Welcome back to The Black Urbanist Weekly. I’m Kristen Jeffers and I’m currently producing this weekly digital newsletter on my site, via email and various other places, to share my thoughts, my Black, Spiritual, Southern, Working-Class, Educated, Queer, Femme thoughts on how places and communities work. Think of this as my weekly column, sitting on your proverbial print paper’s editorial page or as so many other of your favorite newsletters do, in your inbox.

This week’s edition is #13 and I am continuing the series I started last week reflecting on my work over the past decade (2009-2019) and getting ready to usher in a new decade and the tenth year of this online platform.

This week, revisiting my first book A Black Urbanist on its fifth anniversary. Next week will be my traditional wishes post. The following week a Patreon-only preview of what my next book will address, which is the lessons I’ve learned in producing a platform like this and engaging in community work, for the last decade.

Everyone should mark your calendars for the release of A Black Urbanist Journey: Wisdom, Lessons and Models from Ten Years as The Black Urbanist on October 17, 2020.

I hope you’ll consider being a Patreon supporter, as that will help me keep the lights on and the work moving forward in an authentic way. You’ll continue to hear from me weekly. Now, on to the newsletter this week.

Really Revisiting A Black Urbanist

Before I get deep into how I see A Black Urbanist on its fifth anniversary, I wanted to talk about why I put it together.First, I was going through some professional setbacks, while also still grieving the loss of the site’s original muse, my father.

Then, I also noticed, especially as I continued to attend Congresses for New Urbanism and the occasional other major planning, design and development oriented conferences, that all the well-respected scholars and leaders all had books. The people consistently getting invited to do keynotes, of which I’d just done my first major one, had books.

Plus, it was National Novel Writing Month and National Blog Posting Month and I didn’t have anything else better to do. I was able to take my keynote money and continue my job search at the time and give myself something more positive to do besides stare at the ceiling in my teen hood bedroom, where I’d also just returned to for the second time since college.

The book doesn’t completely hide the fact that I was in a state of repression. I knew I was something like queer, but I wasn’t ready to claim that identity. I was beating myself up constantly for these thoughts and also the debts I’d incurred trying to live my urbanist dream life in Downtown Greensboro. I also still experienced pressure feeling tokenized and even persecuted, for having spoken out against teen curfews in Greensboro, as well as expressing support for Black Lives Matter and other similar movements which have always just made common sense to me.

Yet, I was able to pull together pages. I created a framework of cities needing Heart, Commons, Market and Mobility, that I didn’t fully embody myself, but felt like could grow into a bigger platform and a theory of practice, much like so many of my other fellow urbanist leaders. In other words, I tried to use both my marketing and management strategy and create my own catchphrase — my “eyes on the street”.

Even though it was reviewed on the Huffington Post, previewed in Greensboro’s new (and sadly no longer in print) 1808 magazine and I had a very well-attended book signing at Downtown Greensboro’s Scuppernong Books, I was not able to really embrace it and even consider expanding it and publishing it with a well-known urbanist press.

I also knew I’d have to make peace with how I really believed and all the parts of my identity and that was exceptionally scary. I decided to just clutch my book tight, control who could access it (hence why there are very few print copies and it’s technically out of print besides on Amazon and Gumroad). It’s been a gift, meaning free, to each and every one of you who subscribe to my email list via the top of my website.

And as I prepared many times to try and re-release it and try to do more with it, something just never felt right about making it my key book and my touchstone book.

I do believe that we need a heart for loving ourselves, and helping and serving other people, a working common governance, a working marketplace (which I believe also encompasses person-to-person bartering, trading and selling), and the ability to move around.

But, I realized that I only really cited and compared myself to white males in the book. That I still inadvertently thought that the only way people would listen, is to amplify those voices. I felt like other black women wouldn’t want to speak out and that many were being either silent or safe. I erased a reference to my fellow queer community in the section on the corner store, because I didn’t want to defend my now community to others. I wasn’t even aware that there were enough black urbanists in the world to read this book and use it as motivation to keep doing what they are doing in their communities.

Finally, I had only really lived in one state, in one faith practice, with a lot of conservative narratives and in other places, spaces and mindsets that didn’t really serve me then and don’t serve me or the work now as it’s evolved.

So, in lieu of re-writing this book and touring with it and selling it hard as we go into 2020, I decided to start from scratch and write a completely new book — A Black Urbanist Journey: Wisdom, Lessons and Models from Ten Years as The Black Urbanist. It’s outlined and so far, I feel like it’s raw and real. Patreon subscribers will get to preview some of the pieces of wisdom in two weeks.

In the meantime, for those of you who are still on this journey, thanks. For others who need to go on a different path, I appreciate that too.

What matters most, is that I’m going to finally give you the Black, Spiritual, Southern, Working-Class, Educated, Queer, Femme thoughts you need both to keep doing your work or to get started if you haven’t already.

And I’m going to be myself— 100%.

I’ll be announcing pre-orders at the beginning of the calendar year, along with several opportunities to do some pre-book launch workshops and sessions.

Other Things on My Mind

Something about cool airport renderings always gets me. I’m just shocked that Charlotte-Douglass hadn’t already done this kind of renovation of its front lobby, but a lot of airports are still adjusting and shifting to an era of heightened security, but also accommodating us travelers who want to feel like they aren’t trapped inside metallic objects for several hours.

This is #goals— write books, make them bestsellers, use the money to invest back into my community, all with my NC State degree (and my UNCG one too, but this person is a Wolfpacker across the board).

As I said over on my LinkedIn and Twitter, the need to be inclusive isn’t new to those of us who are calling for that kind of inclusion. But its still good to see older tables pull up a chair in this way.

And if you can’t go fare-free, I hope you’re one of the systems like the DC region’s WMATA and Seattle that are looking into sliding-scale options for those folks for whom payment is a burden. Also, if you’re going to have fares of any kind, it’s long overdue to be able to put these cards in our smartphone wallets and to add money directly from those wallet apps.

And I had to go back and add this to the Patreon version, but yes, the CityLab changes are on my mind, as are the whole urbanist media landscape. More thoughts to come, but I wanted to make sure I dropped this here, since it’s starting to hit your timelines as well as this newsletter.

Before You Go

—Check out the job board. I’ve added a couple of job-seeker and job-poster friendly Patreon levels, but I’ve also created a survey to gauge what you want in this kind of resource going forward.

—Check out Kristpattern on Instagram and DM me if you’re interested in anything for sale over there. The holidays are here, folks. And these are great black queer woman-owned gifts you can give this season!

— If you’re excited about my next phase and how my perspective can help motivate your group of any size Book me for a lecture, workshop or both. Also Les, my wonderful life partner and sales director is great at hyping you up, making you laugh and helping you or your organization make radical changes in your life and health Book her too. And listen to my wonderful podcast mentee’s The Crossroads Podcast, which also discusses environmental issues from a black woman’s perspective.

—Finally, even if you aren’t in the job or opportunity market or have jobs and opportunities to post, I’ve refreshed all my Patreon levels. All of you are at least at the $1 a month level, which is why you’re seeing this newsletter. $5 allows you to ask me one question a month that I will research and answer in-depth and make part of a permanent Q&A, $10 gives you first dibs when the podcast relaunches and when we start doing live events again.$20 grants you digital copies of all my future books, including the one I just teased. $50 gets you something free out of the Kristpattern store. Learn more and upgrade!

Thanks for reading! You can get these messages in your email, support the platform financially on Patreon and get special bonuses; follow the platform on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN and Instagram and if you missed some of the previous weeklies, check out the archives.

Welcome back to The Black Urbanist Weekly. I’m Kristen Jeffers and I’m currently producing this weekly digital newsletter on my site, via email and various other places,to share my thoughts, my Black, Spiritual, Southern, Working-Class, Educated, Queer, Femme thoughts on how places and communities work. Think of this as my weekly column, sitting on your proverbial print paper’s editorial page or as so many other of your favorite newsletters do, in your inbox.

This is edition number #12 and I know I promised y’all an even deeper dive into how I’ve changed my views around gentrification. And if you were a Patreon supporter, you would have gotten this message on Friday, as usual. Head over there now, so you don’t miss a newsletter on its release day.

And I said it was coming this week. But as I go back and review my decade of work on the eve of celebrating 10 years of The Black Urbanist in October of 2020, I realize it’s not so much my beliefs have changed as much as I’ve started to really embody my beliefs. That the intentions I set for myself and our communities in 2010 and 2014, are even stronger, prouder, equitable and inclusive than they were then.

I point out 2014 because that’s when I collected my thoughts for the first time and put them in a book.

A book that I kinda hid from the world because I thought I wasn’t enough.

I wasn’t credentialed enough.

I wasn’t respectable enough.

I wasn’t old enough.

And a whole lot of other insecurities and issues.

But, before the end of the month, I’ll be re-releasing it, in its imperfect state, available for you to cherish and criticize (and order in wholesale).

Why?

Because things have changed  and I’m looking forward to dedicating my 2020 to breaking down not just how I’ve grown in this book in my theory and practice of being a friend of cities, but adding in more content and resources to support those already building out this vision.

Because we can’t wait any longer to do the right thing in our communities.

And I’m done waiting to do the right thing myself.

Right now this is my full-time job. Some of you are sitting here still asking yourselves and me why not go work for one of the institutions that I discuss on here? Why not split your time and then continue to do this until it builds up.

Next week, I’ll be doing a review of my book from my perspective five years later, along with sharing the final cover and places to purchase and order the book. I will also be touring with this and the forthcoming second book in 2020, so please mark your calendars and plan to join me in a place near you.

Other Things on My Mind 

First, something very weighty and something I studied back in the 8th grade for a class project and that I would often bring up during my bike tours here in DC when I would take people to Capitol Hill and sometimes the FDR memorial– what the US Government did to Japanese immigrants and their U.S. born descendants during World War II. This article speaks to how they used craft and art to bring some dignity to the injustice in their lives.

On a much lighter note– you can never have enough music from my home state and because these artists have incorporated several notable NC places into these performances of their work.

And more on music as  #spotifywrapped always gets it right with me music-wise. Been with them since 2011 and no signs of changing. 

If Pinterest and The Knot could tamp down search results on former plantations as wedding venues, imagine what this could do over on Zillow, Yelp, Redfin and others that allow people to find places, and sometimes find them for the wrong reasons.

The kind of article that motivates my media making, that straddling between the objective and the subjective. When I read this I still hear Dorothy Butler Gilliam telling me and others that the black press is an activist press.

And finally, several of you have sent me or tagged me information about Kansas City starting the process of going fare-free on buses. Here’s that 435 Magazine article, which links to prior coverage and debate on this issue and Transit Center’ argument against fare-free transit. 

Here’s where I stand on this– anything can be done. I know that sounds simplistic, but seriously, we’ve all seen votes do all kinds of things for our “commons” life. Good and bad. In this particular case, there’s precedent from how the streetcar is funded. They did a use tax on downtown parking lots and downtown businesses.

This is not un-similar to how developers built communities, then built streetcars to serve them in the 19th and 20th centuries.

How this can apply to our modern systems is simple– the whole program can be re-budgeted on the government side and new taxes and fees can be assessed on the citizen-side. So no, it’s not quite fare-free, it’s just that the average solo customer won’t be paying for their bus system twice anymore. Instead, you shift the burden to businesses, the government and ideally, dividends and endowments created from business taxes. This can be done on a progressive scale and it does require major corporations that have been opting out of being taxed, to pay back in.

I feel like the Transit Center article missed several opportunities to argue for fee-free transit, especially on the account of low-income riders. They sort of do at the end, but not before paragraphs of why this didn’t work. They also cite a handful of low-income riders they surveyed with no indication of how race, actual income and resource levels (which can vary even among the poor), gender identity and presentation and the jursidiction they live in makes a difference in how and where they ride.

They also claim that no other US city has managed to fund some form of transit for free. Maybe not every route or every system, but to the average rider, as long as it comes on time and frequently, no one’s really thinking about where the money’s coming from, unless it’s coming out of your pocket and more of it than normal or equiable is coming out your pocket.

Having been on the ground in KC, I think this can be done. But, I do hope they and others who consider doing so are careful with implementation.

Before You Go

—Check out the job board. Additionally, as I work on improving the public job board, I’ve seen your clicks and I’ve added two new Patreon levels—Opportunity Seeker and Opportunity Maker. Opportunity Seeker allows you to get one resume/cover letter/portfolio/proposal critique and I’ll be sending out the email version of the jobs update to those of you who pledge at this level. You’ll also be able to take the web version of my course  How to Communicate in the Modern World, for free. Opportunity Maker allows you to place your job listing at the top of those Opportunity Seeker emails and your firm/agency/organization can hold exclusive webinars with the Opportunity Seekers—which you can treat like similar events on college campuses or at conferences—but virtual! 

—Check out Kristpattern on Instagram and DM me if you’re interested in anything for sale over there. The holidays are here, folks. And these are great black queer woman-owned gifts you can give this season! 

— Let me come and talk to you about killing your civic-inferiority complex before the holidays or in 2020 or beyond Book me for a lecture, workshop or both. Also Les, my wonderful life partner and sales director is great at hyping you up, making you laugh and helping you or your organization make radical changes in your life and health Book her too. And listen to my wonderful podcast mentee’s The Crossroads Podcast, which also discusses environmental issues from a black woman’s perspective.

—Finally, even if you aren’t in the job or opportunity market or have jobs and opportunities to post, I’ve refreshed all my Patreon levels. All of you are at least at the $1 a month level, which is why you’re seeing this newsletter. $5 allows you to ask me one question a month that I will research and answer in-depth and make part of a permanent Q&A, $10 gives you first dibs when the podcast relaunches and when we start doing live events again.$20 grants you digital copies of all my future books. $50 gets you something free out of the Kristpattern store. Learn more and upgrade!

Thanks for reading! You can get these messages in your email, support the platform financially on Patreon and get special bonuses; follow the platform on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN and Instagram and if you missed some of the previous weeklies, check out the archives.

Welcome to The Black Urbanist Weekly.

If it’s been a while since you’ve opened this or if you’re brand new, let me re-introduce myself. I’m Kristen Jeffers and I’m currently producing this weekly digital newsletter on my site and via email to share my thoughts, my Black, Spiritual, Southern,Working-Class, Educated, Queer, Femme thoughts on how places and communities work. Think of this as my weekly column, sitting on your print paper’s editorial page or as so many other of your favorite newsletters do, in your inbox.

This is the 8th edition and this week it’s just past Halloween and I’m both spooked and hopeful.

————

The Real Goblins of Our Urban Lives

I was one of those kids who grew up not being allowed to celebrate Halloween. That didn’t always mean that I was deprived of candy though. What it did mean was that I wasn’t allowed to dress up and most certainly not as anything deemed as evil or demonic. There was also no going door-to-door in any kind of candy pursuit. In fact, many of my childhood Halloweens were spent at home or with my mom at her friend’s home, with the lights out and doors locked to keep out the spirits.

Yet, this year especially, I find that the least scary thing going on with Halloween are the costumes, candy, witches, and ghosts. 

I was reading this Vox article yesterday on every city gentrifying and it summed up both in its content and also who it talked to about the content, how hopeless and fearful I am of being both erased from the cannon of work done for communities and also erased from my community period.

The main way this article was triggering was it being overwhelmingly dude-expert centric. It took 29 paragraphs for a woman to even be mentioned and even at that mention, it was the male-presenting author’s wife. No mention of if she had a job, if she was feeling any kind of crunch under gentrification and if she was, it was underneath her husband’s crunch. But, he, inaddition to being a journalist, is a small business owner, a bar to be exact, everything will be ok, right?

Then, other than Dr. Mindy Thompson Fuliliove, no other woman shows up as an expert in the copy or period. 

I laud the inclusion of two black faces and opinions. I’m glad that people in the upper classes are saying times up. Every city is gentrifying and everyone is feeling the crunch.

However, what about folks, especially our trans women losing their lives at the hands of fear. And  a number of public servants, celebrities and regular folks like my dad, and three other male cousins under 60 becoming ancestors so soon, under the stress and pain of our current world.

I thought I was special when I started doing this over a decade ago. I thought I would be able to write my way completely out of a world where women couldn’t even be full ministers in religious spaces and most certainly couldn’t fall in love with each other. I thought I’d be able to write my way out of low wages and erasure both on and off the page.

I looked forward to the day when I would be able to take the train and go downtown to see black plays and dance performances at the theater, and professional sporting events, not knowing that I did more of that at my diverse, center-city elementary school than I’ve been able to do as an adult. (Save those Mystics and Nats games, but more on that next week)

I’m clinging to the hope that the dystopian books won’t be as bad about how our society is devolving. 

I want to wake up and stop asking myself— Am I still relevant? Does anybody really care? Am I doomed to just be delivering groceries using phone apps and doing maybe two-four paid speeches a year, on something that I’m powerless to change? That’s assuming that those apps don’t shut down or in the interim snatch all my physical strength. I really had to nap to get even this email written.

But, in spite of all this terror, love never changes and never ends. 

I saw it Wednesday night for the second time in my lifetime, as the metro area I claimed as home poured into the streets to celebrate the winning of the World Series. 

I saw it last year, at my first sizable adult Halloween party, where my pink zombie of a girlfriend and my best barista buddy jammed out to 90s R&B after handing out candy to the new crop of young trick-or-treaters on the apartment building steps. 

She and I cuddled last night and watched something mildly scary, with the lights on. 

Then, as you’re reading this, I’ll be delivering groceries on someone else’s doorstep, thankful for the opportunity to make money in a way that doesn’t silence my voice in these trying times.

And, I’m thankful, as we go into this season of expressing gratitude and specifically on this day as so many around the world choose to honor and invite in the presence of their ancestors and their memories.

Things might have to crash and burn before they rise up again. But I know in the example of those ancestors and the courage of Spirit, we will continue on!

————

Other Things on My Mind

Now there were a lot of mainstream and aspiring mainstream publications this week who did amplify black stories and they were the bulk of my reading.

First, KCUR, who had me on and allowed me to express how I felt disconnected from KC’s black community back in 2015, highlights how the black community in Kansas City, Kansas (KCK) is changing. That link also has some great stories of how other communities are shifting along race and class lines.

Then, Zora, the new women of color Medium site featured another black KCKian and other black writers from the Midwest imploring that you don’t forget about them and how powerful their cities have been in the Black American experience.

And finally, the New York Times decided to make their way through my hometown, one other city I’ve lived in in recent years and several others I’ve visited to show black folks in black-in-white and allow us to tell our stories on what makes a black community. 

————

Before you go…

—Check out the job board. I’m working on a job-board improvement survey. Look out for that soon. Also let me know if you get any of the jobs or opportunities listed on the board.

—Buy a bag or t-shirt from The Black Urbanist  store or greeting cards from Les’s Lighthouse. By the time you read this newsletter, we’ll be past Halloween. Yeah, the holidays are here, folks. And these are great black queer woman-owned gifts you can give this season!

— Let me come and talk to you about killing your civic-inferiority complex Book me for a lecture, workshop or both.  Also Les, my wonderful life partner and sales director is great at hyping you up, making you laugh and helping you or your organization make radical changes in your life and health Book her too. 

–Finally, pledge an amount of your choice via Patreon. While this is a for-profit venture, this is a social venture and the funds go back to helping me keep my sanity, make one less grocery delivery and consume more groceries so I can continue to bring you my unique urban and place-based analysis. 

Thanks for reading! You can get these messages in your email, support the platform on Patreon and get special bonuses; follow the platform on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN and Instagram and if you missed some of the previous weeklies, check out the archives.

Welcome to The Black Urbanist Weekly #7. I’m trying something different this week by putting the introduction up at the top so that it won’t get lost in the meat of the newsletter. 

I reintroduced this newsletter as a place where I focus on one big idea a week, then several smaller ideas/articles and then link to things like the jobs/opportunities board and other ways you can reach out and work with me.

My goal is to have this to you sometime on Friday, ideally around 11 a.m. eastern, but sometimes closer to 3 p.m. eastern. Also, I’ve been made aware that the links don’t work on some phones, namely iPhones. I’m hoping this is just an issue with those folks who are reading on mobile using the Mailchimp version, but let me know if it’s happening with this one too. Also, I’m hoping to find a better website theme. This one was only meant to be a placeholder while I got some other things together. However, I now realize having a good website, a good personal and truthful website, will only open up opportunities, not keep them away and so look out for changes on that front in the coming weeks.

If you aren’t already doing so, become a Patreon subscriber. These funds will allow me to do more research and writing on these newsletters, as well as funding a more user-friendly jobs and opportunities board and a better website theme. Plus, the newsletter always gets published there first, sometimes a day in advance, sometimes just hours and occasionally includes bonus materials. Again, you can subscribe here and please share this and that opportunity with your friends and colleagues.

Now, on to the ideas.

Is California Still Worth Dreaming About?

I’ve had the privilege to visit California six times, all in a span of the last 4 years. 

My first visit was as a wedding guest with an ex, where we took Amtrak’s Southwest Chief train from Kansas City overnight through Albuquerque and then we laid over in Los Angeles around Union Station and Olivera Street. 

I wish I’d had more time and I’d been able to explore that area more, as my remaining three trips to Los Angeles have centered around work and training activities at the University of Southern California, staying overnight at the Ace Hotel on Broadway Street downtown and on campus at the USC Hotel my last couple of visits. 

I’ve made ventures out to the Santa Monica Pier via the LA Metro and Koreatown, but outside of those touristy moments with friends and my girlfriend, I’ve been driven on the 105 and the 110 to and from Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) and only flown out of the Southwest, Alaska and United terminals. 

My Bay Area experiences have been train (the Coast Starlight!) to Emeryville where we stayed at a nearby AirBnb and socialized with friends in Berkley and then attended the wedding in the University of California, Berkley’s Redwood Grove at their gorgeous botanical garden, then the next day I took the BART and its extension to Oakland International Airport, which ferried me back to Kansas City. Then that same ex won Super Bowl tickets and we were housed at this nautical-themed Fisherman’s Wharf hotel and then we explored the streetcars and took Caltrain to Levi Field for the actual Super Bowl. OAK was my going and coming airport for that trip too.

You could say that Super Bowl was the beginning of me seeing that California can be a dream-killer. My Panthers lost, a man insisted on tapping on my fro for no good reason and plus, it was the NFL and for something that should be a fun pastime, it’s rife with so many labor and outreach issues.

—

My dad and I always talked about traveling to California. I mentioned in my first book that he had considered becoming a truck driver, so that he could do cross-country drives there and possibly even retire there.

I think it had something to do with in being a Baby Boomer who was raised as television emerged into households of all kinds and like the early films before, highlighted California and areas created from California that made viewers use their imaginations to create all kinds of worlds from them. 

While the very first film was made in Palo Alto, California, the film industry was first established on the east coast in proximity to Menlo Park and Thomas Edison’s tutelage and ownership of both film production patents and control of film creation and early film studios.

Then land speculation shifted the control and influence of the industry back to California.

H.J. Whitley was born in Toronto and prior to founding 100 other towns throughout the Western United States, he’d been a Chicago merchant. He got the idea for calling one of his Los Angeles County land purchases Hollywood by seeing a Chinese man hauling wood in one of those towns, who pronounced the activity “holly-wood”. Yeah, I know. He tried to clean it up by saying holly was for England and wood was for Scotland. 

Then, in true development fashion, Whitley wanted an industry to come populate his series of California towns that he was building around that general area. Whitley found a camera maker that was not underneath Edison’s conglomerate and convinced several other established entertainment companies to come to his towns and build major studios, using the other camera. The first of those, Nestor Studio, opened in 1911.

In 1934, the first unionized thirty-mile zone was established. This basically fixed it so that workers would be responsible for food, lodging and other expenses and not the studios themselves, as well as what rates could be charged for services performed on studios inside this area. For years, this area and its designated additions were the only areas you could be guaranteed the best rates and visibility for working in the film industry. 

Other areas still existed, but they were either sanctioned as “on location” by the major studios or they were independent and at the mercy of the major studios. Later on, you could start your own companies elsewhere, but the major distribution channels were still controlled by the major California studios and required you to work with them to get any major movement.

This is an LA story mostly in today’s newsletter, but I see parallels in how Silicon Valley emerged and how it’s dispersed over the years when it comes to the high technology industry.

And then you have something like a Netflix that merges these two worlds.

But with the volatility of business and tech and commerce, as well as the dispersal of all these activities, is it really worth dreaming about California at the expense of other areas?

North Carolina created one of those new favored film zones a few years ago and has hosted several major film productions, as well as built up at least two well-regarded film and acting programs at its state universities. The advantage of California in film was its outdoor terrain, but you can find unique and reliable outdoor terrain anywhere.

And was California’s terrain really that reliable? We were deeply concerned during this last visit that the palm trees were looking a little burnt and shaky and that we’d be hanging out in the dark hoping for no wildfires. The Hollywood sign is in a fire-risk zone, along with several other areas surrounding studios. Many celebrities have reported losing their homes to wildfire over the years. And as of this morning, several fires are burning across the region.

On the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation’s website, a quick glance at the key industry clusters promoted shows that outside of the entertainment industry, the industry clusters mirror those found in other major centers. In fact, the effect of industry was so grossly mis-judged in the construction of the light rail Green Line, by the time the line was opened, it was lauded as a mis-step in racial and economic equity.

This recent Curbed article noted that many California pensioners, the ones that still have such things, are moving to other states in droves.

And as I mentioned before I’d read Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower between my last two LA visits and was spooked just by my imagination of that LA. 

I could totally see now having paid even deeper attention to the terrain, how people could totally take to the freeways and walk on one side and drive on the other, abandoning their cars due to the extremely high gas prices.How the abundance of fire could become more tantalizing and deadly.

How public services could become commodities and then out of reach of all but the wealthy.

How the middle class neighborhoods could wall themselves off and still be vulnerable. 

How areas like Skid Row could become more common and be depressed for years.

And California could change and restrict its borders at the expense of those who are most needy.

Yet, this is the 2nd most densely populated metro area in the country. There are more people in Los Angeles County than there are in the entirely of the state of North Carolina. This is a local government having to provide a state’s worth of people the kinds of basic services that they do.

But I do see hope.

I’ve always admired James Rojas’s work highlighting Latino Urbanism and I’m excited about Destination Crenshaw, which seeks to not just honor black history and culture on Crenshaw Boulevard, but continue necessary conversations about the quality of black life in Los Angeles. Despite the recent deaths of Phil Freelon and Nipsey Hustle, this project continues on through the vision of many others from across the community.

Part of that Crenshaw Boulevard work is of the expansion of the LA Metro system. We found the Expo Line service to be quick, prompt, clean and very convienient to the beach. I’m really impressed with the wealth of communication and information going forth from the agency, not just about where to find a train, but also on the expansion of the service. And that there is active expansion going on with more planned.

If you’ve made it this far, know this. California, I’ve not given up on you yet.

I trust that you as a citizenry can come together and make the right decisions. Everyone else, I challenge to do the same on a local level. Tour each other. Share resources with each other. However, we can’t keep doing economic development in the way we used to, where we compete with each other and poach from each other and encroach on each other.

We have to kill the civic-inferiority complex. Let’s dream about all of our cities and towns and then create things that benefit us all.

What else is on my mind this week:

Happy to see Michael Jordan make a move like this, in creating a clinic for those who can’t afford or don’t have enough heath insurance and care in Charlotte.

Also happy to learn more about these black women architects from East African countries and that the National Association of Minority Architects had a good national conference this year.

The going, coming and cleaning of grocery stores and other supermarket types are one of the first signals that a community is undergoing economic transformations, not just gentrification, but also cultural displacement and disinvestment. This Kroger in Atlanta is one of the key examples of how this has happened.

Meanwhile, I like this concept out of Montgomery County, Maryland meeting the food pantry and the supermarket in the middle.

And we’ve celebrated a lot of new black male mayors throughout the country, check out this returned citizen who’s now mayor of Leavenworth, Kansas, a town where the justice system has an outsized presence.

Rest in Power, Elijah Cummings and yes, go Nats (Even though, like everything else, it’s a shame that we couldn’t have had a baseball park in the city without massive displacement).

Before you go…

—Check out the job board. I’m working on a job-board improvement survey. Look out for that soon.

—Buy a bag or t-shirt from The Black Urbanist  store or greeting cards from Les’s Lighthouse. By the time you read this newsletter, we’ll be past Halloween. Yeah, the holidays are here, folks. And these are great black queer woman-owned gifts you can give this season!

— Let me come and talk to you about killing your civic-inferiority complex Book me for a lecture, workshop or both.  Also Les, my wonderful life partner and sales director is great at hyping you up and helping you or your organization make radical changes in your life and health Book her too.

Thanks for reading! You can get these messages in your email, support the platform on Patreon and get special bonuses; follow the platform on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN and Instagram and if you missed some of the previous weeklies, check out the archives.

I’m currently on the final leg of my “bonus” round trip to Los Angeles to work on amplifying the site with the wonderful folks of the Maynard Institute.

I wanted to take a moment and reflect on how the airport, especially National Hall at Reagan Washington National Airport, is a slept on gathering place.

Well, soon, this won’t be available unless you have an airline ticket. The airport is in the process of closing that part for public access. I understand. You all know how much I understand, considering the noise I made around Kansas City’s airport and its needs. KC itself is finally taking some of that advice and building a new airport that keeps layover travelers in the era of the TSA in mind.

This also makes me think about how sad it is that I can’t see people off from the airport, at least not totally from the inside. That kids can’t linger at the gate at Piedmont Triad International waiting for that far away aunt or cousin, like I used to do as a kid. That the first time I flew in 2006, my parents had to get a special pass to walk the Charlotte-Douglass airport corridor with me. That Les could come to Ben’s Chili Bowl with me in December when I last flew, but unless we travel together, we won’t be able to do that soon.

I’ll be leaving Los Angeles via LAX, which is one of my favorite layover airports period. From looking at the Jetsons-inspired plus designed by a team with a black architect Theme Building, to ordering food by robot, LAX feels like the epitome of the jet age. The airport I left from, Washington-Dulles, also is a nod to what we thought the jet age would be in the 1950s. Well, those who were major world architects and media makers, who all tended to be white and male.

Next week’s email will have more thoughts on what I think about the jet age and airports, along with how I always feel on the ground in Los Angeles, and how that’s changed since I read Parable of the Sower. So consider this newsletter a two-parter.

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This is a short, travel version of The Black Urbanist Weekly. This is also edition #6. While my head’s in the clouds (literally), I want to thank you all for continuing to support this work. I really want to thank the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education for investing in my training and validating that the world needs a paper like this and more media-producers of color.

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Other Things on My Mind This Week…

The city I’m in profiles a delightful woman from the city I’m from.

More to come on these kinds of situations, but no, I’m not in favor of neighborhoods segregating into tiny school districts, like these folks in and around Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

And I can see why this effort over the years to desegregate schools in Shaker Heights, Ohio is falling apart.

Anytime I’m at a black play or film and I’m one of the handful of actual black folks in the audience, and even as I write this newsletter, I do wonder what gaze am I really using like the creator of Slave Play, the latest play by a black person on Broadway getting buzz.At the end of the day, it’s mine, as a person who’s been taught and enabled to straddle all kinds of worlds.
Additionally, the older I get and the more I interact with people, especially thinking back the panel I was on at the Savanah Congress for New Urbanism in 2018, the more that I feel, like this author, that generations need more racial and class-based analysis.

Same with gender presentations. While this speaks to trying to be seen as bi, it also is glaringly absent of how body-type, skin color, hair texture and other racial elements complicate this, especially when they converge with social and economic class.

Before you go…

—Check out the job board. There’s a new position on the board this week! Renovations coming soon. You’ll be one of the first to know when the new board launches and how you can take advantage of expanded features and resources revolving around it.

–Get this newsletter a day early, along with other bonuses by supporting the platform via Patreon.

—Buy a bag or t-shirt from The Black Urbanist  store or greeting cards from Les’s Lighthouse. The holidays are coming and these will make great gifts!

— Let me come to your town, office, church, school or whatever space you cook up and tell my life story, motivate your students, help you with your marketing and branding or all three! Book me for a lecture, workshop or both.  Also Les is available for motivational speeches and for one-on-one life and health coaching. Book her.

Thanks for reading! You can get these messages in your email, support the platform on Patreon and get special bonuses; follow the platform on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN and Instagram and if you missed some of the previous weeklies, check out the archives.

My name is Kermit The Frog

and I’m sitting on a log

Miss Piggy too

She ain’t wearing no shoes

We went to the mall

On a Saturday

We ain’t have

Nowhere to play

I’ve chosen to open this week’s newsletter with an untitled blues song created by my late father, Sam Jeffers, one Saturday in the early 1990s. This was composed in the ten minutes it took for us to walk from the back parking lot on the upper level of the Four Seasons Town Centre. At the time, it was one of two, soon to be three successful, still open and occupied enclosed shopping malls in the Piedmont Triad area of North Carolina. 

(The Piedmont Triad is the official name of our region, not to be confused with the Research Triangle, which Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill make the sides and Cary, Hillsborough and so many other municipalities fill out the middle and sometimes spill out of the sides).

I decided to dig out this blues song because I’ve noticed people have been making a lot of noise about something called the retail apocalypse. And I happened to read this article put out on the Congress for New Urbanism’s site that had some nice charts from LandUseUSA spelling out exactly which stores are closing and which stores aren’t closing.

Those charts make it look like things aren’t going so bad.

But then you look at the list and later see in an article in your hometown newspaper (which is also on life support) and see your own childhood mall’s Forever 21 is on the chopping block, just years after it was touted as the savior of the space. 

(Ok, this is a theoretical statement, but I know many of you are facing this exact same thing).

Still, even if your store is saved, you think about the dead malls, in the Triad’s case, Carolina Circle and Oak Hollow Mall and Cotton Mill Square and Fourm VI which were so exciting and bright and also touted as saviors, but now are either just Walmarts, Targets, churches, office buildings, schools, libraries and maybe Sears (or not).

You also wonder about the strip malls that have the big box stores and wonder what it really takes to make Kmart turn into Target as we are watching happen in Oxon Hill, our just outside of DC community where we live.

Today’s Les’s and I’s first anniversary and we met for our first date at Midlands Beer Garden, which is very much not a mall in DC.

Or is it? It is on one end of a strip shopping center, that also includes a post office, a used book store and a storytelling collective. The mall was placed in the middle of what was otherwise a block of traditional rowhomes in the northern part of the Park View neighborhood, where I lived both times when I was a D.C. proper resident.

And we often go to Tyson’s Corner Center, one of the largest malls on the East Coast and which sits across from Tyson’s Galleria, which is one of the most high-end enclosed malls in the United States.

We marvel at how practical Greenbelt Mall and Mall of Prince Georges are. There’s Target and Planet Fitness and (in the case of Greenbelt) Joann Fabric and Crafts, and Books-a-Million, along with so many other stores that are owned by people of color, serving all income levels and uses.

And we often commute via The Fashion Centre at Pentagon City and L’Enfant Plaza, the former that combines all that luxury of the Tyson’s malls into a practical use of being a major Metro junction and L’Enfant which provides the touring company I tour at part time, my current hairdresser and sustenance for several federal employees and other tourist attractions that happen to all come together along this enclosed, mostly underground, promenade.

Finally, over last weekend after our joint Untokening presentation, we went to the Streets of Southpoint, the mall in which my resident Durham years I regularly spent at least $150-$200 of my paycheck (at the time). it was interesting to see how the retail trends of the last 11 years had sprinkled themselves throughout the mall, known as one of the last enclosed malls to be built in the United States and one of the first to incorporate both an enclosed version and a “town center” style main street, that effectively serves as the mall’s third floor. 

When I moved to Durham in 2008, the mall was only two years old and practically sparkling. It still sparkles, even with a dead Sears hanging off the side. Mall experts say that when an anchor store closes, that end of the mall often struggles. Thankfully, the mall has four remaining anchors, but with the loss of Sears, it lost some of its middle-income range. 

I’ve come to the same conclusion as the CNU article that retail isn’t dead, it’s just shifting and changing. I do hope though, that our main streets and malls continue to provide the same support that they have in years past, but with an expanded vision of seeing everyone who comes through their doors as potential partners and continuing to help people make memories and movements. So we don’t have to be too mad about the mall, especially this holiday season.

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Welcome to The Black Urbanist Weekly #5. It’s October 11, 2019. Thanks again for opening, clicking, reading and sharing. 

Also, look out for an improved job board over the next few weeks and please scroll down and click on the store links. The holidays are coming and the only time you step foot in a mall this year could be this newsletter. Or, it’s the new year and one of my lectures and workshops or a complementary life coaching session with Les could be exactly what you need to jumpstart your self-care and your community care.

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Other things on my mind this week…

 I was so inspired by so much black excellence.

Like all this black man excellence of several Alabama cities, namely Montgomery, finally electing a black mayor, the success of Charleston, SC’s department of transportation director (and other black alums of his university), this dude not letting gentrification take all of his skills and business savvy and community making as a barber, building up Seattle’s black community, and finally, the head of the North Carolina Industry Expansion Solutions and Manufacturing Extension Partnership (who also happens to be my uncle and one of the reasons I’m a huge audio and music nerd).

And I know folks who aren’t Black Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) often want to benefit from our culture or emulate some of our greatest cultural creators, but please don’t keep pretending to be BIPOC or putting us out front as if this is who you really are, especially when it comes business and government contracting. This illuminates so many of the issues that companies looking to do business with jurisdictions and other organizations that seek to award contracts based on disadvantaged and marginalized peoples quotas. I hope that we can continue to flip the script, look at the excellence we already have and continue to promote our companies with those disadvantaged designations, especially those disadvantaged by race, gender identity and sexual orientation.

And that’s why I’m going to end this section today on how we can really increase leadership and power among black women, and how we can in fact raise the standards, so we don’t have to harbor the frustrations this article brings up of being a black woman in journalism. In fact, I just finished Elaine Welterroth’s wonderful memoir, More than Enough. She’s almost a year younger than me, and I don’t have Ebony, Glamour, Teen Vogue and now Project Runway on my resume, but the millennial hustle as black woman is all there. And I think we can all, especially those of us in the media, learn from the lessons she presents. 

Because at the end of the day, in ways we may not always co-sign, black women will do it anyway. And we are more than enough.

Before you go…

—Check out the job board.  Just minutes before I hit publish on this edition, I got a new submission to the board. Renovations coming soon.
 

—Buy a bag or t-shirt from The Black Urbanist  store or greeting cards from Les’s Lighthouse. The holidays are coming and these will make great gifts!
 

— Let me come to your town, office, church, school or whatever space you cook up and tell my life story, motivate your students, help you with your marketing and branding or all three! Book me for a lecture, workshop or both.  Also Les is available for motivational speeches and for one-on-one life and health coaching. Book her.

Thanks for reading! You can get these messages in your email, support the platform on Patreon and get special bonuses; follow the platform on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN and Instagram and if you missed some of the previous weeklies, check out the archives.

Every day I drive past it. The nets are still in place, but I can see cracks coming up from the concrete. Yet, there’s a wall in the corner. A practice wall, something that is highly coveted if you find yourself wanting to play the game alone and you already have your racket and ball.

I thought at first the court seemed semi-abandoned because no one in this area we live in is really into tennis. That despite the abundance of the Williams Sisters and all the women who followed, plus anyone who is motivated by that level of excellence and activity in a black or brown body, that the court would be used.

Yet, even I still drive past the court and walk into our apartment, past our closet with the rackets and I write off the court again. I can’t really judge anybody for not doing anything that I’m not willing to do myself.

However, I’m actually sitting right in the capital of black tennis.

The kind of tennis that requires a lawn or court, which is what the modern game and all tournaments have evolved into, had only just been patented by the Queen of England in 1874 and just two years later the first tennis tournament of any kind in the United States was held in Massachusetts. By 1880, the Lawn Tennis Association was formed and the first major national championship was held just a year later.

Meanwhile, while black folks were losing some of the rights they had gained in Reconstruction, they were able to establish institutions. Schools and colleges; churches; banks; tennis courts and country clubs, specifically in Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore and D.C. 

The tennis clubs predated black professional organizations such as the National Medical Association, the National Bar Association, the National Baptist Convention, which has become the largest black-led denomination (and the one I was raised in), black-owned insurance companies and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), along with several organized anti-lynching efforts. Black national tennis tournament action pre-dates the Black National Anthem, Lift Every Voice and Sing, the tournaments starting in 1898 and the anthem being written in 1900.

All of this and more history can be found right here on the Black Tennis History site, founded by Bob Davis. Les and I had a chance to talk to Mr. Davis recently, as he served on the panel at the March on Washington Film Festival’s Althea documentary screening.

He told us how he was connected to Althea Gibson, the African-American woman who broke the color barrier in U.S. tennis national championships. Then he harped on how important black tennis history was and also how connected it is to all history. 

Basically, a taste of what I just gave you above, underscoring that tennis has been a thing in black communities, far longer than the dominance of the Williams Sisters. He also answered a question Les had about affordability of tennis and also joked that his parents, despite how other black community leaders made a way for him to play tennis, constantly asked him when he was getting a job. 

PBS has the Althea documentary available to purchase and a trailer is still online there. The documentary goes into how she took advantage of Harlem’s Play Streets, and that network of wealthy African-Americans across the country who used tennis as recreation and as a form of uplift for youth, breaking the color barrier in competitive tennis, how she was received around the world and how unfortunately, she almost died destitute because of the pre-Open era restrictions on who could compete in tennis tournaments and how much they could make from tennis prize money.

Before Les and I left, we managed to snag panelist Leslie Allen, the first black woman since Althea Gibson to win a major adult national tennis championship and the first in the Open era (basically the merging of all competitive tennis, paid or not, into one big umbrella) and ask her how where she grew up influenced her playing of tennis. We were able to connect on having a racket in the house from birth, but as she mentioned several local D.C. area tennis courts, I felt a tinge of shame in not dusting off my own rackets and getting out to play.

Well, fall temperatures are supposed to be in D.C. throughout the week and I think it’s time Les and I both dusted off our rackets and gave our little tennis court that can a shot.

Finally, this is yet another reminder of how marginalized people will always find a way to create their own spaces, even when those spaces are denied. Not only should we be actively not taking away those spaces, but even when we (and sometimes that we is our kin and skinfolk) assumes that this isn’t happening, yet it is and sometimes better and brighter than what we think the solution can be. As we continue our march into equity in placemaking, may we never miss those shots and may we hit those serves with the utmost accuracy.

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Welcome back to The Black Urbanist Weekly! We are on edition #4! This week was spent thinking about how tennis really is in the undercurrent of black life, and doing some brainstorming around my book and what my pitch deck will be when I go to my next Maynard 200 seminars in a few weeks. And yes, wishing Twitter would let me out of its jail. So far, I’ve determined that it doesn’t like some of the auto posts I do on this edition of the newsletter to make sure you all see it. But, between your inbox and Patreon, you’ll never miss any information and commentary from me.


Also, it’s my pleasure to repost Sophonie Milande Joseph’s special report Energy Justice: A Comparative Case Study of Decentralized Energy Planning Models in Rural Ayiti [Haiti] , which recently ran in the American Planning Association’s International Edition September newsletter Interplan, on the site. Folks who publish for academic and similar sources, please let me know if you would like a similar signal boost on the website.

The Patreon edition this week did more than come out first, it has the raw audio of the Althea panel discussion and our two interviews with Bob Davis and Leslie Allen. Plus, there are some extra job notes next to the job board reminder. Subscribe now for that and more future bonuses.

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A few other things I consumed this week…

Still have not had the chance to watch, but I did want to include renowned architect and inspiration Phil Freelon’s celebration of life in this section this week.

I have more thoughts forthcoming on how libraries can be game-changers in maintaining community culture and lifelong learning. I’m also happy to see that it was the election and now leadership of Chicago’s mayor Lori Lightfoot that was instrumental in removing several levels of library fines in the Chicago library system. However, as the article states, I’m concerned about how it took her being elected for this idea to happen and that there were folks waiting for years for something like this and in some cases giving up on the Chicago library system all together, because of the previous system.

This Boston conflict over the Harriet Tubman House isn’t alone in how we as black folks can disagree on how to use public space and how to go about our social justice work and even what really constitutes gentrification and cultural erasure.

In D.C. it’s well known that the rent and the mortgages and the property taxes are too damn high. And I’m not completely convinced that local governments are not complicit in this process. Evictions, high property taxes, tax abatements for developers and allowing certain communities to ban certain types of housing and others to just be leveled (sometimes under the guise of renewal). I do think shame works, but you have to understand what you’re supposed to be ashamed of and you have to admit you’re doing wrong too.

Also, progress being made, but still a long way to go in making sure people are aware of the challenges we face east of the Anacostia River and in similar communities that aren’t being heard, educated and funded adequately around not just non-auto transportation, but so many other things that would really put a dent in us needing and feeling the need to drive.

I did enjoy watching the Mixed-ish pilot episode and I do echo concerns raised that the show assumes that there wasn’t racism, sexism, classism and other issues inside communes However, kids do process things differently and we even see that with her own siblings on the show. 

And you have to listen to Erika Alexander on The Nod and on Essence’s podcast Yes Girl! 

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Before you go…

—Check out the job board. 

—Check out the stores on The Black Urbanist and Les’s Lighthouse . The holidays are coming and these will make great gifts!

— Want to add something to my calendar before year-end or get a jump on my spring schedule? book me for a lecture, workshop or both.

Thanks for reading! You can get these messages in your email, support the platform financially on Patreon and get special bonuses; follow the platform on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN and Instagram and if you missed some of the previous weeklies, check out the archives.