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Collection: Making Sustainability Legal

Unbanning Clotheslines

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Editor’s Note: We’ve followed up on this post here and here, documenting how many bans are actually void.

Elizabeth Morris and her family bought their house in the High Point neighborhood for a reason. “High Point is the City of Seattle’s premier ‘Green Community,’ having been touted internationally as such, as well as [for] mixing Seattle Housing Authority [SHA] rental properties and private home ownership,” she explained. It’s a compact, walkable, mixed-income, energy-efficient, green-built neighborhood peppered with bicycle commuters and rain barrels. So Morris was shocked to find that at High Point, clotheslines are banned.

“Homeowners have even been warned that it is illegal,” Morris said. “Not only are owners not allowed to save energy by hanging out laundry but those who rent from SHA (read: low income) aren’t allowed to save on their energy bills either.”

Like over 60 million other Americans and Canadians, Morris lives in a neighborhood governed by a homeowners association (HOA). These quasi-private governments, along with some apartment blocks and condominiums, are largely free to set rules as they see fit. Penalties for violations range from fines to forced expulsion. Imagine being banished by your neighbors for drying your clothes!

Clothesline bans are wrong headed, because line drying’s advantages are numerous. For one, anyone who hang dries will tell you that clothes last much longer: all that lint in your dryer filter has to come from somewhere! Benefits go beyond that, however: according to the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, households in the Northwest states use 4.3 percent of their annual electricity consumption to dry laundry. To put that into perspective, even our refrigerators only gobble up 3.5 percent. As the New York Times highlighted in an article last year, the typical US household could prevent 1,500 pounds of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere each year simply by turning off its dryer and hanging out the wash. Oh, and clotheslines never burn down your house; in the US alone, dryers cause more than 12,000 residential fires annually.

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Law and Order and Parking Lots

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There’s no better measure of our perverse relationship with cars than the fact that nearly every city and town in North America has laws requiring drinking establishments to provide parking, and yet roadside memorials to victims of drunk driving are mostly illegal. A single year of alcohol-impaired driving kills more Americans than the last decade of war has, but our land use codes practically encourage driving home from taverns. Bar owners can be held legally liable for their patrons who imbibe too much, but our laws force owners to offer parking for their customers.

Can we stop the madness?

In this post, we take a look at how Northwest municipalities deal with parking at drinking establishments. Who gets it wrong, and who gets it (almost) right? The answers may surprise you. At the end, I’ll explain how easy it would be to fix the problem.

Let’s start with the laggards.

Despite its vaunted reputation for sustainable urbanism, Vancouver, BC may have among the worst parking mandates in the region (code, p. 9). Calculated based on the amount of floor space open to the public, the baseline requirement for businesses that sell liquor for on-site consumption is 1 parking space per 60 square feet (5.6 square metres).

Given that a typical parking space somewhere in the range of 170 square feet, and that the smallest parking space Vancouver allows is 148 square feet, it means that in many cases Vancouver bars must provide nearly three times more space for cars than for drinkers. Factor in the non-stall parts of a parking lot and the multiple is higher yet.

Vancouver’s “cabarets” that sell liquor must provide 1 for each 100 square feet (9.3 square metres). The city’s “neigbourhood grocery stores” need not provide any parking at all, but “neighbourhood pubs” must, by law, provide 1 per 200 square feet (18.6 square meters). Even designated “detoxification centres” are required to house 1 parking space per 300 square feet.

Vancouver’s parking laws seem almost directly at odds with British Columbia’s toughest-in-the-region alcohol-impaired driving enforcement. As of late 2010, police can impound vehicles and fine drivers who register a 0.05 blood alcohol level or higher, as compared to the usual criminal level of 0.08. Much to its credit, BC’s new enforcement provisions seem to be substantially reducing alcohol-related fatalities. Yet even so, drinking and driving is still killing more than 4 residents of BC each month, on average.

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Making Sustainability Tasty

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Seattle Food Carts

Update 7/21: The City Council passed the proposed changes to street food regulations on Monday.

Seattle Food Carts
Two pieces of Seattle’s expanding food cart scene.

I’ve spilled my fair share of ink here singing food carts’ praises. It hasn’t just been idle chatter; right now the City of Seattle has the opportunity to take one more small step toward making sustainability legal with one giant leap for street food.

First, let’s review why food carts help to make a sustainable city:

  • They’re good for density: Street food is a cross-culture hallmark of major urban areas, and for good reason: people like it. Plus, carts improve walkability by providing affordable eating options nearly anywhere. In short, food carts make cities attractive, which deters sprawl.
  • They’re good for the community: Food is a uniter, not a divider. Carts are a great place to meet your neighbors (picnic-style!) and establish neighborhood identity.
  • They’re good for the economy: The cost of opening and operating a food cart is a fraction of the enormous expense of running a brick-and-mortar restaurant. Carts are particularly empowering for first- and second-generation immigrants, providing them with opportunities to start a small, agile, low-overhead business.

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Decriminalize Green, Affordable Car Insurance

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Imagine if state law made it difficult for pizza joints to sell by the slice. You’d have to buy and eat a lot of pizza when you got a hankering. Either that, or you’d have to give up pizza entirely. By-the-slice pizza lets light eaters save money.

The car insurance market today is like an alternate reality where no pizza joints sell by the slice. You have to buy a lot of insurance, even if you only drive a little, or you have to give up driving. If you’re poor, you may drive illegally without insurance.

The equivalent of by-the-slice pizza is by-the-mile auto insurance. It gives families a new way to save money, by driving less. It also lets low-income drivers buy just a little insurance. It gives consumers more choices. And it creates a gentle, money-saving incentive to find alternatives to driving alone. This incentive yields fewer car crashes, less consumption of imported gasoline, less congestion, and less air pollution.

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Seattle Starts Making Sustainability Legal

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This morning, Seattle mayor Mike McGinn and council president Richard Conlin held a press conference responding to an unlikely-seeming coalition of workers, developers, greens, and others.

The coalition—of which Sightline is a part—is calling for targeted “regulatory reform.” The idea is to eliminate outdated red tape in order to revive the local economy—kick-starting building projects, creating jobs, and boosting sustainability in the city’s neighborhoods.

If I sound boosterish about the idea, that’s because I am. The proposal is modest enough to be achievable in the near term, but meaningful enough to make a difference. It’s the sort of initiative that can demonstrate the very tangible economic opportunities that come from making sustainability legal. Easy low-cost tweaks to existing rules can make life easier for cash-strapped homeowners, for entreprenuers trying to get a business off the ground, and for hard-hit workers in the building trades. Plus, the same fixes can help create more affordable, vibrant, and walkable neighborhoods.

Media coverage so far at KOMO TV (in two flavors: the clip above and here), Seattle Times, PubliCola, Seattle P-I, The Stranger, Puget Sound Business Journal, and Seattlest. The official press release is here.

Full details of the legislation will be out next week, and I’ll provide more analysis then. In the meantime, you can find a summary description of each item below the jump.

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The Shareable Food Movement Meets the Law

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This post originally appeared on Shareable Magazine.

Editor’s Note: Here in the Northwest, there’s no shortage of creative food entrepreneurs—from popsicle purveyors at farmers markets to ambitious cooks doing dinner swaps. But where is the line between regulations that are necessary to protect public health and rules written for industrial farms or assembly-line restaurants that make less sense for small operators or innovators in the local food economy? As part of our Making Sustainability Legal series, which explores existing laws that make it difficult or illegal to pursue sustainable solutions, we’re featuring this guest post that first appeared on Shareable Magazine, in collaboration with Sustainable Economies Law Center. It makes the case that our food safety laws could benefit from a careful review to ensure that small businesses and community food sharing enterprises aren’t being unnecessarily hampered.

The Health Department didn’t show up when I made dinner for my neighbors last night. Fortunately, our health and safety laws don’t usually dictate how we prepare food in our personal and private realms. But humans have a natural tendency, an urge to feed each other, and the shareable food movement is taking that to new levels—levels that bring up some legal curiosities.

“The Underground Food Movement” has become a thing lately. It’s a foodie’s utopia in Oakland these days, where I’ve snuck off to meals at “underground restaurants” and sampled urban homesteaders’ goat cheeses and preserves.

But this movement goes deeper than its sheer yumminess. We thrive on food. When we share in efforts to grow, process, prepare, and serve food, we greatly enhance our abilities to eat well, provide for ourselves, and build livelihoods around food. Sharing food is particularly important during hard economic times and many small food projects develop out of unemployment.

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Why You Can’t Stop the White Pages

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What could be more annoying than the dull thud of another unwanted phone book on your doorstep? Printed phone directories are as outdated as, well, rotary phones — and these days they amount to little more than waste for the majority of phone customers. That’s why cities like Seattle and San Francisco have recently passed legislation letting residents opt in or opt out of automatic Yellow Pages deliveries. Yet neither city’s pushback will affect the delivery of the White Pages.

The White Pages are an altogether different story. The reason the White Pages land on our front doors isn’t because phone companies want to annoy you; it’s because their delivery is required by state law. Until we make a very minor modification to existing rules, the White Pages will keep on coming to your front door, like or not.

Surprisingly, it turns out that the directory companies themselves would like to stop automatic delivery, if only the law allowed it. While the Yellow Pages generate advertising revenues, the White Pages represent only costs for the firms required to publish and deliver them, eroding the bottom line in an industry that’s already struggling. I’m not making this up: WhitePages.com is actively lobbying to end mandatory delivery laws.

The US industry claims that 5 million trees a year are cut down each year in order to print White Pages directories, and that nationwide in the United States only 22 percent of the books are recycled. (The phone companies’ concern about waste is somewhat ironic given their intransigence on Yellow Pages delivery reform.) I can’t personally vouch for those figures, but based on published numbers for other states, I calculate that reforming Northwest states’ white pages laws could save about 690 tons of paper in Oregon each year, and more than 1,200 tons of paper each year in Washington—nearly the weight of three fully-loaded 747 jumbo jets.

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Legalize Personal Car-Sharing

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What if a stupendously enormous business opportunity were hiding in plain sight before our eyes? What if this same business opportunity would bring gigantic environmental and social dividends? And what if all that was required to unleash these benefits was a simple legal reform?

Personal car sharing is such a business opportunity: a chance to trim emissions, crashes, and fuel costs, all while generating a profit for car owners and giving everyone a new way to save money. Only one legal barrier—an obscure change to insurance regulations—stands in the way.

The Pacific Northwest’s rolling stock of cars and trucks constitutes a mind-boggling amount of underutilized capital. The region has substantially more motor vehicles than licensed drivers. Everyone in the region could climb into a vehicle and no one would have to sit in the backseat. What’s more, the typical car is parked 23 hours a day. Most of us have more money tied up in our cars than in any other physical assets aside from our homes, and all that wealth is just sitting there in the driveway depreciating.

But circumstances are ripening to turn this colossal overstock into an equally massive economic and environmental opportunity.

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The YMCA Should Not Need a Guide-Outfitter Permit, a Special Use Permit, a National Environmental Policy Act Assessment, and a Business Plan to Take Poor Kids into National Forests

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Last summer, I took a four day hike through the high backcountry of the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area in the Washington Cascades. I’m an experienced mountaineer, accustomed to rugged terrain and steep slopes, so I was impressed when after a long day and miles of off-trail travel I heard the voices of young teenage boys wafting toward me from near the Tank Lakes. These remote tarns are in a place that feels like God’s own patio—clean-polished stone slabs holding aloft crystalline ponds that reflect the surrounding summits of black rock and glacier ice.

Tank Lakes, Alpine Lakes Wilderness
Tank Lakes, Alpine Lakes Wilderness, photo by Alan Durning

I later met the intrepid boys, expecting them to be a group from the high-priced and famously hardcore National Outdoor Leadership School. Instead, I found a dozen teens many of whom had never previously camped a night in their lives. One of their leaders told me they were part of the BOLD Mountain School—a nonprofit program of Seattle’s Metrocenter YMCA. BOLD immerses urban kids, especially disadvantaged ones, in the challenges and splendor of big wilderness. This program is not just a matter of summer fun. It’s a transformative experience; it changes lives.

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Making Sustainability Legal

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Some of the smartest, most innovative solutions for building thriving and sustainable communities in the Northwest are, at present, simply illegal.

Even the best-intended rules to protect people and shared assets can become outdated. From business strategies (think buggy whips and typewriter ribbons) to the stuff forgotten in the back of your fridge, almost everything has an expiration date. Luckily, weeding out the counterproductive rules rendered irrelevant by time can have a big impact—making it easier and cheaper to do the right thing.

Take the problem of the urban stormwater runoff that threatens the health of Puget Sound and other waterbodies throughout the Northwest. Low Impact Development (LID) solutions—including such strategies as rain gardens, street-side swales, porous pavement, and green roofs—can treat stormwater more effectively, and for less money, than the costly “hard” infrastructure of downspouts, pipes, and sewers. Yet many development codes mandate the more-expensive, less-effective plumbing solution. If only codes would allow LID as an alternative, the region could see a proliferation of lower-impact techniques that could spare government coffers in lean times, and give developers and homeowners a financial break—even while providing cleaner water and patches of urban habitat.

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