What's up Portland?

Mayor Sam Adams photo by E. Schwartz

If we build it, will they come? That’s the multimillion-dollar question Portland politicians ponder as they plan the Oregon Sustainability Center, a more than $75 million downtown office building that would be the first mid-rise office building in the world to meet the ambitious Living Building Challenge. The net-zero building, which would be located adjacent to Portland State University, is planned to process all of its wastewater onsite and get all of its water and power from the rain and the sun. Portland officials promise that the tower would not only set a new standard for “green” development, it would create a hub for public- and private-sector researchers with an eye on the triple bottom line.

Portland Mayor Sam Adams was elected mayor in 2008 after serving on the city council and is working behind the scenes to persuade major companies to set up shop in the living laboratory. Sustainable Industries talked with Adams this fall after the Portland City Council voted to direct the city’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability and the Portland Development Commission to initiate schematic designs for the building. Now that the Rose City is debating an investment of more than $14 million in the project, we asked Adams how the Oregon Sustainability Center fits into his economic and environmental plans for Portland. 

SI: Last week, you were in Toronto to attend a bicycle summit and Canada’s biggest green building conference. Your travel companions included executives from Gerding Edlen and other Portland companies. How was your delegation selling Portland’s sustainable-business ‘know-how’ and were the folks in Toronto receptive?

SA: We went with a group of ‘green,’ clean technology businesses—everything from a professional-service firm that specializes in making sure the outside of buildings are wrapped and sealed in the most sustainable way ... to an eco-roof manufacturer from Camas, Washington, to Gerding Edlen, which is a local developer that has built more LEED-certified buildings than any other single developer in the United States.

… The housing and construction market in Toronto continues at a pace of before our [economic] fall. At the same time, they instituted more aggressive climate action and green building standards. And so we were up there to market our products and services and also publicize the new direct flights between Portland and Toronto.

SI: The National Bureau of Economic Research declared recently that the recession ended in June of last year, yet Oregon continues to endure double-digit unemployment. What is your plan for making Portland’s recovery both economically and environmentally sustainable?

SA: Well, the unemployment rate is 10.4 percent. I was just in [Washington] D.C. for the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Portland’s unemployment rate is too high, and then I hear about Los Angeles’ unemployment rate of 13 percent and other cities experiencing deeper unemployment. We’re about at the middle of the pack. … Our more successful economy hinges on being a leader in clean technology and sustainable services. We’re a smaller city and have to be scrappy. And being scrappy means we have to continue to actually increase our local efforts about being a living laboratory. …Success, economically, is going to go to the city that can show that its local talent doesn’t just think about design but actually builds and gets projects done on the ground, operates them and improves upon them.

SI: At the U.S. Conference of Mayors summit, I imagine job creation was among the top issues you and your fellow mayors discussed. What were some of the best ideas you heard? And what were among the mayors’ biggest fears as their cities emerge from the so-called Great Recession?

SA: The amount of economic pain and anxiety of families across the United States is palpable, and just right in your face when you sit in a room full of mayors. Back here in Portland, and in the nation as a whole, we were supposed to get back to zero in terms of job loss and then have positive job growth at the end of 2011. Now, it’s looking like a year or two longer than that. That’s very difficult to hear; it’s very difficult for our folks to endure. … So as the mayor of Portland, I’m going to be aggressive as the ‘salesman-in-chief,’ taking our companies and getting them to buyers and getting them to developers and investors around the globe.

SI: Last fall, Portland received a $5.6 million slice of the stimulus for energy-efficiency and conservation projects, including Clean Energy Works Portland and retrofits on municipal buildings. What is the status of these projects?

SA: Clean Energy Works Portland is now spun out to be a nonprofit, and it’s now called Clean Energy Works Oregon. Our pilot in Portland is oversubscribed in terms of the number of homeowners that have signed up to be a part of the program.  …. It’s still early in the pilot, but the results are promising. Half of all workers on the projects … have been people of color. The number of certified firms for this kind work that were women-owned or minority-owned was zero when we started this program. Now we’re up to 13.

SI: How do you respond to those locally who point to the growing budget deficits and say governments such as Portland can’t afford to invest in clean energy and green building projects such as the proposed Oregon Sustainability Center?

SA: Well, I think the premise of that question assumes that to build sustainably, to build with new technology, is the more expensive route. The Oregon Sustainability Center prototype definitely has a premium for being the first large living building—a triple-botton-line building that generates and only gets to use its own power and water and deal with its own sewage. All prototypes have a premium. You don’t get to the sort of roll out and mass production of these techniques until you do your first production of a prototype. …

We started here 15 years ago with LEED buildings. Now, there is none, or little, cost differential all the way up to LEED Gold. …

SI: In terms of tenants, how does the city plan to use this as an economic development tool?

SA: The Oregon Sustainability Center is a living building not only in the sense that it’s triple-net-zero, but it’s also … a ‘plug-and-play’ building. Yes, it will be built with the latest HVAC systems, but it’s also built in a way that we can add and subtract easily components of that HVAC system and at some point, three to five years from now, work with a company to put in an even more environmentally advanced HVAC system. … And so it’s a living building in the USGBC sense of the word, but it will also be a living building in terms of research and development. That’s one reason why it’s on the campus of Portland State University. It’s also a project with the statewide university system. It’ll have classrooms, it’ll have the Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. It’ll have the city’s clean technology interpretive and sales center; we get lots of delegations here to look at our sustainability, climate action, clean technology and economic development goals, but we don’t have a focal point for that. This really brings together business, labor, academia and government around research and development—not just in widgets, but in how humans interact with that clean technology.

SI: What luck have you had in terms of attracting private-sector companies to move in as tenants … is General Electric (NYSE: GE) still in the mix?

SA: We’ve got General Electric; we’ve got Intel. We have a number of other companies that we’re formalizing partnerships with in the sense that they are [providing] either financing or systems or components that make the building work and are used by those companies and others in the future to plug-and-play. … Accelerating research and development to market is what this building is intended to do.