When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delivered the keynote address in March at the annual BuiltGreen conference here in Seattle, a dinner was held in his honor on the eve of the event. As a supporter of the BuiltGreen program, I was lucky enough to attend the dinner and to get up close with Kennedy, a man who bears a striking resemblance to his father, the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and who is in person a soft-spoken, passionate environmental advocate with deep experience and a strong moral compass.

I was raised as an Irish Catholic and the Kennedys were iconic in our household. The dinner was a deeply profound moment for me and my twin, Patti Southard, seated on the other side of the table.

Prior to sitting down to dinner, Kennedy spoke fondly about his boyhood memories of exploring the natural beauty of the Puget Sound region with his father, along with friends such as U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and famed climber and Northwest native Jim Whittaker. These experiences, it would seem, helped to form Kennedy’s passion for the outdoors and the environment. Through his work as the prosecuting attorney for the Hudson Riverkeeper and as president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, Kennedy has transformed his passion into his career.

He has since expanded beyond water issues into a holistic realm of environmental action, including serving on the Board of NRDC; one of the groups I believe is making some of the most significant contributions to protecting endangered species. During his keynote address, he referred to the economy as a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, and made it clear that economic opportunity is tied to strong environmental policy and practices.

With about 16 of us around the dinner table including director of the Washington State Department of Ecology, Jay Manning, along with designers, land use attorneys, developers, communications professionals, and other government and non-profit leaders, we each brought our own lens through which we viewed Kennedy’s work that evening. As the conversation warmed up and we discussed everything from skiing at Whistler to the country’s energy grid, Kennedy shared his thoughts on the growing list of environmental challenges we face today, the connections between them, and the role the environment plays in the economy.

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SvR won last year's Golden Helmet award

It’s time for the third annual A/E bike to work challenge. The challenge, which mirrors the Cascade Bicycle Club’s Bike-to-Work Month Commute Challenge, pushes employees of Seattle-area architecture and engineering firms to compete for the most miles ridden by firm and by individual. It starts May 1.

Last year, 22 firms with a total of 368 riders participated, riding 43,075 miles. Mithun rode the most miles: 6,096.

The firm with the highest percentage of riders was SD Architects, with three out of four employees riding to work in May of 2008. SvR Design won the “Golden Helmet,” the competition’s unique award that calculates the overall miles ridden, factoring in the percentage of possible firm riders who rode and the percentage of possible commute trips ridden

The top rider in the challenge was Igor Rozanski of Notkin Mechanical Engineers, who rode 1,018 miles commuting from South Everett to Seattle. Other top riders included Chris Robertson of Shannon & Wilson at 855 miles, and Joe Llona, formerly of TetraTech, at 769 miles.

A/E firms interested in participating in the 2009 contest should contact SvR’s Maika Nicholson or Tony Dollar at (206) 223-0326.

Build LLC's new office

No, I didn’t forget any zeroes.

Build LLC, a four person design-build firm, recently remodeled its Seattle office for $5,095. The project took six weeks and the firm’s own members did the work.

The remodel also included some interesting reclaimed materials, scrap wood and some salvage finds from Boeing Surplus (RIP).

Check out the details, including video and a materials list, on Build’s blog.

Eds Note: Cliff Portman, Principal Land Use Planner with DPD, sent me this poem in response to our ongoing discussion of livability.

Urban Optimum

For each in the city there is a hum and a beat
To which routines and transitions freely repeat.
The flow and the ebb, with less take and more give,
Is the meter of living for work and working to live.

A calm, easy cadence connects home with labors.
No sour note commute nor dead malls for neighbors.
Uses, mixed local and small, supply points of life.
To them walk, pedal or twitter - modal options are rife.

Among other urban livability measures
Are ample green features and amenity pleasures.
Add a multi-cultural chorus, the polyrthmic part,
With civility and inclusion to give place a heart.

More Seattleites muse about livability here and here.

Eds Note: These 50-word definitions of sustainability ran in today’s DJC. Agree or disagree, we’d love to hear your thoughts.

For Seattle to become sustainable, it will have to take advantage of the environment we inherited. Preserving open space and protecting the Sound are paramount to a livable and lasting city. The new waterfront will be our next big test. Finding a way to blend the needs of the people with the needs of environment, that’s what will make Seattle sustainable. It’s not a choice between a vibrant urban experience or nature — it’s having both!

Charles Anderson, Charles Anderson Landscape Architects

Sustainability means creating healthy built environments as a means to supporting the larger ecosystems that provide clean water, air and soil for all of us. A collaborative, interdisciplinary approach to designing, building and maintaining buildings is critical to the overall health of the environment.

Yancy Wright, Sellen Construction

We achieve sustainability by fostering long-term cultural, economic, environmental and social health and vitality — by putting all those things together for our future and remembering it is a continuing endeavor, not an end point. That means involving all of our communities in the work, and ensuring that everyone contributes, and everyone benefits.

Richard Conlin, Seattle City Council President

Sustainability requires a vision of where we want to go, and an adaptive strategy to get there in a way that is just for all people and the planet. Seattle needs strong public and private leadership to articulate the vision and inspire all of us to walk in that direction.

Joel Sisolak, Cascadia Region Green Building Council

Seattle must be seen as part of the bioregion and global biosphere. The path to urban sustainability lies in achieving ecological balance integrated with social, economic and environmental regeneration. We will need to retool the urban infrastructure to significantly reduce waste and over-consumption, become less auto-dependent and more walkable.

Peter Steinbrueck, Steinbrueck Urban Strategies

Seattle should broaden the sustainability focus from LEED to SEED: Social Economic and Environmental Design. Environmental responsibility is not a stand-alone issue. Economic equity and social justice are equally essential to creating sustainable communities. If Seattle can achieve this union, we will be the sustainability visionaries we claim to be.

Owen Richards, Owen Richards Architects

Sustainability in Seattle (the cynical version): A term used by politicians and the mostly-white upper class for public appearance or as a business choice, while not actually contributing to sustainability on a broad scale. Real Sustainability: A movement where sustainable actions are an EASY choice and are undertaken by all walks of life, not just the elite.

Rebecca Deehr, Pedestrian Master Plan Advisory Group

Sustainability is grounded in values of stewardship, sufficiency and justice, and includes economic, environmental and community indicators of well-being. Sustainability goes beyond meeting people’s immediate physical needs to creating a just society with laws and policies that allow their needs, and the needs of all Earth’s inhabitants, to be met.

LeeAnne Beres, Earth Ministry

Sustainability is being good stewards of our environment for ourselves, for our community and for future generations. This means creating spaces that give us shelter and comfort in ways that enhance the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the earth that gives us food instead of degrading them.

Christopher Imbeau, Rafn Co.

Sustainability must include our social structures. As the health of our salmon requires sound water policy, the health of our community requires sound social policy: housing appropriate to the needs of the whole community, access to living-wage jobs, and a region-wide transportation plan that provides real options to the automobile.

Richard Bloom, Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness

Sustainability means systemic continuity; it is equilibrium, balance. In relation to the environment, sustainability suggests systems capable of continuing (though not remaining static. Change is constant) indefinitely, perpetuating life (including people). The planet will likely persist for some time; sustainability might enable humans to survive with it.

Gabriel Scheer, Re-Vision Labs, Seattle Greendrinks

Bike to work and park there too

The Seattle Department of Transportation plans to create on-street bike parking. They’re targeting one to two per neighborhood and plan to start installing the spots next week.

The spots will take over one or two car parking spots with bike racks with a raised curb around them. Each car-sized space will hold eight bikes.  The new program is part of the Bicycle Master Plan, which aims at tripling Seattle bikers over the next decade.

Here are the first three planned spots:

●  Mid block of Broadway East between East Harrison Street and East Republican Street (by Broadway Market)

●  At the corner of 12th Avenue and East Spring Street (by Stumptown Coffee Roasters and Café Presse)

●  At the corner of Woodlawn Avenue Northeast and Northeast 70th Street (by the Greenlake Condominiums)

Is Seattle getting better? Well…yeah. In my own mind this is so clear that the question is always a surprise.

The discussion is generally about pace of growth. It’s easy to understand slow-growthers’ points, like how cheap everything used to be, the comfort of the familiar, or the ease of parking.

But it’s the big-city traits that impress me, like density, walkability, transit, diversity, and energy. One of the great journeys of life is watching this city turn into something greater.

Some of our neighborhood business and mixed-use districts had better retail in the 70s and 80s, but way fewer people lived there, and these places tended to lack energy. Yes there was parking — it dominated the fringes of many areas, like moats of nothingness. Seattle (in-town) has grown by over 20% since we bottomed out in 1986, and a lot of the growth has gone to urban villages. The difference is even more stark in greater Downtown, where many edge neighborhoods were wastelands.

Of course more stuff in proximity usually means greater walkability. We have physical and policy problems there (the City often doesn’t walk its talk),  but we did then, too.

We’re finally getting light rail, and not just a line but a network. Each new line magnifies the value of the lines that connect to it. Our bus service is less exciting, with service far too limited, due in large part to the 80/20 rule. Because the County might never sober up, we need Seattle to subsidize buses the way the State subsidizes Amtrak, possibly with a levy.

We’ve improved immeasurably on the diversity front. While we’ve lost ground on some fronts as the poor areas have edged southward, Seattle has also had big influxes, such as Vietnamese, Russians, Ethiopians, and others. Today’s Seattle is more worldly and interesting, and as Microsoft can tell you, we’ve gained priceless talent (which I hope we don’t lose due to misguided immigration law).

Parks are another improvement area. Downtown still lacks central green space, but the edges are doing better.

By the way, here is Stephen Cysewski’s astonishingly cool photo collection about Seattle in the 70s and 80s.

Aubrey Cohen’s Friday piece on the Seattle housing market got me thinking about paradigm shifts. The shift from faxes to e-mail, for example, took more than a decade. The internet has fundamentally changed business and everyday life –but slowly.

In just the last year, however, we’ve seen collapse of the stock and real estate market, decreases in home values, multiple bank failures (including Washington Mutual) and the potential bankruptcy of the big 3 American automakers.

The typical solution is to loosen rules and allow more borrowing. Credit is the fuel of innovation, driving interest rates lower, inspiring investment, job creation and expansion of the market. But easy money is what got us into this mess in the first place.

And we are in a liquidity trap. Rates can’t go any lower than zero. Despite a bail out, banks are sitting on their cash until things become more stable. Even dropping cash from a helicopter may not inspire spending.

A Keynesian-Obama-New Deal based on infrastructure upgrades might reduce unemployment, but then what? In spite of the many make-work infrastructure projects undertaken by the New Deal, there was the recession of 1938 when the projects were done. Put a shovel in my hand, but will I buy a big screen television? It wasn’t until World War II broke out that that depression ended.

The solutions (and the problems) of the past aren’t working. Since the seventies, taming inflation, not full employment, was the objective of central banks. Ironically, now we are trying to get inflation going with little luck.

Perhaps in 2009 we’ll begin to see a new paradigm, if there is one, take shape.

An economy built on single family homes filled with furniture, appliances and a car out front, all bought with credit, may disappear.

Considering all this, do we really need a rebuilt viaduct? And doesn’t this change our views about affordable home ownership? What does sustainability look like with falling demand for oil and automobiles? Can we cope with getting what we’ve asked for all these years: a less car-dependent culture living within its means in compact communities? Maybe that is the scariest thing of all.

Writers often dream up worlds that are very similar to our own but have fundamental differences that shine a light on what’s wrong with ours. Thomas More’s Utopia and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels come to mind.

But I had a chance to visit just such a parallel world this week in California called Oakland.

Oakland has long been San Francisco’s ugly sister derided for its crime and Gertrude Stein determined that there was no there, there.

It is a small city and it has had its share of issues with crime. But there is a great deal of natural beauty, cultural and compelling architecture not to mention some fantastic historic landmarks.

What makes a trip to Oakland revealing is what its urgent desire to create more multifamily housing in the downtown area. There don’t seem to be the debates we have in Seattle about whether we have growth and whether Seattle should accommodate it. Instead former Mayor Jerry Brown developed the 10K Initiative which set as a goal to create 10,000 new units of housing.

Shocking! Imagine a housing agenda with an actual numerical and geographic target. And add to that the fact that the projects that are listed range from subsidized low income housing to large mixed used projects like the one on 23^rd and Valdez Street. The amazing and historic Cathedral Building is also being converted to condominiums.

My walking tour of these projects took the better part of a day and some of the projects were completely ugly, others run of the mill and some appeared to really be reaching for new ground in design and function.

The sad thing is the effort may not be working. The flailing economy and the uphill climb to reverse the doughnut effect is creating a high vacancy rate—at least anecdotally. Some locals say they are the ones that should be living in the new units, but Oakland just doesn’t work for them.

So while some in Seattle want to shut the door behind them and keep out new growth, or nickel and dime developers with disconnected housing goals (How many? Where? Why?) Oakland is actually going out of its way to identify under utilized parcels and recruit efforts to build housing on them. I am

sure Oakland wishes it had our problems. And the Lesser Seattle folks, I’m sure, wish we had theirs.

Seattle was absent from the American Planning Association’s 2008 Great Places in America list but Boise and Portland both made a showing. Last year, the Pike Place Market made the Great Neighborhoods list.

Could be a protest, could just be lunch time

This year, Boise’s North End Neighborhood was ranked among the 10 Great Neighborhoods and Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square was ranked among the Great Public Spaces by the American Planning Association.

I think it makes sense for Seattle to make the list every year. Still, I’m pleased to see other great Northwest spaces make the cut.

Pioneer Courthouse Square serves at once as Portland’s Grand Central Station and Times Square. It’s sandwiched by Max tracks, hosts public concerts and protests and has built-in chessboards and benches that are popular to the homeless, businesspeople and tourists.

Thirty years ago, it was a parking lot. Portland’s 1972 Downtown Plan proposed the square and in 1982 the group “Friends of Pioneer Square” raised $1.5 million to make the project happen.

Yes, this is Idaho

I’ve spent a lot of time in the square, eating lunch, people watching and waiting for the Max. My one gripe: It could use a few more overhangs for rainy days.

Boise’s North End is a great close-in neighborhood that allows most of its residents a 10 minute walk to downtown Boise and is home to some great old houses.

It has its own little walking district, Hyde Park, that’s peppered with little shops and restaurants. Neighborhoods with strong identities are common in Seattle and Portland, but in Boise, the North End really stands out. In terms of its architecture and walkability, it’s similar to Queen Anne.

Also on the list this year: New York’s Central Park, Wichita’s Old Town, Washington Street in Boston and the Santa Monica Beach.