Is Suburban Living a Matter of Trade-offs?

BY BILL GERLACH | FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER

A few weeks back, my friend Nate gave me the heads up on a story from USA Today about a study that concluded that walkable communities have happier people.

It seemed logical enough so I went off to calculate Tiverton's own Walk Score. Guess what? My fears were realized when our score came back: Zero. Zilch. Nadda. Our community is not walkable according to this tool.

It makes sense. Aside from areas like North Tiverton, Main Road and the Commons in Little Compton, there is little in the way of sidewalks and other alternative transportation infrastructure to get your human-powered transportation on. Sure, you don't need nice neat sidewalks to head out for a walk, but between the craziness of back-road drivers and the lack of destinations, there is little incentive to leave the car at home.

When talking it over with my wife, we launched into a broader discussion about the trade-offs of suburban living in the Sakonnet area:

My Wife: "The suburbs are all about trade-offs."

Me: "Yes, but..."

My Wife: "You don't have sidewalks, but you do have a big yard to garden."

Me: "I know. I do like that."

My Wife: "And we have good schools. And the ocean. And..."

Me: "Agreed. But we should be able to have it all..."

And so it went. If life is about navigating the give and take of everyday living then shacking up in the burbs certainly presents you with some challenging terrain.

Here are a few more supposed trade-offs that come to mind:

• More open space versus having all your shopping needs fulfilled in town
• Yards for kids to play in versus having to head to the community playground or park
• Having the ocean at your back door versus being landlocked on an urban island
• Farms and farmers bolstering our local food infrastructure versus shipping all our food in from miles away

I'm sure you could think of many more. But does it have to be that way?

Could suburban living ever be transformed to one of true sustainability -- both at the individual household level and the collective community level? What if very real and tangible scenarios -- like steep rises in the cost of gasoline -- forced us to redesign how we went about our day-to-day? Should we be proactively planning for these things through something like a Transition Initiative or wait and cross that bridge when (note: not 'if') we get there?

What do you think? Were there conscious trade-offs in your decision to live in the burbs? Do you wish anything could be different? Is the Best of Both Worlds a pipe dream?

Be well,
Bill

P.S.: If everything sticks to schedule, my new bi-weekly column, Simple Green Living will debut in next week's East Bay Life section of the Sakonnet Times. Be sure to check it out and let me know what you think. Thanks!

[image: andygeek]

Saving Suburbia (Part III): Ditching the Car

Over the last few weeks I've been giving a lot of thought to another one of those big(ger) ideas for saving suburbia: alternative transportation options. Or put more simply: Ditching your car/truck in favor of a less-impactful way of getting around town.

"No way," I'm sure you'll say. "Can't be done."

I admit, the idea of a suburban lifestyle sans the car is a tough one to sell. The inherent layout and design of your typical suburban town is self-limiting: Disconnected neighborhoods spread out over a large land area; roads built primarily for four wheels and little else; small pockets of limited economic and business activity that cause consumers to drive long distances to get what they need, when they need it; a general car-centric mentality that's so engrained it's tough to buck.

All that aside, a few things have happened recently around town that do provide a glimmer of hope:

• News that Stafford and Crandall Roads will be receiving new "Share the Road" signage courtesy of of the RI DOT that aim to raise awareness of and promote bicycle traffic. This is in addition to new signage that was a part of the Main Road corridor improvement work that happened over the summer.
• Last week's passing of new business zoning regulations that will set the stage for transforming the north end and Bliss Four Corners parts of town into more pedestrian-friendly and inviting community-scapes.
• Continued development of the new artists' community at Sandy Woods that showcases the effectiveness of mixed-use neighborhood and community design.

Clearly, this will not enable all of us to leave the cars at home and still get things done. But what else do we need? Here are my two-cents:

• Continued partnering between Town Planning and Economic Development entities that look to shape other pockets of value-added business development in town. Basically, cut down on the distances that people have to travel to secure the necessities of living while promoting local businesses. Start with basics such as food, then go from there with a preference for small, mom-and-pop style endeavors. This could be at the macro, multi-neighborhood level, or in the case of the Sandy Woods project, at the micro, single neighborhood level.
• Partner with local businesses and/or the town to install bike racks to encourage car-less travel
• Continue to repair/install sidewalks
• Renewed enforcement of speed limits and other safe driving behaviors to create a safe environment for walking, biking, etc.
• Exploration of in-town public transportation (e.g., small-scale bus or shuttle services) to get people to these new town centers
  
• Take additional cues from other urban-based transportation planning playbooks

This problem won't be solved overnight and I'm firmly grounded in the reality that we're not going to wake up one morning and not need our cars, but improved suburban transit could benefit us on so many levels: environmental, health, economic and so on.

What about you? Would you ditch your car once or twice a week if the infrastructure was in place?

Saving Suburbia (Part II): Transition Towns

Way back in December, I wrote a post on “saving suburbia” spurred on by the announcement of a proposed 650-acre Eco-Village development here in town. My intent was to follow that up periodically with other thought-provoking ideas out there on how to transform the inherent design failures of modern suburbia into something more promising and sustainable. (Clearly things – work, school, baby – got in the way of that well-intentioned plan.)

During my research I happened upon a UK-based movement knows as “transition towns”. I squirreled away my notes and there they sat until one day, fellow Sustainable Sakonnet reader Jeremy happened to forward a note about a NY Times Magazine article chronicling transition town efforts here in the U.S. I just love when things come full circle like that!

In a nutshell, the transition town premise is that Peak Oil and Climate Change will negatively impact life as we know it in the not-so-distant future. The solution: Start preparing now by figuring out how to solve these pending dilemmas at the community level.

To that end, the Transition Town (TT) movement offers community members a literal game plan and playbook for recruiting and organizing their fellow neighbors, then developing solutions for everything from energy to transportation to food. TT doesn’t provide communities with the answers; it merely supplies the tools for you to figure that out on your own.

It appears to be working with – according to the article – over 150 TTs in existence across the globe. Closer to home, a national arm of the grassroots organization has formed (Transition United States) to provide guidance and resources to communities through hands-on training and ongoing support. One by one, a network of Transition initiatives is taking root across the county: Los Angeles, Boulder County, Colorado, Sandpoint, Idaho (the feature location for the Times Magazine article).

Now, I read something like that and say, “Let’s rock! This is something that we could do right here!” Then, the reality of community organizing hits me upside the head and retorts, “Sakonnet could never get something like this off the ground. Too polarizing. Too tree-hugger. You’ll get kind words of support but little action. People are too pre-occupied with other things…” The list of excuses goes on.

But could we?

I know from professional experience that if you involve others in the solution, they are more apt to support it, give it a try, and less apt to shoot it down. From that angle, the TT concept makes sense. But do enough people in our community feel this passionate about the potential life-altering consequences of the post-carbon crash and climate catastrophe to do something of this scale?

Please, someone, take me off of this pessimistic ledge I’m holding on to...

More TT resources:

• Official TT Wiki
• TTs in action (Ashland, Ireland)
• TT coverage on TreeHugger.com
• Rob Hopkins (TT Founder) YouTube interview

Saving Suburbia (Part I): To Eco-Village or Not

For a while (OK, years) I’ve thought about how the collective we might go about “saving” that grand ol’ plan of post-WWII expansion known as “suburbia”. Clearly, at the time it sounded like a good idea, but with time comes wisdom and of course, hindsight. Alas we now know that it is at the heart of why the U.S. is leads the world in carbon emissions. You just can’t walk to the store when it’s ten miles and half-a-dozen-40-mile-per-hour-no-sidewalk roads away.

But what if you could start over? Re-architect the whole thing? Build it from the ground up with sustainability woven into every single construction-laden fiber?

I guess that’s the idea behind the eco-village concept. And last week, that hit home with this interesting announcement.

Clearly, if you’re coming to the table with this kind of plan, you’re coming out swinging. Hence you hire a PR agency to pitch it with all the fanfare and spotlights you can (those spotlights, mind you, help to blind you from the details, which many times are scant at this point in the whole thing). You have some fresh concept posters. You give it a cool name.

All that aside, this thing is massive. Six hundred and fifty acres spanning both sides of a major highway; industrial and residential mix-use areas; pre-powered with its own wind and solar arrays build in; agriculture, retail, trails; the list goes on. New zip code anyone?

Not wanting to pass an uninformed judgment, I set out to learn more about other eco-villages. What I found was interesting.

The Global Eco-village Network is a good resource for learning about and finding a large listing of these sustainable communities across the globe. Another listing/tracking site I came across was Intentional Communities.

No matter the listing, traditionally, the typical motivations behind these shared living communities are social, environmental, and/or spiritual. While there is a more-with-less approach it is kind of Three Musketeers at the end of the day – one for all, all for one. Micro-governance structures are in place with shared decision making the primary means of “law”. Many times there is strong link to permaculture.

Check out some of the specific communities I found (I tried to find ones with decent websites). All are in various stages of formation. This list is in no way exhaustive.

• Abundance Ecovillage, Fairfield, IA
• Nubanusit Neighborhood and Farm, Peterborough, NH
• Sawyer Hill EcoVillage, Berlin, MA

My take-away: The new eco-development proposal for Tiverton is at a scale unlike any of the eco-villages I checked out. Is that to say such scale and size is un-doable, contrary to what a sustainable living infrastructure is supposed to be? I don’t know. It reminds me of driving through Utah and seeing new towns being build literally out of nowhere on huge tracks of land.

But the thought of clearing all that land to develop all this makes me wary. I’m all for doing more with that industrial space off of Eagleville and agree that would be great for our local economy. But adding 480 new homes and trying to figure out how to support all that with an already strapped municipal infrastructure is concerning. And then there is the “gated community” portion of the plan – that just flies in the face of what true cooperative living is all about. And finally, there are other potential placement opportunities for renewable energy structures in town (if the town could just its act in gear and push forward with all that).

So, if clear-cutting and building from scratch is not an attractive way to save suburbia, what is? Stay tuned for Part II…