Pittsburgh may be beautiful (trash-strewn hollers aside), but some of our facades could stand some love — a little soap and scrubbing, a little paint, maybe some patching, reattaching the metal awning, that sort of thing.

 

There’s help out there for small storefront shop owners through the Urban Redevelopment Authority’s “biz buzz” program

and the Oakland Planning and Development Corp. has a residential facade grant program.

 

Now the Polish Hill Civic Association is initiating the Pivotal Streets Façade Renovation Grant Program  for residential property owners to replace gutters, siding, windows and doors; paint trim or porches; for landscaping; to repair or replace sidewalks, steps or retaining walls, and to receive a bonus for energy efficiency improvements.

 

 

The program is open to all Polish Hill residential property owners who are ready to begin their projects. Applications are due by March 30. PHCA will announce the awards by April 30, 2013.

 

Each residential property owner in Polish Hill is eligible to apply for a matching grant of from $500 to $5,000 to renovate the street-facing side of his/her property.  Awardees must contribute the project match amount and all amounts over the maximum $5,000 match.  

 

Grant money will be provided after the work is completed.

 

The program is funded by the PNC Foundation and Pittsburgh Partnership for Neighborhood Development.

 

Read program guidelines here and download your application here 

 

The public-works investment that will be ALCOSAN’s answer to a federal consent decree can be green, gray or shades of both. Gray is what ALCOSAN proposed to the Environmental Protection Agency — a series of underground tunnels.

 

But the Clean Rivers Campaign asks: “Why have ‘tunnel vision’ and bury our money in tunnels under the river when we can manage stormwater where it falls and improve our neighborhoods with green solutions?” 

 

City and county officials will join rate payers at a town hall meeting asking for your feedback at 7p Thursday at the United Steelworkers Building, 60 Blvd. of the Allies, Downtown. There will be snacks.

 

The Clean Rivers Campaign has been urging a greener solution to the region’s problems with stormwater run-off and collection and hopes to get ALCOSAN to work with municipalities and citizens’ groups to come up with strategies for stormwater collection in parks, rain gardens, permeable pavement, tree wells and green roofs.

 

The investment will mean rate increases to the consumer, and the consumer should have a say in what the public investment will entail.

 

Community benefits from green solutions, the campaign activists maintain, are living-wage jobs for local workers, flood reduction, more green space, improved water and air quality and healthier neighborhoods.

 

 

Twenty finalist cities have been chosen in the Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Mayors Challenge, described by the Huffington Post as “a competition designed to inspire America’s mayors to generate innovative ideas that solve major challenges and improve city life.”

 

They are Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, Knoxville, Durham and High Point (NC), Milwaukee, Santa Monica, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Hillsboro (OR), Indianapolis, Lafayette (LA), Providence, Lexington (KY), Phoenix, St. Paul, Springfield (OR) and Syracuse.

 

Pittsburgh submitted an idea. Marissa Doyle from Mayor Luke Ravenstahl's office wrote:

 

 

I checked out some of the finalists' stories. I started with  Durham because I have a soft spot for that town and read the idea summary: “Three Proof of Concept Community Labs will transform vacant, blighted properties into the stages where resident stories meet relevance-based governance and global-reaching solutions.” There’s a “click-here” button to vote for it, but I would need it in English. 

 

The video here will translate better.

 

You can read the whole story and weigh in here for your favorite civic innovation.

 

Applications came from 305 cities in 45 states and represent more than 64 million Americans, according to the Huff Post. 

 

 

Earlier this year, Walkabout began an informal series that features the leader of a different neighborhood advocacy organization. Most of these are community development corporations, which, although many neighborhood stories bring their work to the public eye, fly under the mainstream radar like many things that seem wonky and unexciting.

 

This series is meant to highlight the sometimes very exciting, tireless and occasionally maligned, or misunderstood, work of CDCs in this acronym-rich field of professional planners, designers, organizers and activists of every stripe.

 

Some neighborhoods don’t have CDCs. They might have a civic council or other all-volunteer  group of passionate advocates who struggle to amass accomplishments; some neighborhoods have extremely potent CDCs that have guided and even led neighborhood transformations.

 

The Oakland Planning and Development Corp. is one of the high capacity CDCs with 20 employees. Its current executive director Wanda Wilson (in photo above) said OPDC was “a rock star of the CDC world” in the 1980s. “ELDI [East Liberty Development Inc.] is kind of that rock star now.”

 

Both OPDC and ELDI — whose leadership Walkabout will nag for an interview in the near future — have real estate work at the core of their missions. OPDC has built and renovated 320 houses and more than 100 units of rentals over the decades and was one of the early users of low-income tax credits.

 

Wanda went to full-time advocacy for Oakland in 2009 after nine years as a senior planner for the city and three years as a program officer for the Pittsburgh Partnership for Neighborhood Development. In both of those earlier jobs, she had Oakland on her plate.

 

When the job at OPDC opened, she stepped into it “to be on the ground, able to implement and do things first hand,” she said. “It was a better fit for me.”

 

A graduate in sociology and anthropology from Denison University in Granville, Ohio, she received her master’s degree in urban and environmental policy and planning from Tufts University in Boston.

 

“I know all neighborhoods of the city because as a city planner I was a generalist working throughout. But I was always the planner for Oakland and at PPND, I was assigned Oakland.”

 

She declares a passion for Oakland as a neighborhood and a regional cultural hub.

 

At OPDC, she oversees OPDC’s programs, fundraising, and planning projects and the job-training operations of JobLinks and School 2 Career.  JobLinks serves people from throughout the city but was established by OPDC to focus on helping neighborhood residents get jobs at Oakland institutions. That remains at the core of its job training.

 

OPDC, which grew out of the late 1970s Oakland masterplan, led the year-long community engagement process that resulted in the Oakland 2025 plan last year. It was professionally assembled by Pfaffmann + Associates and the Studio for Spatial Practice as “a vision for sustainable living and mobility.”

 

It deals with opportunities for development and housing — for students, low-income workers, professionals and retirees to Oakland — environmental remedies, land banking and transportation options. The transportation component of the plan includes a proposed redesign of the Fifth and Forbes corridors to slow and narrow lanes of traffic to better accommodate bikes, buses and pedestrians.

 

“If we want Oakland to be a healthy neighborhood, transit hubs are essential. People have been thinking about transportation in Oakland for a long time, but we came out of the 2025 process with a ‘complete streets’ vision. This vision is compelling” and calls for “change that will help Oakland and Pittsburgh keep up with what people want of a city.

 

“It’s not just about looking at Portland,” the perennial feel-good capital of sustainable transformation and hipness. “New York City, an old Eastern city, is a leader in bicycle infrastructure. We need to be moving in the direction of places like New York and Boston,” where the street grid configuration (crazy-ish) is similar to Pittsburgh’s. In cities that are attracting people, she said, “there’s high demand for being able to get around without a car.”

 

The Oakland Transportation Management Association — itself a non-profit advocate of better public transportation opportunities for residents and visitors to Oakland — reports that more than 100,000 pedestrians and 75,000 vehicles travel through Oakland every day.

 

And while it does seem that every bus in the Port Authority’s care goes through Oakland — many do — the traffic lanes and traffic intensity are unfriendly to people in the cross-walks, especially along  Fifth Avenue.

 

“We can’t accomplish growth and quality of life by accommodating more and more cars,” Wanda said. “Changes in transit development in Oakland would benefit everyone, including employers.”