Humanize the Earth!

Marshall Square Parkway Garden Club at Carrillo’s, planting day report

As I’ve written about before, today was planting day for the Marshall Square Parkway Garden Club at the Carrillo’s corner store, and the day couldn’t have been better, with beautiful sunshine and temps in the 70s.

On Thursday, Sarah Kaplan and I picked up the plants and tools at the Chicago Center for Green Technology, provided to us by Greencorps, through my involvement with the Chicago Conservation Corps. We each had a full bike trailer on the way home, with the wind at our backs. Fun!

Today we had a great turn-out, with Mr. and Mrs. Carrillo and their daughter Laura Rodriquez and Laura’s husband Rick, a neighbor from the 2400 block of Whipple, Mars (from Wicker Park, who found about the event through this website) and her mother (from Nebraska), and 5 of us from the HUB Housing Co-op, where I live.

We had 24 1-gallon pots, 3 each of 3 kinds of daylillies, 3 each of 2 kinds of hostas, 3 each of 2 kinds of bleedings hearts and 3 coralbells, and one flat of echanacia.  I was envisioning planting all of these is a fairly small area, removing the grass to do so, giving a really big impact in one dense area, or perhaps two smaller dense areas (the store is on the corner so has parkway in two places).  What actually happened was a sort-of dense area around one tree with 3 hostas and about 10 echanacias (these with no grass in-between, with 3 bleeding hearts nearby, planted in holes surrounded by grass (we didn’t take out hte grass except right where we planted), and then non-dense planting of all the rest.  Two or three trees had about 3 plants around each, with echancias to fill in, and some of the bleeding hearts ended up sort of off by themselves in the grass.

What’s really interesting about this in retrospect is that when a neighbor sees a full-on large-scale parkway garden, they may think it’s beyond their skills, experience or financial other means.  when they see two bleeding hearts in an otherwise solid stretch of 50 sq ft of grass, maybe that feels more accessible and they can do something like that themselves, without anything from me or other neighbors or the City.  That would be really cool!

Another thing about the day that was really cool was the amount of conversation that happened between neighbors.  Some of them came over to our place to see our compost and rainbarrels and talk about greenroofs and other goodness.  I really look forward to seeing these folks again, and I’m excited about the connections that were formed.

So we’re going to do another planting day in June, on Whipple, in a smaller area.  I need to check my calendar and the put in another order with Marissa.

Green Roofs

I met with Kevin from Xero Flor America, LLC tonight.  The name is a bit confusing because their website is xeroflora.com.  Anyway, they’re the leading contenders for suppying our green roof.  A green roof means growing stuff up there.  Not flowers or anything, but sedum.  Sedum is a succulent that’s ideal because it can hold a lot of water, but is also very drought resistant.  The whole point of having a green roof is to reduce stormwater runoff.  Well, that’s one of the points.  Here in Chicago when we have heavy rains, the water treatment plants can’t handle all of the volume in our combined storm water and sewage system so we release raw sewage into the river.  That’s bad, obviously.  So here at the HUB (my co-op) this year we’re going ot install a green roof, which should vastly reduce the amount of runoff we have.  We’re also depaving part of our concrete courtyard to plant a rain garden, which is native grasses that grow really deep roots so then can absorb a lot of water.  Water for the rain garden will come from our disconnected downspouts as well as our rainbarrels.  Wow, we’re doing a lot!  We’ll see how it goes.  Anyway, let me know if you have experiences with Xero Flor.  Thanks!

air + water + sunlight = soil + oxygen

I started composting a couple of years ago. I wasn’t a gardener at the time, but it just seemed to make sense. Why send organic matter to the landfill when I could do something else with it. Seemed better than recycling!

When I moved into the HUB Housing Cooperative last spring, the composting effort immediately and drastically expanded. It went from one person and one bin to 8 people and 4 bins!

The more I tended the compost, the more I had an emotional connection to the soil we were creating. And I wanted to grow more plants specifically for the purpose of composting them! It felt to me like converting sunlight into soil.

I didn’t really fully understand the process until last night when I watched Upward Spiral by Paul Krafel. This is a 50-minute self-made film where he shows how bedrock left by glaciers is converted into soil by the process of life! This is the upward spiral. Life create soil just as it requires soil. And the more life there is, the more soil is created, thus leading to more life.

So of course the point is metaphorical about the power of each of us to help humanity move up the upward spiral, but the point I’m so excited about today is the equation in this post’s title.

air + water + sunlight = soil + oxygen

This also comes from Paul Krafel, from the very first issue of his free quarterly newsletter that’s been going for more than 10 years!

What he’s saying (crudely) is that photosynthesis takes carbon dioxide, water and energy from the sun and creates a physical solid (leaves and all plant life) and oxygen. This plant life then either drops as leaves and flowers or dies and drops as the whole thing, decays and creates soil. So far we’re just talking about compost, but here comes the cool part!

When leaves fall, they obstruct the flow of water. This obstruction causes the water to flow slower. A slower flow drops solid matter from the flow to create more soil. The more soil there is, the slower the water runs off and the more plants grow. This is the upwards spiral again!

This whole exploration, and timely email yesterday from a friend suggesting a green roof for the co-op, has me totally excited to plant vegetation on our roof and work on (at least) partial de-paving of our courtyard, to minimize run-off, thus benefiting the whole ecosystem and planet!

Can you tell I’m excited?

Added a few hours later: By the way, the idea of slowing down the water to increase interactions between particles the eventually become soil and thus leads to more vegetation sounds remarkably similar to the idea that slowing down the flow of traffic leads to more interactions between human beings and thus more life to our cities.  Ideally even bikes will feel too fast.

new Chicago Co-op website

The Chicago Co-op website is finally up. If simply want to follow along with the news about what’s happening the in Chicago housing cooperative and intentional communities scene or write about such events, then the blog is for you: http://www.chicagocoop.net/blog/. Check out the invitation for the Chicago Cooperatives and Communities Gathering on July 8th at Stone Soup.
If you’d like to help organize information about cooperatives and communities or simply get more information, then the wiki is for you: http://www.chicagocoop.net/wiki

I also welcome general design advice or offers of help. For example, should the blog be on the Chicago Co-op home page, with the wiki somehow linked from there, perhaps with different categories linked seperately? How should we best unify the styles of the two parts of the site? Thanks!

zoning good news!

This is a follow-up to my last post on zoning.  In that post I told you how our architect was going to put the average ceiling height on the drawings to address the legal-floor-area issue (Zoning says 6′9″ is legal so if we’re below that, we’re increasing floor area, which is an issue - Permits says legal has to be 7′6″ which is why we’re in this mess to begin with).  Peter (the architect) did that and it still wasn’t good enough.  He then produced a sort of inverted topographical map of the ceiling which today was accepted!

What does this mean?

We got our denial today.  This means we can finally file an appeal.  The denial lists 4 issues so we’re asking for 4 variations to the zoning ordinance.

1. Reduce the required rear yard from 30′ to 0′ since that’s where the entire rear building sit anyway.
2. Reduce the northside yard from 4′ to 2′11″ since that’s the amount of passageway we have to the alley right now.
3. Reduce the combined side yard from 10′ to 2′11″ for the same reason as #2 (we have no southside yard b/c we’re on the corner and that’s the sidewalk on that side.
4. Increase allowable floor area by less than 15%.  This is because some (small portion) of the ceiling is less than 6′9″.  If it were more than a 15% increase, we’d have a big problem

So our attorney, Mark Kupiec will now file the appeal and send us a copy and then he’ll send a letter of notification of filing to our neighbors.  Once the appeal application is accepted, we’ll be given public hearing notice signs for our windows and the Zoning Board will send another notification to our neighbors with the date/time of the hearing, most likely sometime in July.

zoning update

This is a follow-up to my previous post about zoning. 

I have not spoken with attorney, Mark Kupiec, since April 19th.  At that time, he told me visited Gerald Garcia in Zoning 6 times and found new objections each time.  He was hoping for a denial “any day now.” 

On May 2^nd we found out from Aggie in Mark’s office that there was an additional objection from the City, relating to existing ceiling height.  Our architect provided a letter stating that the ceiling is sloped and that the average existing height is 6’9.5”. 

On May 9^th, Mr. Garcia said that wasn’t good enough, he needs a section drawing showing the exact height at each point.  Anything less than 6’9” is not legal living space with regards to FAR, which is why this is important.  I spoke with Peter, our architect, today and he’ll put the average on the drawing and send it to Mark.

70 Years Ago Today

This post from Michael J.’s Notiohas been in my drafts folder since January. Seems it’s time for it to come out. :-)  Cool stuff about co-ops.

Terry Appleby, General Manager of the Hanover Co-op, of which I am proud to be the current board president, wrote:

On January 6th, 1936, in the middle of the Great Depression, 17 families from Hanover, New Hampshire and Norwich, Vermont gathered to discuss the creation of a society of cooperation to meet their common needs. According to founding member Charles Bagley, “at the close of the meeting they signed the register, paid the initial fee of one dollar and became charter members.” They thus formed the buying club that later in the year would be incorporated into the Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society, and joined with consumers in Berkeley, and Hyde Park in Chicago and many other places who were also inspired by the idea of the transforming power of cooperation.

One of the first purchases by the club was for fresh citrus fruit from Florida, scarce in Northern New England at the time. Hanover Co-op still celebrates that purchase with an annual citrus sale in January. Here’s hoping you’ll join in a symbolic toast (of orange juice!) to the visionaries at each of our co-ops who have kept alive this dream.

Cooperatives present an alternative model of providing goods and services. They are member-owned, and organize around serving member needs. Sometimes members are workers, sometimes the members are customers – sometimes they are both, thereby tying together the combined self-interests of producers and consumers. In an era of so-called “customer-focused organizations” with un-navigable voicemail menu systems, cooperatives provide an honest alternative to greed.

If you’re interested in learning more, or even starting a new Co-op, there are some good resources listed in the “Cooperatives” topic on this weblog, particularly around July 2003.

professional communication

My housing co-op needs a zoning variance (or variation, depending on who you ask) in order to replace a flat roof with a gable roof that will allow the inside space to be of legal living space height to put in a bathroom.

We hired a zoning attorney, Mark Kupiec, back in February.  Actually, we met with him at our place on Feb 8th and then officially agreed to hire him at a meeting on the 11th.  The plan was that he would get us a denial first (required) and then apply for a hearing before the Zoning Board of Appeals.  There was some requirement of a public notice 30 days before the hearing so the earliest to get a hearing date was to be April.

Two weeks ago today, we finally were told by the attorney that we were not on the schedule for April.  Dan then talked with him 3 days in a row where Mark promised to send an email explaining the situation so we all could have the same information rather than play the telephone game where our questions don’t get answered.  No email.

Then I left messages 5 business days in a row.  And I sent one email.  No response.  Yesterday we had a bicycling attorney friend give Mark a call.  He left a message.  No response.  He recommended we drop by Mark’s office.  I did that today.

Mark wasn’t in.  I spoke with Agnes (I think).  She said they were waiting for Peter to get new drawings to them, as required by Mr. Garcia at the City.  Mr. Garcia is the one that has to officially deny our request so we can file the request for appeal.  Agnes hopes to get the denial tomorrow.  She didn’t know if we’d already missed our window for the May hearing date (they only meet once/month).  She also couldn’t give me any better advice about how to get Mark to communicate with us.  She took my name, phone number and email again.  We’ll see.

Update 5:24p same day: Mark phoned me just now to give me the whole scoop.  He wasn’t calling back because he was hoping to give us news of the official denial last week and then every day they’ve been visiting the City.  Still no dice.

He had to visit the examiner (Gerald Garcia, the most senior person there) 6 times so far on our case because there are no City records showing 6 units in this building.  Everything shows 4 so they had to search Board of Elections, Water Department from the 50s, permit applications, etc as well as photos we submitted.  Since we’re 6 units, we also were not given a City certification of number of dwelling units at closing because that’s only done for 5 or fewer units.  We also had to submit a section drawing from our architect because the front part of the building has 2 floors and the back part has 3 floors which made the examiner question how the building fits together and when the back building was added.

We have missed the May hearing deadline.  We should get a denial soon (tomorrow, he hopes) and then will move forward with the June 16th hearing.  We’ll know the answer that day, more or less and then can follow-up by phone the following Monday, and will have to wait a few weeks for the in-writing confirmation.  That’s when we can apply for our permits.

co-op gathering 3rd week in April in Little Village

Email I sent to Hub Housing Cooperative members, Mark Fick and Dorian Breuer tonight (crossposted at the Marshall Square blog):

Sarah and Mark Fick spoke at one point about two things:
1. http://chicagocoop.info that Sarah and I are starting (it’s slow-going) and that all will be welcome to contribute to.
2. A one-day gathering of co-op folks in the spring sometime, as a replacement for the Chicago Mutual Housing Network annual meeting that is no longer.
3. Possibly using 1 as a collaborative space to plan 2 and using 2 as a way to get more folks involved in creating 1.

So, tonight I was at the Illinois Green Party fundraiser with Howard and spoke at length with Dorian from the Pilson/Southwest Side Greens about co-ops. He’s been kicking the idea around with some friends about starting a co-op. I said we (Hub in general, and me specifically) have lot to share about our experiences and we’d love to help others.

He’s a do-er, not a talker, so we immediately decided to do a one-evening event the 3rd week in April, hopefully in Unit M1 at the Hub (is that possible, Dan and Laila?). If this isn’t okay, maybe we can use Cafe Catedral. If it is okay, which night of the week would work. We’re just to pick a date and tell Dorian.

And Mark, is that day-long gathering still in the works? How might these two events work together? Share a flyer? Be billed as a “series”? Have the Little Village event be but one topic for the day-long event, but be a different day? I don’t know. I’m just brainstorming here.

We didn’t talk about length or agenda or anything like that. Nothing is set in stone except for our desire to make something happen for information purposes in this part of the city.

Please let me know how you (each of you) see this and what you might like to do to make it happen. Thanks!

bike potlatch 28Jan06

Recieved email on the Working Bikes list. No website so giving it all:

Greets, folx,

Got bike tools? Got a problem bike? Bike questions, bike answers?

Bring ‘em!

Yeah, bring ‘em to:

The Humboldt Park Bike Potluck
Saturday, January 28th
12 pm to 8 pm
942 N. California Ave, first floor

This is a dayish-long gathering for folks with all degrees of bike-love.
We’ll be sharing what we know and the tools we have. We’ll be helping
anyone with any degree of knowledge and a bike.

So bring any tools, spare parts, portable stands–especially portable
stands!–you’ve got. Let’s wrench.

Oh, and when I say “we,” I mean “you, too.”

Yours in bikes,
Ben B.