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 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

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.

Some are making lemonade from the housing bust’s lemons. The New York Times had an interesting story today on cities buying up foreclosed property to prevent blight from seeping into their towns. Boston, Minneapolis, San Diego and others are busy buying up land with public and private dollars, then redeveloping and flipping it.

Housing bust not a bad deal for all

On Morning Edition the story this morning was the “green lining” on the cloud of bad housing news. Nature and land trusts have taken advantage of falling prices and foreclosures to get good deals on properties or areas they plan to turn into open space and preserves, including a significant stretch of coastline on Oahu that will be turned into a wildlife preserve.

And, if you haven’t yet heard through the grapevine, two very non-serious new news sources have hit the Seattle media. One is about (supposedly) ugly condos, the other is Seattle’s own Onionesque fake news site, the Naked Loon that touches on development, politics and just how silly it is to be a Seattleite.

Seven mature trees along the Burke-Gilman trail were likely injected with herbicide and are dead or dying, Seattle Parks and Recreation announced this morning in a press release.

Staff on a routine maintenance visit found three silver poplars and four Douglas Firs along the trail at NE 77th St. had quarter-inch holes drilled into them, and the speed of their death suggests they were likely injected with herbicide.

It's not easy being green

The three poplars are already dead, two of the Douglas firs are dead, and the other two are starting to turn brown.

Parks staff have submitted a police report and said in the release that the crime could be prosecuted under the State Malicious Mischief statute or under the Timber Trespass Statute. Anyone with information is asked to call the Seattle Police Department at 206-625-5011.

The trees are valued at $40,000 to $60,000 and it will take up to 30 years for replacement trees to reach maturity.

My DJC colleague Lynn Porter reported today that the Carroll’s Fine Jewelry clock that has been on Fourth Avenue near Pike Street since 1913 could make a move to MOHAI.

Carrolls Clock photo courtesy of MOHAI

Carroll’s closed this Spring. The Carroll family has donated the two-ton freestanding cast iron timepiece to the Museum of History & Industry.

The Seattle Landmarks Preservation board will weigh in on the landmark’s move at its Aug. 6 meeting.

Eight other Seattle street clocks are also designated city landmarks. They include the Ben Bridge jewelry store clock at the Fourth and Pike Building and the Greenwood Jewelers clock on North 85th Street.

Read more at DJC.com

Transfers of Development Rights are not new. In 1916, New York City planners zoned the city and included a provision letting owners sell their building rights to neighboring lots. In the 1960s, they changed the law so lots didn’t have to be next to each other to TDR-swap.

Thanks for the development rights

In downtown Seattle, the owners of older, landmarked buildings get money for selling their development rights, and downtown developers buy those rights to build bigger on other sites.

King County also has a TDR program that lets developers in areas targeted for growth buy development rights from rural landowners. Vulcan took advantage of that program in 2005, purchasing 19 private TDRs to build 40,000 more square feet at Westlake/Terry. The county’s TDR program sunsets this month.

Now, the Seattle City Council is considering expanding Seattle’s program to other areas of the city. Proponents like former council aide Roger Valdez say other neighborhoods like Capitol Hill and First Hill are also seeing rapid growth and the TDR program will help the city hold on to some of the older buildings that might otherwise get razed.

The Seattle City Council’s Planning, Land Use and Neighborhoods Committee could discuss the idea at its meeting at 9:30 a.m. this Wednesday.

The committee will also talk about raising allowed building heights in Interbay and South Downtown, and about extending the developer incentive program, where developers get to build higher if they build or pay for affordable units.