Urban EcoBlock president and Director of Design Dan Hellmuth met with a group of professionals who created an EcoBlock in Oakland, CA. Therese Peffer, principal investigator in the Project Management Division of the EcoBlock (and Associate Director, California Institute for Energy & Environment (CIEE) within the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) and the Banatao Institute at UC Berkeley) had reached out years earlier, and since Dan was planning to be in the area they were finally able to connect.

Therese invited Christine Scott Thomson, Senior Project Manager of the Urban Planning & Process Team of the EcoBlock (and Director of Sustainability/Urban Planning & Design at MIG, Inc.) and Susi Marzuola, member of the EcoBlock Design and Construction Team (and Principal at Siegel & Strain Architects).

The meeting took place at Therese’s office at UC Berkeley’s office in the David Brower Center in downtown Berkeley. The Oakland EcoBlock team shared their origin story, which originated back in 2005. Dan shared some background on the evolution and mission of the Urban EcoBlock, and offered an introduction to our model EcoCode, and how we got this approved as a Planned Unit Development by the City of St. Louis and promoted this to local neighborhood groups and community development agencies to consider in their planning.

Where the Urban EcoBlock is primarily focused on largely vacant blocks in depressed urban areas like North St. Louis, the Oakland EcoBlock really only had fully occupied blocks to work with. Given that, they were primarily focused on gaining community buy-in to electrify older homes (and eliminate natural gas), implement comprehensive energy retrofits, develop a solar PV microgrid with the local utility (PG&E) for resiliency, and promote the use of shared EVs and water conservation strategies. So there were a lot of similarities with the Urban EcoBlock.

The Oakland EcoBlocks do represent some low-income residents, so we share a social equity mission.  However, the physical layout of the blocks are quite different from midwestern and eastern cities in that there are no alleys, and the parcels themselves are relatively short with small back yards.  As a result, any new infrastructure has to go into the street.  Affordability is a common challenge, and grant funding was necessary to finance the energy improvements in the older homes, including new electrical appliances, DC wiring and solar panels.  Renovations of existing homes also included sustainable, low-carbon embodied materials, which can serve as a model for us to develop guidelines and standards for renovating existing historic homes and buildings in an Urban EcoBlock.

The actual EcoBlock that has been established in the Fruitvale District of Oakland has been accomplished with a $5 million grant through the California Energy Commission (CEC’s) EPIC Challenge: Accelerating the Deployment of Advanced Energy Communities, along with the Oakland  Fund for Public Innovation.  The total project has been funded to the tune of $8M, including a contribution from an anonymous donor.

The process of selecting a site proved to be challenging, with the first proposed location falling through while the second location has had around 80% participation. Similar to our approach with a Community Land Trust, their research team came up the concept of an organization called the “EcoBlock Trust” of which property owners are members, with a 5-member board to allow representation from tenants, technical experts, and so on. This Trust would also be responsible for the shared assets (such as energy storage, microgrid control, solar panels, and EV charging) that are collectively owned by the participants. There would also be a method of collecting the necessary funds for continued operation, maintenance, and insurance after the project ends. The details of how the EcoBlock Trust would operate would be developed with input from the block participants. However, perhaps due to the complexity of the trust, the homeowners opted to create Community Association with a simpler Common Interest Development agreement akin to a typical homeowners association agreement. More information on the legal framework is described in detail here.

We agreed to continue to collaborate, look for possible partnering opportunities and share information as well as to have targeted meetings together. Therese expressed interest in us potentially presenting our approach with the City of St. Louis to the City of Oakland to illustrate how other municipalities can facilitate the creation of an EcoBlock.

In many ways the EcoBlock, as it has evolved in California, is far ahead of our group, with deep funding support as well as support from public universities and other benefactors.  But they have also experienced some ups and downs due to the complexity of actually implementing a project, and ran out of funding for the microgrid portion of the project.  As a volunteer board, the Urban EcoBlock is largely dependent upon grants to advance our efforts, and we have accomplished quite a bit without any major funding. 

Note: Other EcoBlock contributors include Sascha von Meier, Principal Investigator and Energy Team Co-Lead of the Oakland EcoBlock project, interviewed by Eunice Chung from CIEE. Dan also connected with Anthony (Tony) Edwin Nahas who is a co-founder and former Project Manager of the Oakland EcoBlock project with the Energy Resources Group at UC Berkeley.