Rachel Corrie’s final hurrah
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ASPSU, Sierra Club run campus voter registration campaign Partnership will generate numbers to be used in Salem lobbying effort Alison Barnwell Vanguard staff
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Voter registration: Vote or Vote clipboarder Madison Garda, 18 (left), registers junior Adrien Green, 20 (right).
Sustainable textbooks save time, money Pilot program for digital books reaches Portland State Bookstore Peter Browning Vanguard Staff
For students attending college, the cost of tuition is not the only financial burden to worry about. Each term, students not only spend hundreds of dollars on textbooks, but publishing houses often print new editions, making it hard to find used copies. To help solve this problem, the Portland State Bookstore is partnering with Hewlett Packard to create a more sustainable and business-friendly version of a practice that has been around for decades. Joining Arizona State University and the University of Kansas as the only schools to participate in this pilot program, the PSU Bookstore’s ultimate goal is to lower costs for both students and itself. The new digital format of textbooks allows a more on-demand model of purchasing: The technology allows users to print and bind the book, as well as have it ready within seven minutes of a student’s request. In the past, bookstores would order the amount of textbooks that classes predicted for their enrollment.
However, not all students purchase their textbooks through the university bookstore, and some don’t purchase the textbooks at all. According to Ken Brown, the PSU bookstore president and CEO, the costs associated with shipping back and forth then result in a huge loss for the bookstore. Now the bookstore receives a digital file from the publisher, and then owns the rights to print the book as many times as needed, Brown said. HP’s new on-demand model for printing textbooks could revolutionize old practices, and make current an industry that, to some, has missed the mark when it comes to student services. “I feel the cost of textbooks can be absolutely ridiculous. I spend an average of $300 a semester on textbooks. It’s even more frustrating that most textbooks are useful for only a single semester,” said PSU student Charlene Xu. “Cutting back costs in any way would be extremely helpful.” Brown was instrumental in having HP’s pilot program come to the university; at a conference HP representatives approached him to ask whether he would be interested in
BOOKS ON PAGE 3
SPSU is running its Vote or Vote campaign in partnership with the Sierra Club’s Reenergize the Vote this year. Since Sept. 20, booths around campus have displayed stickers and buttons representing non-partisan voter registration campaigns. The campaign goal is to reach 3,000 Portland State students by Oct. 12, the national cutoff date for voter registration. As of press time, campaigners had registered 1,150 students. Reenergize the Vote is working towards Vote or Vote’s goals. Chris Smith, the Reenergize the Vote PSU
campus organizer, appreciates the response he’s gotten at PSU. “Even if we ask [a PSU student] to register five times, they recognize what it takes and appreciate our help,” Smith said. This year, the efforts of Vote or Vote and Reenergize the Vote have broader access to the campus than before—including permission to visit dorms and classrooms—thanks, in part, to the efforts of Brittany Duffy-Gochè, the new legislative affairs director at ASPSU. In an attempt to formalize agreements between PSU’s administration and ASPSU, Duffy-Gochè organized a voter registration committee, called the Vote Committee, that has been in the making for a few months. The committee wasn’t involved in the planning of this year’s Vote or Vote campaign because PSU’s legal counsel
VOTE ON PAGE 4
Students create proposal for Portland’s largest undeveloped site Idea calls for shared street parking, Target store, New Seasons Market Vinh Tran Vanguard Staff
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wenty-one acres of undeveloped urban land located in Portland’s industrial center—between the Pearl District and the Northwest 23rd neighborhood— may soon become a bustling commercial hub if a project proposal created by a group of Portland State graduate students from the Center for Real Estate is approved. The six-member team, led by Adjunct Professor Will Macht from the School of Urban Studies and Planning, worked on the plan as part of the Building Owners and Managers Association summer workshop. The group recently presented its proposal to 200 members of the business community, including the vice president and chief tax officer of Con-way, the company that owns the 3.76-million-squarefoot site. The site is divided into 16 city blocks, bordered by Northwest Thurman and Pettygrove
Streets and Northwest 20th and 22nd Avenues. The plan is to turn the site into a thriving mixed-use neighborhood that accounts for the diverse urbanites who live and work in the area. Con-way employs about 700 people; however, the company currently only uses about 400,000 square feet of office space—the rest is parking space. “The scale of the site was pretty daunting and it took us a while to come up with a general plan,” said Jason Clough, a team member. “Also, trying to balance the needs of all the different parties—the landowner, the city, the local neighborhood and the business community—was a challenge.” One of the first challenges was to come up with a way to satisfy the demand for parking space. Since an underground parking tunnel would prove to be too costly, at about $50,000 per plot, the group turned to on-street parking with a park-like setting, according to Macht. “We utilized on-street parking and turned that into an asset rather than a liability,” said Susan Posse, a project team member. The proposal calls for 1,125 spaces in street parking,
DEVELOPMENT ON PAGE 2
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Potential commercial hub: The Conway site in northwest Portland is the city's largest close-in undeveloped space.