The notion of equity in design can have many different meanings.

For instance, the U.S. Green Building Council in 2013 introduced Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design social equity pilot credits. They address equity within the project team, equity in the community around a project and equity within the project supply chain. However…

“When folks questioned us about the human impact we found it was missing the people side of the framework,” said Kimberly Lewis, U.S. Green Building Council senior vice president for market transformation and development.

Six years later, the LEED social equity credits remain a work in progress. But Lewis believes the design community can do more to move the needle.

“We struggle with amplifying the message,” she told attendees at a panel discussion Tuesday at the Center for Architecture in Portland. “Our heart and our mission are as powerful as we want, and it’s a great social justice message. But to the people on the street all things are local, and engaging vulnerable communities is not easy. Trust takes time, and we have a responsibility to shift the conversation. It’s us – even here.”

The discussion was part of Portland’s second annual Sustainable Building Week, a weeklong event dedicated to sustainable design and construction.

Equity has to do with access and empowerment, said panelist Elaine Aye, a regional manager with RWDI Consulting Engineers and Scientists. A good example, she added, is the .

Created in 2009 by Prosper Portland (the Portland Development Commission at the time), the Lloyd EcoDistrict uses public money to prioritize projects and programs that address transportation, water, energy, waste and education. It’s all in the name of prosperity, environmental quality and social welfare.

It’s a unique framework for sustainable development that has seen its share of success, Aye said. She pointed to an effort to retrofit buildings with LED lighting as one example.

“The value of a framework is it creates a path for an individual, an organization, a building type,” she said. “We had two listening sessions in the community and it was fantastic. We asked about resiliency and climate change, and it’s diverse. It impacts everyone differently.”

The key point, Aye said, is that the discussion involved the community and not merely a project team.

“In the world of an eco-district it is the essential elements that have to be done,” she said. “There are resiliency, equity and sustainability; those are the essentials, and we have to address them systematically – not at the building level, but at the society level or at the city level.”

Money for such initiatives is always an issue, said panelist Dave Otte, partner and development director at Holst Architecture.

But Aye said the issues at hand go beyond mere funding. It’s also a matter of listening to the wider community before making critical design choices.

“I think we scale it up by having conversation, by listening and observing what’s in our communities and finding the touch points where we can effect change,” she said.

Panelist Afton Walsh, community outreach director for Walsh Construction, agreed and pointed to the passage last year of Metro‘s $652 million affordable housing bond measure as an example.

“If you live in the metro area, you passed a monumental affordable housing bill last November,” she said. “On top of the city of Portland bond from 2016 the community has really stepped up, and we need to now fix this. Implementation obviously is just getting under way, and that will be the real scorecard.”

To build equitably, Walsh said, means using new and more efficient materials to advance energy performance, indoor air quality and other areas.

But those are the places where developers often look to save money, Otte noted. That is particularly true with affordable housing projects, he added, especially those constructed with the expectation of profits from the sale of the building.

“The bond is a great step, but frankly we’re playing catch-up – and in some ways we’re going in the wrong direction,” he said. “There’s something to be said for a long-term investment in housing, and sometimes we lose sight of the fact these buildings will be around for 60 years, so much of it is based on the cost per unit and not based on the quality per unit.”

Otte added that he hopes this does not come back to bite public housing authorities in coming years when they make use of Metro bond dollars.

“Housing is not just a human right; it’s also health care,” he said. “So investment in housing will pay off in ways we don’t even understand yet. Look at the long-term benefits from an energy and social justice perspective, because every project out there will still have a (financial) gap; every project will struggle to find a way to get built. It’s a stop-gap and it is going to take everyone working hard together and having the conviction and drive to make it happen.”

Otte noted that designers and builders are in a strong position to guide the conversation.

“We are the trusted agents in society, more than politicians and policy makers,” he said. “People will listen to us, and that’s an exciting opportunity. It’s in this discomfort that we’re going to be able to move the needle. That’s where design gets exciting, is in that discomfort.”

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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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