Finding the Future - Innovations in Land Use and Sustainability Bill Griffith

Last year, the city of Bloomington Minnesota hired Karla Henderson to help steer the city’s redevelopment as Director of Community Development.  She is well qualified for the job since she served in Detroit Mayor Dave Bing’s inner circle and brings a wealth of experience turning around neighborhoods to her new job in Minnesota.

On a trip to Guatemala, a friend introduced me to a unique outdoor classroom, a learning lab of sorts, for those interested in sustainable agriculture. It’s located on the shores of Lake Atitlan, a beautiful volcanic lake in the central highlands.

IMAP https://imapermaculture.org/ is short for the Mesoamerican Permaculture Institute and was founded by local people to showcase the ancestral knowledge of food production in the area, which is known for a rich diversity of seeds and plants. Since the lake is situated between the tropical lowlands and the cloud forests, it is an area filled with exotic plants.

Ronny Lec is one of the founders of IMAP, which started over 20 years ago. He explained that much diversity in plants and seeds has been lost to monoculture farming practices. IMAP is hoping to stem the loss by educating local farmers of the value of the biodiversity which is unique to this lakeshore region.

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In cities across the country, the pandemic has brought home the plight of the homeless.  Rising home prices, job losses and economic disparity have left more and more people without viable housing options.  Communities everywhere are struggling to find alternatives to the tent cities that have sprung up in public parks and along highways.

One solution is gaining national attention – the construction of tiny house villages.  A housing nonprofit in Seattle has had great success pioneering the concept and now manages tiny house villages in Seattle, Tacoma, Olympia and King County.  The organization is known as LIHI, which stands for the Low Income Housing Institute.

Recently, I had the chance to sit down with Josh Castle, the Community Engagement Director for LIHI.  It’s his job to run the gauntlet of community and church organizations, building support for the construction of tiny house villages and seeking volunteers.  Josh has seen volunteers’ attitudes shift from concerns about the impact of the villages on neighborhoods to “tell us what residents need.”

A little over five years ago LIHI started partnering with the city of Seattle on the tiny house village project. Castle explained, “There was a huge homelessness epidemic in the Puget Sound region with encampments popping up all over the city. Seattle was trying to find a solution, so they started authorizing these encampments, allowing them to be in place as long as they had some kind of an organized structure, some management and a fiscal sponsor.”  LIHI stepped in to serve as fiscal sponsor working with other organizations to address homelessness.

LIHI has been around for 30 years and owns or manages nearly 2,400 units of housing in six counties.  About 20 years ago, the organization opened its first urban rest stop in downtown Seattle providing laundry services, showers and bathrooms for people experiencing homelessness. Eventually, that experience and working with the City led to the creation of the tiny house village concept.

“We realized that if you build a structure that is 120 square feet or less, it falls below the limit for the International Building Code so it’s not considered a dwelling unit, and it makes it much quicker and easier to build the structure,” said Castle.  “So, we started building tiny houses that were 120 square feet or less and very cost-effective, about $2,500 to build.”  The cost has gone up with the spike in lumber prices but it is starting to come down again.

Now, LIHI manages a total of 14 villages, eight in Seattle alone, two in Olympia and three in nearby Tacoma. Recently, they added a village in Skyway which is an unincorporated area of King County near the airport.  Castle adds, “It’s the first one that the County has funded.”

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Bill Griffith practices real estate and municipal law and is the host of Finding the Future, a podcast that explores innovation in land use and sustainability. If you have a story about innovation in land use and sustainability, please reach out to Bill.

Every day, business and political leaders are tackling the question of how to revive downtown Minneapolis. After a year of dealing with the pandemic, social unrest, and shuttered businesses, they are searching for ways to bring people back downtown. Even as the state has ramped up vaccinations against COVID-19, downtown remains a ghost town with few office workers, limited events, and restaurants and bars scrambling to attract customers.

The question of how to revive downtown Minneapolis was recently posed to a group of real estate leaders on a panel organized by Bisnow. The panel acknowledged real challenges facing the city, however, at the same time they found bright spots on the horizon as people are ready to leave their homes in pursuit of a bit of normalcy, illusive as that may seem.

An interview with Mall of America's Jill Renslow and Kurt Hagen.  

Why would any Mayor want to describe his community as a "slow city"?  Stefano Cimicchi is the former Mayor of Orvieto, a medieval hill town with a population of 20,000 located in central Italy.  Cimicchi was one of the first city leaders to sign on to the "slow city movement" when it began in the late 1990s.