What’s better at bringing people together than shared mugs of beer? In one Pennsylvania city, two drinking buddies think they might have an answer: hops.
At two sites in Pittsburgh — an unseemly roadside retaining wall in Stanton Heights and a recently shuttered YMCA in Hazelwood — hop plants are adding some much-needed greenery on their crawl up 10-foot-high trellis systems. Used to add a bitter, zesty flavor to beer, the leafy hop cones are being donated to three local craft breweries, who will then donate the proceeds from each batch of beer brewed back to community projects.
The seeds for Hops on Lots Pittsburgh (HOLP) were planted in Pete Bell’s mind during a community gardening class. A part-time trade-show coordinator, Bell loved the idea that those without backyards could share a plot with their neighbors. But he wondered if there was a better way for all the produce and herbs he was learning to grow to benefit the entire community, not, he says, just the people who are able to garden. One night, over drinks with friend Joe Chmielewski, an operational support assistant at the University of Pittsburgh library, the conversation turned to how the two men could find a project they’d enjoy that would, in turn, benefit others. The pals, who Bell confesses enjoy “a lot of beer,” decided on growing hops. They believed the urban agriculture could support the red-hot craft-brew scene while prettifying some of the city’s 27,000 vacant lots.
“There are so many little breweries everywhere. They’re popping up, it seems, by the month,” Bell says. And yet, “nobody in the area was growing any hops.” Microbreweries around town jumped at the offer of locally harvested hops. “They like the idea that they’re fresh, right off the vine,” says Bell. “They don’t have to get hops shipped in from the other side of the country.”
Bell waters the hops two or three times a week, with five-liter jugs he keeps in the back of his car. The plants at both sites have grown to full size, pleasing the guys who nurtured them from seedlings. Now, says Bell, he’s watering the Stanton Heights crop in a narrow two-foot space between the retaining wall and a busy road.
Seeing HOLP’s success, Bell’s already scoping out sites to grow more hops next season, and as ale aficionados contact him from other cities, he’s helping to spread the idea nationwide. He warns them to be patient in waiting for other people to get on board, but he promises the idea is a sure-fire win: “Throw them in the corner of a community garden, and you have a cash crop there,” he advises. Bell says he’s willing to take calls from any aspiring gardeners.
That is, after he recovers from yesterday’s party. On September 18th, HOLP held its first annual celebration to raise money for the Stanton Heights community. (The funds have yet to be allocated, but Bell says money will go to fixing playgrounds, renovating the firehouse, installing rain barrels, or whatever else residents want to see.) Revelers poured into Roundabout Brewery to try to the pale ale brewed from the local hops, eat pizza and dance to the strains of a bluegrass band. Amid the carousing, a toast was in order: Here’s to more beer next year!
Unnatural Selection, The New Yorker
The ocean holds many wonders, but perhaps none are more precious and more fragile than its tropical coral reefs. Coral, at first sight, appears to be a lifeless rock, but it’s actually a miniature animal that houses an even smaller plant inside its cells — a symbiotic relationship developed over millennia. Ruth Gates, a University of Hawaii marine biologist, is attempting to speed up that evolutionary process and create a “super coral” by exposing it to the harsher conditions expected by next century: warmer, more acidic water caused by climate change. It’s a new take on conservation — call it “assisted evolution” — that’s also being tested on forests in Syracuse, N.Y., where a professor is genetically engineering a fungus-resistant chestnut tree. Can these scientists do what Mother Nature couldn’t? This Mayor Wants To Give Struggling Cities a Front-Row Seat in D.C., Next City
Standing at 6’8” with a shaved head and tattoos on his arms, the mayor of Braddock, a Pittsburgh suburb hammered by industrial decline, doesn’t look like your typical public official. Dubbed America’s coolest mayor, John Fetterman has implemented some of the brightest ideas for urban renewal, as he replaced a moribund steel industry with public art, urban agriculture, craft beer and other hipster fare. Now, Fetterman is competing in the Democratic primary for Pennsylvania’s Senate seat (currently held by a Republican). If he wins, he’s promised a new Marshall Plan (like the billions invested in Europe after WWII) for America’s forgotten cities. In most election cycles, Fetterman would be written off as an outsider without a chance, but in this unpredictable year, this fresh candidate may just have a shot. The Resurrection of St. Benedict’s, 60 Minutes
Up until 1967, St. Benedict’s Prep was your run-of-the-mill Catholic boy’s school, serving upper-middle class, white families in Newark, N.J. But when racial tensions exploded into bloody riots that summer, whites fled the city en masse. The school nearly collapsed (it closed for one year), but faculty member Edwin Leahy, then 26, quickly got it back on its feet. It reopened with one big change: students would run the school themselves, keeping each other out of gangs and competing for top marks. Of its 550 students today, nearly all from poor neighborhoods, only two percent don’t finish high school — in a city with a 30 percent dropout rate. Intellect isn’t the major problem in American education, Leahy, a Benedictine monk, argues; it’s all about making students’ realizing their own potential and see “the fact that they are a gift to somebody else.”
Every time your air conditioner or furnace rumbles on, greenhouses gases spew into the air. All those volts —about 10,900 kilowatt-hours per person — used to charge laptops and phones, light rooms, and keep the refrigerator running don’t come without an environmental cost. American electricity generation contributed 2.04 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2014, clouding the earth’s atmosphere with emissions and worsening climate change.
A hot new trend in architecture may offer one of our best hopes for significantly diminishing that pollution. “Passive house” construction — usually built without central heating or cooling systems — can reduce energy usage to net-zero or even net-positive, meaning a building generates more energy than it consumes. Applicable to both commercial and residential properties, passive construction centers on five key design elements: heavily insulated walls (sometimes up to 15 inches thick), an extremely tight envelope, triple-paned windows and doors that are outfitted with high-performance locks, high-tech ventilation and moisture-recovery systems filter the air and solar panels on rooftops.
“There are no drafts in the winter. And in the summer, it stays cool without strong air conditioning blowing on you,” Jane Sanders, a Brooklyn architect, tells the New York Post about her home. “This morning, there was jackhammering two doors down from me, but I could barely hear it. It’s so quiet that I feel like I live in the country.”
Some homeowners will take objection with the boxy design; others will balk at the price tag. But as more passive homes are built, architects are experimenting with chic design and developing cheaper construction methods. NationSwell looked into five of the most interesting passive houses in America today. Cheap land helped determine the location of the Smith House.
The Smith House, Urbana, Ill.
American designers first pioneered passive construction — then known as “superinsulation” in the early 1970s — after the oil embargo caused wild swings in energy prices. When conservation fell out of fashion during the Reagan years, the idea caught on among Germans in 1988, but it took until 2002, for the idea to return across the Atlantic. Katrin Klingenberg, a young German architect, and her now-deceased husband Nic Smith broke ground on the first American passive house prototype in Urbana, in part, because they could test the house against the harsh Midwestern climate. “I believe that climate crisis is real and that buildings need to do their part of reducing carbon emissions. The good news is that buildings have a lot of potential to do just that,” Klingenberg tells the Chicago Tribune. “We have to work a bit harder to get those reductions and invest a bit more upfront. But the reward is huge with long-lasting payback.” Window detail, Kiln Apartments.
Kiln Apartments, Portland, Ore.
Portland is undeniably at the center of the American passive house movement, with more than 100 certified buildings in its metro area, according to some counts. The Kiln Apartments, in North Portland, are one of the largest mixed-use buildings — 19 apartments above ground-floor retail — to meet passive house standards.
The Oregon city already has one of the strictest building codes in the nation, but these units save up to 75 percent more energy than equivalent ones. With many south-facing windows, the buildings is heated largely by the sun during the winter. Thick metal sunshades that look like modernist awnings block the sunlight during hotter months, when the summer sun rises higher in the sky. The four-story building does have an elevator, but because everything is about energy efficiency, residents are encouraged to take the stairs. Dedication ceremony for the Empowerment House, a 2-unit townhouse.
Habitat for Humanity Townhomes, Washington, D.C.
Demonstrating that passive house principles can be readily implemented, volunteers in the nation’s capital are building six townhouses for poor homeowners. Located in Ivy City, a portion of the structure was originally designed for the U.S. Solar Decathlon, a competition for college students to build the most energy-efficient home. Students from The New School and Stevens Institute of Technology put the one-bedroom together on the National Mall for under $230,000. After being moved northeast in 2012, a second story was added and Habitat for Humanity built a copy next door. Now, as the neighborhood gentrifies, the families in the six brick rowhouses have affordable rent and a a minimal utility bill. “I just remember thinking, we did it: a non-profit, affordable house developer can do this, even using volunteers with no construction experience,” Orlando Velez, manager of housing services at Habitat for Humanity’s D.C. chapter, tells ThinkProgress. “I started thinking, what’s everyone else waiting for?” The north building of the Uptown Lofts.
Uptown Lofts, Pittsburgh, Penn.
This 47-unit housing affordable project, provides greener living spaces to those who can’t afford a market-rate home. Split into two buildings across the street from each other, 18- to 23-year-olds who aged out of the foster care system live in the northern building’s 24 one-bedroom apartments; to the south, 23 affordable units go to people who make less than 60 percent of Pittsburgh’s median income. The $12 million project was also notable for being the first time any state subsidized a passive house with tax benefits.
At the ribbon-cutting ceremony this February, the project was praised for realizing its ambitious goals with limited dollars. “How proud we are to help bring these buildings to reality,” said Stan Salwocki, manager at the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “This project shows how cutting-edge, state-of-the-art, energy-efficient affordable housing can be done.” The central utility plant at Cornell Tech is currently under construction.
Cornell Tech, Roosevelt Island, N.Y.
Still in the works, the world’s tallest and largest passive house began construction this June. Rising 26 stories above Roosevelt Island, a sliver of land between the boroughs of Manhattan and Queens, the apartment tower will house about 530 grad students, professors and staff for Cornell University’s new 12-acre applied sciences campus. Since nearly three quarters of the carbon emissions in New York City’s come from heating and cooling its skyscrapers, school administrators hope this project will set a new standard for energy efficiency and gain the attention of engineers and designers across the Queensboro Bridge in midtown.
The construction “is a clear signal that in today’s era of climate change, it’s not enough to simply build tallest. To lead the market, your tall building will need to be a passive house,” Ken Levenson, president of NY Passive House, an advocacy group, tells The New York Times. The $115 million project is expected to open in 2017 and will save 882 tons of carbon dioxide annually — the equivalent of planting 5,300 trees, according to the university.
The likes of Marie Curie and Jane Goodall may have set great examples for future female scientists, and it’s time that more women follow in their footsteps — especially when it comes to computer science.
For all the jobs available in the industry and programs to train workers for it, a mere 18 percent of computer science graduates in the United States are women. Can we balance out the gender gap amongst computer scientists? Some of the top institutions of higher learning have already started, according to The New York Times.
At Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, 40 percent of incoming freshmen are women, and almost a third of computer science graduates this year were women at the University of Washington. And that’s not all. Harvey Mudd College in California boasts that 40 percent of their computer science program enrollees are female and this year, more than half of their engineering school graduates were women — a first for the school.
As promising as these numbers are, these three schools represent only a fraction of the computer science programs in the country. The question remains – what’s their secret, and how can it spread to every school?
Unsurprisingly, there is no cure-all, but one general trend is helping out everywhere: With so many professional opportunities for computer science majors, the field in general is attracting more students — regardless of gender.
But what sets Carnegie Mellon, University of Washington, and Harvey Mudd apart is that they are grabbing potential students when they’re younger by promoting computer science at an earlier age. By hosting summer camps and training high school teachers to teach computer science, girls are more likely to gain exposure to the discipline and develop a lifelong interest in it.
Another tactic used by these schools is revamping their marketing and support systems. Harvey Mudd, for example, has featured female students in their brochures to show that it’s normal for girls to study science. “We made it very clear that being a female scientist, that’s normal,” said Maria Klawe, president of Harvey Mudd. Plus, the school now talks about computer science as a way to problem solve (as opposed to it simply being about technical coding), putting an emphasis on its practical applications.
At Carnegie Mellon, the requirement to have prior experience in order to enter the major was eliminated and an official student mentorship program was established. By removing barriers and easing the process of becoming a computer science major, more women are showing interest.
Good news is, this can be easily replicated elsewhere.
As Lenore Blum, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon told The New York Times, “I don’t think we’re doing anything that nobody else could do, but it has to be sustained and institutionalized.”
If other schools picked up some tips from this trend-setting trio, America could be well on its way to unlocking a whole new set of minds for computer science. MORE:Can Google Crack the Code for More Female Computer Scientists?
In our opinion, the best prize is always cold, hard cash.
And this year, that’s exactly what four cities are receiving from the federal government after competing for funding to support low-income communities. This year’s winners are using the money to rethink the potential of public housing.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) awarded a total of $119.7 million (about $30 million each) to Norwalk, Connecticut; Columbus, Ohio; Philadelphia and Pittsburgh for its annual Choice Neighborhood Initiative.
These four recipients bested 40 other cities that applied for the urban housing program. Each will combine the grant money with private funding to transform aging public housing and depressed neighborhoods into mixed-income, mixed-use communities, Next City reports. “By working together, with local and state partners we will show why neighborhoods should always be defined by their potential — not their problems,” said HUD secretary Shaun Donovan. “Together, we will work to ensure that no child’s future is determined by their zip code and expand opportunity for all.”
Donovan, who led President Barack Obama’s Hurricane Sandy Task Force, has made sustainable building a priority at HUD in the wake of recent natural disasters. The agency has collaborated with FEMA in redesigning recovery projects, which extends to Norwalk’s project: rebuilding a blighted public housing development devastated by Sandy.
New units will be built six-and-a-half feet above the floodplain and will be protected by FEMA-funded storm-proofing infrastructures. The new development will also include community gardens, fitness trails and parks with playgrounds and sports fields.
In Pittsburgh, officials will use the grant to redevelop two of the city’s low-income neighborhoods. Plans include a one-to-one replacement of 155 public housing units and development of the area surrounding the new, upscale Ace Hotel.
“It will be the most significant investment in low- and moderate-income communities in the East End in 75 years,” Councilman Ricky Burgess, who represents the neighborhoods, told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
HUD began the initiative under President Obama’s order in 2011, awarding Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle and New Orleans a total of $122.27 million in grants. Submission for applications for next year’s funding is slated to begin this fall.
Adam* is a public school student who lives in the Northside neighborhood of Pittsburgh—a place where the lack of public transit has long made it hard for him to get around. But when he received, through a partnership with his school, a free bike, helmet and lock, that began to change in a major way.
“Since he has been able to bike home … he has been given a burst of new energy, freedom, and independence,” Julie Mallis —director of the program that made Adam’s bike gift possible — told Sustainable Cities Collective.
Mallis leads Positive Spin, a program that partners with Pittsburgh Public Schools to provide over 300 students with access to bicycles and lessons in bike mechanics. Positive Spin is a local initiative of Marilyn G. Rabb Youth Empowerment, a national nonprofit focused on helping young people overcome the social and economic obstacles that face them.
None of the kids in the program had access to functional bikes before their enrollment in Positive Spin; in fact, about 15 percent of them had never ridden one before the nonprofit gifted them with their new wheels. After ten weeks in the program, Positive Spinners can not only ride their bikes, but fix them, Mallis says.
But the skills students hone in the program don’t stop there. As part of their discussion around why cycling is important, the young enrollees recently shot and directed their own rap videos about the environment.
No positive spin is needed in ticking through all the reasons why Positive Spin is great for young people and their communities: it’s empowering and encourages physical activity, ownership, and a sense of freedom all while fostering a love for a green means of getting around.
Sometimes people with the least to give are the most generous. In Pittsburgh, a group of about 90 former refugees banded together over the holidays to donate hundreds of necessities for new refugees. The group — most of whom had arrived in the U.S. over the last several years from Turkey, Bhutan, South Sudan and Thailand — are all students participating in the Greater Pittsburgh Literary Council’s English language classes. They first started giving back about three years ago, when their program services manager, Many Ly, saw a poster seeking donations for military families and decided to implement the idea with the ESL students. Ly thought that sort of cause would teach the students to help others the way they’d been helped when they first arrived in America.The donations were small at first: pens and pencils, a handful of peanuts and a $1 bill. But after the first year of giving, the ESL instructors began teaching their students about poverty in America. They now give caches of household goods, toys and clothes. Tulasha Rimal, 45, who came to the U.S. from Bhutan four years ago, told Stephanie Hacke of Trib Total Media, “I came to the United States. It’s home now. It’s important to help others. … I understand now. Now I help new people.”
