A lot has happened since 2009, when then-Portland Mayor Sam Adams christened the country’s first municipal eco-district program.

Four of the five districts formed as a pilot project to provide environmentally-friendly services for their respective neighborhoods have nearly fallen off the map, melded into other groups or ceased to meet altogether.

The one that has perhaps fared the best, the Lloyd EcoDistrict, and its two salaried employees subsist on an annual budget of $100,000. But the nonprofit is able to provide and lead forays into LED lighting for the growing district. The Lloyd EcoDistrict began with some natural advantages, but observers say it got some things right. With word being that Portland is in danger of ceding its mantle as a leader in green building, the most successful eco-district of the bunch could provide valuable lessons.

A major impact

The Lloyd EcoDistrict has its roots in the Lloyd Transportation Management Association, which was established around the turn of the millennium. The Lloyd TMA eventually morphed into a group now called GoLloyd, but when Adams looked to establish a series of local improvement districts dedicated to reducing resource consumption, it had been operating for nearly a decade.

“In essence they began conversation about sustainability and transportation and carbon emissions and resource conservation,” said Ethan Seltzer, a professor of urban planning at Portland State University. “At the end of the day, communities have all kinds of things that they care about. The notion of an eco-district is that it somehow assumes at the outset that the most important thing that people have to get together around is resource-use efficiency, and that’s kind of a stretch for most communities. Most communities don’t describe their problems in quite that same way.”

What is an eco-district? It’s basically getting neighborhood stakeholders to pay for improvements relating to sustainability. A Portland Sustainability Institute paper, co-authored by Seltzer in 2010, described how eco-districts could lead to sustainable neighborhoods and a more sustainable city.

“If the EcoDistricts Initiative can demonstrate its ability to advance neighborhood aspirations as defined by the neighborhoods themselves, the potential is great for making a major impact on citywide sustainability since the effort can then be applied to every neighborhood in the city,” the paper’s authors wrote.

The Lloyd District itself is an unusual sort of neighborhood, anchored by a small number of large owners, including Kaiser Permanente, the Oregon Convention Center and the Lloyd Center mall. Like the rest of Portland, it’s changing fast. Just four years ago, its population was around 1,000 – a quarter of what it is today.

Through its programming, the Lloyd TMA established infrastructure for light-rail, streetcar and bicycle commuting. Today, the district is distinguished as a leader in multimodal transportation, said Irene Bowers, a Lloyd EcoDistrict board member.

So when Adams, along with Rob Bennett and Susan Anderson, proposed eco-districts, it was only natural for the Lloyd TMA to incorporate the virtues of resource efficiency into its mission. Board members switched over, carrying with them institutional memory. The board gained important stakeholders, including Metro, the Lloyd Center, the Portland Development Commission and the Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability.

A shining example of what eco-districts are all about, Bowers says, is American Assets Trust’s Hassalo on Eighth. The Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design platinum-rated mixed-use development, where leasing began about six months ago, effectively doubled the district’s residential population and became a showpiece for a number of progressive and environmental features. Today the facility recycles all of its wastewater. Incoming residents sign pledges to do their part environmentally.

The building owners in the Lloyd EcoDistrict pay an Enhanced Service District fee, which generates the district’s $100,000 operating budget. It’s enough to pay for Executive Director Sarah Heinicke’s position, as well as one other. The two employees are assisted by two interns, who together work fewer than 40 hours a week.

Heinicke, who has a background in green project consulting, provides exceptional leadership, according to Paul Slyman, chairman of the Lloyd EcoDistrict’s board.

“She’s fantastic,” he said.

Perfect fit

In short, Portland’s four other eco-districts have not fared as well. The PSU one is now the South of Market Eco-District, which PSU still partners in. The South Waterfront one still functions, though now in a reduced capacity. But the Gateway and Lents (later the Foster Green EcoDistrict) eco-districts appear to have petered out.

In the early days of the pilot program, the city convened regular meetings with all districts represented. Eventually, the city’s involvement ceased. But that was always the plan, Bowers said.

“This is part of the city’s role; we launch these initiatives,” she said. “We try to support them to see if they fly, and sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t, depending on whether it’s a good idea or a timely idea. And I think this was a great idea for the Lloyd District.”

Residential neighborhoods can either have too few owners (in the form of property managers) or too many,

“I’ve observed since the beginning that if you have some (sort) of established entity, whether it’s the Lloyd TMA or PSU, that’s been around, that helps,” Bowers said. “When it goes into the neighborhoods it gets harder. You have to go house by house by house. And, you know, life just gets in the way. I do hear that there are some people trying to keep doing it (in Lents and Gateway), but it’s like this with governance. It’s trying to get people together for night meetings. You know how it is.”

But Lloyd is “kind of perfect for it,” Slyman said.

He said he has taken part in focus group testing and watched Lloyd District residents say they’re “proud” to live there – something that would have been hard to believe not long ago.

“It’s kind of perfect because we have businesses and residents, and we have shopping and transit, and I think if you’re an eco-district in a residential neighborhood, you don’t have all those tools available to you,” Slyman said.

At the moment Heinicke is spearheading a waste reduction effort put forward by Metro. She’s also looking to add planters to roads to separate bike lanes from motor vehicle lanes, and working with Tim Navarette of GoLloyd on an extension of last year’s “E-Bike” initiative, which put 12 electric bicycles in offices to help demonstrate the perks of bicycle commuting.

“We got it out the door basically, because the Lloyd EcoDistrict vouched for us,” Navarette said. “They said to their partners, ‘Hey, these guys are doing really cool things.’ It was a real natural business partnership for us.”

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You’re not alone.

The annual eco-district summit is under way, and hundreds of people from around the world are in attendance. They are architects, city planners, policy makers, designers, CEOs, government reps, students, (and press). And they all have questions. By the time the conference ends on Friday evening, though, the attendees and speakers are sure to have answered at least a few of each other’s questions.

Portland has five pilot eco-districts, which are existing neighborhoods that come together to identify and implement projects that will increase the area’s sustainability efforts and reduce its environmental impact. The neighborhoods follow a method that was designed to be both scalable and replicable for use in other communities.

At a session yesterday, a team of consultants presented its assessment of the current eco-district development method, which it applied to the Gateway neighborhood, one of Portland’s five pilots.

You can read about their findings in tomorrow’s paper (subscription required). But the conversations after the presentations were also interesting.

Josh Morrison, a Seattle resident who has worked with the International Sustainability Institute as well as a Danish-based, urban quality consulting firm, admired the consultants’ work, but also saw some disadvantages:

One approach, the approach that this team of consultants took, is to gather all the relevant data, critically synthesize and pull out the important metrics, and then develop a series of strategies that come from these data sets. All of the time and money is spent on the consultants and their expertise, and the results of their findings are accessible primarily to specialists (planners, architects, designers etc.). The advantage of this is that you can hone in on very specific analysis with incredible detail, and put to test very innovative ideas, as we saw in the presentations. The disadvantage is that the capacity building within the district for what will happen after the initial assessment is not built into the process, and the final product is often not legible to many members of the district or community being surveyed.

But, as Josh points out, there are people all over the world trying to deal with the same challenges right now. The Danish firm that he worked with – Gehl Architects – took a much different approach to analyzing public life and public places. It ran workshops in Copenhagen using student and public volunteers who would survey key indicators of urban health – pedestrian movement, stationary activities, and age and gender surveys.

Instead of using its budget for highly trained consultants (the PDC paid about $100,000 for the study of two of Portland’s eco-districts), the Danish firm used the majority of its budget to organize the data and make it easily communicable to citizens, public policy officials and other lay people – they would sometimes even translate their reports into multiple languages.

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What is an eco-district?

Interest in district-scale projects stems from the belief that coordinating such efforts can increase efficiency in use of water, energy and other resources to significantly reduce overall environmental impacts.

Steps are being taken to hone the process of transforming existing Portland neighborhoods into eco-districts.

The , a nonprofit established by City Council in 2009, developed a method to help communities and professionals plan eco-districts. The intent is to broaden Portland’s reputation for sustainable planning and design via creation of an eco-district approach that will be both scalable and replicable for use in other communities.

“The hope for the eco-district methodology is that it will apply anywhere and everywhere. It was launched to great fanfare, but we have to test it first,” said Matthew Arnold, an associate principal at and a member of a team hired by the Portland Development Commission to do just that.

The team recently completed an in-depth assessment of the PoSI methodology by applying it to the Gateway neighborhood, one of Portland’s five pilot eco-districts. The group presented the findings from its work in Gateway at the second annual eco-district summit on Wednesday.

PoSI’s method is based on nine “performance areas,” including energy use and water quality, as well as “software” metrics such as social cohesion and place-making. When existing data in these areas is evaluated, intermediate and long-term sustainability strategies and reduction targets can be tailored.

But sorting through the mountain of data was not straightforward. The team took note of factors such as the number of cul-de-sacs, the average distance from a resident’s house to a community park and the amount of waste that could have been recycled. The group even felt as if it could have done more.

“It’s like drinking water from a fire hydrant,” said Arnold, who worked on the project with two other consultants – Nicole Isle, a senior sustainability adviser at , and Tom Puttman, president of Puttman Infrastructure and technical director of PoSI.

The group met also with a steering committee of community members, who are now gauging the feasibility of various projects.

“Folks in Gateway will want to dive into this data even further as they start investing in projects,” Arnold said. “Whether it’s a series of pipes, solar panels, or whatever – they’ll have to justify those expenditures and prove positive outcomes from the eco-district.”

After working with the available data for four months, the team found some potential pitfalls in the methodology and made suggestions about how to tweak the process. Their findings were relatively technical and meant for planners, architects, and engineers – many whom were in the audience.

But the next big question, according to Arnold, is how to engage a larger cross section of the community in the entire process.

In the consultants’ recommendations to PoSI, they described a strategy called “eco-district dashboard” that would show the community how its activities relate to the nine performance areas. It could be a desktop or mobile application or even a billboard – something to show actual data relating to traffic, energy use and water use in real time.

The PDC commissioned the study for about $100,000, according to PDC project manager Justin Douglas. The consultants recently started their second assessment, which is focused on the Foster Green pilot eco-district in Lents.

While Arnold wishes the study could have had greater depth, some summit attendees called for simpler – and cheaper – methods to analyze communities’ efforts.

One graduate student bemoaned the fact that he has attempted to offer his time to eco-district projects, but has been brushed aside and shut out of the process. Another audience member suggested that instead of sorting through heaps of data, the consultants pin down “keystone indicators” – like keystone species – to measure an eco-district’s progress.

The consultants welcomed the suggestions. They will analyze data from the Lents neighborhood until at least February, and their goal, after all, is to refine the ideas and data in order to help communities focus their eco-district strategies.

“The goal is to make the best decision possible with the least amount of work,” Puttman said.

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The Portland Development Commission last week expanded the possibilities for an upcoming renovation of Memorial Coliseum by issuing a request for proposals to explore the potential for a shared heating and cooling system for the coliseum and other buildings in the district.

The project could be a showpiece for the feasibility of district-wide energy. However, “the timing may be too tight for the coliseum to be able to tie in to the district energy system,” said Sarah Heinicke, director of the Lloyd eco-district.

Memorial Coliseum soon will undergo a major renovation, including energy-efficiency retrofits to achieve Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design gold standards as well as upgrades to seating, lighting, concessions and finishes. Boilers and chillers also will be replaced, regardless of whether they can fit into a district-wide energy plan.

The RFP was issued now with recognition that significant time and money would be saved if a thermal energy system were installed during the renovation. The system could be added later, but Heinicke said it would be a “huge miss” if the Memorial Coliseum were not hooked up to district energy during the remodel.

If the project were to move forward as outlined in the RFP, Memorial Coliseum would be the first building hooked up to the shared energy system. Later, the Rose Garden arena, the Oregon Convention Center and other Lloyd District properties could be connected as well.

Heinicke noted that she spoke about the shared energy project with stakeholders involved in establishing the eco-district, but added that the project is mostly the work of the city of Portland and the PDC.

“It would have gone on with or without the eco-district being established,” Heinicke said. She added the proximity of the Rose Garden arena, the coliseum and the convention center to each other has been “a key aspect of how people have thought about the Lloyd District being ripe for an eco-district.”

Chris Oxley, general manager of the Rose Garden arena, said that the RFP presents an opportunity for a tangible project inside the nebulous eco-district concept.

“It hasn’t really been done on this scale, particularly in an entertainment or sports entertainment district,” Oxley said.

In Portland, district heating and cooling systems were implemented for Oregon Health and Science University, Portland State University and the Brewery Blocks.

Oxley considers the RFP process as a chance to gauge interest from companies that perform district energy projects and determine whether one would be feasible in the Lloyd District.

A district energy system uses one or more centralized thermal energy plants to heat or cool multiple building through a system of underground hot or chilled water pipes. Plants can use a variety of technologies, including waste energy and alternative fuels; the PDC has not decided which would fit best in the Rose Quarter.

The RFP asks proposers to recommend a system type, comment on feasibility and a timeline for a project, and suggest a plan for development, construction, ownership and management.

The PDC would prefer that a private party invest in, own and operate the system without a need for financing or capital investment from the agency or the city, but that is merely a preference at this point, PDC spokesman Shawn Uhlman said. If the system were owned privately, then owners of the coliseum, the convention center and the Rose Garden arena would pay for heating and cooling as they would through a normal utility.

Proposals are due by 4 p.m. on Aug. 29. An optional pre-submittal meeting is scheduled for Thursday.

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The Lloyd eco-district finally has its first director: Sarah Heinicke will start on July 1. She has experience in planning, development and financing of sustainable projects in work with the Portland Development Commission; Brightworks, an investment-banking firm; and Verditas LLC, her consulting practice. Some of Heinicke’s work is creating business-friendly ways to pay for energy-efficiency and green building projects. She says she will call on her experience in both the public and private sectors to lead the eco-district.

Heinicke recently spoke with the 91��Ƶ to discuss her new role.

91��Ƶ: What is an eco-district?

Sarah Heinicke: An eco-district, for me, is a place where people are looking beyond the built environment to find solutions to the way people live in a neighborhood, district and area.

The eco-district is the green building proposition exploded larger, to a more efficient scale. You may want to embody sustainability in a green building project, but realistically your environmental impacts are much larger than a stand-alone building. I think the district-wide answer is a scale that makes a little more sense. It’s not quite so unwieldy as a city or even as a quadrant; it’s something that people can kind of get their hands around and maybe actually make some progress in.

So, there’s this aspect of buildings and infrastructure, but the eco-district part of that is bigger and more robust than in a green building. It’s really dependent on how people interact with their neighborhood, their workspace and their environment.

91��Ƶ: Why is it hard to pin down what an eco-district is?

Heinicke: I think people like to have a black-and-white answer, but I think, like in a lot of things that are complex, we all must find some comfort in the gray. An eco-district evolves with time, space and people. All those things are huge X factors that change over time, over space and through peoples’ personalities.

That’s not blowing off the need for some measurable objectives, but I think the fact is that the eco-district will be different for Lloyd than it will be for the other eco-districts in the city – at (Portland State University), in Gateway and in Lents. I think that’s a really good thing, because those places and the people involved there are all really, really different.

91��Ƶ: What will be the first milestones in the Lloyd eco-district? How will we know what is a success?

Heinicke: That is really hard to say, because I don’t want to pre-empt too much right now. I want to be respectful of the folks who have already come together in the district, and I want to hear what they see as being their priorities for the district.

The city and Portland Sustainability Institute have identified a pipeline of projects and possibilities for the district, and I think they’re all worthy of consideration. Many of them will move forward, I’m sure. I think my role for the first six months, at least, will be to really work with all of the stakeholders, identify the nonparticipating stakeholders and expand the tent, as it were, to reconstitute a board that reflects the hopes and dreams and desires of the Lloyd District.

That will be an accomplishment. It doesn’t look like a project where you have a gold shovel and you stick it in the ground and take a picture – but it’s a huge accomplishment to coalesce a social cohesion around what we all want. Ultimately, this is something that gets implemented by people.

The eco-district will start with how people perceive the area as different. That needs to happen first. You can’t just deliver a bunch of cool stuff to the district and hope that people get it eventually or appreciate all the good work you’ve done for them. That’s a kind of approach to development work and approach to municipal overtures that has proven itself to be unsuccessful.

91��Ƶ: Who will be the key partners for the eco-district?

Heinicke: A lot of the partners are already on board and on the resource advisory council – including major property owners in the Lloyd (District) and in the Rose Quarter, business interests and city agencies that are heavily vested in delivering certain sustainable objectives in the Lloyd District.

I think the stakeholders who are not there are the residential population and the smaller business. There’s a really vital small commercial sector along Broadway/Weidler and in the intervening nooks and crannies of the Lloyd District that I really want to get involved in this project.

There’s also a social equity piece that people in the green building industry and sustainability circles have a really hard time wrapping their heads around. We need to understand how to approach a social equity – a rising tides lift all boats kind of thing – and apply it honestly to a process like this. That’s something that the Lloyd District could certainly benefit from and could be really gratifying.

91��Ƶ: What are the other parts of the eco-district process that you think will be important?

Heinicke: I really hope that we can unlock the economic development potential of the eco-district, and not have it be something that only delivers better, more efficient infrastructure.

My focus will be pushing the jobs agenda and the economic development agenda, because I think there are already partners at the table who are heavily vested in the energy efficiency and water resource reclamation agendas. I am so grateful for that, because I think you have to have strong partners that are representing the many moving pieces of this.

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The Lloyd eco-district is ready to kick off as an official entity this summer with the hiring of a new director. Sarah Heinicke, a former sustainability advisor at Brightworks and consultant at Verditas LLC, will begin leading district sustainability efforts July 1, according to Lloyd transportation management association director Rick Williams.

Hiring a director has been anticipated by the business community as a step toward taking concrete action in the district, which is the farthest along of Portland’s five pilot eco-districts. Since 1994, the Lloyd District has had an association organizing the area’s transportation, which is credited with reducing single-occupancy vehicle traffic and bringing light rail to the district. The Transportation Management Association is an example of district-level organization that the eco-district attempt. The eco-district could also include district-level energy and waste management solutions.

Portland’s other designated eco-districts include South Waterfront, Gateway, Lents (now known as the “Foster Green” eco-district) and the University District, including Portland State University.

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Lloyd Transportation Management Association Executive Director Rick Williams last week got a call from a company that wanted to install food digesters in the . Williams has in fact fielded more than a dozen similar calls from companies seeking to “plug in” to the pilot project.

He tells them all the same thing: “We don’t have the district yet.”

The Lloyd District is one of five designated eco-district pilots identified by the . The city of Portland in 2009 charged PoSI with creating an eco-district strategy. It has since drawn coverage and and was cited as a model for projects in Beaverton and Columbia, Mo. But no district exists … yet.

“We might be over our skis a little bit in what we’ve said,” Williams said.

But progress could be forthcoming. A resource council, which consists of Lloyd TMA business interests and other stakeholders, plans to name a sustainability director within the next two months. This will be the first staff position dedicated to the Lloyd eco-district.

“This is a major milestone for us,” said Naomi Cole, PoSI program manager. “We feel pretty strongly and practically that having professional staff in the neighborhood driving projects is what it’s going to take” (to establish a working eco-district).

An association of businesses in the Lloyd business improvement district will cover the cost of the sustainability director. Funding for the eco-district is $300,000 per year for three years, and includes the private funding for the staff position as well as cash and in-kind contributions of staff time from the city, Metro and PoSI.

PoSI and the Lloyd TMA have managed the eco-district project for the last 18 months. The TMA was formed in 1994 and is credited with bringing light rail – and an extension of the free-rail zone – into the district. The association is an example of regional management that works and the reason that the Lloyd eco-district is the one that PoSI is tackling first, Cole said.

One of the sustainability director’s first tasks, Williams said, will be to ensure that stakeholders are on the same page.

“If you were to ask the 13 members of our resource council what an eco-district is, you’d get 13 different answers,” he said. “A lot of people think we’re just going to drop a centralized energy plant into the district and call it an eco-district. That’s a misconception. It’s coordinated management of sustainability programs in a district that can include energy, water, food digesting, waste, solar, habitat, transportation and community awareness. It’s too early to say that it’s going to be (only) energy.”

Though there is no clear vision on what the eco-district will look like, stakeholders have ideas about what success will require.

“In the first 12 to 18 months, there have to be some (project goals) accomplished. A couple of things should be completed at that time,” said Jeff Blosser, executive director of the Oregon Convention Center and a member of the resource council. He mentioned district-scale energy or water systems as examples.

Too much government interference could make the district unsuccessful, Blosser said.

“It has to be good for business and job growth or we will have failed,” said Hank Ashforth, CEO of Ashforth Pacific, another business heavily involved in the district’s management.

Local businesses stand to gain from lower costs for energy or waste management if systems are put in place, Blosser said. The district also has the potential to attract certain kinds of businesses and patrons that might otherwise go elsewhere. But that will hinge on early action – excessive stalling in the planning process could cause people to lose interest, he said.

“There’s a lot of buzz out there,” Williams said. “What’s rewarding about getting a director in is that we can turn the buzz into something real.”

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Portland’s first eco-district pilot project is moving forward in the Lloyd District.

Naomi Cole of the Portland Sustainability Institute says that project stakeholders have signed a declaration of cooperation to perform a pilot eco-district project in the Lloyd District.

An eco-district involves multiple property owners coming together to create a neighborhood that is efficient with energy, water and waste. The Portland Sustainability Institute is currently looking at five pilot eco-districts throughout the city.

Project partners in the Lloyd District include the Portland Development Commission, regional government Metro, the city of Portland, Portland Oregon Sustainability Initiative, Lloyd Transportation Management Association and the Lloyd Business Improvement District.

“Lloyd District is well positioned because they have a history of multiple property owners working together with the Lloyd Transportation Management Association,” Cole said. “Now we are focused on forming a government structure with these groups around energy, water and habitat resource management.”

The Lloyd Transportation Management Association is a nonprofit that provides services and programs to encourage Lloyd District employees to take alternative transportation. Along with the Lloyd Business Improvement District, the Lloyd TMA will provide $300,000 per year for three years for the eco-district pilot.

The next step will be to get the area’s property owners to sign on to the project. The Oregon Convention Center, Ashforth Pacific and Lloyd District Mall are three major property holders in the area. Cole expects to have signatures from property owners by the end of the month. The first project meeting will be held in June.

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Studies are in the works that will look at the possibility of planning eco-districts in five Portland areas. The goal is to see how residents, commercial property owners and utilities may be able to work together to make neighborhoods more environmentally and economically sustainable.

The most critical eco-district pilot area, according to Naomi Cole of the Portland Sustainability Institute (PoSI), is Lents. The residential area has seen a lot of planning, but little action over the last few years. Most recently, a plan to build a new stadium for the Portland Beavers in Lents ended in 2009 after team owner Merritt Paulson pulled the proposal off the table.

“The residents there are suffering from planning fatigue,” Cole said. “There are a lot of plans for the area but nothing is happening yet. It’s critical to have a residential, low-income community as one of our pilots. Engaging the residents will be really important.”

Using a grant from the Bullitt Foundation, PoSI will work with the city of Portland, the Portland Development Commission and Portland State University professor Ethan Seltzer over the next six to eight months to study the potential conflicts and opportunities in all five eco-district pilot areas: Lents, Gateway, South Waterfront, the Lloyd District and the area surrounding PSU.

Some pilot areas like Lloyd District will rely on preexisting partnerships between building owners to leverage innovative projects such as shared energy systems. But no such relationships currently exist in Lents, where numerous individual property owners may have wide-ranging opinions on what the neighborhood’s eco-district should be.

“This won’t happen because people from downtown Portland show up and say it should,” said Dan Vizzini, principal financial analyst with the Portland Bureau of Environmental Services. “The folks from PoSI can provide assistance, but it’s going to have to grow out of that community.”

Last year, Lents resident Jalene Braun started Green Lents, a grassroots organization that works to promote activities like tree planting, urban gardening and sustainability education. She said her neighbors are generally supportive of a greener Lents, but the question that always pops up is: Who’s going to pay for it?

“I’m a big supporter of these things, but I’m still going to ask those questions,” Braun said. “I’m nervous about the talk of utilities and homeowner liability related to cost with things like the eco-district. But I’m also hoping it provides a model to bring people together.”

But Lents residents have more pressing concerns than carbon-footprint monitors or solar panels on commercial buildings, according to Rob Bennett of PoSI.

“In Lents what drives people is getting their basic needs met,” Bennett said. “You have more people living in poverty than other areas. Being able to walk safely, serving local businesses and reducing the impacts on the cost of living will be the drivers behind this eco-district plan.”

Bennett said an early project in the Lents eco-district could be something like a weatherization training program, which would provide reduce utility costs and could even create jobs. Also, sidewalk improvements could reduce residents’ dependence on automobiles.

Kevin Cronin, senior project manager for the Lents urban renewal area, said the city’s Clean Energy Works program, which provides low-cost financing for energy-efficient home improvements, could be implemented fairly easily in Lents. He hoped that several other projects he’s been working on can be rolled into the Lents eco-district effort.

“Clean Energy Works is the easy one because we will be able to match our tax increment financing to ramp that up,” Cronin said. “We’re trying right now to align these city resources and leverage those against private investment. There’s definitely a little planning fatigue in Lents. But with its different circumstances and conditions, we want to design something that will work.”

Braun said it can be difficult getting Lents residents to rally around a common goal like an eco-district.

“It’s a large neighborhood with a lot of cultures, some of which are not English-speaking,” Braun said. “People are engaged around different issues, but they aren’t talking amongst themselves. If anything, I hope this effort provides a model that will bring people together.”

“Eco-districts will employ things like district heating, but it’s fundamentally (more) about relationships between people than any particular project,” Seltzer added. “Start with what neighborhoods feel are the issues. Whether you’re talking about Lents or the Lloyd District, this has to come up from grass roots.”

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