In The New West magazine

From Rubble to Riches: Western Communities Capitalize on Cleanups

Missoula's affable Mayor John Engen calls it an unsavory part of town, a place that "deadens community energy" and enables vandalism and crime. Bad stuff happens to people there -- "That's where I first learned to drink Sterno," he quips.

The former Champion Sawmill site is maybe a minute's float down the Clark Fork River from vibrant downtown Missoula, a fenced in and desolate 46 acres. On a still December day the dregs of demolition remain, blanketed by snow.

Today, nearly 100 years after the mill first opened, a propitious recipe of rising land values, forward-thinking local government, community-minded developers, and some financial gymnastics mixed with grants from the Environmental Protection Agency is working to turn this symbol of the Old West into the New: the blight will give rise to a mixed-use development in the heart of town, called The Old Sawmill District.

Such redevelopment is happening in cities around the Rocky Mountain West, from Missoula to Boise to Denver -- cities still carrying the legacy of industrial booms of the past and now confronted with this question, as posed by Chris Behan of the Missoula Redevelopment Agency: "If we're not going to sprawl, where are we going to grow?" Former industrial sites, or brownfields, are increasingly a viable answer.

In The New West magazine

The LEED Shade of Green

When the U.S. Green Building Council announced in November a program to rate the environmental qualities of new home construction -- one based on the highly successful Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design requirements for commercial buildings -- it marked a watershed of sorts for the two-decade old sustainable building movement.

In the last year, public clamor for more responsible and energy-efficient ways of living, combined with the politics of climate change and the economic reality of soaring energy costs, has ushered the once-staid subject of how we build from the business section to the front page.

This story first appeared in the preview issue of The New West magazine. For more information on the magazine, or to subscribe, go to www.newwest.net/magazine.

In The New West magazine

Bill Vaughn: The Art of the Feud

If Thomas Jefferson had time-traveled to our rural neighborhood he never would have predicted that small landowners will forge the spine of democracy. Because here in the Squalor Zone -- that redneck netherworld of "manufactured homes" and distressed pickups that encircles Western towns like the puffy flesh around an infection -- it's one against all and all against one.

Soon after we moved into our ten-acre plot of Montana floodplain the opening salvos were fired in what would become a civil war raging across two decades and multiple fronts.

First, we discovered that the Smiths (not their real name) had installed a gate in the barbed wire separating our place from theirs so they could traipse around our forest on their nags. Then we found the bloated carcass of a doe gut-shot with an arrow in a copse of hawthorns not far from a steel archery stand these yahoos had installed in one of our Ponderosas. I nailed the gate shut, pulled down the tree stand, and tacked No Trespassing signs on the border. One winter morning Mr. Smith blew these signs to smithereens with a shotgun fired from his snowmobile. So when the Smiths decided to sell half their place, presumably to pay down their liquor bills, I sent an aerial photo to the real estate agent that showed the five acres in question under water during the most recent flood.

In The New West magazine

Hot or Not: Roundabouts

Orderly roundabouts -- as opposed to the disorganized rotaries of East Coast cities such as Boston -- are a safe, quiet, clean and community-friendly alternative to traffic lights and stop signs.

Here's the pitch: A roundabout eliminates almost all of the risky split-second decision-making that occurs at most congested intersections. Do I try to make that left before the red light? Does that guy see the stop sign?

You wait until the circle is clear and move forward. The new roundabouts include signs in advance explaining what lane you should take in the circle, depending on where you plan to exit. If it doesn't make sense the first time, proponents say it will on every subsequent trip.

In The New West magazine

Ancient Building Blocks of Dirt

How a few homes in the West are reviving the oldest construction material.

Consider dirt. It's old, and it's making a comeback as a construction material under a new name: rammed earth.

Rammed earth is exactly what it sounds like.

Hard-packed dirt, as a building material, predates all others. Under the right conditions, it endures. About 22 centuries ago, the Qin Dynasty built parts of the Great Wall of China using rammed earth. Some portions still stand. There's an earthen building near Luxor, Egypt, which was built some 3,300 years ago.

In The New West magazine

Urban Livestock: A Tender Issue

The urban livestock movement can seem more whimsy than necessity, more social gesture than lifestyle. It can be viewed as a protest of the American industrial food system, but also strikes an old instinct: to raise and gather food.

"There is certainly a romantic nature to it," said John Bottelli, a 37-year-old urban parks planner who also owns three chickens. His wife, a cellist, named them after classical composers. "It's also an affordable way to get fresh eggs."

In some cities across the West, the collision of these rural ideals and urban life can be jarring. In Missoula, Mont., the city council spent months debating an urban chicken ordinance last year before finally agreeing to allow residents to keep up to six chickens, no noisy roosters.

In the video at above, NewWest.Net's Anne Medley explores the issue in Missoula.

In The New West magazine

The Gravel Next Door

Last summer massive gravel trucks rumbled and thundered away the peaceful early morning, every morning, on Paul Matteuci's picturesque riverfront acreage in Montana's Gallatin Valley.

"A county road bisects my property," Matteuci said. "A gravel truck came by about every five minutes from 5 a.m. to dark."

The noise sucked, sure, but the traffic hazard was downright dangerous. The Silicon Valley entrepreneur had found the place appealing, in part, because of the romantic notion that his 4-year-old could run out the front door without being supervised every second.

Gravel is the foundation, literally, of growth. Beds of gravel lie beneath every building, roadway and sidewalk. It's also a main ingredient in concrete. And almost everyone hates proposed gravel pits, as well as the massive trucks that haul the loads. It's one of those wonderful ironies of the West these days. Economics pull growth and gravel together with inexorable force. If hauled more than a few miles, the cartage can easily top the cost of the gravel itself.

Geology plays an important role, too. Glacial moraines and pebbly former riverbeds produce top-notch gravel. We're talking about meadows and valley floors – the closer to a river the better. Just the kind of place guys like Matteuci adore.

From The New West magazine

Q&A With Bozeman Architect Ralph Johnson

Ralph Johnson is a Bozeman architect, professor and author of Building from the Best of the Northern Rockies.

NW: What will it take for meaningful green designs to get the benefit of large-scale production? You've studied and profiled some innovative projects in the book Building from the Best of the Northern Rockies, but many of them seem, well, pretty similar. Why, for instance, have we never seen anything fundamentally different, like a 200-home straw bale subdivision, popping up on the outskirts of Bozeman?

RALPH: There are a couple reasons why subdivisions look the way they do. Builders want to build what they've built before and sold before. Zoning ordinances where they exist are written to promote the normal. If you're atypical – good or bad – you jump through far more hoops. That takes longer, and time is money. There's also the – 'I don't like the look of that.' And if the banker doesn't like the looks of it, the bank isn't going to give you a loan. That's what it takes – some crazy builder willing to take this up.

In The New West magazine

Western Outlook: Partly Sunny, With a Chance of Recession

The economic watchword of the moment may be "recession," but in the upper Mountain West, continued growth is tempering the impact of tight credit markets and the slowdown in residential construction.

In Colorado, energy development and commercial construction as well as investment in the mountain resort areas has offset a weak residential real estate market on the Front Range, said Mark Schweitzer, a Denver-based economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

"The resort region and the energy region, right next to each other, are intertwined," competing within the same workforce for employees, Schweitzer said.