Cities See the Other Side of the Tracks

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/03/realestate/commercial/cities-see-another-side-to-old-tracks.html

The High Line park, built on an elevated railway trestle in Manhattan, has become both a symbol and a catalyst for an explosion of growth in the meatpacking district and the Chelsea neighborhood. 

 

Now cities around the country, including Chicago, Philadelphia and St. Louis, are working up plans to renovate their aging railroad trestles, tracks and railways for parkland. Cities with little public space are realizing they badly need more parks, and the High Line has taught that renovating an old railway can be the spark that helps improve a neighborhood and attract development.

The High Line’s first and second sections cost $153 million, but have generated an estimated $2 billion in new developments. In the five years since construction started on the High Line, 29 new projects have been built or are under way in the neighborhood, according to the New York City Department of City Planning. More than 2,500 new residential units, 1,000 hotel rooms and over 500,000 square feet of office and art gallery space have gone up.
...

The area around the park, sprinkled with small offices under 200,000 square feet, has become a draw for start-ups and creative companies.

 

Though plans in many cities have a long way to go before becoming reality, a point in favor of reuse is that it can be cheaper to renovate old rail structures than to tear them down. The Reading Viaduct, an old elevated railway line in Philadelphia, would cost $50 million to demolish versus $36 million to retrofit, according to the Center City District, a business improvement group. 

In Chicago, where a 2.65-mile elevated rail line slices through four residential areas, tearing down the line would be prohibitively costly. With 37 bridges and large earthen embankments, the Bloomingdale Trail, as it is now called, snakes east to west across Chicago and is simply too big to go.
...

As with other, similar rail lines around the country, passenger and freight trains have not operated on the Chicago line in at least 10 years. The only traffic most of these lines see is an occasional runner or bike rider, even though trespassing is usually forbidden.

...

The Bloomingdale Trail is moving forward after Rahm Emanuel, who made completing the trail one of his campaign promises, was elected mayor in February. Over the next year, design concepts and engineering work will get under way. The Bloomingdale Trail will allow bikes and dogs, interconnect with new and existing ground-level parks and cost $40 million to $75 million.
In St. Louis, plans are in the works to renovate a 2.1-mile elevated rail trestle and turn it into a park as part of a larger waterfront revitalization project. The Iron Horse Trestle, estimated to cost $50 million, does not have a timeline. Organizers hope to have the first one-mile phase completed in five years.
...

In October, Mike and Matt Pestronk pounced on a 10-story office tower next to the Philadelphia viaduct when it fell into foreclosure and bought it for $5 million. ... The developers plan to renovate the vacant office tower for $25 million and turn it into apartments.... The brothers are trying to improve the area and have done some “guerrilla improvements” to the viaduct, such as weeding and putting down plywood to cover holes, and installing artwork and live video projections on two sides of their building.  Plans for the viaduct are slowly moving ahead after nearly 10 years of grass-roots work.... As a first step, a small section of the trestle owned by a regional transportation authority would be redeveloped for $5.5 million.

...

Atlanta also hired Mr. Corner to help redevelop a 22-mile rail corridor encircling the city. In the next 25 years, Atlanta plans to add 1,300 acres of parks and green spaces, public transit and trails along the necklace, increasing Atlanta green space by nearly 40 percent. The project’s cost is put at $2.8 billion.
...
by Kristina Shevory
FOR FULL STORY GO TO:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/03/realestate/commercial/cities-see-another-side-to-old-tracks.html
The New York Times www.NYTimes.com
August 2, 2011

The Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) and North Side Community Federal Credit Union Train Financial Counselors on the Link between Living Green and Saving Green

http://tinyurl.com/6xyjdup
The Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) and the North Side Community Federal Credit Union recently sponsored a two-day “train the trainer” program for financial counselors to reduce their clients’ household expenses and environmental impact. The program, Equity Express, illustrates that economic and environmental sustainability go hand in hand.

“Despite the popular belief that living ‘green’ is only possible for upper-income households, CNT has consistently found in its research and programs that sustainable practices significantly decrease household expenditures on utility bills, transportation costs, and telecommunications services, to name a few,” said Steve Perkins, senior vice president at CNT. “Households can use sustainable practices to help them save towards goals like homeownership and higher education, while also reducing their environmental impacts. Equity Express shows them how.”

The 13 representatives from nine financial education and homeowner counseling organizations that attended the training can now use Equity Express to show their clients—often low- and moderate-income individuals—how making smart decisions about money has positive impacts for them and the earth. Previous Equity Express Workshop participants in the San Francisco Bay Area have decreased expenses from $20 to $200 per month.

“Our mission at the North Side Community Federal Credit Union is to provide affordable, alternative financial products and services to the community,” said Kristen Cox, Marketing and Community Relations Manager at the North Side Community Federal Credit Union. “We believe Equity Express will add depth to our financial literacy curriculum by providing a participatory and supportive, ongoing six-week class environment in which members learn from each other what best behavioral strategies really work.

Center for Neighborhood Technology www.CNT.org
Press release dated March 17, 2011

A calibrated auction-conjoint valuation method: Valuing pork and eggs produced under differing animal welfare conditions

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0095069611000520
Abstract: This paper develops a valuation method which generates consistent and systematic estimates of people's preferences for complex multi-attribute goods by inextricably linking auction bids with conjoint ratings. The advantage of the valuation approach is that it permits the estimation of people's values for many potential goods, allows one to decompose people's values for a good into its sub-components, and permits the study of preference heterogeneity without distributional assumptions. We apply the method to an important and increasingly controversial topic: animal welfare. The method is used to determine people's preferences for eggs and pork produced from different production systems. Data from experiments conducted in three diverse U.S. locations (Chicago, IL; Dallas, TX; and Wilmington, NC) indicates that people are, on average, willing to pay $0.95 more for a dozen eggs raised in an aviary, pasture system vs. a cage system, and are willing to pay $2.02 more for two-pounds of pork chops raised in a pasture system as opposed to a crate system.

by F. Bailey Norwood and Jayson L. Lusk, both of the Department of Agricultural Economics, Oklahoma State University, 411 Ag Hall, Stillwater, OK 74078, USA
Journal of Environmental Economics and Management via Elsevier Science Direct www.ScienceDirect.com
Volume 62, Issue 1; July, 2011; Pages 80-94
Keywords: Animal welfare; Auction; Conjoint; Discovered preference hypothesis; Willingness-to-pay

Cities Use Brownfields to Go Solar « The Dirt

http://dirt.asla.org/2011/04/13/cities-use-brownfields-to-go-solar/

New York City, Chicago, and Philadelphia increasingly view their contaminated inner-city brownfield sites as natural locations for large-scale solar installations. At the national Brownfields conference, each city explained how solar farms can be set up in the unlikeliest places, saving the money involved in cleaning up some of the worst sites.

Chicago Launches Largest Urban Solar Installation in U.S.

In Chicago, Dave Graham, ... said the City Solar project [was brought to the City by] representatives from Exelon and SunPower, [who] ... wanted to create a massive solar farm on a derelict brownfield site.... It’s the largest urban solar plant in the U.S. Its 32,000 photovoltaic (PV) panels provide 10 MW of energy, enough for 1,500 local homes. In addition, GPS tracking systems help tilt the panels, ensuring the most efficient use of solar energy.

Heavily contaminated sites can cost up to $150,000 per acre to clean up. The West Pullman site for City Solar, which “has a variety of issues,” would have cost $20 million alone to clean up, “something no one in the city wanted to invest in.” As a result, Exelon simply put solar panels on top of the site, leaving the worst soils untouched underground. In some cases, where PV structures need to be installed, the team did actually discover underground storage tanks, which they then removed.

Throughout the process, the local community was consulted. Some residents had concerns about living so close to the new power facilities. Graham said one plus is that the facility is totally quiet.

In the construction process, some 200 jobs were created, “all local labor.” ...

Philadelphia Takes Advantage of Solar America Grants

Philadelphia won a Solar America Cities grant, which they will use to help create renewable power purchasing agreements. Kristin Sullivan, Philadelphia Mayor’s Office for Sustainability, said a number of city-owned sites are already being prepped for solar. In an example of multi-use infrastructure, Philadelphia Water Department’s treatment facilities will also host panels, generating 250 KW of power.

In addition, the city will soon be issuing a request for proposals for a new three MW facility....

New York City Incentivizes Reuse of Brownfields

New York City launched SPEED, a searchable database of brownfield properties, a “real estate search engine”, that has gotten great traffic from the local developer community. Dan Walsh, Mayor’s Office of Operations, New York City government, said SPEED includes historical maps so developers can “toggle through time” and explore some 3,150 vacant commercial and industrial brownfield sites spread throughout the city. The idea is to use some of these sites for solar power plants.

To make it even easier for developers, the city launched a $9 million brownfield reinvestment fund. Each developer of a brownfield site gets $60-140,000 “fast” if they commit to cleaning-up a brownfield or redeveloping for energy uses. The grants can be used to cover expenses involved in design, investigation, clean-up, or insurance, says Walsh.

For brownfield sites that will be used by the public, the city has also launched a Green Property Certification program, which can be shown on site as proof that the area is fit for its intended use. “This is a voluntary, not regulatory program.”

Interestingly, none of these urban policymakers discussed how to turn parts of these new solar facilities into public spaces. Solar facilities need not be cut-off from neighboring communities. If designed well, they can also offer green space or even wildlife habitat. As an example, see Walter Hood’s model solar campus project at the University of Buffalo, which will be both public art installation and 1.1 MW solar power facility.

by asladirt
The Dirt - Connecting the Built & Natural Environments
http://dirt.asla.org
April 13, 2011

Aurora nixes proposal for wind turbines at police HQ

http://beaconnews.suntimes.com/news/4442361-418/city-nixes-wind-turbine-plan-at-police-headquarters.html#
A plan to install five wind turbines at the Aurora Police Department headquarters has been axed by Mayor Tom Weisner.

“In looking at the numbers, there’s probably a program that would have a better return on investment,” said Chief of Staff Carie Anne Ergo.

Instead, Ergo said, the city will look to expand existing green programs, like the Waubonsee Greenworks partnership, designed to help local contractors undertake commercial and residential building audits, or the energy-efficiency grants intended for Aurora businesses and homeowners....

City staff requested that Shaw Environmental complete a cost-benefit analysis of the project
...
The project was slated to cost $213,500 and would have been funded by a $1.57 million Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant.

The 23-foot turbines. which would have been placed directly east of the police headquarters building on Indian Trail, would provide 7.5 kilowatts of power, according to Kris Kiszynski of Shaw Environmental, the firm slated to complete the project.

Lawrence said at the meeting that the turbine output did not justify the cost of the project.
...
The turbines would have provided about .2 percent, or one-fifth of 1 percent, of the amount of power the police station now uses, or about as much power needed to power one to two homes, Kiszynski said. Kiszynski said that would equal a savings of $560 to $1,200 a year.

But Barb Katterman, special assistant of development facilitation and the police headquarters project manager, said it would reduce the station’s energy use, would create jobs and could be used as an educational tool.

In late January, the city installed two 38-foot-tall wind turbines on McCoy Drive, at Waterford Drive and at Frontenac Street on Aurora’s far East Side. The turbines, which were estimated to generate 10 to 20 times the amount of power the traffic signal would use, cost $117,400 and were also funded as part of the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant."

By Stephanie Lulay
The Beacon News http://beaconnews.suntimes.com
March 22, 2011
For Full Story Go To:
http://beaconnews.suntimes.com/news/4442361-418/city-nixes-wind-turbine-plan-at-police-headquarters.html#