Grist has a ”15 green (fill-in the blank)” lists feature and the most recent one is 15 green cities. Notice that it’s not “greenest.” Portland is second on the list, but I’m not sure that these are necessarily ranked. Other North American cities on the list are San Francisco, Austin, and Vancouver, B.C. Seattle gets an honorable mention.

Although Portland has made some noteworthy advances toward becoming sustainable, one phenomenon occurring in my section of town (Southwest) is irksome at best and is a move in the wrong direction. The opening sentence of Grist’s story is a good lead-in: “These metropolises aren’t literally the greenest places on earth — they’re not necessarily dense with foliage, for one, and some still have a long way to go down the path to sustainability. ”

My gripe about Portland going backward is the redevelopment of existing properties with ginormous houses at the expense of a lot of trees (not to mention the increase in impervious surface, which leads to run-off and wildlife habitat problems). All the talk of preserving trees and some sort of a tree ordinance seems to have taken a back seat to developers’ desire to get the most money out of a chunk of land by putting as big a building on it as possible, and also to the city’s and county’s desire/need to increase tax revenues.

One example from my block: yanking down a 1200 s.f. house to put up a 6000 s.f. house with a three car garage, to house the same number of people (two). And unfortunately 5 Douglas firs and a huge shade tree (my guess is that it was about 60 years old) came down. The lot was scraped of all trees. Ridiculous.

Any green building expert will tell you the most sustainable thing you can do when planning to build a house is to build it small.  And as much as people think using green features in building a home will offset their home’s impact on the environment, the editor of the Environmental Building News has this caveat:

Most of the green features people are incorporating into their homes represent ecological improvements in the 10 to 50 percent range. . .But even a 50 percent reduction in the ecological footprint. . .would be totally offset by a doubling of the house size.

And since house size has doubled in the past fifty years (1100 s.f. to 2150 s.f.) and number of residents has dropped by almost half (4.2 to 2.3 residents) a 4000 or 6000 s.f. house is not sustainable, unless you’ve got eight or twelve people living in it.