asphalt Nation is comprised of three parts: the first, "Car Glut: A Nation in Lifelock," examines the impact of the automobile culture on life in the United States today. "Car Tracks: The Machine That Made the Land" traces the history of cars from Henry Ford to the present, while "Car Free: From Dead End to Exit" imagines a happier future without automobile dependency. What makes Asphalt Nation far more interesting than the typical anti-auto diatribe is Kay's discussion of the cultural mores that helped create America's current car glut--namely, our attitudes toward land use and growth management; her comparisons between American and European practices in these areas are particularly interesting. Others have written about the American love affair with the automobile, but Holtz revisits the discussion with lively writing and a dramatic narrative.

Cities: Atlanta, Georgia

by Kari Larson

·     19^th in the US City Sustainability Ranking in 2008

·     Leads the Southeast in LEED registered buildings

Beltline Project

1.     Background

·     Idea came from the thesis of a grad student at Georgia Tech, Ryan Gravel, 1999

·     The large issue preventing Atlanta from being more sustainable is urban sprawl. - There are 5,000 people living in the city of Atlanta and 5,000,000 people in the metropolitan area.

·     The thesis addressed the need for an infrastructure system that could promote and sustain economic growth in a way that would promote a more sustainable lifestyle.

·     The original project would create a 22-mile long loop around city and construct a light rail system around city accompanied by a linear park and 33-miles of multi use trails. Because of the projects growing support many other projects have been added.

·     The Beltline began being built in 2006 and in 2010 many walkways and parks connecting parts of Atlanta have been opened up for public use.

·     This is a 25-year project, funding has been approved for the first 5 years.  It is projected to cost 2.8 billion dollars.

2.     Environment

·     The project plans on cleaning up over 1,100 acres along the Beltline that have been designated as “brown fields”, areas where the Environmental Protection Agency has declared that it may be complicated to develop because of the presence of hazardous substances, contaminants, or pollutants. 

·     The added parks will increase Atlanta’s green space by 40%, which will add over 1,300 acres of new park space.

·     These parks include retention ponds that protect against flooding

·     An old quarry is in the planning stages to become a 2.5 billion gallon water supply that is meant to supplement Atlanta’s water supply and can be supply water for 30 days to all of Atlanta in case of a drought.   The quarry will also add 3.000 more acres of park to the Beltline.

3.     Transportation

·     The Beltline will allow city residents, who prefer not to use a car or can not afford one, to travel to all of Atlanta’s surrounding neighborhoods as well as connect to the already existing MARTA transit system as well as bus roughs.

·     The Beltline is expected to reduce Atlanta’s carbon footprint by 665,000 metric tons per year simply by reducing the amount of cars on the roads

·     The trails promote people to walk or bike to there destinations rather than ride in a car, which also promotes a healthier lifestyle.

4.     Economy

·     The Beltline allows for the northern and eastern portions of Atlanta to continue to grow in a way that can sustain its growing population and prevent congestion.

·     The project will promote growth in the southern and western parts of the city by creating easier access and will attract simple amenities like grocery stores to areas that do not have easy access to them.

·     The project promotes a more even growth through out the city.

·     There is a green space job-training program to train workers so that they can get jobs working on the beltline. As of 2010 100% of the graduates of the program have been employed and usually work on projects in there own neighborhoods. 

·     With new development comes a higher property tax.  To take this into account, the city of Atlanta plans to implement the largest affordable housing initiative that has ever been undertaken in the city.

E News: January 6

New Data Reveals Mid-size Cities May Be Hotter For Jobs than Larger Cities

CareerBliss.com released the report Tuesday, detailing its projections for the 20 best hiring cities in America this year. The press release is titled "CareerBliss Data Shows Bigger (Cities) Isn't Always Better For Hiring in 2011"; weird grammar aside, the headline intends to highlight cities like Charlotte, N.C. and Hartford, Conn. that crept into the Top 20 list.
But the top of the list was still dominated by big cities, and Chicago was right up there.

Dead Birds Fall From Sky In Sweden, Millions Of Dead Fish Found In Maryland, Brazil, New Zealand

The Huffington Post, Jan. 5  

UPDATE: Wildlife officials say that even more previously unreported dead birds were found in Kentucky last week.

Millions of dead fish surfaced in Maryland's Chesapeake Bay in the U.S., Tuesday, while similar unexplained mass fish deaths occurred across the world in Brazil and New Zealand. On Wednesday, 50 birds were found dead on a street in Sweden. The news come after recents reports of mysterious massive bird and fish deaths days prior in Arkansas and Louisiana.


Green Design Predictions for 2011

As we kick off 2011, there's no better time to reflect on the past year and to make some predictions as to what the coming year may hold. In what's become a bit of a tradition here at Inhabitat, we asked some of our favorite movers and shakers in the green design space to share their forecasts for what 2011 may mean for sustainable design, architecture and the natural and social environment. From the proliferation of share programs and bike culture, to eco-innovations in technology to make building and energy management easier — read on for what some of the most eminent minds in the green design world have to say about 2011.

Read more: Green Design Predictions For 2011! 2011 Green Design Predictions from Inhabitat – Inhabitat - Green Design Will Save the World

Farm Journal: Frozen Pot Roasts and Kidding Preparations

Donna hurls a pot roast onto the pile

You really have to love farm work to subject yourself voluntarily to a cold, wintry day to chip out frozen water buffalo excrement from the ground and put it on a compost pile! Yet that is what Donna and I did today. 

 Check out my blog, http://www.olgabonfiglio.blogspot.com/

It includes various sustainability articles on small farming, local food (including recent videos), passenger trains, organic food, New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina,  GMOs: