For many, the image that first pops into people’s heads who have heard of cohousing is one of boomer hippies sharing communal meals every Sunday in their housing complex. The thing is, it’s a fairly accurate assessment for many of the only 110 cohousing projects in the U.S., and while it’s far from desirable for most people, there are some good lessons from its creation process, which is very relatable to crowdsourced placemaking. Here’s one Brooklyn story:

When a plan to build 40 courtyard-oriented apartments within an long-abandoned Episcopal church, its former rectory and a new building fell through, a group of cohousing advocates incorporated themselves as Brooklyn Cohousing LLC and bought the rights to the site, plans and city approvals. To date, 14 member households have committed $20,000 to $40,000 (and sometimes more), and 25 ‘associates’ that have invested $500 (nonrefundable) and agreed to attend weekly meetings. The goal, naturally, is to secure enough members to get a construction loan to start building next spring so people can move in by early 2010.

Decisions are made by consensus, often with members holding up one of six colors to express their opinions objectively: green = agreement; blue = neutral; yellow = unsure/unclear; orange = serious reservations but will not block consensus; red = will block consensus; white = don’t know enough because I didn’t do my homework.

One of the decisions the group immediately made was to reduce housing prices, such as smaller kitchens and living rooms in lieu of a larger common space, minimizing spare bedrooms with the use of guest rooms within the building, and providing a range of sizes and configurations from studios to four-bedrooms. No word on parking, but the website does emphasize green and sustainability prominently.

Read more about the decision making process in the NY Times article, A Village Down the Block and accompanying slide show. The most interesting element in the article is that the group has now been approached by four other Brooklyn developers looking to sell their projects, as the development’s project manager states, “There are developers telling me they cannot get construction funding because they don’t have buyers they can point at and show the banks.”

While we may be familiar with city policies promoting car-free living, what are the examples in the built world?

That’s where you need to visit the Moda condominiums in the Belltown district of Seattle, Washington. Moda is a model application of truly attainably-priced housing via reducing housing size and eliminating parking spaces. The evidence:

- 83 units have no parking at all, which are $30,000 less than those with parking.
- The units start at $149,950, almost a third of the median home price, by being offered as efficiencies at 296 s.f. (27.5 sq m). These smaller units sold out within a week.

To respond to the inevitable reaction, “300 s.f.?!  Who can live in such a tiny space?“, the developers wisely built several of the smallest units as demonstration models. As shown in the 338 s.f. model to the left, it includes a bathroom, kitchen, walk-in closet, eating counter and areas to fit a desk, table and foldaway bed, with a smaller fridge and dishwasher.

Are most U.S. Americans ready to give up on the GM-homebuilders 1939 vision of the American Dream? According to these responses regarding Moda, no, not most of them, but they’re not the target market either. Then again, based on the financial crisis, the average U.S. home buyer isn’t exactly able to afford the average-sized U.S. home either.

What do you think?

What are the real, personal financial benefits of going car-free?The friendly folks at the U.S. Dept. of Housing & Urban Development (HUD) have provided a collective body of research, Regulatory Barriers Clearinghouse (RBC), the goal being to help build more affordable, pedestrian-oriented residences, especially in preparation for what they’ve been instructed will be an innovation-minded administration. The following statistical summaries are found within:

- Minimum parking requirements, often legislated by local municipalities, can increase the price of housing by approximately $30,000 to $40,000 per unit. RBC source #1, RBC source #2).
- Eliminating a parking space saves $53,000 to $117,000 from increased housing prices, reduced loan eligibility, and public infrastructure, from U.S. Federal Highway Administration transportation specialist, Allen Greenberg.
- Mandatory parking requirements increase development costs by as much as 21%, from a Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California report. RBC source.
- It’s well known in the industry that average car ownership and operation costs of $5000 a year translates into a mortgage that is larger by $100,000.
- Parking spaces add $20,000 to $30,000 to the cost of housing, up to $50,000 in some parts of the city, according to the City of San Francisco planning department.
- 24% more households could afford houses and 20% more could afford condominiums if they did not include parking, concludes another SF study.

Solutions are simple, yet difficult to get municipalities other than the leading cities of San Francisco, Seattle and possibly Washington DC to approve:
- Eliminate required parking spaces per unit.
- Unbundle parking from a unit so that they’re ‘sold separately’ (like batteries).
- Provide car sharing, where each one takes 14 others off the road, according to a 2005 Transportation Research Board study.

The next entries will look at real world brick and mortar solutions…

There’s no question what the first green business incubator is - it’s the Environmental Business Cluster in San Jose in 1994, christened by then Vice President Al Gore and still going strong. However, as you can see by its website (and the fact it started in a suburban office park with cubicles, though now located downtown), it’s not a coworking site. Btw, check out its graduate list of companies - I helped found the firm called Global Opportunity Villages in that incubator - a bit too ambitious and ahead of its time, but the description should sound familiar

So, what’s the first coworking site for green businesses, that is, an open plan, cafe-like destination typically in a natural cultural district, for entrepreneurs, started and run by entrepreneurs? While I’m sure many people will lay claim to that, one clear candidate is Green Spaces in Brooklyn, New York. It’s best left to cofounder Jennie Nevin to better understand why:

“My background is in finance but I have always thought there were a lot of opportunities in the emerging green economy, especially after taking graduate environmental courses at Harvard night school right after college in 2001.  Around 2005, when I was working at Merrill Lynch in New York I realized that the economy was starting to shift and people were starting see the financial opportunities by becoming green, whether it was solutions to water shortfalls, more sustainable agriculture or a long-term energy solution. I started a group then called Green Business Leaders to bring together emerging green activists from all fields and we started meeting for intimate cocktail hours every other month in Manhattan, featuring leaders such as the executive directors of the Rainforest Aliiance and Gaia Institute.  At this time many emerging green start up companies were popping up and from the networking groups I realized they were all working from home - I knew it was lonely and difficult working out of a small New York apartment.

We started Green Spaces to meet that need.  We opened in May of 2008 with a launch party of over 100 green-minded folks and 3500 square feet in downtown Brooklyn. It has now been expanded to about 7000 square feet with over 15 companies ranging from sustainable fish sourcing to carbon sequestration projects.  We also have a rotational internship program connecting emerging talent from the local universities such as Columbia, and host a monthly workshop series.“

Now that’s a green coworking space.

Do you know of any coworking spaces for green businesses?

Visitors to historic districts in older cities around the world will often come across majestic public spaces, but it’s rarer in the U.S. because it’s such a relatively young country. One of the few examples of such places, one may be surprised to know, is in Cleveland, Ohio, known as the Old Arcade and is even said to be modeled after the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, Italy.

The first arcades were built in Paris in the early 1800s as reflection of the industrial age, offering a covered passageway connecting two busy streets, lined with shops showcasing the retail wonders of a growing goods-based economy, with the glass and steel versions appearing in the 1840s, and toward the grand multi-story versions by the late 1800s. By 1860, the Civil War and railroad networks connected Cleveland’s 43,000 inhabitants to the rest of the economy, leading to it becoming the 15th largest city by the end of the century and providing the financial prowess for the Arcade’s construction in 1890 at a cost of $867,000 ($20 million today).

In 1973 the five-story, 300-foot-long, 100-foot-high Arcade became Cleveland’s first building to be added to the National Historic Register, only the ninth nationally. In 2001, the Hyatt Regency Hotel contributed to the $60 million renovation of the building, occupying the top three floors, but keeping the lower two floors open to the public as an ever popular destination of shops and restaurants.

Next time you’re in Cleveland, be sure to download the CityProwl tour, a 30-minute ipod-oriented guide to the city’s best experiences, including of course, one for the Arcade.

We’ve had public art cows in Chicago, fish in Baltimore, pandas in Washington DC... at long last we have something more permanent and actually practical - public art bike racks.

Cities across the U.S. from Louisville, Kentucky (pictured left) to Austin, Texas to Sioux Falls, S.D are paying artists to sculpt more creative destinations for people to park their bikes. Longmont, Colorado and Portland, Oregon are also participating. Regular racks cost from $200 to $500, and artists are paid $2000 to $2500 - seems like a great opportunity for art patrons to sponsor something more meaningful than a brick.

New York City held a competition to produce a new standard bike rack for the entire city. Musician David Byrne, former lead singer of the band Talking Heads, New York City was so enthused to be a judge that he submitted his own designs, which will be donated. The elegant winning design from biking capital Copenhagen, Denmark is pictured to the left, 5000 of which will be installed over the next 3 years.

If there was ever a concise, sticky way to explain the crowdsourced placemaking process, it’s the 1:9:90 rule. Here it is:

- 1 will create or contribute something.
- 9 will rate, edit or vote on it.
- 90 will use the result.

Explaining in more detail…

- 1 will create or contribute something. These are the ‘supercontributors’, and as is evident here, represent only 1% of the community.  Keep in mind that this isn’t 1% of the population, but 1% of an identifiable crowdsourcing community, like Threadless members.
- 9 will rate, edit or vote on it. These are often referred to as ‘people who contribute a little or from time to time’, or regular contributors, but Jeff Howe describes them best in his Crowdsourcing book as those who vet and fine tune the content of the supercontributors, such as the reviewers on Amazon and Yelp, the voters on American Idol, and the people who update or correct Wikipedia entries.
- 90 will use the result. The rest of us, who now feel comfortable buying that book, trusting that Wikipedia entry, or dining at that restaurant, or buy that album because of the previous supercontributors and contributors.

Evidence? Yahoo Groups, Wikipedia, Flickr all follow this rule by nature.

This is why crowdsourced placemaking beta communities need to have at least 300 to 500 members, where 3 to 5 of them will present ideas that get 30 to 50 members excited enough to help them see it become a reality, so that the other 270 to 450 members will then become committed customers, tenants or residents of.

On the one hand you have authentic cultural destinations grown naturally, referred to as natural cultural districts (NCD)(image on the left), which attract creatives. On the other hand, you have developments that attempt to become such cultural destinations in one fell swoop, referred to on this site as corporate cultural districts (CCD)(image on the right). However, they tend to attract tourists and corporate employees with higher salaries than creatives. Here are the objective differences why, from a placemaking point of view:

Time: NCDs are built slowly over time, decades.CCDs are built completely within a couple of years.
Developers: NCDs involved multiple developers.CCDs involve just a few, and often only one.
Building age: NCDs have a mix of old and new buildings. CCDs are predominantly new buildings.
Building proportion: NCD buildings are often taller than they are wide, and not more than four to six stories. CCDs are almost always wider than they are tall, unless they exceed ten stories, which is often the case.
Building size: NCD buildings square footages are measure out to four (ie 5000 s.f.) or five digits (ie 50,000 s.f). CCD buildings are usually no less than six digits in square feet (ie 500,000 s.f.), even seven (ie a million s.f.), typically encompassing entire blocks.
Retail: NCD restaurants and shops are primarily local independents. CCD businesses are mostly chains.
Retail scale: NCDs almost never have big box stores. CCDs often have big box stores.
Entrepreneurs: NCDS often host entrepreneur-oriented workplaces. CCDs favor Class A corporate office space.

Images by Nik81 and M.V. Jantzen.

On the one hand you have the good ol’ boys network. On the other hand, you have diversity. Obviously, the title of this entry hints at the answer, but it’s not that simple. Here’s a story from Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business that illustrates this:

The founders of Marketocracy established an online stock market that allowed its members to use ‘monopoly money’ to make trades. The top 100 performers, known as the Marketocracy Masters 100, formed the basis for actual investment. The ‘m100’ outperformed the market in 2002 and 2003 (43%), but then began underperforming in 2004 as investors fled the scene. What happened? Wasn’t there diversity among the 100? Yes, in 2002 and 2003, until 2004 when the m100 members began networking with one another, sharing ideas and tips… essentially becoming a good ol’ boys network. The point is, even if you think you’re diverse, you may not be.

In the book, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies, author Scott Page states, “Scholars from a variety of disciplines have studied how people and groups make breakthroughs. The common answer: diverse perspectives.“ It can hardly be better stated than this:

“Progress and innovation may depend less on lone thinkers with enormous IQs than on diverse people working together and capitalizing on their individuality.“

This helps explain the difference between the natural cultural districts” that attract the creatives, and the corporate cultural districts that typically mainly attract tourists.

Image: Restaurant Row, Dresden, Germany by stuckincustoms.

If self assessment of your own body, fitness, energy, and overall well-being matters, then Burlington, Vermont is the healthiest city in the U.S.. This is according to a recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study, mentioned in news sources throughout the country, from CNN to the Associated Press. However, other sources claim Lincoln, Nebraska takes the top spot, though if you look at the map below, Burlington makes sense. Boulder, Colorado is also up there.

Burlington and Boulder have two things in common:

1. People are skiing, bicycling, hiking, and staying physically active on a regular basis in either city. You’ll find some of the best deals on snowboards and mountain bikes in Colorado, as evidenced by the map below. If your city doesn’t have the majestic scenery either city has, it’s that much more crucial to invest in greenbelts, bike routes, sports fields and access to national parks to make up for it.

2. Both cities are known to have a progressive, green, forward-thinking mindset. It’s no coincidence each city has a pedestrian-only downtown adjacent to a university, featuring restaurants that emphasize healthy, organic, and vegetarian. If you want an idea of what our communities will be like in the future, this is a good place to start.

Photo: Downtown Burlington by eternalsun.