The mission of the Portland Sustainability Institute (PoSI) is to create “nontraditional” partnerships that further sustainable economic development in the Portland region. PoSI connects business, higher education, nonprofit, community, and government leaders to foster urban sustainability initiatives for the Portland metropolitan area. PoSI links economic growth with environmental sustainability through projects that “emphasize systems integration, scalability and enduring results.¹” PoSI is currently involved in three projects: The EcoDistricts Initiative, Portland Metro Climate Prosperity Project, and the Oregon Sustainability Center.
The EcoDistricts Initiative is focused on community supported environmental and economic sustainability. An EcoDistrict is a region (such as a neighborhood) that is “small enough to innovate quickly and big enough to have a meaningful impact.²” The EcoDistricts Initiative seeks to remove policy barriers to localized projects that aim to enhance neighborhood sustainability. In partnership with the City of Portland, PoSI is developing five EcoDistrict pilot neighborhoods to test PoSI’s concept of sustainable development. PoSI works to support a sense of shared project ownership and partnership in each EcoDistrict by incorporating community members, developers, and other stakeholders in the creation and implementation processes. If successful, the pilot EcoDistricts could serve as models of locally initiated sustainable neighborhood development. PoSI has developed a toolkit based on the five pilot projects that includes EcoDistrict organization, funding, and policy.

The Portland Metro Climate Prosperity Greenprint is part of the Climate Prosperity Project, Inc., a national initiative led by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to “[showcase] how innovation and economic development can move … society [toward] a carbon-free future (Climate Prosperity Project, Inc., 2011).” The Climate Prosperity Project is based on the Brookings Institute’s findings that more people are employed by “the US clean economy … than the fossil fuel industry,” and that each “metro region has its own clean economy opportunity based on its strengths, assets and priorities.³” The Climate Prosperity Project works regionally to develop and support these latent economies.
Portland was one of the four regions selected from across the United States by the Climate Prosperity Project to be a pilot region. The Portland Metro Climate Prosperity Project has produced the Greenprint document, a roadmap to improve the region’s clean economy. Over 200 business, academic, and government leaders worked together to develop the Greenprint. It serves as an instrument that links organizations and coordinates goals, policies, and investments regionally. The Greenprint recommends seven actions and strategies to further develop the Portland region’s green economy: (1) Expand Green Project Finance, (2) Accelerate Energy Efficiency and Clean Energy, (3) Commercialize Green Technologies, (4) Cultivate the Clean Tech Cluster, (5) Cultivate a Sustainable Forestry and Agriculture Cluster, (6) Develop a Pipeline of Green Talent, and (7) Build Support and Communicate Results. According to PoSI, if the recommendations and actions in the Greenprint are successful, the Portland metro region will become the most energy efficient region in the United States by 2030.⁴
The Oregon Sustainability Center (OSC) will be a 200,000 square-foot high-rise building in downtown Portland meant to provide a building scale model of sustainable, urban, high-rise construction featuring “net-zero performance goals for energy, water, and carbon emissions.⁵” A net-zero building produces as much (if not more) energy on-site as it uses, by utilizing regionally appropriate alternative energy and green design methods. The OSC will be a sort of green design laboratory located near the Portland State University campus.  It will provide “sustainable practices, policy, education, research and entrepreneurship” for the University community. Its location is also ideal because it is within the Portland State University EcoDistrict. The OSC is projected to open in late 2013 and will continue to move the Portland metro region towards its goal of the most sustainable region in the United States.
The PoSI projects highlighted above could be viewed as studies on the applicability of sustainable economic development on three levels: regionally (Climate Prosperity Greenprint), neighborhood (EcoDistricts Initiative), and an individual building (Oregon Sustainability Center). How the three levels will affect each other remains to be seen. Furthermore, these models could help to assess whether or not a private developer could profit using these models.
Resources:
Portland Sustainability Institute
Publications
Oregon Sustainability Center
EcoDistricts
Portland Metro Climate Prosperity Greenprint
Climate Prosperity Project, Inc.

Written by Brett Roeth, Daniel Brooks, & Zoe Koven