The Bay Area and our neighbor to the north, Portland, Oregon, have had a friendly competition over which of us is the greenest state. Portland scored big points by providing proof positive that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) a.k.a. the Stimulus Bill, has crated good paying, permanent jobs in the new, greener economy.

The Energy Efficiency and Community Block Grant (EECBG) program, which targets urban settings for energy efficiency building retrofit, economic stimulus, and job creation is a sister program of the Weatherization Assistance Program. Both programs are supported by the Department of Energy. Both programs are on the chopping block in the current House budget. The City of Portland, with the help of Green For All, a national nonprofit organization that works to spread the benefits of the new green economy to every level of the economic hierarchy, was given through EECBG access to $1.1-million for a pilot program to retrofit 500 homes in the Portland area. But the money was not a grant—it is a revolving loan. Portland has leveraged the loan fund with public and private investments to generate to date close to $7-million in homeowner investment.

The results so far:

• More than 500 newly retrofitted homes that use on average 450 therms of gas and 7,700 kWh of electricity less than they did before retrofit. At about $1 per therm and $0.12 per kWh (which is what I pay to PG&E) that equals a savings of $1,374 per house per year.

• Employment for 381 construction workers making an average of about $25 per hour. The workforce is about 50% people of color and 8% women.

• Almost one-quarter of the pilot project dollars have gone to minority- or women-owned businesses.

The administrators of the program, including the City of Portland, Energy Trust of Oregon, and Conservation Services Group provide support in the form of information, marketing help, and discounted training to the company’s involved. But the companies were also asked to make a commitment to the communities they serve. The companies hire locally, establish long term relationships with their employees, and move towards having all their employees trained and certified through the Building Performance Institute (BPI) a nationally recognized, and widely respected standards and certification body.

But so far I’ve only given some statistics. There is a story that better illustrates what the Portland program is all about. I spent two summers working as a volunteer in the skid-row area of Portland, around Broadway and Third Street back in the mid-80s. I met a lot of homeless men and women, some Vietnam vets, some World War II vets, who had little hope of a better life. One nun I worked with gave her homeless clients birthday parties as well as other help, just to give then a sense of individual dignity and importance.

Alber Horsely Jr. is a 25-year old formerly homeless Portland resident who was recently trained as a weatherization technician and now has a job earning more than $15 per hour—and he has health benefits. There’s nothing like a job to give a person a sense of dignity and worth and to inspire other homeless men and women and give them some hope for a better future.

The City of Portland, through the 500-home pilot program is working to extend the program to all of Oregon and thereby do energy efficiency upgrades, bringing better health and comfort as well as energy savings to the residents of 6,000 homes per year. Come on California, time to catch up.

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The Tassajara Valley is at the center of a hot debate in San Ramon. The valley is a sparsely developed strip of land just south of Mt. Diablo and is home to a handful of ranches and orchards.

In the East Bay city of San Ramon, voters are deciding a measure that would substantially expand their city limits. Measure W is one of several urban growth measures on Bay Area ballots this November.

San Ramon is largely home to rows of suburban houses. At the edge of town, those homes give way to open, grassy hills.

"This really is the edge of development," says Matt Vander Sluis of the Greenbelt Alliance, an environmental non-profit. "You’ve got the beautiful rolling hills of the Tassajara Valley and then more and more open space stretching out essentially until the Central Valley."

The Tassajara Valley is at the center of a hot debate in San Ramon. The valley is a sparsely developed strip of land just south of Mt. Diablo and is home to a handful of ranches and orchards.

"This is one of our most important wildlife corridors and it’s also just an important piece of the mosaic of protected lands across the Bay Area," says Vander Sluis

Measure W would put 1,600 acres of this valley in San Ramon city limits by expanding the urban growth boundary. More than 40 cities in the Bay Area use these boundaries, typically to control the growth of housing development.

Measure W would increase the size of the city of San Ramon by 19 percent. But city officials say they have no plans to develop that area.

"There is no secret plan to develop Tassajara Valley," says Eric Wallis, a member of the San Ramon Planning Commission. Wallis says the reason city planners are supporting Measure W is so the city can decide the future of Tassajara Valley. Right now, the valley belongs to Contra Costa County.

"We feel very strongly that this area should be within our urban growth boundary for planning purposes because we’ve had some negative experiences with having the county plan areas that wound up going into San Ramon," says Wallis.

Right now, Tassajara Valley is zoned for agricultural use. If a developer wants to build something bigger than 30 acres, today it would require the approval of Contra Costa County voters. Wallis says that isn’t local enough. "Bottom line is – who do you trust? Do you trust someone who lives in the same city and is responsive to you as a voter? Or do you trust someone who lives miles and miles away?"

If Measure W passes and a local commission approves the changes, the valley’s future would be decided by city officials, without going to city voters. That’s a concern for Measure W opponents.

"About 70 percent of the land here in the Tassajara Valley that would be affected by Measure W is owned by major developers and land speculators. The only reason to expand an urban growth boundary is to open up an area for development," says Matt Vander Sluis.

Voters in Petaluma, Santa Rosa and Cloverdale are also deciding urban growth measures in November.

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Dave Robinson is the "anti-flipper." Credit: Tom White

The cab driver is a renter, and when I told him that the conference he was driving me to was about residential energy efficiency, health, sustainability, and affordability, he complained that his landlord is not interested in making his rental home energy efficient, since the landlord doesn't pay the energy bills. We call this a split incentive. The split incentive facing the imaginary bankers in the back seat of my driver's cab-he wants to keep the bailout money for himself but he's supposed to use it to help people struggling in a down economy-may not end up putting a fat wallet in the cabbies back seat.

I met a man here who can handle a split incentive pretty well. David Robinson is a retired contractor who recently started doing what he calls Energy-Wise Renovations of foreclosed homes. He is buying clusters of homes in rundown neighborhoods in the South Bay, and retrofitting them with measures such as R-50 insulation in the attics, air sealing, and Energy Star appliances. But he is also creating some pretty stylish kitchens, redoing hardwood floors, and installing granite countertops, crown molding, and wainscoting in these homes. "You can't sell a home on energy efficiency alone," says Robinson.

Robinson is having no problem selling these houses for 20% above market prices, and he's still giving the homebuyers, and the neighborhood, a very good deal. "I believe that there is a wonderful and huge opportunity in bank-owned foreclosures-millions of them-and we must rescue all those wonderful opportunities from the normal house flippers who would turn them into a rental and lower the values and miss the opportunity for deep energy reduction. I buy all foreclosed homes and don't feel bad about beating up the bank to get the really good deals."

Robinson is looking for former or current realtors, and financial backers. He wants to teach them his method and therefore accelerate the process of converting our housing stock to affordable, efficient, and sustainable housing, and to make a good living doing so. If you want to know more, call him at (605) 475-4800.

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Research shows that to be healthy physically and psychologically, when we grow old we should stay connected to others. My father moved into an apartment that he had built next to my sister's house in Maryland. My mother and father-in-law are still able to live in their home in Orinda after more than 40 years there. My grandmother on my mother's side lived for nearly 100 years. She spent the last 20 or so years of her life in a community, where everyone had their own apartment, but everyone was responsible, according to their ability, to see to the safety and well being of the others. She rode with three other elderly women to daily Mass and shopping in a big blue Cadillac.

Recent research results published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives shows that the buildings we live in influence whether we stay connected– and stay healthy– or not. Researchers from the University of Miami, the University of Maine, and Lehigh University in the departments of medicine, education, human development, and architecture, studied a community of mostly elderly, Hispanic, and low-income people in a place called East Little Havana, a neighborhood in Miami. They gathered information about the health and lifestyles of more than 250 people over the course of two years, as well as the buildings they occupied.

Here is a summary of their findings:

1. People who live on blocks where there is a high percentage of porches, stoops, and with buildings built with windows overlooking sidewalks were healthier and happier than those on blocks with fewer of these architectural features. Interestingly, people in buildings with low windowsills out front (less than about a meter between the bottom of the window and the main level of the first floor) were more likely to feel isolated than those with higher windowsills. The researchers speculate that residents felt a lack of privacy with the low windows that made them feel vulnerable, and therefore less likely to interact with people outside the home.

2. People in East Little Havana who lived on blocks with a high level of first floor parking garages did worse physically and psychologically than those living on blocks with more buildings that had people, not cars, living on the first floors. Since newer buildings tend to have the first floor parking, it seems that buildings built before cars became widely available, say pre-1945, are more conducive to the health and well being of their elderly occupants.

The Cadillac my grandmother rode in? It was parked in a parking lot.

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