Don't Want to Know Where Those Grass Roots Have Been

This year Evanston is celebrating Earth Month by going beyond the usual tree-hugging. They are hugging visiting officials from the City of Portland, Oregon, specifically someone from Portland's Office of Sustainable Development. Evanston wants to know more about energy and food production. The Chicago Tribune:

"They're one of the leaders in [environmental] sustainability," said Sue Carlson, leader of a group called Evanston's Affordable Housing Future, which is participating in the event. "We want [to learn] how Portland got to where they are now."

The event is sponsored by the Network for Evanston's Future, a grass-roots consortium that includes six groups of volunteers working to create green policies that they hope the city will adopt. The event, which will be held at the Unitarian Church of Evanston, is free and open to the public.

Some Evanston officials said they would be open to ideas.

"The folks who are involved in creating a sustainable Evanston are right," said Ald. Steven Bernstein. "We have to save the planet. It should start here in Evanston."

Debbie Hillman, leader of the Food Policy Council, another group involved in the event, said she has been eyeing Portland's initiative to turn food waste collected from restaurants and groceries into compost rather than dumping it into landfills.

Hillman said her group also has taken note of Portland's plans for urban farms and hopes Evanston might be able to follow suit with a 2- to 3-acre farm inside the city limits. The farms are environmentally friendly because they tend to support organic produce, she said.

Yes, you just read that---a FARM. In Evanston. Probably they will knock down a few homes to achieve this. And maybe it would be nice on the lakeshore. There would be a water source close by and such a nice view.

Meanwhile, in Portland, families are moving to the suburbs as the bigger homes and taxes to go with them are too expensive. But Portland officials don't want to end up like San Francisco, with more dogs than kids. The Portland Tribune:

Speaking of both housing prices and families, Adams and Saltzman each talked about San Francisco — which housing prices have made a city largely made up of the very wealthy and the very poor, who find subsidized, transient housing.
“I love San Francisco, but it’s not a place I want to emulate,” Saltzman said.

So Portland is trying to keep families in the city:

But any changes probably won’t significantly change the forecasts: that the decline in kids in Portland will continue for the next few years and then level off at a much smaller number of kids than 10 or 20 years ago and even now. Forecasts show that the Portland school district enrollment, for instance, should level off at somewhere in the low 40,000 range, Fregonese said.
By then, only 18 percent to 20 percent of Portland households will have children in them.
“That’s fine,” he said. “That’s what cities are going to look like. That’s what Europe is like now.
“We’re unfamiliar with it because we grew up in the baby boom with lots of kids and we think that is normal,” Fregonese said.
“This is the new normal.”

Yeah. A dying city. Eventually Dogs will Rule! (Well, in Evanston it's probably cats.)

I suggest Evanstonians who want to live on a farm-like controlled environment with other earnest greenies move to----Vermont!