“The Challenge & Opportunity of Greening America’s Small Cities” (3/1) Recap + Video
How do we decarbonize our smaller post-industrial cities—which are seeing a second coming?
Beyond the moral imperative of addressing the climate crisis as laid out in the latest IPCC report, decarbonization is mandated under New York's Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, which stipulates that we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions 40% by 2030, and 85% by 2050 and that at least 35% of all clean energy investment must go into disadvantaged communities. Make no mistake—to truly meet these benchmarks will require a complete reordering of our society and our economy, and in many ways we’re still playing catch up with the CLCPA.
At last year's Sustainable Futures conference, which the Future of Small Cities Institute co-hosted along with RPI and University of Albany, Janet Joseph, Vice President at NYSERDA, said that “in order to meet the goals of the CLPA we are going to have decarbonize 500 buildings a day for the next 12,000 days.”
This task is particularly relevant in Upstate New York where we have a lot of old housing stock. We can’t just simply build our way out of the climate crisis. We’re going to have to adapt and work with what we have. But such widescale rapid investment in retrofitting and electrification will take a lot of upfront capital and a lot of human power, something small cities are often in short supply of. Indeed, one of the biggest questions as we kickstart this green economy is where will the workforce come from? If we are going to decarbonize 4,000 buildings in a city, how do train an army of energy auditors, heat pump technicians, solar array installers, geothermal techs? How do we train the urban agricultural experts to close the loop in hyper-local food systems?
Thermal imaging heat loss from old building stock.
To meet these challenges, we must all take this leap of faith together—we must invest in the green city, we must invest in the green economy, in green food security, and we must invest in the green workforce. This is going to take vision, leadership, and cooperation. It’s going to take public-private partnerships. It’s going to take brilliant storytelling and community engagement. It’s going to take all of us.
During this dialogue, we heard from Dr. Catherine Tumber, author of Small, Gritty, and Green, who has been working on an inventory of small city sustainability plans for the Lincoln Instute for Land Policy. She provided a national portrait of what small cities are doing to green themselves, where they are succeeding and struggling, and what trends we might see over the next decade.
We then heard about the case study of Ithaca, NY, where Dr. Luis Aguirre-Torres, the city’s sustainability coordinator, has created an extraordinary funding model to decarbonize 4,000 buildings in the city. While every city can’t be Ithaca, there are many lessons to be learned from Dr. Aguirre-Torres’s work.
This email contains highlights from our conversation and a link to video of the event.
DR. CATHY TUMBER kicked off our conversation with a brief history of the literature on small legacy cities, including Gritty Cities (Temple University Press, 1978) and her own seminal work, Small, Gritty, and Green(MIT Press 2012) which examined the particular infrastructure and ecological footprints of smaller legacy cities and made an argument that much of their resources were primed for the growth of a green economy as a redevelopment and regeneration strategy. But a myriad of challenges remain, as these cities still struggle with "sprawl without growth," high poverty rates, decades of disinvestment, and a legacy of lost manufacturing that continues to affect the workforce. Although Dr. Tumber pointed out that such history also might be an opportunity for a new kind of green economy.
We're accustomed to thinking about the consumer economy. We've lost sight of the productive economy in many parts of the country and we will need a productive green economy to get through climate change.
Dr. Tumber's more recent work has been for the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy's Legacy Cities Initiative. Her team's first working paper was called "Greenventory 2.0: Sustainability Lessons from Small and Midsize Legacy Cities." The full report will be published this fall.
The three phases of sustainability planning in smaller legacy cities.
The report focuses on three policy domains: 1) decarbonization and climate resilience, 2) racial and economic equity and environmental justice, and 3) green economic development. The report also helpfully describes how there are three "generations" of sustainability planning in these small and midsize cities, though "it's nearly impossible in these cities to get to the third generation and optimal sustainability planning due to severe capacity issues."
Many of the legacy cities they studied struggled to get past the first generation. Moving through second generation planning required a financial commitment and the onboarding of a full-time sustainability manager, but it also required a layer of cross-sector collaboration and integration that can be difficult to establish in time-strapped municipalities. This points to the challenge of establishing a sustainability office—by definition it must be wide ranging and touch upon all sectors of the city, a level of comprehensive, interdepartmental reach which cities are often not prepared for.
Dr. Tumber then showed us the case study of Toledo, Ohio, which demonstrates many of the typical challenges we see in smaller and midsize legacy cities when it comes to Sustainability planning. Toledo is firmly in the "midsize city" category with a population of 270,000 (down 33% from its peak), and like many of these legacy cities, Toledo still has a strong manufacturing presence, including a large Chrysler Assembly Plant on the city's outskirts. Toledo has a long history of glass fabrication for windshields and other automotive uses and interestingly, this sector has made a transition into the green economy as there is now an industry of solar panel manufacturing in the region, including First Solar, the largest domestic PV manufacturer in the country.
First Solar is an example of Toledo transitioning its history of glass fabrication into the green economy.
The city has been struggling with environmental problems in its watershed, including toxic runoff from pollution and algae blooms from overuse of industrial agricultural products. There are glimmers of hope, however, as the city recently completed an 18-year project to upgrade its wastewater treatment plant. Overall sustainability progress has been incremental, led mainly by the Toledo-Lucas County Sustainability Commission. There are benefits to this city-county tandem approach, which leads to a inherently more regional effort, but can be hampered by competing levels of governance. Taken together, the city and the county are stuck somewhere in what Lincoln Institute would call the "Second Generation" of sustainability planning, with some aspects of first generation, ad-hoc volunteer efforts mixed with areas of more comprehensive policy implementation. This uneven result may be familiar to many small city sustainability managers.
An algae bloom on Lake Erie in 2011 (MERIS/NASA)
One of the areas where the Toledo-Lucas County Commission for Sustainability continues to struggle is publicizing and creating a cohesive narrative around all of the disparate sustainability efforts—again, a familiar issue for many cities. Toledo has also not undertaken a lot of the critical baseline assessments like a Greenhouse Gas Inventory which is essential for measuring decarbonization progress. They have not electrified their municipal fleet or installed LED streetlights. Thus the city received a relatively low sustainability score when assessed by the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy.
Despite this, the city and county continue to push novel programs and iniatives, including a number of large-scale solar arrays on redeveloped brownfields, a regional financing structure for green buildings called Better Buildings of Northwest Ohio, and a number of equity projects, including a Rockefeller Foundation Environmental Justice Pilot program on lead pipe remediation using machine learning as well as a citywide equitable code enforcement program.
Toledo has a ways to go before reaching a third generation sustainability program, but like many of its legacy city brethren it is doing good work in some areas, lagging in others, and still seeking the kind of interdisciplinary, cross-sector coordination and mainstreaming of its sustainability work that will be necessary to truly decarbonize the city within the timeline that our climate crisis demands.
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One of the few small cities that has achieved what could be argued is "third generation" sustainability planning is Ithaca, NY—though the city does not really qualify as a classic legacy city, as its anchor institution of Cornell University has allowed it certain benefits that other post-industrial metros may lack. Still, their progress is remarkable, and worth examining in detail.
A large part of this progress is due to DR. LUIS AGUIRRE-TORRES, sustainability manager for the City of Ithaca, who presented on the city's evolution over the past year and half. He began his talk with a sobering note coming on the heals of the IPCC report: "What's coming is going to be really hard. It's going to be really expensive. But we have no choice."
He stressed that what they were trying to do in Ithaca relied on the participation of many partners, constant feedback and an ongoing effort "to fix what isn't working"—such is the nature of the process when you are reinventing the wheel. When Dr. Aguirre-Torres came on last year, the city had already passed a Green New Deal, which declared that the city would go Carbon Neutral by 2030. At the same time it would also "address historical inequities, economic inequality and social injustice," said Dr. Aguirre-Torres.
But how do make it so that the ambition the city has shown in the resolution for the Green New Deal actually stays, and expands and goes beyond what originally we wanted?
Part of this was translating the climate pledge into economic terms. This meant not just reducing carbon emissions, but also reducing energy intensity and carbon intensity. In addition, Dr. Torres-Aguirre acknowledged that the healthy competition between New York and California to decarbonize was necessary for real innovation to occur.
How then to achieve 100% carbon neutrality by 2030? This is only eight years away... and counting. To begin, the city did a quick sketch modeling of its emissions ("Greenhouse gas inventories take to long!" lamented Dr. Aguirre-Torres), which totaled about 400,000 mt Co2e. Most of these emissions come from energy use—energy in buildings, for space and water heating, and energy in the transportation sector to move us (and our stuff) around. The grid, which in other places accounts for a much larger slice of emissions, in Ithaca only accounts for 15% due to the progress NY State has made on shifting to renewable energy production, particularly upstate.
Ithaca's overall approach to carbon neutrality was through four avenues: 1) energy efficiency, 2) decarbonization, 3) electrification, 4) carbon capture and sequestration.
Dr. Aguirre-Torres then broke each of these areas down into action items. "This means that for buildings, we're talking about thermal efficiency, reducing energy use in buildings, insulation, high performance windows, state of the art ventilation systems," he said.
We also need to look at waste materials. We need to start to thinking about a circular economy and addressing source reduction.
When it comes to electrification "there are so many everyday appliances that can be electrified," including air source heat pumps, water heaters, cooking appliances, dryers, automobiles. "Electrify Everything!" declared Saul Griffith, chief scientist at Rewiring America.
But Dr. Aguirre-Torres also made the case that when it comes to mass electrification and decarbonization "there has to be economies of scale. There has to be some economic benefit of doing all of these improvements at the same time." This economic case becomes critical alongside an investment in new and emerging technologies, including home energy storage, hydrogen production from wastewater, and the ongoing electrification of transit systems and heavy-duty vehicles.
He also mentioned that carbon capture and sequestration has to be an essential part of the greening strategy—a strategy that is often overlooked by cities at the early stages of their sustainability planning. This includes the use of biochar, which is an exploding field for sequestration, ecological restoration, and even design and building.
The challenge for hitting all of these areas becomes further complicated when viewed through the lens of equity and justice.
Ethnicity, skin color, education—when you compound this with the effects of climate change, they become a threat multiplier. So if we're going to do this, we need to make sure that we do it at the same time we're thinking about climate justice, at the same time that we have a baseline so that we can represent a climate action plan, at the same time as we rethink a model of democratic engagement.
To make this happen, green workforce development becomes a critical area of investment. "Who's going to be retrofitting 6 million buildings in New York State in the coming decades?" asked Dr. Aguirre-Torres. "We need to think about workforce in a way we've never done before."
So we need to think about climate justice, democratic engagement, workforce development at the same time that we're electrifying building and transportation, because if we don't have all of those, it's not going to work. It's not just a vision about buildings. It's not just a vision about cars. It's a vision about a city. It's about changing people's lives.
Many challenges remain in implementing these changes, not least of which is the financial model. How can cities raise the upfront capital necessary to fund all of these projects? In Ithaca alone, the cost of true 100% Carbon Neutrality is estimated to be just under $2 billion. But there is also an opportunity here—in particular for private equity to get smart about investing in municipalities and making returns on longterm energy savings. Such deals will take an unprecedented level of cooperation between cities, public entities like NYSERDA and the Green Bank, insurance companies, venture capital funds, quasi-governmental organizations, utility companies, and community organizations.
It's not cheap and it's going to take some time, but we have identified where we need to be successful. And this means we need to increase economic sophistication—there has to be more options to do this and to do it right. We're going to turn this into a buyer's market. But this really requires a different type of thinking.
Dr. Aguirre-Torres stressed that one of the keys to the success of the program was transparency. "We need to do this in the most transparent and efficient way, because we need to be accountable—we're promoting a massive change in infrastructure, in a city that didn't ask for it," he said. "Maybe they understand we have to do it. Maybe they agree, but we need to be accountable and transparent to work with it."
Cooperation is also essential, and the city is working with more than 60 regional partners on their electrification and workforce program. Researchers at the Environmental Systems Lab at Cornell Universityare using machine learning to map the city's energy profile on a building-by-building scale—to estimate city-wide costs of decarbonization and retrofitting as well as to help model future grid loads. This mapping software can be used to diagnose other city's decarbonization costs in the future.
Energy Modeling Map, City of Ithaca (ES Lab, Cornell University)
Dr. Aguirre-Torres also touched on a number of other aspects of the Ithaca's decarbonization plan including details for the financial model, a regional approach to workforce development using a Green Jobs Corridormodel, and the alignment with the Governor's agenda around sustainability, but you will have to watch the video for this!
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In the conversation following the presentations, we covered the challenges of hiring a full-time sustainability coordinator; how to cohesively storytell a climate action plan to the middle 50% who are "sustainable curious" but not yet convinced, particularly in economic development terms; increasing the supply and demand of green economy and quickly ramping up a green workforce; and the first steps in how a small city can get their sustainability office off the ground.
To see the full video of the event, click on the video image below.
EVENT SPONSORS:
This event is being presented in partnership with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy as part of a larger series about sustainability and equity in smaller legacy cities. To sign up for Lincoln Institute’s newsletter, click here.