Welcome to the first edition of Living City Block’s Newsletter, our monthly mailing to keep you up to speed on all of the developments and advances at LCB. As we enter our third month of operations out of the Alliance Center on Wynkoop Street in Lower [...]]]> Friends and Supporters of Living City Block;

Welcome to the first edition of Living City Block’s Newsletter, our monthly mailing to keep you up to speed on all of the developments and advances at LCB. As we enter our third month of operations out of the Alliance Center on Wynkoop Street in Lower Downtown Denver, Living City Block continues to build momentum and add essential partners.

Living City Block hosted a Charrette on March 18 and 19 that was attended by many of you. We thank you again for your important participation and contributions. We have now concluded our report of the charrette work and we are proud to offer it for your study and perusal. It can be downloaded by following this link. You are also invited to participate in our LCB Forum by requesting access here.

As you will see when you read the Charrette Report, the establishment of Work Stream Groups is the most important work to come out of this process. These groups are forming during the first weeks of May and consist of work around the following topics:

– Energy Efficiency and Renewable Integration
- Mobility Integration
- Livable Community and Creating Place
- Materials Flow, Waste and Water
- Financial and Business Case Analysis
- Marketing and Outreach

Many of you will be contacted in the upcoming weeks about participating in these work streams. If you know that you would like to be involved, please contact Buffy Andrews at bandrews@livingcityblock.org or Nick Groos at ngroos@livingcityblock.org for more information.

At our LCB LoDo Pilot project, we have begun the early and vital work of commissioning, energy auditing, and energy modeling. Our partners, Green Building Services and Xcel Energy will be working with LCB and our various building owners, business owners and residents to perform this energy modeling over the next months, with a goal of completion by early Fall of 2010. Once we have this information in hand we will begin to put together proposals for building by building and block wide energy efficiency retrofitting. We are also working with Geo Energy Services to begin a feasibility study for block wide Geo thermal heating and cooling applications.

Discussions with representatives of three other neighborhoods in Denver have begun: Westwood, Five Points and 10th & Osage/La Alma/Lincoln Park. We will know within the next several months if we will be launching Living City Blocks in these communities, and we hope to be able to update you in the next Newsletter.

Our staff has grown to include myself, Llewellyn Wells, President; Chad Riley, Director of Finance and Business Case Analysis; Buffy Andrews, Project Manager of LCB LoDo; Doug Laub, Director of External Relations; Lindsay Franta, Livable Communities; Jonah Bea-Taylor, Livable Communities; Nick Groos, Sister Neighborhoods and Fund Raising; Tucker Miller, Associate for Financial and Business Case Analysis; Roger Burleigh, Associate with LCB LoDo; and Jack Sinclair, City and County of Denver Liaison.

On the partnership front, we are proud to continue our strong primary partnerships with Rocky Mountain Institute and Alliance for Sustainable Colorado. We also have important partnerships with a number of government, academic and corporate organizations. Please see a full list of LCB partners here.

Funding is progressing, and again we hope to announce many exciting developments in our next newsletter.
Living City Block launched in January of this year out of the nurturing and protective cacoon of our parent organization Rocky Mountain Institute. Since then, we have grown substantially, further evolved our goals and our organizational framework, and have begun the long term process of developing lasting partnerships and funding sources. We have launched the on the ground analysis and planning work essential to the success of our Living City Block LoDo pilot project. We could not have gotten this far without the support of each and everyone of you.

We thank you and look forward to working with each of you even more closely as Living City Block evolves over the years.

Best,

Llewellyn Wells
President – Living City Block

Ben Holland

Smart growth. Sustainable cities. These terms get tossed around a lot. And, typically, they are used in reference to new buildings and new communities. What about our existing buildings and our aging cities?

Living City Block is taking aim at this question. By combining urban revitalization [...]]]> Originally posted at: Big Green Boulder by RMI’s Ben Holland

Ben Holland

Smart growth. Sustainable cities. These terms get tossed around a lot. And, typically, they are used in reference to new buildings and new communities. What about our existing buildings and our aging cities?

Living City Block is taking aim at this question. By combining urban revitalization with a focus on energy-efficiency retrofits and cutting-edge renewable technology, they are trying to set an adoptable standard for urban sustainability.

Raising the bar
Typical building renovations increase energy efficiency by 10 percent. Pretty marginal. If you consider the fact that 80% of the existing buildings in the U.S. will still be in operation 50 years from now, that’s not exactly pushing the envelope to a sustainable future. What if you could cut the energy consumption of an entire community by half? Even better, what if that community could produce more energy than it consumes?

A possible starting point for the Living City Block | Courtesy livingcityblock.org

This is exactly what Living City Block intends to do, starting with its pilot project in Lower Downtown Denver. They’re calling it LCB LoDo. The site chosen encompasses a full city block between 15th and 16th, on Wazee and Wyknoop Streets. Here, the organization will showcase advanced renewable energy and efficiency practices, while enhancing the “livability” of the community. Essentially, they want to create an environmentally friendly place where people come to “live, work and play.”

LoDo is already a thriving community. Once a seedy skid row of abandoned warehouses, the neighborhood underwent revitalization a couple decades ago. It is now a lively center of restaurants, coffee shops, businesses and upscale lofts. So in that respect, this project has a bit of a head start. Nevertheless, achieving the energy goals set forth will be extremely difficult.

Greatest Hits of Green

What a living city block might look like | Courtesy livingcityblock.org

So what will a Green LoDo look like? At first glance, not a whole lot different than it does now.
Much of the work involved in retrofitting buildings involves maximizing insulation, rearranging mechanical systems, upgrading lighting systems and installing high-efficiency windows. Though not as sexy as solar panels, this kind of work is by far the most important when it comes to creating green buildings.

As the energy needs are brought down through efficiency improvements, cutting-edge green technologies can be much more effective at creating a building that produces more energy than they consume.

That’s where the fun stuff comes in — what we’re calling “a greatest hits of green.” After a few years, the block should feature a range of technologies, such as wastewater treatment, composting, rooftop gardens shaded by solar panels, ground source heating and cooling, and my personal favorite–permeable sidewalks, which allow rainfall to absorb through walkways and into the soil below, reducing runoff in the streets, the need for storm drains, and in turn the mixing of water with dirty oils and chemicals.

Barriers
LCB Lodo has already gained some support, most notably from Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper. Still, the future of this project must contend with a fair amount of obstacles, particularly regarding behavioral and business norms.

“We need new models of collaboration that can be applied to real estate development and urban revitalization throughout the country,” says Chad Riley, project lead for Business and Economic Development project at Living City Block. “And to do that we need to unite numerous players toward to a common goal.”

So the team has held several intensive meetings at the famed Tattered Cover Bookstore, one of the buildings on the block. These workshops have brought together leading architects and designers, local utilities, representatives from various government offices, and the owners of the buildings on the block. The goal: to break through conventional planning and financing practices and find practical opportunities to really make the project work.

Translating sustainability
The team is confident that it can reach these goals with a financial payback as quick as 5 years. The hard part is communicating and visualizing the work in a way that will inspire support. So they’re working with the design programs of Denver University* and Metro State College of Denver’s to create various interactive media that will show what the block will look like at various stages of the project. These displays should start rolling out sometime this summer.

This also relates to the community vitality element of the project. Living City Block is working with University of Colorado-Denver’s Planning and Health Departments to better understand what makes a community thrive. In tandem with the actual retrofits, there will be an extensive research component to this project.

“We want to get a better idea of what a community needs and wants and then go forward with improving social connectivity in the area,” says Lindsay Franta, head of Community Research and Development for LCB.

Spreading the idea
Ultimately, the organization hopes to encourage others to replicate their work by making available a laundry list of recommendations and best practices. In addition, they will work with other organizations and building owners around the country to launch “sister-neighborhood” projects. Like LCB Lodo, these sister projects must include an NGO that will organize the project, a local city council on board, an academic institution that will commit to research to the project. And the site chosen must be mixed use, with nearby access to a transit hub and a group of tenants and owners that are committed to sharing the costs of retrofitting their buildings.

As a nonprofit organization, Living City Block is currently trying to drum up support and funds to keep the project moving. If you’re interested creating an LCB of your own, you can contact the organization. First you need to identify an NGO that will organize the project, a local city council on board, an academic institution that will commit to research to the project. And the site chosen must be mixed use, with nearby access to a transit hub and a group of tenants and owners that are committed to sharing the costs of retrofitting their buildings.

Ben Holland is Outreach and Marketing Coordinator for Rocky Mountain Institute. Focused primarily on external activities, he is the point person for all public inquiries, partnerships, conferences and speaking engagements. He also lends support to RMI’s marketing efforts by developing strategy and writing extensively about the Institute’s research and programmatic work.

*Correction: The LCB is working with University of Denver (DU)

Except for the problem that nobody actually lives in this imaginary place, and most of the visitors have [...]]]> Imagine a beautiful set of buildings that produce more energy than they use. Imagine them out in the middle of a stunning mountain valley; it’s a perfect retreat. They don’t even allow cars on this imaginary campus. Idyllic.

Except for the problem that nobody actually lives in this imaginary place, and most of the visitors have to fly in. You could say it’s hypothetically a model of sustainability. It could even be a community of sorts – at least a temporary and isolated one. If the visitors pay money and the buildings were built from an integrated approach, it might even make a clear business-case. But this idea is very far from a Living City Block because it is not a livable community.

One of the biggest contributions of the Living City Block model is looking at urban communities from an integrated perspective: We want to address issues related to sustainability and have that also create a clear economic impact, as well as make the neighborhood a stronger community. In my imaginary example, only two legs of our stool were addressed: sustainability and economy.

Surely it’s possible to succeed in one dimension without the others – there are many examples of isolated sustainability, and great economic success, without community building. And perhaps it’s also possible to create a vibrant community that is not very sustainable; a place that depends on a polluting industry, or a place where everyone is forced to have a car, etc. But when we look at helping existing neighborhoods generate a Living City Block, we recognize that all three dimensions must be equally served.

One of our basic challenges at Living City Block is working with community leaders, businesses and sustainability experts to identify a set of projects, specific to that neighborhood, that impact all three areas at once. By making a key building more efficient, or working to transform a street into a vibrant place for community interaction, are we also really creating an opportunity for more local jobs? Are we just increasing traffic? We ask these questions in earnest and only detailed answers help us take the next step.

Seventy-five percent of our existing building stock will still be standing in 2050.

We can construct highly-efficient, new “Green” buildings, but that [...]]]> By the year 2050, eighty percent of the world’s population will live in urban areas. Our cities will face increasing demands for energy and resources. So how will they adapt to these great challenges?

Seventy-five percent of our existing building stock will still be standing in 2050.

We can construct highly-efficient, new “Green” buildings, but that isn’t really getting to the problem. Our existing building stock is largely inefficient, leaking waste heat, consuming more energy than it should. And, more importantly, they are here to stay. In fact, 75% of our existing building stock will still be standing in 2050. We need to re-energize those buildings and expand their lung capacity for the modern age.

That’s exactly what Living City Block intends to do–and more. Our team is collaborating with building owners and city leaders to transform two blocks on Wazee and Wynkoop into a hyper efficient, regenerative demonstration of what is possible for our urban centers.

We’re creating a new paradigm for our cities–sustainable, economically thriving, livable communities for tomorrow.