EQ Journal

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Negative Cost Selling Solar Arrays

School Board Pays Negative Cost for new Solar Panel Installations Rex Parris, Mayor of Lancaster, California doesn’t like to lose. It must come from his class-action lawyer background where he won almost $1 billion in claims for his clients and himself. Three years ago he decided to make the city where the sun (almost) always [...]

Ringing Pine Medallions of Red Pine Camp

A Fable According to legend, the ‘Ringing Red Pines’ of Red Pine Camp on Golden Lake in Ontario are very old, very special trees that over their lifetimes have accumulated so much energy that they start emitting a vibrating ring tone. It is believed that simply being in close proximity to these trees or having [...]

Occupy But Measure

I woke up this morning thinking that OWS supporters everywhere might want to find more ways to influence the conversation beyond sit-ins. One thing that occurred to me was that they could adapt LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) mission statements to their cause. LEED rates the built [...]

Russian Dachnik Movement

Introduction The Russian Dacha and the Dachnik movement have been around for more than 100 years and the home garden for more than 1,000. The Dacha is typically a one-room cottage perched on one hectare of land—large enough to grow fruits and vegetables to support a single family via intense, mostly manual labour. One-room Russian [...]

Livable Cities Versus Mono Cultured Suburbs

This article was originally written for the Conference on Social Harmony, Ottawa Public Library, December 4, 2001 It wasn’t long after my wife and I and our five kids moved to a western suburb of Ottawa in the late 1980s before a group of our neighbors circulated a petition in the neighborhood. They were concerned [...]

Highest and Best Use

A Guiding Philosophy for Neo-Urbanist Designers Why Nimby’ites are Wrong to Oppose Higher Densities and Mixed Use Negative Property Taxes Urban Catalysts/Anti-Catalysts Highest and Best Use “Highest and best use for a property is achieved when the value created by its development for a specific set of physically possible, permitted uses (its functional program) and [...]

Democratic Abuse

The Growing Imbalance between City Planners, Developers and Community Activists— Democratic Abuse and Re-Engineering Approvals Introduction Once upon a time, town government or city-state government was based on the Athenian model of participatory democracy. Citizens and land owners met with town elders to plan the development of their communities—who lives where, what type of activities [...]

Revenue Sources for Commercial Landlords

Rooftop Solar Takes Off in Ontario Does this sound like a bad business? A business that hasn’t had a significant new revenue stream since the 1980s? Well, that would be the commercial real estate business. Here is how it breaks down: 1. In the ‘olden days’, Commercial Landlords received rent, a gross rent. 2. From [...]

Should Ottawa Allow Chickens in Residential Areas?

To find out the answer to that question, I asked someone who has experience in the matter—my son, Andrew, who lives in Canberra (Australia). I asked him how his neighbours reacted to his hen house in their quiet suburban neighbourhood. Were they opposed? Here’s his answer: “Quite the opposite the neighbours delighted in it. One [...]

Go Green! Live Closer to Where You Work!

A while ago, I was watching TV with my eldest daughter, Rachel, and we caught a Rick Mercer commercial called the “One Tonne Challenge”. Rachel turned to me after the commercial and asked: “How do I personally go about reducing my carbon footprint, Dad?” That is one of the problems with well-meaning initiatives like this—they [...]

Moon, Mars, Earth, Asteroid Plan

President Obama’s recent speech about US intentions in space was uncharacteristically weak and unfocused, indeed, poorly expressed. His over-arching goal about humans in Mars orbit by the ‘mid 2030s’ was hardly an inspiring call to the barricades. He ineptly attempted to recall President Kennedy’s words “and to return them safely to Earth”. His timeline was [...]

Building Orientation

Which way should homes and offices face to optimize daylighting as opposed to power production? Most developers and builders take it as given that the ridgeline of a home built in a northern shelf city like Ottawa should be east-west. When the ridgeline (i.e., the long axis of the structure—either a home, a condo tower [...]