Portland, sustainable capital of North America
This is an interview I did with Michael Armstrong, senior sustainability manager for the city of Portland.
The city of Portland has taken a number of groundbreaking measures over the years to increase its sustainability. How do you get the support from the public to enact such measures?
Michael Armstrong: A big part of what we do about setting a vision is setting public engagement. We do that through surveys and public workshops attended by the mayor, and we’ve also been working in small groups. We learn a lot from this, and people understand how things work city-wide.
There’s a long tradition of that here. There is this well-established institutional culture and citizen engagement. We sort of joke about this, some people say “do we really have to get people’s opinion on this issue?” Well in Portland, we do. In Portland people care and that’s how they understand the outcomes. People who have less interest in what the municipal government is doing are less likely to move to Portland than, say, Houston.
Some of these measures, like promoting local food, aim at changing people’s behaviours. How do you do that?
We actually think food is relevant to the overall strength of the community. We want these changes to have a health impact, a carbon impact, and local economics impact. The ways we can influence that are somewhat limited, but what the city can do is to support farmers markets, or community-supported agriculture. We have turned city-owned lands into public garden projects. We have a zoning code that we make sure is not getting in the way of these things. We can help people see the relationship between food choices and climate change for example. This goes back to seeing our community as a resource.
One of your newest initiatives is the Clean Energy Works, which encourages residents to renovate and upgrade their houses to reach energy efficiency. How does that work?
This is a key piece of our climate action plan. We have a goal of reducing our carbon emissions to 20% of the carbon we used in 1990, and we’ve been trying to push people to think about how this translates into their daily life.
Energy improvements are paid for by the city and the homeowner repays the loan over time through the energy bill. The key is that it’s the city that makes the investments. Our community workforce agreement has been putting in place standards for labour practices to make sure the jobs that are created by that program are quality jobs. Right now we’re in the pilot phase, doing the first 500 homes.
It's not only about the environment...
These types of upgrades can take years to pay off. How do you gather political consensus to invest into programs that may not yield immediate results?
Cities are used to make investments over periods of time. We think of Clean Energy Works as providing public service. This has value to the community, in the same way that fixing potholes in the street has value, or building a bridge over the river. The difference is that the buildings are privately-owned whereas the roads are publicly-owned. We’re never going to solve problems like climate change if we leave the responsibility to change to the people only.
Another new initiative is EcoDistricts, which aims at increasing sustainability at the neighbourhood level instead of concentrating on single buildings only.
There are opportunities to do much better by sharing resources among buildings. The big challenge there is that our whole system has been structured around not sharing things. If anything goes wrong in my building it’s my problem. This notion of sharing and thinking about ways groups of buildings can perform together much better than individually is exciting. It reminds me about the things we learned in kindergarten like sharing… This is driven by climate change, we’re taking all kinds of risks. There’s a degree of urgency. It’s a safe bet compared to the risks we’re taking with our current emissions.
Next: an interview with Naomi Cole from EcoDistricts.