My blog and my vision for Eureka are about Slow Cities and Conservation. Slow Cities is a movement that takes us back to the days when we did things slowly and thoughtfully. We made things well: we were craftsmen and artists and workers of all kinds. We built buildings to last, we made zippers that outlasted the jacket. We prepared our food slowly and ate it slowly and it was tasty. We do things fast nowadays and the things we make are rarely made well and our fast food is eaten in a hurry and our favorite taste is sweet or fatty. Not only do we do things fast but we are destructive in the ways we make things and how we dispose of the remnants and wastes that remain from our efforts. And we make things intending that they do not last long so that they will have to be replaced, promoting spending. My blog and vision and my wish list for Eureka are about striving for excellence in those things that we do and make and in cleaning up behind our work. Striving for excellence is a key element of the Slow Cities movement.
Conservation is the second tenet of my Vision. Conservation of resources is what I have in mind. Conservation is not punitive; I do not seek to punish anyone by asking him or her to conserve resources and non-renewable energy. I merely want the people of our region to share in the wealth of natural resources that the people of earth have been blessed with and I want us to not use a disproportionate share of this wealth. I want us to think about future generations and their share so that we do not spend it instead of passing on their share to them. Conservation means using less fuel and it means walking a little more, and it does not mean finding alternate fuels to keep doing as much put-putting around as we are in the habit of doing.
Slow cities and conservation are about breaking bad habits. To start I am going to demand that we change our outlook from one of being ashamed of "ugly, stinky, blighted Eureka" to an attitude showing we are proud of the beautiful bay-edge location that is on its way to featuring a 6 1/2 mile bay-edge trail on both sides of our seaport Old Town and boardwalk. We are proud of our fine restaurants and our coffee shops and our art scene and our thrift shops and book stores and two big healthfood supermarkets. We are proud of our farmers' markets and our music venues and our festivals. We are proud to join with the other towns of Humboldt in the Kinetic Sculpture Race and numerous other activities. We are proud of our historic architecture. We are proud of our rainy, foggy, cool climate and our lush green gulches, our rhododendrons and our expanding green areas.
But beyond being proud of who we are and of Eureka, we need to strive for excellence. We need to implement our trails plan and make it beautiful, we need to keep our restaurants in business and make sure new ones can afford the costs of permitting and buying leases and running a business. We need to make sure our farmers can afford to sell at the farmers' markets and we can afford to buy the foods. We need to take care of our historic architecture and not allow it to be destroyed by neglect or without analyzing the posibilities of restoration or rehab. We need to make sure the housing we invite the poor to live in is decent as required under the Housing Act of 1949. We need to take care of all our housing and neighborhoods, tame the traffic and protect pedestrians. We cannot be afraid that improving living conditions and beautifying our neighborhoods will raise the cost of housing. If a low-income persons come to Eureka because it is affordable, is it wrong for them to want to improve their neighborhood? There are ways to control the excessive rise in property values or at least control their costs. This will be the discussed in my position paper Homeless in Eureka and consists of reminding local banks to participate in the directives of the Community Reinvestments Act by making available low-interest long-term loans to low-income persons. In addition, the City had a good First-Time Homewowner loan program which was recently revised to make it less useful.
We also need to do a better job of enforcing laws that already exist to protect people from noxious fumes and toxic emissions, harmful rays and dangerous substances in our neighborhoods, schools and commercial districts. We need to encourage walking and biking by making it safer and more pleasant to be on the sidewalk. We need to use trees and labor as resources instead of high-cost engineering solutions to increase open spaces and intra-urban trails and buffers to make our city greener, safer and pleasantly free of toxic odors. Simply stated, we need to make our city liveable for the people who live here. We need to pay attention to what other cities do and value citizen participation in the planning process. We cannot afford to reject good advice. Planners learn by studying other places and learning from their mistakes and successes.
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