Here's a very lightly edited transcript of the interview with Ben Gates. Just a fun sidenote: the transcript was generated by posting a task on Amazon's Mechanical Turk service - 5 bucks for transcribing 18-minutes of audio.
Ben Gates Interview
Bomee: So we're talking about this idea of whether there is something worth discussing in the area, the field, of urban planning that could fairly be called open source paradigm for planning. And whether this idea of enabling planning practice is something that deserves to be considered along-side things like, you know, public participation, access, these other sorts of things we think about as part and parcel of what constitutes planning.
So, what we're doing, one of the things I wanted to do was run around and look at examples where planners really have made this idea of sharing or enabling other peoples practices a key part of the work that they're doing. And it seems to me like, just what little I've heard about your project, come a little closer, what I've heard about your project, it seems like you guys really were working with this idea of enabling other folks to do similar things in mind. So I'm really curious to hear a little bit about your project, and what role, or where in the process of planning, your thoughts about how do I get other people to be able use these resources that I've put together came into play. And then, you know, just tell us a little bit about what you're working on.
Ben: Cool, and we're on tape.
Bomee: Right. And your name is Ben...?
Ben: Ben Gates, and I work with Central City Concern in Portland Oregon. We're a non-profit organization that works in the areas of affordable housing development and also a provider of social services. We started out 30 years ago by addressing the drug and alcohol problem in Portland and started a detoxification center, quickly realized that those people need housing too, in order to be successful. Started that, both transitional and permanent housing and also employment services and physical and mental health services. So we have about 1400 units of housing that we've built in the central city of Portland., primarily for individuals, but also some family housing. I started working with them three years ago through the Rose Architectural Fellowship. And that allowed me to take on some planning projects that were, maybe, above and beyond what a normal non-profit would do because here they had this person who was funded through foundation supports and could work on some of these issues.
So my main project has been, and is, realizing a urban family housing: high rise, mixed-use, building with a community center and child-care facility in downtown Portland. The presenter this morning from AARP talked about the Pearl District as being livable neighborhood where we want to build this affordable housing. And really early on, we realized there was some potential to involve other folks and individuals because it was such an innovative project. Bringing families into a new urbanized central city. And we decided that one of our goals for that project was to achieve a living building challenge, which is a new pilot project of a local USGBC chapter. It's going beyond LEED to look at what would be a truly sustainable building. So it's got goals such as net zero energy, water independence, no use of toxic materials; very simple requirements, but really profound. And our strategy for that project was really to say, okay, well, you know, this is definitely going to require some additional investment and it's not going to be paid for, you know, with the normal way we do development. But because this project is significant, because we're setting this goal, we think that it's going to draw lots of people to be involved in the project.
And one of our first considerations in working towards that goal was just taking one of the sustainability issues and really looking at it in depth. And so we asked ourselves, What was the most difficult aspect of the truly sustainable building. And we decided that water independence was. And so by water independence, I mean what if a building were able to harvest all the rain water that falls on site, re-use gray water, re-use black water, so that no water leaves the site. Basically using all of your available resources and it's difficult because the regulatory environment, there's lots of agencies involved in water, from the Department of Environmental Quality to the Health Divisions, to Building Codes and it's complicated. Often times agencies don't talk to each other. And so people who want to incorporate these innovative strategies like gray water harvesting and reuse to save flush toilets have a hard time doing so because they just don't understand how to go about it. So we said that we were going to look at the entire regulatory environment, explain these systems in a mixed-use building, and we are going to tell people how to navigate the regulatory environment. Initially we thought we'd explain how to do a building by building appeal of how to incorporate each of these systems.
And so, that project started a year ago. We received foundation support from the Bullitt Foundation , a local northwest foundation interested in environmental issues, Enterprise Community Partners, and Cascadia Regional Green Building Chapter Portland Development Commission, so some other, kind of small, really local matching grants of folks that are interested. In addition, the team who took it on, are architects, engineers, were so excited about the work that they also wanted to contribute some of their own time to the project. And so there are lots of in-kind contributions, because through this audacious goal they would be pushing the envelope and leaning a lot for themselves and the other projects that they were doing. So, here we are, you know, a year later, after starting with the intention of, you know, exploring this with the intent of applying it on our building, but also to share the work we've learned with other individuals, and we're nearly complete with our final report, that's going to be released in January. It's going to be made freely available to everybody.
Let me explain it's significance for Oregon, which was our target area; the State of Oregon. And then also for other jurisdictions. In Oregon, what we did is, we explained the entire regulatory environment, so we have this road map, and we also found that you can pursue change not on a building by building basis, but state-wide. So we found a way, as we've explained in our report, to work with your local codes division and your local boards who have jurisdiction on these issues to allow some of these strategies to be used statewide. So, particularly in Oregon, you used to have to get a permit for rainwater harvesting and gray water harvesting wasn't allowed. Now you don't need a permit for rainwater harvesting and gray water harvesting is allowed, also without , you know, a special building appeal. So we've succeeded in removing a couple of the barriers to water independence and it's significant because where a lead kind of platinum building or advanced building could achieve 30-40 percent water savings through energy efficiency measures, now with , for example, in our high-rise development, as in other multi-family building, we can achieve, in Oregon, not justa 30-40 percent water savings, but a 70-80 percent water savings, which is absolutely huge. And it's not just our building, but any building in Oregon that converts to that now. And that's not only with commercial buildings but we changed that for residential buildings as well.
So the great thing about this project was that it became not just academic but actually had real tangible results. So the benefit, I think, beyond Oregon and other jurisdictions is that we've created this road map, template, which is a very, kind of, simple to understand diagram for water systems in buildings, mapped out each of the regulatory agencies for Oregon. Now other jurisdictions can use our roadmap, template, and even, we'll explain our process, they can adopt certain aspects of the process we went through, as appropriate, and create a road map for their own environments. What it's been helpful in doing is, we're able to, kind of get all of these different regulatory agencies around the table and have discussions with them with this road map in hand and it actually starts to, even, show them, like, where, kind of, anomalies are, or help them understand where they have jurisdiction over it. Because often times, they're not even sure and they're pointing fingers at somebody else and the other person isn't really the problem and it starts to, really, unveil some of the inconsistencies in the environment.
Bomee: So I think one of the reasons we started thinking about the importance of how we create a framework for sharing information as a planners has to do with this idea that in order for us to have a meaningful response, whether you're talking about the mitigation of climate change, in other words, figuring out how to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, or whether you're talking about adaptation to the things that we are not going to be able to stop from happening, that what we really need to do is have responses that are much faster than what we've been able to muster together, and also at a much greater scale than what we've been able to do in the past. And so, I was wondering, listening to your story, to what extent does this question of the speed of change or the scale that you could achieve, how much was that, really, in the forefront of your thought processes as you were designing this process?
Ben: I definitely agree that, that is a problem. I think, we thought about this issue of scale, you know, in three ways. And definitely we thought about it because it's an important part of our strategy to get a living building built. And also to use it as an example to accelerate change in the industry. So scale jumping: we have a real project that we want to apply this work to and I think that's key. In order to even have a plan looked at often times it needs to be implemented and people need to see how actually it was executed in the end so you have both those aspects. So this early work, hopefully it will result in a built project. Definitely now other projects in Oregon are taking on gray water re-use and so there is going to be built projects beyond ours. So
I think it's about really applying it to something that will actually get built, not just an academic project, but then, thinking about how what you're doing is useful to other folks in the industry and around the world. So we took a kind of national approach. We said, you know, we could never understand every jurisdiction, but we could give people the tools and ideas about a process by which they can understand their own jurisdiction. And let's not, like, keep this as proprietary information that just our team has access to and can apply because it creates a market niche for them. Let's make sure that our non-profit organization is spear-heading an approach by which we can capture all of these tools and then make them freely available to others. And so we're looking at, you know, an open-source or creative-commons license where just anybody can know that this work has been authored so that it's freely available in the public domain. And I'd be interested to talk to you about that based on your experience.
Bomee: Well, you bring up, I think, one of the real key questions about sharing , which is, when you're talking about something where you're creating a new product, where you've brought together information in a way that other people haven't before, I think there's a worry that if you somehow give it away or you make it available to other people that you're sort of, you know, like, letting go of a proprietary product that gives you some kind of an edge or gives your organization a competitive claim on. So, did you, was there any point in what you were doing where you got push-back on this idea of sharing? Because it'll make it easier for other people to block it...
Ben: Yes. I think it's been an education process for me. And it deals with copyright issues and creative work and that kind of stuff. I think that if we want to share this information we're going to need to understand these issues of copyright and sharing work. So, early on when we were creating our contracts with our consultants to carry out this work, we made sure to retain ownership of all the creative work. You know, and even in an architecture contract there's language, in there, that says the architect is the owner of the creative work. We changed that, so that the non-profit, we Central City, are the owner and author of the work, and we gave them, you know, fully paid-up rights to use the work in their own projects. But what that allowed us to do, since we're the authors of it then we can determine what the use rights are for them. So it kind of takes away the creative rights of all the team members, puts it under one author, and I think the non-profit is a great organization to control that authorship because they have the mission and the values and, in our case we've attracted funders because of our ability to say, okay, now we're going to share this with a greater audience. And then, what we're allowed to do is then freely share that because we're the author and we have the authorship to do that, or the permissions to do that. So I don't know that that's always, you know, the best strategy, but that's the strategy that we took. Because, I think, that with any creative plan or product there is, people who want to retain that and keep it close, for whatever reasons. And you know, as the convener of a project you're in a really great position to say, Okay, from the get-go with this project our value and our mission is to get, run a product option, and by investing and working on this project it's assumed that all of your work is going to be shared. And I think, you know, initially that might be greeted with hesitation among consultants, but I think, what they've all realized is that they've gotten huge attention from all of this work. Our architects and engineers in particular have now started printing a road map for Washington. They've been contracted by Clark County to do that. One of the foundation supporters of our project interviewed our architects and engineers on one of the buildings they're working on that's going for a living building challenge. And so it really helps, I think, our team become leaders in the field.
Bomee: That's great. So then my last question is, in your work in this area, was there ever a moment when you felt like if somebody else who had either data or some other kind of information, where you wished that person or that organization had, had the same kind of attitude about sharing. Like a moment when you were like, if this were just something I had access to, why didn't these guys stop to think about sharing?
Ben: That's a good question. You know, recently with one of my consultants, they have this water calculator that they've created, and there's been some data that I've been trying to put together and map and chart about costs of water use and cost of water, or savings,
associated with water savings in dollar amounts, that I've been wanting to graph and put together. And it's been very difficult because the consultant is, that's proprietary material of theirs and they've been kind of unwilling, to date, to share the inner workings of that
kind of calculator. So they've been sharing the information, but you don't really have the original data to work with and manipulate. So that's one really close example of that. And then a second is that, you know, just the availability of information on the web is really, you'd think there'd be more information about water conservation and water use strategies. But it's been really hard to dig up. There's are a lot of trade associations that you have to have a membership to get access to their reports and so as a researcher working in this field, it's difficult in that regard.
Bomee: Okay! Well, thank you very much for your time and the work that you do.
Ben: Thanks, Bomee.
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