Turning a Dubious Designation into an Awesome Opportunity
By Tom & Carol Braford
The St Louis population cluster has the 13th highest global and 3rd highest US carbon footprint per capita. Other midwest river and waterfront cities are just ahead or just behind St Louis.
That makes sense because these were the places settled first as the non-native population pushed west along the waterway transportation corridors, and streetcar lines were replaced with highways to the suburbs and beyond, leaving us with aging, but beautiful, functional buildings that were easy to retrofit, and inadequate public transportation that, with the assistance of key components of our Rapid Alternative Freight & Transit (RAFT), is easy to transform.
That puts us in an enviable position when it comes to Climate Restoration and a setup for success, because there are megatons of embedded carbon in those buildings and transportation infrastructure and a potential livable community scenario, densification, that I believe will soon make St Louis the envy of the world, if we don’t fall down the rat hole of massive site scraping, like Detroit did instead.
Are you wondering how this is possible and eminently doable and affordable through the power of organized, committed, now reforming, Islands of Coherence Communities of Practice? Go to our website, find out and sign up for upcoming actions.
Our City, our yet salvageable democratic society and our beautiful blue green marble of a planet is a terrible thing to waste, and deeply organised community is a big part of the answer. Join us soon before the opportunity slips away!
The awesome opportunity is that we are in the running for a $2,000,000 Housing Solutions Grant being offered by a major international foundation that will virtually guarantee that these long anticipated projects will finally sprint to the finish line. because the grant founder has publicly expressed his preference for comprehensive climate solutions.
Luckily for them and conveniently for us, we are offering a comprehensive Housing Solution that gets us all the way there with the Housing Solution part and more than half way there as a Climate Solution, as well.
The challenge is that our community development sites are no longer marginally desirable places to live but are now sandwiched between two of the hottest redevelopment areas in the City. Now this area is in the sites of our building division, other City agencies and related organizations that are in the midst of a giant land grab working on behalf of more established status quo developers.
Luckily there is power in numbers and there are a lot more of us than there are of them. So if we come together quickly, as the saying goes: the people united will never be defeated.
The most effective way to blunt their efforts is to have this opportunity be a comprehensive opportunity for reconstituted, breakthrough communities. All of you stepping up and rejoining or joining for the first time this big tent conglomerate of worker owned permanent family wage jobs generating divisions of Irresistible Community Builders that will build out 4 contiguous cohousing and cooperatively owned communities and permanent on site co-op owned businesses that will build out these and other co-ops that will operate permanently from the Central West End and our satellite smaller community in Fox Park with growing raised guideway Rapid Alternative Freight & Transit (RAFT) connected Islands Of Coherence Communities of Practice, throughout our region and beyond.
The sooner we fill these community based family wage job positions, business, housing and the investment in the future opportunities that these developments represent, the more secure these prototype projects that we have so painstakingly put together over decades will now quickly move to secure completion.
Years ago when these communities were first in formation, we cemented the forming bonds by attending a Regional Cohousing Conference together en masse. So we have decided to do what we already know works with a tweak that recognizes the evolution of now being a model Climate Solutions Community, by encouraging as many of us as are able to take the train together to and from this year’s regional conference in Denver, which promises to be just as evolved as we are. Contact us at braford@sbcglobal.net or at www.ArizmendiEcovillage.com.