Albany, New York is the epicenter of a workforce renaissance.
Following decades of manufacturing job losses, the city capitalized on its infrastructure and advances in technology to create thousands of new jobs and increase its GDP more than 60 percent between 2001 and 2015. More than $49 million worth of state and federal funding helped the Port of Albany-Rensselaer expand its shipping operations for clients like GE Power, while simultaneously creating 1,400 jobs.
At the same time, the construction of the Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at the University of Albany added an additional 4,000 jobs and helped the city become a leader in the worldwide semiconductor industry.
But despite these advances, Albany’s poverty rate still remains higher than at the turn of the century, with 36,827 residents living in poverty as of 2015.
Watch the video above to see how Albany’s growth has changed the nature of this capital city.
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#AmericaResurgent is a five-part series that elevates the changemakers, approaches and innovations that are driving urban revitalization across the nation. Look for the next four installments in the weeks to come.
After seeing former Vice President Al Gore’s climate change documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” in 2006, Scott and Julie Brusaw wanted to do their part to help the planet. Yet they hesitated at the idea of getting solar panels.
“I pictured them on our roof and knew I wouldn’t like the look of them,” admits Julie.
Plus, the solar panels would have to be taken down anytime the roof needed to be repaired. And they’d be a pain to clean. Julie wasn’t about to climb onto the roof. She worried that Scott would fall and hurt himself if he did.
They also worried the panels would be hampered by weather troubles. The couple lives in Idaho. Every winter, wouldn’t the panels get buried under snow?
Glancing down their long driveway one day, Julie mused, “Couldn’t solar panels be on driveways and roads instead of roofs?”
“Scott laughed and said they’d be crushed, so I let the idea go,” she recalls.
But Scott couldn’t. As a kid, he’d loved playing with slot cars. Maybe the idea of electric roadways could work in real life?
A week later, the electrical engineer was thinking about how to design a protective case that could protect solar panels from the weight of cars and trucks.
“I come up with dreams, ideas, concepts and designs,” says Julie, a former counselor retired from private practice. “Scott makes them tangible and real.”
Neither of them had built a tech company from the ground up. People cautioned that their idea would never get off the ground, but Julie and Scott had a feeling they were onto something.
In 2009, their start-up company, Solar Roadways, won a contract from the U.S. Department of Transportation. A 12-foot-by-12-foot prototype was created. Next came a 108-panel parking lot on Julie and Scott’s property and a 30-panel pilot project — a pedestrian plaza — in Sandpoint, Idaho. (Another is slated for Baltimore’s Inner Harbor this spring and will be open to the public.) Civil engineering labs continue to test samples for traction, load stress and impact resistance.
The idea has come a lot farther than Julie’s initial brainstorm of solar panels on roads. “Our panels have solar cells for energy collection, heating elements to prevent snow and ice accumulation and LEDs to illuminate roads lines and provide graphics,” says Scott. They have the potential to charge in-transit electric vehicles, welcome energy from other renewable sources into the nation’s power grid and create an “intelligent road” that can actually steer, accelerate and brake autonomous vehicles.
“Imagine getting into your car and telling it to take you to the store,” says Julie. “You could take a nap while the road guides your vehicle to the store, finds a parking spot, and wakes you up.”
So far, Solar Roadways has interest from all 50 states and virtually every country in the world. Eventually, Julie and Scott hope to have manufacturing facilities throughout the globe as well.
They want to sell panels not only for roads and driveways, but for patios, bike paths, playgrounds, sidewalks, pool decks and parking lots.
The possibilities of the panels are only limited by the imagination: Flexible parking lot lines could shrink to fit motorcycles or widen to fit RVs. Handicapped spots could be created dynamically instead of dedicated by the use of paint. LED lights could illuminate lots for nighttime safety.
And imagine airport runways built with solar panels — Scott and Julie have. “We don’t know if actual runways are possible,” acknowledges Scott, “but we expect that by keeping surfaces snow and ice-free and eliminating most of the plowing needs for airports, Solar Roadways could greatly reduce flight delays due to snowy, icy conditions.”
Scott estimates there are nearly 33,000 miles of impervious surfaces in the U.S. Transform them into solar facades, and they could generate three times the electricity the nation needs. Greenhouses gases could be slashed by 75 percent.
“We honestly believe Solar Roadways is the most viable plan to help halt climate change before it’s too late,” says Julie. “We want to make this world a safer and greener place.”
Off Interstate 85 along the Alabama-Georgia border, an area of asphalt the size of two SUVs parked nose-to-nose is soaking up the sun. But unlike traditional blacktop, it’s capturing solar energy and using it to power a nearby information booth and electric car-charging station. This bright idea to cover a roadway with solar tiles stems from the notion that highways should be dual purpose. This solar road is the first of its kind in the U.S. “Roads are an extremely underutilized resource right now. They’re just asphalt that takes us from Point A to Point B,” says Anna Cullen, director of external relations for The Ray, the Atlanta-based project that installed the tiles. “We don’t have anything in our lives today that is just one purpose. A road should be the same.” Solar roads have already been installed in the Netherlands andFrance. Georgia’s patch is the first in the United States. But cost is a significant roadblock. The tiles — which are thankfully skid resistant — are composed of expensive materials imported from France. Plus, they must be laid on top of existing pavement, which is labor intensive. MORE:Building the Future: Sustainable Infrastructure And there’s the question of whether the tiles will generate as much energy as is projected. In Sandpoint, Idaho, a company called Solar Roadways paved a town square with hexagonal solar panels that were meant togenerate electricity for nearby restrooms and a fountain. The multi-million-dollar project collects just a fraction of the energy it intended — only enough to operate a hairdryer. “Aside from road dust, particularly black tire dust and diesel exhaust, which will quickly cover a portion of each panel, the continuous traffic covering panels will reduce their solar output,” Stanford University Engineering Professor Mark Jacobson told National Geographic last year. If successful, however, Georgia’s project could become the model for the entire United States, where hundreds of thousands of roadways are in need of repair. Homepage photo courtesy of The Ray.
President Trump has pledged $1 trillion to rebuild America’s systems, but the proposed infrastructure bill relies heavily on private financing to fund sorely needed waterworks and transit projects. This poses a problem because private companies “only work on projects that create revenues,” saysRep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), ranking member on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. “The vast majority of the national highway system, and our bridge problems and all our transit problems, do not generate revenues. It will not help them.”
A BETTER FINANCIAL MODEL
Sustainable infrastructure is often understood to be a bridge built from recycled materials or an electric plant powered by wind, for instance, but it’s also infrastructure whose upkeep expenses are included in its building costs so that there aren’t social or environmental costs later on.
The ability to fund maintenance prevents massive failures, like the Flint water crisis or the year-long shutdown of certain lines of the Washington, D.C., metro, from ever happening. “For years, there’s been this separation of costs for building a bridge versus actually making sure that bridge stays up, and over time, it’s created a really weird recipe for a lack of consideration for operational costs in state budgets,” says Anthony O. Kane, managing director for the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure. “If you build a road one way and it has to be built again in 20 years. Why not build a road in another way and give it a longer lifespan?” For the close to 30,000 rural local bridges that are deficient across the U.S., sustainable infrastructure is a solution with longevity. The Kansas City street car is a new example of sustainable infrastructure.
SUSTAINABLE CITIES
Leading the way in sustainable infrastructure projects are New York City, Chicago and Kansas City, Mo. The use of recycled materials, a reduction of carbon emissions and sound pollution are often key elements of building plans. In Los Angeles (another city at the forefront of the environmental movement), the Metro system is being revitalized by utilizing solar panels for alternative energy and adding 6.6 miles of new train tracks using recycled materials.
“It’s not the classic 1950s definition of infrastructure anymore,” says Rick Bell, executive director of New York City’s Department of Design and Construction. “Transportation isn’t just highways and bridges. It is just as important to create a bike lane for people to get around the city without a car.”
“BRANCHING” OUT
Some of the most successful sustainable projects are ones that citizens might not even view as infrastructure. In Chicago, trees are used as infrastructure to help reduce the city’s greenhouse gas emissions and energy usage. A 2014 Friends of the Park report found the 70,000 trees that were planted over a 20-year period have reduced carbon emissions in the Windy City by 25,000 tons each year — the equivalent of 15,100 automobiles. The tree canopy also reduced air temperature, saving $360,000 annually on residential utility costs.
CATCH UP ON THE FUTURE OF SUSTAINABLE INFRASTRUCTURE WITH THESE DEEP READS:
The late 2000s was a dark period for homeownership in America. Viewing the real estate bust as an opportunity to rethink affordable housing, childhood friends Jason Bordainick and Andrew Cavaluzzi pooled their entrepreneurial backgrounds and real estate experience to create the Hudson Valley Property Group.
The New York-based business works with property owners to rehabilitate blighted developments to improve the lives of existing residents and the surrounding community. Avoiding the types of projects that other real estate developers rush towards, HVPG builds upon existing infrastructure, utilizing investors with long-term financial goals.
See this unique public-private funding model in action by watching the video above.
In his victory speech, Donald J. Trump vowed to “rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals.” The investment is long overdue: The American Society of Civil Engineers, in its most recent national assessment, rated the country’s infrastructure as a D-plus, just above failing. The group estimates that, by 2025, the nation will need a $1.44 trillion boost over current funding levels to meet growing needs.
Since 2009, when Barack Obama doled out roughly $800 billion in a stimulus package, that money’s been hard to come by, largelyblocked by partisanship. But advocates hope the election of Trump, who made his fortune in real estate, could launch a building boom. The Republican president, so used to seeing his name on gilded skyscrapers, hotels, casinos and golf courses, could cut a deal with congressional Democrats, who view public-works projects as an engine for job growth.
Assuming Trump can indeed pass a bill, we at NationSwell have a few ideas for him to consider. A big, beautiful wall’s not one of them; instead, here’s the top 10 shovel-worthy alternatives we’d like the new administration to undertake.
The City That Unpoisoned Its Pipes, NextCity The idea of preemptively improving infrastructure long before a crisis hits is foreign to most Americans. An hour’s drive west of Flint, Mich., the entire water system in Lansing (which once contained lead-lined service mains) will be declared lead-free in 2017 after a decade spent switching to copper pipes. Soon, residents will have the ability to swig their H2O without worry. A New Brand of Doctor Targets the Unhealthy in Rural Tennessee, The Tennessean In rural areas, there are a lot of benefits to a country doctor who makes house calls: a robust patient-physician relationship, no administration contributing to overhead. But isolation limits those medics’ ability to understand what’s affecting their region. By banding together, a network of primary-care physicians in 50 desolate counties across Tennessee now share knowledge such as health trends among their populations and best practices for dealing with insurance companies. The Collapsible Helmet that Could Revolutionize Bike-Share Safety, CityLab Bike-sharing is one of the easiest ways to get around a city and is friendlier to the environment than a short, gas-guzzling car ride. But cyclists often put themselves at risk on roadways by going without a helmet. To improve safety, a Brooklyn, N.Y., commuter created a collapsible helmet made from paper honeycomb and glue, which folds up to the size of a banana, making a bike-share ride even more desirable. MORE:In the U.S., 1.7 Million Don’t Have Access to Clean Drinking Water. This Grandma Is Changing That
On an evening in August 2007, Minneapolis commuters sat in rush-hour traffic on the I-35 highway bridge that spanned the Mississippi River. Some drivers probably glanced at the construction crew resurfacing the concrete deck of the eight-lane, steel truss structure. Suddenly, a terrible wrenching noise sliced through the summer night. People screamed and honked their horns. A section of the bridge plummeted 60 feet straight down into the river, and the rest of the structure crumpled, sending 50 cars sliding into the water.
The collapse, which resulted in 13 deaths and 145 injuries, pointed to the importance of repairing aging infrastructure. As a result, Minnesota’s Department of Transportation (MnDOT) looked into new ways to conduct their biennial inspections on the state’s 12,961 bridges that carry traffic (830 of which urgently need repairs). Recently, drones replaced workers at several inspection sites, allowing the agency to get a closer look at the structures without closing a lane of traffic and sending a worker over the edge.
The eight lane bridge spanning the Mississippi River near Minneapolis’s downtown was undergoing repair work when it collapsed during the evening rush hour.
MnDOT uses the senseFly eXOM drone, a four-pound machine resembling a bumblebee that was specially built for mapping and inspection. Hooked up with an LED light and a camera, the drone can illumine dark spaces and capture detailed pictures. Oftentimes, the images have better resolution than inspectors can snap with a digital camera, while either perched atop a cherrypicker or suspended by rope underneath a bridge, says Jennifer Zink, a state bridge inspection engineer. A drone’s flight controller can toggle with an infrared camera, giving heat-sensing capabilities to pick up on distressed spots in the concrete.
The technology not only gathers better data, it also keeps workers safe. Even when traffic lanes are closed, a surprising number of drivers head into a work zone, swerving away from disaster at the last minute. The drone, on the other hand, steers clear of any objects, automatically bouncing away when it detects something closer than one to five feet.
The site of the collapse, Blatnik Bridge in Duluth, Minn., now uses drones to inspect the infrastructure.
Zink says the MnDOT team has been excited to innovate with new technology, but the law still lags behind, restricting when and where they can fly. There’s a lot of bridges in the state, Zink says, but with drones, managing their safety doesn’t seem like such a high-flying task.
Infrastructure determines how we live, says Ryan Gravel, an Atlanta planner. But he’s not just talking about the tedious methods for relieving road congestion or figuring out how to efficiently transmit water, gas and electricity to every home. No, Gravel’s got something more personal in mind. Infrastructure, to him, determines how people interact and bond, children grow up, residents spend their time and communities preserve their heritage. “Infrastructure is the foundation of social life and economy and culture,” he tells NationSwell. That may sound grandiose, but thinking big hasn’t stopped Gravel before. He’s the visionary behind the mother of all urban redevelopment projects: a 22-mile metamorphosis known as the BeltLine, linking Atlanta’s unused railroad tracks and abandoned industrial zones in a gigantic loop of public transit, green parks, walking and biking trails and neighborhood revitalization.
“If we build highways and off-ramps, then guess what? We end up with a way of life that’s dominated by cars. If we build walkable communities with transit, we get something that’s entirely different,” Gravel says. “The BeltLine is catalyzing a new way of life, a new kind of infrastructure. It’s supporting something other than what Atlanta is known for, which is car dependency, and it’s working.” City planners hope that long-term infrastructure projects, including the BeltLine, will alleviate the traffic that clogs Atlanta highways.
By picturing what kind of city he wanted to live in, Gravel first envisioned the BeltLine in 1999 as part of his master’s thesis. Cathy Woolard, former city council member and gay rights advocate who’s readying to replace Mayor Kasim Reed (who’s in the midst of serving his second term) in 2017, provided invaluable early assistance and got the massive 25-year project up and running by 2005. Gravel personally helped oversee its rollout with a full-time role at city hall. Yet working in government bureaucracy quickly tested his nerves. He loved meeting all the different stakeholders interested in the BeltLine — from local restaurant owners to fellow urban planning wonks — but, as he told Ozy, “The politics of it got too much.” Gravel quit after five months. (He notes he continued to be involved in the BeltLine’s development through volunteer work, advocacy and private-sector work.) Ryan Gravel first envisioned the BeltLine in 1999 as part of his master’s thesis.
A decade later, the BeltLine has generated $2.5 billion in economic development, and Gravel wrote a book about infrastructure, out last month. Recently, Gravel announced he’s rejoining the planning process from within the mayoral administration, by serving as manager of the Atlanta City Design project, a new design studio that will sketch out long-term plans for Atlanta’s growth after at least six months of public meetings at Ponce City Market. Writing in an email, he made clear that the job isn’t a long-term position: “My role … is as a consultant. And by this time next year, I’m guessing it will be over/near over.” But on the phone, he communicates enthusiasm for the project’s ambitious goal. Essentially, Gravel wants to find out what makes Atlanta tick and preserve those elements through a projected boom in population.
In January, Mayor Reed welcomed Gravel back to city hall. ”His vision to transform old railroad corridors into a 22-mile transit greenway has spurred economic development across the city, improved the quality of life for residents and led to a total transformation for Atlanta,” Reed said. Part of that renewal has been an in-migration to Atlanta’s downtown. Regarded as the capital of the South, the urban center of Atlanta dwarfs in size compared to the city’s suburbs. Fewer than one in 10 people live downtown out of the 5.7 million that claim the metro area home. Stretching out 50 miles in every direction, the outer ring of the nine-county area was once the hotspot for new growth. Now, people are pouring back into downtown. ”There’s a limit to the sprawl,” Matt Hauer, head of the University of Georgia’s Applied Demography Program, tells the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “We’re seeing much more urban revitalization and growth in the central metro counties.”
With so much in flux, Gravel’s assessment of what defines Atlanta will be all the more important. “The purpose of City Design is to identify the things that are special about Atlanta, then embed those things in the decisions about how the city grows in the future,” Gravel says. In other words, he believes that Atlanta’s history and environment should inform every planning decision. The BeltLine, in repurposing old railroads, for instance, would get high marks for its nod to Atlanta’s beginnings and its reclaiming of industrial land. The neighborhood containing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthplace and burial site in the Historic Fourth Ward have been connected to the BeltLine via a trail and a 17-acre park, but there’s plenty of other sites from the Civil Rights Movement to safeguard and integrate.
“We have been so car-centric that you didn’t experience the city in an intimate way,” Reed explains to The New York Times. “We are changing Atlanta into a city that you can enjoy by walking and riding a bike.”
There’s not much precedent for this type of metropolitan-wide planning in North American cities. Workers within individual departments may come up with an idea for housing stock or parks and recreation, but they’re almost never joined together in one unified vision. (Gravel points to only one prior example in the United States that he can find: Chicago’s Burnham Plan in 1909.) That’s because the hardest part is getting everyone to sign off on one big plan.
By taking hundreds of thousands of people’s opinions all being taken into account, the BeltLine has run up against some major political hurdles (typical for massive government undertakings). Not surprisingly, the biggest tiffs involved money. When the stock market took a nosedive in 2008, it looked as if the BeltLine wouldn’t get built. Under then-mayor Shirley Franklin, the city set up a new process, known as tax-allocation districts in 2005, to borrow school tax revenues to fund the initial construction (to be returned upon the project’s completion), but it didn’t go into effect until a state constitutional amendment was approved in 2009. Construction resumed, but when the city missed its payments on the $162 million owed by 2030, Reed received a sharp rebuke from Atlanta’s school superintendent, including threats of a lawsuit. “Bikes or books?” one graduate student at George State University asked. “What does Atlanta support more? Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed.
This February, three years after that budget fight turned nasty, Reed brokered a deal that offered less money, but with a guarantee the schools would be paid first. He argued that funding the BeltLine would foster a more robust tax base — a $30 billion increase is hoped for by 2030 — filling both the city and the school’s coffers. The deal “will allow the Atlanta BeltLine to recover from the worst recession in 80 years. And then, when the Beltline is strong and able again, it can make payments at a higher level,” he promised. The school board unanimously agreed.
Across the rest of the city, however, individuals still questions if they will be able to cash in on the investment. Neighbors bordering the city’s new lifeline worry that gentrification will drive up rents to sky-high prices. There’s plenty of evidence in other cities to support their point. For instance, in Southern California’s Elysian Valley, proximity to the Los Angeles River redevelopment — a concrete blight that’s now a natural asset — drove up the median price per square foot 28.3 percent in one year.
Gravel hopes people see that the answer is not to leave the city as it is, without improvements, in the hopes of warding off gentrification. That’s not to say, there won’t be unintended consequences, he admits. But if anything, this is where planning is all the more important, preparing ways to keep housing affordable while sprucing up a neighborhood’s character.
Gravel looks around him for all the signs that the BeltLine’s already improving Atlanta. “It’s not just people commuting or exercising, they’re going out on dates, going to the grocery. That to me is a huge measure of success. To me, it’s changing the way that people live their lives,” he says. With more long-term planning still to come, we can expect to see a new model for urban growth born in the south in the decades ahead. Correction: A previous version of this article referred to Atlanta City Design as a “committee.” It is a design studio. The article also said that Ryan Gravel was nervous about his new position, which was incorrect. It also stated that Mayor Reed set up the tax-allocation districts. That work was done under Mayor Shirley Franklin. NationSwell apologies for these errors.
Construction projects wreak havoc on everyone’s lives. Residents become sleep deprived when the jackhammers wake them each morning, and commuters stress about detours adding minutes to their daily travel. But local business owners may suffer the most harm, as merchants on Manhattan’s Upper East Side near the Second Avenue subway construction and West Los Angeles storeowners coping with the new light-rail extension cutting through town can attest. Noise and dust drives away customers and businesses lose millions as a result.
When a year-long, $5.5 million repaving project threatened Cleveland’s now-thriving Collinwood neighborhood near Lake Erie, one civic group came up with a solution. Northeast Shores, a community development corporation, asked 225 artists to beautify the half-mile under construction with 52 community art projects. Funded by a relatively modest $118,000 grant, the initiative helped keep all 33 participating merchants in business.
“It’s pretty typical in Cleveland that a streetscape project results in business loss,” Brian Friedman, executive director at Northeast Shores, tells the blog Springboard Exchange. “People decide not to come thanks to the orange barrels.” Mac’s Lock Shop on Waterloo Road.
Ravaged by the decline of the city’s manufacturing industry and the onset of another recession, vacancies used to dominate Cleveland’s central thoroughfare, Waterloo Road, and more stores were boarded up than occupied. By 2013, however, a new generation of small businesses was reviving the neighborhood, but infrastructure improvements needed to catch up.
To create a distraction amidst the chaos, Northeast Shores drew inspiration from a similar arts project in Saint Paul, Minn. The development agency offered small monthly grants, made available on a first-come, first-serve basis. Storeowners instantly crowded outside their offices, clamoring to get in.
“We were a little distressed by the number of merchants who were literally waiting for us to open so they could shove paper at us seconds apart from each other, to make sure they could be included,” Friedman recalls. “We didn’t think it was a good community-building moment for us to have merchants sitting in front of our office at 5 o’clock in the morning, arguing with each other about who got there first.”
With a streamlined application process, projects soon got underway. Mac’s Lock Shop, for instance, helped sculptor Ali Lukacsy put up luggage locks stamped with individual messages (Locks of Love) on fences. Storefronts and open spaces filled with crafts.
Not only were beautiful surprises scattered throughout 10 city blocks, but the venture also helped to solidify lasting partnerships and sparked community involvement from artists who could’ve hunkered down in their studios until the streets were clean. Creative businesses — art galleries, performance spaces, fabric stores and design agencies — proliferated, and now, Waterloo Road is considered the city’s hotbed of arts and entertainment. A detail of the Locks of Love installation.
That strong civic fabric will be vital as Cleveland shifts its image from Rust Belt holdover (derided as “The Mistake on the Lake”) to an attractive destination for Millennials (with a new nickname of “The Comeback City”). “I want Waterloo to be a mini Austin or Nashville,” Cindy Barber, co-owner of Beachland Ballroom, a longstanding live music venue on Waterloo Road, tells the Cleveland Plain-Dealer. “We have to dream big to expand what we’ve been doing here to get people to Waterloo.”
The artwork gets visitors to stop and look. From there, closing the deal should be the easy part.
