Take Back the Streets

How one Dutch neighborhood made streets safer for the whole world

Traffic calming has swept the world over the past 20 years. It’s based on the rather simple idea that cars and trucks don’t have exclusive ownership of our streets. Streets are shared commons that also belong to people on foot and bicycles, in baby strollers and wheelchairs. Reminding motorists of this fact, traffic calming uses design features such as narrowing roads, adding speed bumps or elevating crosswalks to slow traffic and assert pedestrians’ right to cross the street.

This idea has altered the literal landscape of urban life in the Northern Europe, North America and the rest of the world as people move about their communities with more ease and pleasure.

The origins of this ingenious idea trace back to Delft, Netherlands, where residents of one neighborhood were fed up with cars racing along their streets, endangering children, pets and peace of mind. One evening they decided to do something about it by dragging old couches, coffee tables and other objects out into the roadway and positioning them in such a way that cars could pass but would have to slow down. Police soon arrived on the scene and had to admit that this project, although clearly illegal, was a really good idea. Soon, the city itself was installing similar measures called woonerfs (Dutch for “living yards”) on streets plagued by unruly motorists.

Invented by neighbors in Delft, Netherlands, who were tired of cars speeding down their street, traffic calming is now spreading throughout the world.

One can only imagine the response of city officials if these neighbors had meekly come to city hall to propose the idea of partially blocking the streets; they would have been hooted right out of the building. But by taking direct action, they saved their neighborhood and improved everyday life in cities around the world.

—JAY WALLJASPER
Photo by Walk Eagle Rock under a Creative Commons license from flickr.com.

Editor: Another chapter in Celebrating the Commons: People Stories and Ideas for the New Year from Commons Magazine being presented each Sunday at EYNU.

How New York City Kept Its Drinking Water Pure

. . . and saved billions of dollars

Beginning in the 1830s, the City of New York created a water system generally considered to have no equal in the world. Generations of city leaders chose to go far north and west of the City, to find rural environments that would provide pure, pristine water.

But in the 1980s, as the economics of industrialized agriculture began to undermine the economic vitality of the small family farms that dotted the Catskill mountains, things began to change. Catskill farmers, in a desperate attempt to remain economically viable, began industrializing their own farm operations. Chemical fertilizer use increased, erosion accelerated, and pathogen contamination began to grow. Farmers also began selling off the forested portions of their land for environmentally damaging exurban development.

By the end of the 1980s, public health specialists were publicly stating the City would have to substantially increase the treatment of its drinking water source. The costs for the advanced treatment were estimated to be $4 billion to build and $200 million annually to operate. This would double the cost for water in New York City, with major adverse impacts on low-income families.

Thus, when I became Commissioner of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection and Director of the New York City Water and Sewer system in early 1990, determining if there was any alternative to this was at the top of a very crowded agenda.

However, unlike nearly the entire American water industry and its regulators, both of which were dominated by civil and public health engineers who thought almost exclusively in facility construction terms to solve water quality problems, my background was in management reform, public finance and environmental policy, particularly land use.

My new management team and I were quickly convinced that allowing Catskill drinking water purity to deteriorate and then spending massive sums to clean it up was not the ideal option. The team’s philosophy was that a good environment will produce good water. And that made investing in the environment a smart and profitable investment for New York City.

It took eighteen months of mutual work between the City and the Catskill farming community but, in the end, using concepts that have now come to be called ecosystem services, an innovative and far reaching agreement was crafted.

Operationally, the question became what environmental investments should the city make. Some, such as adding to the publicly held land in the watershed— particularly critical lands threatened by development—along with stream corridor restorations and better stewardship of city owned lands were obvious. But that did not answer how to control non-point source pollution on privately held farmlands and other rural landscapes.

The City began to organize an unprecedented program of regulatory enforcement against non-point source pollution runoffs in its watersheds. Some farmers and other rural landowners reacted angrily. But with the city’s support, the Catskill farmers created a program they called “Whole Farm Planning,” which incorporated environmental planning into the business strategy of the farm. A pollution control plan was developed for each farm by the farmer and local farm and agricultural experts.

To ensure pollution control efforts would reach critical mass, the program set a goal of obtaining the participation rate of 85% of Catskill farmers within five years. Thus, while the program was voluntary for any individual farmer, the Catskill farm community as a whole was committed to reach a goal that would ensure the City met its pollution reduction objectives. After five years, 93% of all Catskill farmers were full program participants.

In terms of Clean Water, the results speak for themselves:

There was a 75% to 80% reduction in farm pollution loading;  

The pristine quality of the City’s drinking water was preserved and improved, and the threat that New York would have to spend billions on advanced treatment of drinking water was eliminated; 

The program paid for itself many times over through its many cost savings and played a critical role in helping to stabilize water and sewer tariffs, providing major benefits to low-income households; 

The program was wildly popular with the public and helped build strong urban support for future watershed protection efforts by New York City.

On a broader scale, the Catskill program spurred watershed protection and environmentally-friendly farm programs throughout the United States and catalyzed interest in non-traditional facility construction approaches of the U.S. water industry.

Ecosystem service payment programs like the one used in New York are a way of capturing the environmental profits from the services rural ecosystems provide urban areas and then funneling those profits back into the rural landscapes and the rural communities that provide them, creating a righteous cycle of mutually supportive economic and ecological investments between urban and rural areas, leading to a more sustainable future for both.

The importance of these payments for environmental services (PES) to the future of rural landscapes in particular cannot be overstated. All over the world, rural landscapes are being transformed at a rate that has no historic or economic parallel. PES payments can stabilize rural land use at a more balanced point by making environmental stewardship a new source of economic wealth for rural populations.

The list of water related ecosystem services is almost endless. Water utilities need to go beyond deployment of their traditional engineering skills and pioneer innovative financial arrangements with upstream residents, as New York City did, to take full advantage of these potentials.

—ALBERT APPLETON
photo from Ephemeral New York (ed: a wonderfully fascinating site)

Editor: Another chapter in Celebrating the Commons: People Stories and Ideas for the New Year from Commons Magazine being presented each Sunday at EYNU.

The Little Free Library That Could

Bringing the shareable society to a sidewalk near you

You can boost literacy, neighborliness and the commons all at once with a Little Free Library. It’s such an ingeniously simple idea, one wonders why no one thought of it until now. You can take a book or leave a book (or both) at these informal institutions, which “look like birdhouses and act like water coolers” according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune. They are popping up all over Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota, and spreading throughout the U.S. and Canada.

The idea began with social entrepreneur Todd Bol who built the first one in his home of Hudson, Wisconsin and kept right on going. He soon teamed up with his friend Rick Brooks in Madison to form the non-profit group Little Free Libraries to spread the idea. Today, they’ve nearly doubled their goal of establishing 2510 new libraries around the world, outdoing philanthropist Andrew Carnegie.

For the latest about the movement as well as all the information you need about building, buying, stocking and maintaining a Little Library in your neighborhood, go to their website Little Free Library.

—JAY WALLJASPER

Photo from Little Free Libraries website

Editor: Another chapter in Celebrating the Commons: People Stories and Ideas for the New Year from Commons Magazine being presented each Sunday at EYNU.

Philanthropy Cannot Solve All Our Problems

                            COMMONER                             

An authority on non-profits explains the necessity for government programs

Kim Klein, an eminent authority on fundraising for non-profit groups, first realized the importance of the commons one afternoon at a workshop in Monterrey, California.

“I was fielding questions about how groups can raise money,” she remembers, “and I realized that half the people in the room were school principals and superintendents, who were taking a day off of work because raising money had become so important to their jobs.”

Klein, author of Fundraising for Social Change and co-founder of the Grassroots Fundraising Journal, immediately wondered, “What’s going on here?” Education is a commons that should be supported through public taxes, she says, not private donations. If school principals need to write grants to cover teacher’s salaries, something is wrong.

Even more shocking was another growing segment of the fundraising business that Klein noticed at the time. “About twice a month I got a call from parents who want to raise money to buy Kevlar vests for their kids in the Iraq War. Everything has become so privatized—even the safety of our soldiers.”

It’s become her mission to highlight the importance of the commons to people in the non-profit sector, which accounts for 10 percent of the workforce in the U.S. and 12 percent in Canada. She does this through her firm Klein and Roth Consulting and the activist group Building Movement Project.

For Klein, a Methodist who once considered becoming a minister, the commons is a spiritual as well as a political and social issue.

“I introduce the idea of the commons into all my workshops, conversations and speeches,” she adds, “starting with the premise that the commons is becoming enclosed because of privatization, poor tax policy, environmental degradation and the like. I am now leading specific workshops on the role of taxes in our society.”

Klein lives in California, and therefore has seen firsthand the pain and suffering that happens with reflexive opposition to tax increases. “Tax cuts rarely save money for the public,” she notes. “They enclose our commons and they allow only very wealthy people and corporations to become wealthier. The sooner we understand the absurdity of saving money by cutting taxes, the sooner we can actually become the...nation that people imagine: welcoming to all, with high-quality schools and health care, well paying jobs, and vast protected natural beauty.”

She notes that in many countries,“ people pay half their income in sales and income taxes. But they get a lot for it. Unlimited health care and universal higher education, for a start. That’s why they don’t hate taxes.”

Klein’s vision of a commons-based society is built on a foundation of sensible tax policy as well the civic sector, community involvement and people treating one another well. “How do we make sure each person has what they need and how can we take care of the common good? That cannot all be accomplished by philanthropy, it needs public funding.”

—JAY WALLJASPER

Editor: Another chapter in Celebrating the Commons: People Stories and Ideas for the New Year from Commons Magazine being presented each Sunday at EYNU.