When passengers pass through the newly remodeled Portland International Airport in spring 2024, they’ll be able to point up to specific Douglas fir beams around the oval skylights and know that they came from the ancestral lands of the Coquille Indian Tribe in Southwestern Oregon.
This will be the first major US airport to have a mass timber roof, and all the timber for the project came from sustainably managed forests that are located less than 300 miles away. The soaring, nine-acre ceiling — which will have lots of natural sunlight streaming in through the skylights and windows — will feel a bit like a forest. (The renovation will also include the addition of 70 or so living trees that will be growing in recessed and above-ground planters.)
The process of sourcing the wood took six years of planning, research, forest visits and many, many phone calls between the Port of Portland, Portland-based ZGF Architects, regional tribes, family-run forests, mill owners and brokers.
All the wood for the nine-acre ceiling came from within 300 miles of the airport. Courtesy of Port of Portland
When ZGF principal Jacob Dunn joined the firm in 2017, his colleagues were already considering going with an all-wood roof. The Port of Portland, the public authority that oversees the airport and marine terminals in Portland, loved the idea. “The Port’s mandate was: We want it to be a mass timber roof. We’re the front door to the region, we really want to showcase this industry that is critical to managing and stewarding one of our region’s most precious natural resources,” recalls Dunn, who is ZGF’s sustainability lead for the PDX airport project.
The Port of Portland also wanted the roof to be the most sustainable version of a mass timber roof that it could possibly be — which meant traceability. “Most of the voices in the room said, ‘That can’t be done, that’s not the way the industry works,’” Ryan Temple, founder and owner of Sustainable Northwest Wood recalls. He was one of a handful of people who said that not only was it possible, it might even help redefine the timber industry — by making timber more traceable. He saw the project as a chance to identify and celebrate the people who are sustainably managing their forestland.
When it comes to the US housing crisis, Portland was early to the party. Well over a decade ago, in 2009 and 2010, Oregon’s biggest city had the lowest rental vacancy rate in the country. The years since have brought little relief: From 2013 to 2018, median rent in Portland rose 29 percent, and the average home price rose 46 percent. Since 2015, the city has been under an official housing state of emergency.
Portland’s housing crunch has many roots, from multi-decade population growth to the broader affordability crisis sweeping the nation. But one factor stands out: Most of the city’s residential neighborhoods had been zoned exclusively for single-family homes since the late 1950s. That is, in most neighborhoods, new duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes (let alone apartment buildings) have not been allowed.
Four new townhomes built using Portland’s Residential Infill Project in the city’s Woodlawn neighborhood. Credit: Cheryl Juetten
But in 2020, all that changed when Portland’s city council tossed out 60-plus years of low-density mandates by voting in favor of housing reform that ended single-family zoning. The new rules were game-changing: a package of zoning shifts known as the Residential Infill Project (RIP for short) laid the groundwork for more residential density than in most American cities. RIP made new single-family homes of over 2,500 square feet illegal. It erased bans on “middle housing” — a term describing duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes and townhomes — across the city. And it allowed for two accessory dwelling units (ADUs) on any lot, removed residential parking mandates, and permitted three-story apartment buildings of up to six homes on any lot as long as they met deep affordability standards. It amounted to a transformation in Portland’s approach to urban density, and is, to this day, one of the most pro-housing reforms that any US city has passed.
“This reform ultimately became the most permissive update to low-density single-dwelling zones in the country,” urban planning consultant Neil Heller, who helped do some of the financial modeling for RIP, writes in the latest issue of Southern Urbanism Quarterly.
This is the story of how Portland got it done.
Many cities have attempted to increase density. Nearly all have been met with fierce opposition.
The reasons behind these objections are many. Sometimes it’s a fear that proximity to denser housing will decrease the value of single-family homes. Other times opposition stems from a desire to preserve historic neighborhoods. (“Stop Demolishing Portland” was a popular yard sign among the city’s anti-RIP contingent.) But objection to density is often racially coded. Multi-unit buildings, because they cost less to rent, often attract more low-income and non-white residents to neighborhoods.
Portland at the turn of the century, when the city was still developing. Credit: TriMet
Explicitly racial zoning has been illegal since 1917, but racial covenants — clauses written into deeds that bar the (white) owner from selling to non-whites — existed for decades beyond that. In 1948 the Supreme Court ruled that racial covenants couldn’t be enforced, and in 1968, the Fair Housing Act made them illegal.
But that didn’t stop racist zoning practices — cities that couldn’t ban non-white homeowners instead started banning the types of housing they believed non-white homeowners would buy. In some cities, duplex bans and even apartment bans became popular in wealthier neighborhoods. In 1959, Portland went even further, banning construction of duplexes and other attached housing in almost every neighborhood. (Portland’s loophole to this was that duplexes were allowed on corners.) “One effect, in many cities a primary goal, was to segregate people by class, race, age and income,” writes Michael Andersen, a senior housing researcher with the Sightline Institute, a progressive Seattle-based think tank. These bans on so-called “middle housing” remain in force in many cities to this day.
“There’s this pretty big presumption that you don’t mess with single-family zones,” says Eli Spevak, a developer of small-scale housing and one of the Portlanders who pushed for zoning reform. “People love their homes to be investments they make. Understandably people get attached to things not changing.”
Not all of the opposition to Portland’s reforms was self-serving. Some objected to tearing down beautiful historic homes—and the resulting environmental impact, since most tear-down detritus goes to a landfill. Others worried that the RIP would encourage developers to tear down affordable single-family homes in outer neighborhoods—where people of color have long owned their own homes—and build market-rate townhouses instead. Since the RIP wasn’t tied to comprehensive affordability mandates, these people feared that “affordability” would be an elusive promise, dictated by invisible market forces, and inadvertently fuel gentrification in these areas.
Houses of Portland. Credit: Cheryl Juetten
These reservations aside, a loose-knit coalition that included developers, pro-tenant rights groups, an anti-displacement coalition, environmental groups, and transit and mobility advocates came together under one unified voice. This group, Portland for Everyone, helped to change the tenor of the conversation and persuade the City Council that more density was exactly what Portland needed to alleviate its housing crisis.
One of the leaders of Portland’s zoning reform was Spevak, who had worked for Habitat for Humanity and consulted for other affordable housing projects. In 2014, Spevak, wanting to see a broader palette of housing choices in Portland, drafted a letter to the director of the city’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability (BPS) asking for a code update to meet Portland’s future housing needs.
The letter, signed by nearly 40 building professionals, local organizations and Portland residents, asked the Bureau to encourage accessory dwelling units (ADUs), permit existing homes to be divided internally, allow small “cottage cluster” developments, eliminate household size definitions from the zoning code, and more. Demographic shifts had left Portland with smaller households that looked different than traditional nuclear families, the letter argued, and the city code needed to catch up.
The letter was an opening gambit to the BPS, where both the then-director and her long-range planner were looking for ways to increase density and discourage so-called McMansions.
In 2016, Spevak came to the realization that if they wanted to win the fight for zoning reform, they needed a dedicated advocate who would lead the fight. “The people who were going to oppose the changes have a lot of time and are self-organized. If we were going to create a ground game, we had to have a staff organizer,” says Spevak. “So that was pivotal. We were going to lose unless we had staff.”
Spevak saw the ideal coalition organizer in his employee, Madeline Kovacs. A then 29-year-old Portland State University grad student interested in the links between density and decarbonization, Kovacs had been active in the youth climate movement, eventually becoming co-director of a group called Project Survival Media. After graduate work in urban and regional planning, she interned for two years at BPS and then came to work for Spevak at his firm Orange Splot, LLC.
Kovacs, a passionate organizer, also had affordable housing connections. “Plus, everyone likes her,” Spevak adds. The anti-sprawl nonprofit 1,000 Friends of Oregon was willing to host Kovacs and her emerging coalition of pro-housing groups under its banner. (Eventually the organization even helped fund her position.)
Kovacs set to work launching a coalition called Portland for Everyone. She and representatives from nonprofits and organizations throughout the city met frequently and determined what they had in common. “One of the things I’m very proud of is that the pro-housing advocates really un-siloed ourselves,” says Kovacs. Indeed, Kovacs gathered some unlikely bedfellows: affordable housing providers and nonprofit land trusts sat at the table with members of the Portland Homebuilders Association, a trade association representing builders and remodelers of single-family homes. Environmental groups like Sunrise PDX started talking to folks from Anti-Displacement PDX. The coalition even included a handful of progressive neighborhood associations, which historically have not been supportive of denser zoning.
“So I think when people look and they’re like, ‘Oh! You have affordable housing builders, tree canopy advocates and bicycle advocates — and they’re all signing the same letter?’ That makes a policy maker pay attention,” Kovacs says.
“We all worked and talked together and we adopted a very holistic approach. It’s not just upzoning and it’s not just funding, it’s not just stability — it’s all three of those things,” she says. “And we need a housing strategy that’s going to provide a range of solutions working across that spectrum.”
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There was seemingly no one that Kovacs and her coalition members wouldn’t talk to. They did education and outreach with neighborhood, business and community-based associations. “We presented to 3,000 Portlanders face-to-face!” she says, laughing. They also partnered with and presented to organizations as varied as AARP, OPAL Environmental Justice Oregon, and Business for a Better PDX. They got inspiration from the YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard) movement. “It was nice to be able to learn some lessons from colleagues in other places — share ideas, share strategies,” Kovacs says.
By 2018, when the project came before the city’s Planning Commission, some 38 organizations had already endorsed the coalition’s principles in advance. The result? Over half of the testimonials before the Commission were pro-density — a dramatic departure from such meetings in many other cities, where anti-density voices are often the loudest in the room.
Portland for Everyone had successfully educated Portlanders en masse about the benefits of the zoning changes. (Kovacs left Portland for Everyone to work on state zoning reform at the end of 2018.)
In August of 2020, the City Council passed the RIP by a vote of three to one. It no doubt helped that two of the newer City Council members — Chloe Eudaly and Jo Ann Hardesty — were both renters.
Meanwhile, down at the State Capitol in Salem, then-Speaker of the House Tina Kotek had just helped push through a groundbreaking zoning bill, making Oregon the first state in the nation to effectively ban single-family zoning. House Bill 2001, passed in 2019, required cities larger than 10,000 residents to allow duplexes in single-family zones and cities larger than 25,000 to allow even more types of multi-family housing like triplexes, fourplexes and “cottage clusters.”
“I think this is really brilliant legislation that will have long-term impact,” says Steve Messinetti, the President and CEO of Habitat for Humanity Portland Region.
“The neat thing about the timing is that Portland passed residential infill in 2020, and there were neighborhood associations on the west side raising money to sue the city over that,” Spevak says. But by the time Portland adopted the RIP, the state’s own zoning reform required cities of Portland’s size to densify, defanging the legal challenges being prepared by some of the city’s neighborhood associations. “So the city was never sued. That worked out nicely,” Spevak says. Kotek, who is still a vocal champion of density, is now Oregon’s governor.
Other cities and states around the country have passed similar reforms. Statewide “middle-housing” bills have been introduced in nearly 20 states since 2019 and have passed in at least two beyond Oregon: Maine and California. Minneapolis and Vancouver, Washington both re-legalized duplexes and triplexes citywide before Portland did. Seattle eliminated single-family zoning in 27 neighborhoods in 2019. And Austin passed a zoning reform allowing sixplexes with affordability the year before Portland’s RIP passed.
“That presumption [that you don’t mess with single-family zones] is getting blown away faster than you’d ever guess,” says Spevak. Now, roughly a dozen states allow cities to add ADUs to residential lots, even red states like Montana. (Texas’ state house just narrowly voted down a bill that would’ve allowed ADUs statewide.)
Most developers and city planners say it will take at least a decade before we see measurable results of Portland’s RIP. That said, from August 2021 to July 2022 — the first 12 months the RIP was in effect — 367 middle housing units were built, according to Morgan Tracy, Senior Planner at the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. During that same time period, just 107 single-dwelling houses were built. (28 of those had a single ADU on the property, but those were permitted prior to RIP passing.) So, in the first year of the RIP, 3.4 times more middle housing units were built than single-family houses.
“I think this is really brilliant legislation that will have long-term impact,” says Steve Messinetti, the President and CEO of Habitat for Humanity Portland Region. “Where I think we’ll see the greatest impact is in the 10 to 20 year horizon.”
Development — especially for affordable housing projects — can be slow. You have to buy the property, get funding approved, clear additional zoning hurdles, and so on. That said, Messinetti is overseeing two low-income housing projects that wouldn’t have been possible prior to these zoning changes. In Northeast Portland’s Cully neighborhood, Habitat bought a three-quarter acre lot that had a derelict home on it. Prior to the RIP, a developer might have torn down the home and subdivided the lot for five expensive single-family homes. Now, however, Habitat will be able to build 15 affordable units on that parcel — a mix of duplexes and triplexes. The second project, in Southwest Portland, was a former church on 1.9 acres. Habitat is currently building 17 detached homes there. (Cottage clusters, which state legislation allowed in 2019, were added in an update to the RIP in 2022.) “This is a good example of an area where not a lot of affordable housing has been built,” he says.
While he acknowledges that some of the triplexes and townhomes are not as affordable as the activists who helped push through RIP probably would have liked, he does think they will be the most affordable housing in the city in the future.
“The long-term benefit is we’re creating more housing for middle and low-income folks, helping to desegregate neighborhoods,” Messinetti says. “And that’s a good thing overall.”
When Rukaiyah Adams took the podium at Nike World Headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon, two weeks ago to announce Phil and Penny Knight’s $400 million donation to the 1803 Fund her voice wavered with emotion. It’s understandable why: Thanks to the contributions of the Nike founder and his wife, the scale of the assets she’ll be managing as chair of the newly formed fund will be game-changing for Portland’s Black community, which her family has been a part of for four generations.
“At $400 million, I’ll be managing almost more than all Black women in venture capital,” Adams tells me by phone a week later. “I don’t think there’s a Black woman who has ever raised more than a few million dollars for a historically Black community.”
The 1803 Fund, a public benefit nonprofit, is dedicated to rebuilding and strengthening the historically Black community in North and Northeast Portland. “It’s like a private equity fund for the people,” Adams says. The fund will have three focus areas: education, culture and belonging, and place. Its first project, Rebuild Albina, is focused on investing in the Black neighborhood that was partially razed in the 1950s to make way for Memorial Coliseum, I-5, and Legacy Emanuel Hospital, displacing a vibrant business district and residential community of bungalows, jazz clubs, corner groceries, and churches.
Continue reading here. Or email me for a copy of the PDF!
David Odusanya (L) and Keith Crawford (R) at the Solace offices in Portland, Oregon
When Keith Crawford and David Odusanya started their cremation company in April 2019, there was no way they could anticipate that a worldwide pandemic would soon prove the urgency of their model.
As Covid-19 approaches the two-year mark, Solace Cremation has turned out to be a service for the modern age—a web-based business that offers a safe and remote experience while allowing customers to smoothly organize a loved one’s cremation. Based in Portland, Ore., with operations in Seattle and Southern California, Solace handles the entire process almost completely online.
Crawford and Odusanya, formerly brand designers at Nike, left the apparel giant in 2017 to form their own creative agency, Co-Lab. A couple years later, after reflecting on the difficulties they both experienced upon losing a parent, they started to research the funeral business.
Crawford’s father died in 2013 after a battle with Parkinson’s disease, but he’d planned everything about his own funeral and paid for all of it in advance. Even so, the funeral director overseeing the arrangements tried to up-sell Crawford and his siblings on various products and services once their father was gone. “Why would we want to do anything different from what my dad had chosen?” Crawford asks. And why, he kept wondering, hadn’t anyone come up with a better experience, given how many Americans are dissatisfied with end-of-life rituals.
Odusanya’s mother passed away later that same year, in his hometown of Sheffield, England. Her wish was to be cremated. “I couldn’t understand why we were paying $2,000 for a wooden casket,” he says.
They each came away from those experiences wondering how they might fully redesign the funeral home experience — “so creepy and gloomy,” says Crawford. Part of their research involved interviewing families who’d had reactions similar to Crawford’s. The process, they heard again and again, was antiquated and cold, leaving most people feeling it was all about money. The pair was also surprised to learn that the cremation ratesurpasses the burial rate in this country and no one’s building new funeral homes. So they ditched their initial idea and focused on modernizing the experience of saying goodbye to a loved one.
The death-care industry is dominated by Service Corporation International, a conglomerate that owns mortuary chains such as Dignity Memorial, Neptune Society, and Funeraria Del Angel. The industry is notoriously opaque about pricing. Even in California, where funeral homes must list prices online, a loophole allows many to get out of that basic requirement. Most funeral homes won’t disclose rates until you’re sitting at a table with them with a big binder plopped down in front of you.
“If you’ve chosen direct cremation there is no need for all the funeral home visits, paperwork by hand, and in-person meetings,” Crawford says. “We removed that from the equation and—COVID aside—people are very happy about that. It gives them time to do other things—plan a memorial, grieve with their families.”
Funeral rates rise with various purchases: caskets, floral arrangements, even prayer cards. And the cost of cremation increases significantly when handled by a traditional funeral home—to an average of $2,550 in the U.S., according to the National Funeral Directors Association. Even when choosing cremation at a typical funeral home, the fees can pile up, says Malisa Riceci, Solace’s funeral director. “If you want ‘priority’ cremation, if you want a lock of hair, if your loved one is over a certain weight, even if you want a pacemaker removed—these all add up very quickly,” she says. Most people, still overcome by grief, wind up agreeing to extra costs because they don’t have the time or emotional energy to shop around or negotiate.
Solace adds no extra fees. Its $895 flat fee includes: picking up the body (of any size), removing a pacemaker, cremating within 48 hours, completing paperwork, and returning a loved one’s ashes in a simple cardboard box. The only extra cost is for the death certificate, as that varies depending on the state and the number of copies a family needs.
The Solace office in Portland, Oregon. [Courtesy of Solace Cremation]
“What they have done is brilliant and necessary,” says Michael Hebb, founder of Death Over Dinner, a nonprofit that organizes events where people talk about death. He met Crawford and Odusanya about five years ago at Endwell, an annual industry symposium. “For one, the clarity of the offer and the pricing.” he says. “It’s not hidden away in some part of a funeral home’s website.”
Liz Eddy is the 31-year-old founder of Lantern, a resource guide for end-of-life planning that also serves as a digital vault for documents. Eddy singles out the one-on-one care the Solace team takes with each customer—even as it’s done remotely. “You have to deeply connect and earn trust with the individual,” she says. “They allow for ease, but also the experience is warm and connected and run by people who really understand” customers’ needs.
Solace says its growth has been swift. Although it doesn’t disclose figures, it says revenue tripled from 2019 to 2020. The startup recently collaborated with the Good Mod, a Portland design company, and industrial designer Rob Bruce, also a former Nike employee, to create more permanent urns—a frequent customer request—from 3D printed clay. These are available for sale on a separate website for $195 and up.
“We want to provide services that families want,” Odusanya says, “vs. just trying to sell them anything.”
Most jeans manufacturers rely on petroleum-based dyes and pollutants. Tammy Hsu and Michelle Zhu are on a mission to revolutionize the industry with planet-friendly, microbe-based dyes.
Michelle Zhu (left) and Tammy Hsu run Huue, a startup developing sustainable textile dyes to replace the ecologically destructive colorants the fashion industry uses.
About 20 percent of the world's industrial water pollution comes from textile dyeing. And the denim industry is the worst offender: Most mass-market denim brands rely on petroleum-based dyes and chemicals like formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide. In 2019, that reality inspired Tammy Hsu and Michelle Zhu to start Huue, which they spun out of Hsu's grad school work at the University of California at Berkeley, where she developed dyes made from microbial secretions. Huue is working on the launch of its first dye, a natural-but-synthetic indigo. The company's eight scientists are also developing sustainable dyes and colorants to disrupt other parts of the fashion industry. --As told to Hannah Wallace
ZHU: My parents were entrepreneurs in the apparel industry. Their brand focused on urban streetwear in the late '90s and early 2000s, which was why denim was such a large focus. As a child, I would visit garment manufacturing facilities on summer trips to China and witness the pollution firsthand: particles in the air that workers had to guard against with facemasks, and foul-looking waterways around the factories. It made a lasting impression on me.
HSU: I came at it from studying science and biology. The lab I was in was very entrepreneurial—we were all thinking about how we could apply these solutions to real-world problems. I'm interested in fashion, clothes, and textiles. The more I read about it, the more I realized that this is a huge problem in the industry.
ZHU: Until the turn of the 20th century, indigo was made from plants. Natural indigo is not very cost effective or scalable, and its performance and color consistency doesn't fit industrial needs. Today, it is generally created via petrochemicals. Fossil fuels are used at the source of creation, but the industry also relies on toxic chemicals such as formaldehyde and benzene— which not only pollute the planet but are carcinogenic as well. That's the main challenge we're tackling.
HSU: We look at how the indigo plant makes the indigo dye molecule. Then we take that genetic information and instruct our microbes to make indigo the same way. We're growing these microbes, and they're programmed to secrete the indigo.
ZHU: Microbes are truly amazing—they multiply rapidly. We call them nature's most powerful manufacturers.
HSU: Six years ago, my professor at Berkeley had a grant, and a story was written about our project. When people learned we were working on sustainable indigo, brands started inquiring.
ZHU: We'd just hired our team of scientists and everyone was so excited to get to work last year. And then it was all shut down. Our milestones are lab-based, so not being able to go into the facility for three months created all sorts of uncertainty. Then there was the issue of when we could run productions and supply products. We were fortunate to win a female founders competition hosted by Microsoft's M12 fund, Mayfield, and Melinda Gates's Pivotal Ventures. That gave us an extra million dollars, which was a big help in the midst of Covid. Finally in July 2021, we brought the whole (vaccinated) team back into the lab full time.
HSU: We've made a lot of progress to scale up our production with a couple of facilities around the U.S. and to make our microbes more efficient. In August, we were producing 80 times more dye than at the end of last year. Our partners want huge amounts of dye.
ZHU: The fashion industry is aware of its challenges—its troubled supply chain and the toxic nature of the dyeing process. It hasn't been difficult to get people really excited about the technology and potential.
But recently I was assigned the enviable task of checking out the newest arrivals in the Central Eastside, an up-and-coming neighborhood near our house. My write-up for Travel + Leisure, which accompanied Sarah Jaffe's wonderful article, covers everything from the latest music venues to new restaurants and hotels. My favorite new discoveries? The multi-course tasting menu at Holdfast Dining and the cheese-stuffed scarpinocc at Renata.
spot prawn, peas, horseradish at Holdfast
Here's what I had to say about Holdfast:
Dining here is like joining an intimate dinner party where your 30-something hosts—Will Preisch and Joel Stocks—are two of the most talented modernist chefs around. No nine-course meal is the same, but expect startling combinations like kimchi panna cotta with sea beans and sea purslane or fried sweetbreads—“The Chicken McNugget of the offal world,” says Stocks—with pickled shimeji mushrooms, roasted maitake, and artful drizzles of XO sauce. The wine pairings are orchestrated by a new guest sommelier each weekend. holdfastdining.com; prix fixe $90, including wine.
The stylish artisan tells us exactly where she buys the vintage and contemporary pieces that make up her enviable wardrobe.
In the decade since Sarah Hart opened Alma Chocolates, a visit to taste her beguiling treats—bittersweet chocolate–dunked pistachio brittle, gold-leafed chocolate icons, rich cups of hot chocolate—has become a requisite stop on Portland’s food map. Hart is also known for her stylish wardrobe—a mix of vintage finds and timeless pieces from local designers. Here she tells us which of the city’s boutiques are her favorites.
Sevens Sisters has some local designers but it is mostly super-curated vintage. I can’t go in there because I always end up buying something!
At Six/Seven jewelry designer Emily Bixler (BOET) and dressmaker Liza Rietz have combined forces. Bixler has done a lot of hand-woven metal—it almost looks like macramé—and they’re working some of that into the dresses.
Portland designer Holly Stalder at Haunt had a place on NW 23rd called Seaplane back in the day. I bought this cool oversized flannel dress here that’s been dip-dyed. It has modern cuts but it’s very comfortable.
And then there’s Una. Giovanna Parolari’s jewelry collection is one of the most amazing in town. She also sells clothing lines by slightly more obscure European and New York designers.
My other favorite place is the Grand Marketplace. Most antique malls have something good and then lots of junk, but everything in here is good because the owner, Andrea Jones, is so careful about what she lets in. We just bought a big workbench that’s going to be the counter at the new Alma. It was somebody’s garage workbench: super beat-up and cool. I also bought a mechanic’s jumpsuit for $24.
There’s an amazing new vintage clothing shop called Workshop over on Williams. They also have some new jewelry and then really good, curated vintage stuff. And they have furniture and housewares too. I got a really cool fake fur jacket there, and my friend Jessica got a fake leopard coat.
We deliver to Cacao so I’ll drop into Odessa, which is next door. I got an amazing dress there recently. It’s a floor-length, black lace gown by French designer Isabel Marant.
The Belfield Avenue Townhomes in Philadelphia, designed by Onion Flats
I'm in awe of the Passive House standard—buildings that are so well-insulated and air-tight that they only need to use 1/4 the energy of a traditionally-powered home. Across Europe, Passivhaus construction is widely used for multi-family buildings and public housing. Cities such as Antwerp, Belgium, and Cologne have even made Passivhaus standards part of their building codes. But it's taken awhile for the U.S. to catch on. In the current issue of Dwell (May 2015) I write about four new housing projects here that embrace Passive House design: Belfield Avenue Townhomes in Philadelphia; Knickerbocker Commons + the Mennonite in Brooklyn; the Orchards at Orenco in Hillsboro, Oregon; and Stellar Apartments in Eugene, Oregon. You can read my article on the Dwell web site or Download the Passive PDF here.
I wrote about Hood River Middle School's ultra-green music and science building in the February issue of Portland Monthly.
Hood River Middle's new music and science building is Net Zero-certified: it produces more energy than it consumes.
At the design charrette for a new music and science building at Hood River Middle School, students ran the show. They sat up front and told architects from Portland’s Opsis Architecture how they wanted an interactive, transparent building that used renewable energy and captured rainwater to flush toilets. “If you’ve got a middle schooler asking you, ‘Why can’t you do it?’ You better figure out how it might be done,” recalls architect Alec Holser.
Michael Becker, the preternaturally energetic science teacher who spearheaded the project, spurred his students to come up with their own solutions to energy conundrums. “We wanted to build a giant functional laboratory,” says Becker. Collaborating with the folks at Opsis, they set the bar high, shooting for the International Living Future Institute’s Net Zero standard, which requires that one hundred percent of the building’s energy be supplied by on-site renewable energy. The result is the first Net Zero-certified public school in the country, with rain-flush toilets, waterless urinals, rooftop solar panels, a “climate battery” for the greenhouse, and geo-thermal heat pumps. (The building is also LEED platinum.) In the three years that the building has been occupied, the school has paid zero dollars in energy bills. “And at year twelve, for the amount of money we spent, we’ll be in the positive,” says Becker.
The building does use electricity from the grid—but only for a few days each year. “Overall, we produce electricity,” explains Becker. “In June, July, August, and September, we’re a serious energy production center.” The photovoltaic array is mounted on south-facing roofs, where it gets the most sun exposure. For each of the past three years, the building has exceeded predictions, producing three percent more energy than it’s consumed.
The heating system combines a radiant floor system with a geothermal heat pump and pipes that are buried ten feet beneath the soccer field. During hot weather, this transforms into a cooling system: cold water is piped in from a nearby creek, which cools the concrete floor and the building. The building also has an ultra-tight envelope, with triple-pane windows and insulated concrete formwork walls, which explains why the indoor temperature never varies more than two degrees—no matter the temperature outside. (Hood River can get below 8 degrees Fahrenheit in winter.)
But despite the costly solar panels and geothermal heating system—paid for by a grant from Energy Trust of Oregon, fundraising, and a local bond measure—conservation is key. The building has skylights and clerestory windows that let in as much natural light as possible but when electric lights are needed, a sensor dims them automatically when the sun streams in. Kids check the building’s energy monitor daily and if it’s out of balance, they’ll use a handsaw instead of a table saw. As Becker likes to tell his students, “You have to eat your conservation vegetables before you can eat your solar cookies.”
David Posada wants to tell me about the windows. We’re standing outside his latest project: a chic 19-unit “Passive House” in North Portland. Four-stories high, with a cedar façade and seven-foot-high windows framed in bright orange panels, it’s an impressive sight. (The brown-and-orange color scheme was inspired by the embers of a campfire.) Biking down North Williams Avenue, you’d definitely stop to gaze up at this arresting building, called KILN. But you’d never guess that it’s one of the most energy efficient multi-family apartment buildings in the country—so well-insulated and with such air-tight construction and high-performing windows that tenants will rarely need to turn the heater on. (There is no air-conditioning.) Posada estimates the building will use a full one-third of the energy of a similar, traditionally-powered apartment building.
KILN, on the corner of North Williams and Beech
The Passive House concept originated in Germany, where the buildings are promoted and evaluated by the Passivhaus Institute in Darmstadt. “In Europe, there are hundreds or thousands of multi-family projects that are built to Passive House standards,” says Posada, a Passive House consultant at Portland’s GBD Architects, which was an early adopter of green building rating systems such as LEED. “In the U.S., where it’s mostly caught on in single-family homes, I think there’s been an assumption by many developers and builders that the market isn’t asking for this.” But—at least in eco-savvy Portland—developers are betting that Passive House apartments catch on.
But back to the windows. Originally, KILN’s owner had wanted to go with triple-paned fiberglass windows, which are energy efficient yet still cost-effective. But then he saw wood-framed windows at the Janey—a LEED-platinum building (also designed by GBD) in Portland’s Pearl District—and fell in love with their graceful beauty. He had to have similar windows for KILN. Most triple-pane windows are made in Europe, which adds to a building’s environmental footprint. But Posada and his team were able to find a German window builder, now living in Seattle, who crafts triple-paned windows from Douglas Fir. (To make things even more sustainable, the Doug Fir comes from the Oregon Coast.)
KILN is the second multi-family Passive House in the United States; the first, the Stellar Apartments, opened earlier this year just 100 miles south in Eugene, Oregon. And there’s another multi-family Passive House on the way. Out in the Portland suburb of Hillsboro, the affordable housing nonprofit REACH Community Development is building a 57-unit Passive House. A Passive House makes sense for tenants who make less than $30,000 a year, says architect Michael Bonn at the Portland firm Ankrom Moisan, because energy bills will be practically non-existent.
The U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification used to be the toughest green building standard in the country. But these days, sustainably-minded architects and designers are looking to other, more rigorous benchmarks like Passive House and Living Building Challenge.
“Nearly 50% of our domestic energy consumption in this country comes from building usage,” says Dan Whitmore, project supervisor and building & energy analyst at Hammer & Hand, a Seattle-and-Portland-based contractor that’s built six Passive Houses and consulted on a dozen more. “The beauty of the Passive House is that it’s a practical way to address energy consumption in our buildings, not just in the short term but in the long term.” Instead of focusing on energy-efficient appliances, which can be swapped out when technology becomes more efficient, Passive Houses put resources into parts of the building that will be there for the long haul, like walls and ceilings. Living Building Challenge, on the other hand, is meant to be that: a challenge. Touted as the most rigorous green building certification on the planet, the Living Building standards require projects to produce all the water and energy they consume (via rainwater collection and solar panels, for instance), incorporate agriculture into the design, and use local materials. (See sidebar for more on green building standards.)
No matter what the green certification, though, it turns out that the Pacific Northwest is home to some of the most cutting-edge sustainable architecture projects in the country.
“Oregon and Washington are really big leaders for us,” says Jacob Kriss at the U.S. Green Building Council, which runs the LEED certification standard. “There are a lot of sustainably-minded people there and they’ve made building the green environment a priority.” Meanwhile, Katrin Klingenberg, executive director of the Chicago-based Passive House Institute U.S., says there’s a preponderance of Passive Houses in the Northwest. “The Northwest is the closest to the central European climate, so it’s no coincidence,” says Klingenberg. And even though there are only five buildings in the world to achieve Living Building Challenge status, the Northwest has the highest concentration of registered projects. (The Living Futures Institute, which developed Living Building Challenge, requires 12 consecutive months of occupancy before it can be certified.) “It’s the progressive nature of these metropolitan areas. It’s a part of the world where people take chances,” says Jay Kosa, Communications Director at the Living Futures Institute.
The Bullitt Center in Seattle [Photo by Nic Lehoux]
On track to be the sixth Living Building is the Bullitt Center, a 50,000 square-foot office building in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, designed by Seattle-based firm Miller Hull. Not only does the Bullitt Center have a rainwater harvesting system, 575 solar panels on the roof (which produce enough electricity for the building), and copious bike storage (instead of a parking lot), it also has composting toilets. Though this last detail may sound like a rustic latrine at summer camp, it’s actually quite high-tech. The building is not hooked up to the city’s sewage system, so when you flush one of the building’s ultra-low flush toilets (they use three tablespoons of water per flush), it will take your cargo directly into one of ten Phoenix Composting Systems in the basement. The liquid and solid matter is mixed with wood chips and “fluffed regularly” using comb-like structures. Over time, and with the help of the oxygen that comes down through the toilet itself, the mixture decomposes. Ultimately it yields just three things: carbon dioxide (which leaves the building via a “heat recovery ventilator” on the roof), stabilized leachate (picked up monthly and taken to a nearby liquid waste facility); and biosolids (which will be taken to a biosolids recycling facility to be mixed with sawdust, then sold as fertilizer). Because the composting process significantly reduces the biosolids, it will take approximately two years before the first load of biosolids leaves the Bullitt Center.
Over in Ballard, a bustling north Seattle neighborhood, a new mixed-use development with 18 units is setting the bar for other green building projects. Called Greenfire Campus, it has a rainwater harvesting system, geothermal heat pumps, and a green roof as well as garden plots for each tenant. (The captured rainwater provides all the irrigation for the green roof, gardens, and an on-site wetland habitat that includes ferns, wild hyacinths, and willows.) The campus, designed by Seattle-based Johnston Architects and developed by the Seneca Group, is also home to the Wilburforce Foundation, Skillet Diner, and Parfait Ice Cream. Ray Johnston, the lead architect on the project, says Greenfire is by far the most energy-efficient building he has worked on. “The single most innovative aspect is the ground-source heat pump,” Johnston says, referring to the twenty-one 300-foot deep wells that pump heat from the ground into the units. “The ground-source heat pump is also a heat sink from the solar panels,” explains Johnson. In other words, when the weather is nice, the solar-thermal arrays will transfer heat to the ground-source heat pump, storing it for later use. Currently, the geothermal heat pump provides about 70 percent of the heat for the apartments. (An energy-efficient gas-fire boiler supplies the remainder.)
Greenfire Campus in Ballard
Johnston says he and the building’s owner had hoped to use grey water—recycled water from tenants’ sinks and showers—to irrigate the green spaces as well as flush toilets. But in addition to the considerable cost of adding all that plumbing—$250,000—Seattle’s city code doesn’t make this innovation easy. “The technology is there to clean and filter water,” says Johnston. “But the various agencies aren’t comfortable on a code basis level yet. Once they are, industry and government will meld and it will be a much more sensible code.” Greenfire Campus is slated to receive LEED Platinum certification—the highest LEED rating—for the commercial side and LEED Gold (the second highest) for the residential side.
Just five miles southeast of Ballard, in South Lake Union, the LEED-Platinum certified Stack House proves that green architecture is feasible on a much larger scale. A mixed-use development designed by Runberg Architecture Group, Stack House includes two 7-story buildings (278 apartments total) and the historic rehab of the 107-year-old Supply Laundry Building. Stack House, like Greenfire Campus, has rainwater cisterns, rooftop community gardens (known in Seattle as P-Patches), and efficient appliances like low-flow toilets and Energy Star rated refrigerators and dishwashers. But instead of geothermal heat pumps, the “west building” employs what’s known as a “reverse-cycle chiller.” Two-and-a-half times more efficient than a gas-fired boiler, this innovative heating system transfers ambient heat from the garage via an air pump to heat the tenants’ water. (The east building has a conventional gas-fired boiler.) Vulcan Real Estate, which was the developer on the project, also has a partnership with the city to create bioswales—grassy areas that collect stormwater runoff—between the sidewalk and the street. “The stormwater that runs off neighboring Capitol Hill currently goes untreated into Lake Union,” says Lori Mason Curran, real estate investment strategy director at Vulcan. “All the oil and dirt goes into the lake. But the swales will capture 199 gallons of run-off every year.”
And what could be more sustainable than the adaptive re-use of a city landmark? “Not tearing a building down is one of the most sustainable things you can do,” says Curran. Stack House won the U.S. Green Building Council’s award for Outstanding Multi-family Project of the Year for 2013, and the Supply Laundry Building, which will house offices, is targeting LEED Gold.
Hassalo on 8th will have an on-site wastewater processing center
Perhaps the most groundbreaking large-scale residential project is back in Portland. Hassalo on 8th, developed by San Diego-based American Assets Trust and designed by GBD Architects, has broken ground on a three-building, 657-unit project that will have its own on-site wastewater processing center. In other words, the buildings won’t even be connected to the City of Portland’s sewer system because all waste will be treated on site. The liquid waste and “grey water” will be cleaned and zapped with UV light and plumbed back into the building for non-potable uses like flushing toilets, watering gardens, and replenishing the cooling towers. (The “sludge” will be taken off-site by a pump truck every two years or so and used as organic matter.)
“It’s super exciting,” admits project architect and design principal Kyle Anderson. “There isn’t a multi-family residential project that I’m aware of that uses reclaimed water in the building.”
Because Hassalo on 8th won’t be contributing to the city’s already over-burdened sewer system, the Bureau of Environmental Services gave the developers a 60 percent reduction on systems development charges—a savings of $1.4 million. Because of that, the costly wastewater recycling system will pay for itself in 2.5 years. “After that, it’s crazy. It’s extra margins for the client,” says Anderson.
In addition, because of the buildings’ high-performance envelopes—they’ll have added insulation in the roofs and wall cavities—Anderson expects them to beat the already-stringent Oregon Energy Code by 30 percent. The building is vying for LEED Platinum.
But some of the most energy-efficient buildings around don’t have any kind of green certification. “I’d rather use the $30,000—or more—it would cost to get LEED certified to put solar panels on the roof,” says Jean-Pierre Veillet, founder and president of Siteworks, a design build firm in Portland. This is precisely what Veillet did with EcoFLATS, an 18-unit rental building on North Williams Avenue. Rooftop solar arrays provide all the tenants’ hot water and rooftop photo-voltaic panels generate electricity, which goes back to the grid when tenants don’t use it. (Veillet was able to off-set the considerable cost with a generous subsidy from Energy Trust of Oregon.) Instead of on-site parking, the building has a 30-unit, wall-mounted bike rack in the lobby. One of the building’s most ingenious features, though, is a flat-screen monitor, prominently displayed in the lobby for all to see, that tracks how many kilowatts per hour each tenant is using. When I visited, on day two of the building’s weekly energy cycle, unit 301 had only used 3.8 kw/hour, but unit 303 had used 12.3 kw/hour. “That’s probably their plasma T.V.,” surmised Veillet. According to the International Energy Agency, the average per capita consumption of electricity in America is 37 kw/hour per day.
Veillet says it’s not about public shaming, but engaging tenants—most of whom already commute by bike and recycle every scrap of paper in their apartments—in the process of saving energy. “Hopefully they’ll look at that and think, ‘Oh, shit, I left the lights on. I’m going to go turn them off,’” says Veillet. “EcoFLATS is the type of people-first green building project that we should replicating by the hundreds, all over the Northwest,” says Jerry Yudelson, one of the founders of the U.S. Green Buildings Council and now president of the Green Building Initiative.
Veillet made sure to keep the rents in this building affordable, which is one of the reasons he didn’t pursue any sort of certification. EcoFLATS tenants pay market rates—$1.55 a square foot—and their average monthly energy bill is $15. “We don’t need more trophies. We need to build stuff that’s affordable—that people can live in,” says Veillet.
A shorter version of this story appears in the July 2014 issue of Alaska Airlines.
This Field Note appears in the Design section of Modern Farmer (pg. 64):
Anna Cohen's lipstick red Charlie Dress, made of Oregon wool
Since 1999, rancher Jeanne Carver's Imperial Stock Ranch in central Oregon has spun spools of beautiful raw wool yarn. Dyed, carded, and spun on site, “Imperial Yarn” has fetched rave reviews from knitters, who love its natural softness and sheen as well as its spongy, lightweight texture. It was also the favorite domestic wool of designers at Ralph Lauren, who sought it out for the patchwork cardigans that Team U.S.A. wore at the opening ceremony of the Sochi Olympics.
Thanks to a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Carver has now teamed up with green fashion designer Anna Cohen to do a line of “ranch-to-runway” apparel. The collection, which debuts this fall, will have more than a dozen elegant pieces for women. Our favorite is the Stella Dress ($680), a sexy, geometric frock inspired by the work of midcentury modern great Frank Stella and the lipstick red Charlie Dress ($350), which wouldn’t seem out of place on Jackie O. (Suggested retail prices: check website for stores.)
