Category Archives: Essay

Alexandria, Cities, DC, Durham, Essay, malls, mental health, North Carolina, Politics of Place, Retail, suburbs, Things At a Place, transit, urbanism, Weekly Newsletter, Winston-Salem

Community Care at the Mall?

I know they are sites of capitalism, but when I go to the mall, I’m there to find things I need to make my own tools of system dismantlement and comforts through the storm. As we re-examine many of these spaces, they will thrive only if we see them as extensions of our community care, not a money scheme.

This is The Black Urbanist Weekly, an email newsletter that highlights the Black Queer Feminist Urbanist thoughts and commentary of me, Kristen Jeffers, an internationally-known urban planner, fiber designer, and contributing editor. Think of this as an editorial page column, but directly in your email. This week I wanted to check in with one of my first sites of considering urbanism, which seems to get popular around this time of year — the mall. Also, we have a special message from the University of California at San Diego. Learn more about how you can advertise in this newsletter. Prices start at just $75 a week with a four-week commitment.  You can also become a Patreon as an individual and support this work for as little as $5 a month.

I had other plans to end my year of this newsletter, but right after I pulled my wishes together for this year, I realized I had a couple more things to say that were very relevant to this time of year. Hence why this week’s newsletter is in your inboxes and online today and on Monday, I’ll be revisiting and updating my post on Kwanzaa from a Black queer feminist urbanist perspective, but this week, I wanted to take us back to the mall.

This past Saturday, I snapped the photo that leads this post, showing the far northwest corner of Tyson’s Corner Center at full parking capacity. I was in the middle of one of my many social distancing parking lot picnics with Les, my partner, at the Silver Diner across the street. This diner bills itself as part of the mall, but is really only connected by a pedestrian signal and a sidewalk that still has you battling six lanes of traffic, plus one of the mall access roads that can still be treacherous to cross as a pedestrian to one of the many side doors the of the mall.

I digress, but do I really?

Those of you who have been reading my work for the past decade and some change know that I’ve struggled, as many in the journalism community have, with writing accurately about the built environment. I’ve had a particular struggle in writing about an environment that, confirming my suspicions, doesn’t want to support me at my income level and sometimes my skin tone and whom I choose to love, and how I choose to adorn myself.

Yet, despite evidence to the contrary, Cinnabon, Jamba Juice, Barnes and Noble (B&N), Kohls, Sephora, Target, and Michaels seem to be happy to have me, especially on bad days, when the mall is empty enough to social distance and I can take that bun and juice back to the car and grieve over deceased relatives and new health challenges.

I get back home and I curl up into my new sweatsuits that fit my new size with my shiny new crochet hook set and experiment with making machine-washable sweaters. I do so while listening to podcasts or audiobooks I saw the covers of at B&N. Sometimes I color, because lo and behold, not only does B&N have craft magazines, they still have adult coloring books and pencils. Sometimes I just polish off stacks of memoirs. Sometimes Les and I grab a cheesecake or two, like the Golden Girls, to polish off when we get home.

Ok, that is a digression, but right now, just trying to stay alive in a pandemic while having side illnesses and creating our own self-care network that goes beyond the limitations of the built environment on our bodies, has been vital.

And yes, one of those sites of self and community care for us is the enclosed shopping mall and its power center cousins.

Plus, we live in the DC region and several of our shopping malls and plazas are a half-mile or less from the Metro. Others have bus routes. One is the original central business district, which also has transit access, right next to its local yarn store. One is a power center, but by next May, it will have a Metro stop, after years of plans. I dream of the day when its enormous parking lot stops being an asphalt heat island, but a covered lot like The District Wharf with lots of fun restaurants and shops up top.  

In addition, some of the best formal architectural and planning work on how to make these shopping districts better has come from feminine-presenting people, which in general the mall loves the most or thinks is more likely to part with their money. I first found the work of architects Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson on retrofitting suburbia and I was thrilled to do a special chat with them in March of 2021 they released their newest set of Retrofitting Suburbia case studies. Another collective of planners writing online, managed by Nancy Thompson, AICP, has written this article for people who need steps to turn their back mall into something productive.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that so many of these shopping centers are failing because they see themselves as just shopping centers at best and tax shelters at worst. So many suburbs built and “abandoned” have become sites of opportunity for folks like me who are lower income, small business owners, LGBTQIA+,  immigrants and their descendants, and/or descendants of the Black/African enslaved, and who use mobility devices and other disabilities to make a life for ourselves. Many malls and shopping plazas servicing us are reviving, just in a different way. Meanwhile, other places that were built as money schemes are unfortunately failing, especially if they aren’t properly connecting with the communities that use them.

Because of these kinds of closures and disinvestments,  it might be too late for several malls in Les’s home region of Hampton Roads/Tidewater, Virginia. The area is a cluster of small cities with large land areas, divided up by a substantial waterfront, harbor, and naval operations. Some malls are becoming town centers, including one that she and I both visited a lot in our younger years, and went to in August of 2021 before more of it closed down. Others are just doing their best to share holiday cheer before they go away.

However, the malls and town centers I spent my formative years in Northwest and Southwest Greensboro, Winston-Salem, Durham, and just outside the beltline and midtown Raleigh are not all dead but have had a lot of demographic and physical shifts. I spoke in this presentation in January of 2021 about the death and “re-birth” of two (I set this to start at the part where I start talking about this, then I move on from that around the 38-minute mark). I wrote a slightly humorous holiday tale about a few in 2015. If anything, my hometown malls are showing resilience, in the face of so many of the corporate and manufacturing facets of the goods that fill them moving away over two decades ago.

Finally, you might not have thought much about these shopping centers and you may see them with disdain. Hopefully, it’s not because you find yourself lesser than for admitting you shop at these stores. Instead, I hope you consider standing with all the retail workers who make far too little making and serving the items we adore so much, with a glimmer of hope that they can get a store discount, much less a living wage. I hope you also think about how and where we choose to trade and barter goods and services we make with joy and in right-relationship with the environment, much like I did in my 2020 Sierra Magazine piece. 

And I hope whichever holidays you choose to observe this year, you do so with joy. Since it took me a minute to get you this week’s newsletter, I’ll be right back in your inbox on Monday, with a revisit of my 2012 post on Kwanzaa as a community holiday, on its first day this year, and how it can become more queer and feminist along with being Black and urbanist.

By the Way

If you’re new here, I write out my grand thesis of the week above, then I share other articles/videos that were noteworthy for me this week in this section. Apologies in advance for things behind a paywall. Some things I subscribe to and others I grab just before the wall comes down on me. I will start marking these articles and describing them.

Nearly an hour after posting this tweet last week about suburbs of survival, I finished editing this piece for GGWash of fellow urbanist writer Addison Del Mastro, on the wild and winding history of this Pizza Hut in what we consider the central part of  Prince Georges County, MD. I was also captivated by his article on the suburbs as we know them being a “first draft”. I’ll be revisiting these ideas in the new year, of changing definitions and feelings of “suburbia”.

Meanwhile, I received other confirmation/affirmation in my Black queer feminist journey from this examination of the late Black feminist Toni Cade Bambara’s 1970s questioning of the gender roles placed upon us as Black folks and  Black construction company executive Deryl McKissack’s article from 2021 on her perspective on defining yourself for yourself. I plan on taking lots of time over this week to not be on social and finding inspiration from within myself and non-digital or digitized written sources. 

And I considered holding this link until next week, but I know many of you are either going to be a Black Santa or you’re looking for one and I really loved how my friend and brilliant Baltimore-based essayist Alanna Nicole Davis described how Baltimore’s holiday celebrations can still be discriminatory and segregated through the hook of a Black Santa everywhere, but Hampden, which is internationally known for its neighborhood Christmas celebrations. (This may be paywalled for you).

Before You Go

The folks at the University of California, San Diego would love for you to know about not just one, but two tenue-track jobs they have available next year. Plus, some housekeeping about our little space. First the two jobs.

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN URBAN STUDIES AND PLANNING

The Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of California, San Diego invites

applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor working in the area of urban studies and

planning to begin July 1, 2023.

This is a position for a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Urban Studies and

Planning at UC San Diego, a rapidly-growing department with strategic emphases on social and spatial justice; climate justice; and multinational planning.

The department is interested in candidates who have demonstrated commitment to excellence by strong engagement in teaching, research, and service toward building an equitable and diverse scholarly environment. The successful candidate will be an excellent scholar with an active research program in one or more of the following areas: transportation planning; climate change mitigation and adaptation; environment and land use planning; health and wellness, and/or spatial analytics.

The University of California, San Diego is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer advancing inclusive excellence. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, age, covered veteran status, or other protected categories covered by the UC nondiscrimination policy.

Department: https://usp.ucsd.edu

Apply link: https://apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF03452

Open date: November 21, 2022

Next review date: Tuesday, Jan 31, 2023 at 11:59pm (Pacific Time)

Apply by this date to ensure full consideration by the committee.

Final date: Friday, Mar 31, 2023 at 11:59pm (Pacific Time)

Applications will continue to be accepted until this date, but those received after the review date will only be considered if the position has not yet been filled.

***

And…

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN URBAN STUDIES AND PLANNING WITH A

FOCUS ON DESIGNING JUST FUTURES

The Department of Urban Studies and Planning seeks faculty candidates at the level of Assistant Professor whose research, teaching, and service will advance scholarship and institutional solutions for designing more just and equitable systems and structures.

This faculty member will advance UC San Diego’s commitment to the inclusion of Indigenous, Black, and migrant communities, anti-racism, anti-oppression, equity, and social justice. We especially welcome candidates whose professional experience, community engagement, and personal background have facilitated their understanding of and ability to better serve students from Indigenous and other underrepresented populations.

Faculty hired under this Initiative will join the UC San Diego campus, the UC San Diego Design Lab (https://designlab.ucsd.edu/), and the Indigenous Futures Institute (https://ifi.ucsd.edu/) to forge a new paradigm of engagement and collaboration that draws on the geographic, academic, institutional, and cultural strengths of our tri-national region across Southern California, Baja California, and the Kumeyaay region.

This search is part of a UC San Diego-wide cluster hire on Designing Just Futures (https://www.design-just-futures.ucsd.edu/) that aims to recruit scholars who can contribute to the advancement of design, social justice, and Indigenous, Black, and migrant futures and seeks engagement with scholars across disciplines to address issues of territory, access, and equity, and social and political debates pertinent to Indigenous, Black, border, and migrant communities, while also working within their home departments and professional communities.

Department: https://usp.ucsd.edu

Apply link: https://apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF03484

Next review date: Tuesday, Jan 31, 2023 at 11:59pm (Pacific Time)

Apply by this date to ensure full consideration by the committee.

Final date: Friday, Mar 31, 2023 at 11:59pm (Pacific Time)

Applications will continue to be accepted until this date, but those received after the review date will only be considered if the position has not yet been filled.

***

I know I’ve been promising that I’ll be live on LinkedIn and YouTube and Instagram and I haven’t forgotten! I’ll be doing my wishes video live on Wednesday, December 28 and a video about these two holiday-themed newsletters Thursday, December 29. Both of these will go live around the noon hour Eastern.

***

I have created a special landing page, www.theblackurbanist.com/books, that’s not only a home for my upcoming volume, A Black Urbanist Journey to a Queer Feminist Future, which I just chatted with my editor with this week,  but I have embedded my Bookshop.org booklists here as well since we were having so many issues with the link. Go here for all things books I’ve read and my book when it comes out!

***

As of today, I am on holiday break from any client projects. I’ll be releasing my Kwanzaa email, making those videos, and doing some 2023 strategic planning and newsletter writing. I’ll release my 2023 Capabilities Deck in the first weeks of January along with a video to pair to explain what my calendar will look like in 2023 and how you can plug into it this year. 

***

Thank you for supporting last year’s capital campaign. Thanks to you, this year, I was able to cover my web hosting, enhance this newsletter, and position myself to take on some other client projects. However,  if you want to send me money for quick expenses or like a tip jar, you can Venmo me. I will also be introducing a paid tier for Substack and Medium users to also function like a tip jar.

***

Happy holidays and talk soon,

Kristen

Essay, Kristen's Mind, media, mental health, migration, Money and the City, Moving and Migration, placemaking, planning, Politics of Place, urbanism

Are There Really Too Many Planners in Certain Metro Areas?

Recently, I was made aware of and responded to this series of threads on Twitter, that among my colleagues in the D.C. area, there’s a concern over how many practitioners of place,  especially planners, exist in the metro area and how many folks want to be planners by name, versus just doing the work in many different aspects of the field.
 
I’ve heard this before, from planners and related advocates, architects, engineers and others who do community work of all races and from all other regions of the U.S. I’m not surprised and I do know why I hear this so much.
 
I’ve talked about it before, but as I’ll mention in the final section, I want to shift my thoughts and takes back to this site, where I own the server space and have plenty of room to link to things. 
 

Why There’s Merit in the Too Many Planners Argument 

First,  few clients exist in need of architecture and building services as well as transportation planning and operations, that don’t already have existing contracts and people they use. Even for general environmental planning, or acceptance of environmental injustice, there’s a drought. Your client base/employment options are limited greatly.
 
The one most people are aware of are government entities, which have all kinds of requirements to ensure fairness and equity in the awarding of work contracts to firms, but sometimes can be cumbersome and create competitive environments. Also, for legal reasons, which yes, have merit, you have to be careful what you talk about and who you talk to when it comes to these competitions. Which can be hard when most of the people you compete with were at one point studio classmates or internship cubemates. Or even better, roommates or lovers. Plus, if you elect to work in-house with a government entity, you have other ethical considerations and gag orders, which again, are often necessary. Finally, some things, like public transit, just make more sense to be governed by you know, the government and for their privatization to be regulated, if there’s privatization at all.
 
Or, you work with private for or non-profit developers, without government funding, some who are in the business to create things that make our world better and some are in the business to take from others and make gobs of money from themselves. Now for-profit doesn’t always mean capitalist monster, just like non-profit doesn’t always mean charitable and for the people. Many places need to build or renovate homes, build or renovate transportation systems and honestly, build or renovate a lot of other pieces of the built environment or society. However, there’s even a limit there to how much people can build and operate.
 
Speaking of the nonprofits, you could be or work with an advocacy group with a dash of service provision, but you’re often getting your money from government grants, private grants or private banks, so there’s not that much difference from what I mentioned above. There’s also a size issue, some contracting firms might as well be power brokers, while others like me are just small shingles.
 
Basically, if you’re new to the idea of planners/architects/engineers/contracting, all these firms operate and build like law firms and attorneys as well as media outlets and journalists. We also have lawyers in our clubhouse too and they can tell you what their lives have been like as they’ve seen a shortage in labor and emphasis on big versus small especially over the last 10 years. And this site, if you haven’t already picked that up is a journalistic outfit ;).
 
The next big argument against a growing class of capital p planners is the public will of the citizenry.  Some well-meaning folks, as well as your usual villains in many jurisdictions and metro areas, fail to provide adequate funding, maintenance and even just the creation of adequate transportation, housing, environmental quality, and education systems. For that, I do suggest that more people with a good grasp of land use planning, construction, and operations, run for elective office and approve budgets that fund these things, as well as go to public meetings, especially ones that offer you the chance to pick budget items to fund or for items that are in active stages of construction or pre-construction, where changes can be made.
 
Then there’s human prejudice, marginalization and power dynamics unrelated to land use and planning, that still affect the profession. This encompasses the lingering hurt and harm done to those of us who started as enthusiasts or hobbyists of architecture or transportation systems, as well as the marginalization of community groups or communities period, especially black, brown, queer and poor groups.
 
Plus, some groups just don’t talk to each other or talk over each other. I can’t tell you how many arguments, especially online, would be solved if the two entities would do a thorough review of the bodies of work and life experiences that have been shared, on the internet, as well as in offline resources. Not just professional work, but considering how lived experiences affect how people see the world, especially the environment which we all battle over.
 
All this gets wrapped up into how we interact and I think that to go forward, we have to address this elephant.

How This Affects Me Directly

This conversation hits me so much because it’s directly related to why I’m going through a tough time. 
 
In doing my reader’s survey, I learned that many of you started following me (or at least those of you still paying attention enough to fill out my survey), in or after 2014. Since that’s the case, you may have only realized in passing how much the loss of my dad in 2013 has reshaped almost every aspect of my life. I think that taking a detour into what brought me to this post today, which has been discussed in other parts of the site before, is valid because some of you have yet to peruse the archives!
 
When he was living, my dad was a very an active force on how I approached the built environment. From him teaching me how to ride and care for a bike, to me going along on some of his electrical contracting jobs and sometimes to the school buildings he helped maintain, to the way he never met a stranger and how proud he was of my achievements (my degrees were on HIS resume), he had a very outsized presence in my life and loved being part of my online stories and life.
 
He also understood what it’s like to struggle with the ups and downs of having a professional services business, and also needing a job to pay benefits. He went through open discrimination on the job. When I would cry about my own similar issues, instead of just leaving things as that’s the way it is (and he would say that in a Walter Cronkite voice impression), we would scheme about how to change and fix it. Neither of us would accept no for an answer and we didn’t accept that just because that’s the way it is, that’s the way it should stay. Then, all of a sudden, 50% of him was gone due to a major accident in 2010 and finally, all of him was gone over Memorial Day weekend of 2013.
 
Not having my parent to debate the ways of the world unconditionally with, lurched me into a state of trying to find that in other family members, friends and colleagues. It, along with the awareness of middle-class, suburban Black American police shootings and other random racialized violence and incidents, plus microaggressions that ballooned in my post-graduate school, post-2013 working environments drew me into the state of rage that James Baldwin so eloquently illustrated. It also fuels, much like Baldwin, my want and love of travel and moving away from bad situations.
 
Additionally, my mom and several other family members with similar experiences of racism and business-making are more private people and that’s why I share very little of them on here. While I love how connected the Internet makes us, I’m a firm believer in respecting privacy and that some things will always remain secret.
 
However, I wouldn’t have felt the need to move so much, if one, there were other options professionally to fix the mistake that got me fired from my design services firm in Greensboro in 2014 and the dating life I’ve not really had anywhere, especially given my sensitivity to partners, namely male, respecting my brain and ambitions. Plus, political work often leaves you with more enemies than friends and such a critical analysis of what’s wrong with society, it’s very difficult to see and embrace what’s working right. I’m dealing with the opposite of what my colleague Chuck Marohn has shared recently. There’s very little of the negative I don’t see, I just don’t comment on everything and clearly, this website has been stringing cobwebs as I just realized this is my first full blog post that isn’t a newsletter copy I’ve written in 2018.
 
When I left North Carolina for Kansas City in 2015, I felt like I was giving up on North Carolina, as I discussed in great detail last year. I felt like I couldn’t be a die-hard supporter of the betterment of my home state without being in said state. On the other hand of the lack of urbanist media focus on North Carolina, alternatives to car transportation, alternatives to certain kinds of single and multi-family housing, and the issues mentioned above,  made me believe that I couldn’t do what I wanted to do in North Carolina.
 
I brought that baggage with me to Kansas City, along with the pull of a partner who lived in what I considered the optimal environment for urbanist debate and planning, as it had some of the functions that we all advocate for, as well as again, a class of folks who love to debate and talk about it constantly. I would no longer get teased or harassed for only talking about this at the expense of other things. (Mind you, doing anything, including being an urbanist, in excess, is a recipe for disaster).
 
So when I left Kansas City for D.C. in 2016, my goal was to establish myself in that greater collective of urbanist minds thinking through solutions on a national level.
 
However, as has been well documented, this moving back east plan backfired.
 
I’ve barely made any real money, wrecked my credit and ability to have credit lines, barely had health insurance and healthcare and of course, the relationship that was the foundation of my move to D.C. broke down. Somehow I’ve managed to scrape by, but it’s taken me moving all around and thankfully, folks still finding value in these kinds of writings on the sense of place and the experience of being out in the world. That and finding a flexible barista gig that will finally come with full benefits. And before that, having a community up in Baltimore that took me in when things got really tight and tough in D.C.
 
Additionally, in many cities, including the ones in my home state, as well as the greater Kansas City region, we are a very culturally in-tune people and in cities where rail, bike-share, and enhanced bus services are available, we do park our cars and use those services. We also know how to park our cars and walk down our one-two main streets. And yes, there may only be a couple, but they are well utilized. This happens across class and race lines as well. I had to learn this the hard way as well, that I’ve been way too pretentious for my own good, in assuming that other cities would never be capable of the urbanity I so wanted from them.
 
Finally, having traveled and worked in so many states and the District of Columbia, I’ve found that every state and the District has some form of discriminatory or structural issue that causes marginalization. Plus, migration as a whole creates multiple cultural awareness and needs to balance one’s personality with one’s environment.

So What Now?

I hope that with this post, it’s clear, to both new and old followers and colleagues, exactly why I decided to leave North Carolina, come and go from Kansas City and come and go to the Greater Washington/Baltimore region, as well as travel often and broaden my ideals of land use and environmental thought, planning and doing. 
 
Additionally, this is how I would like to address the elephant of too many planners in too few places.
  • Acknowledge that all cities are different, and have different land use and planning needs, therefore creating many urbanisms/rualisms/placeisms, etc. Also, I’ve debated replacing my references to urbanism, with placeism. Placeism is the concern with all aspects of land use and natural environments, urbanism focuses mostly on the densification of those environments.  Dr. Lisa Schweitzer has a great breakdown of how she uses the terminology and echoes things I’ve said in this post and in prior posts. I also invite anyone who is unfamiliar with the urban to rural transect to get to know more about that and use that to help as you advocate formally, design and build things and especially in these online arguments where people want to create a utopia in ten tweets. Also, feel free to engage ways that the transect is limiting and build upon this to establish a standard of broadening how we talk about the environments we inhabit. Coming to terms with the differences in terrain and resources is also helpful if you’re in the field in a jurisdiction that doesn’t have some of the infrastructure you want and need, to start productive conversations with people about that, that may yield the support system that you absolutely need to not go crazy like I did and jump off the proverbial cliff. Finally, let’s get out of the habit of saying X person or groups of people suck for having to drive or having to live in a cul-de-sac or only being able to  shop at Walmart, when we need to be yelling at public officials, proposing new ordinances and maybe suing dishonest developers for creating this environment. Everyone shouldn’t have to be a planner to make sure we don’t get mistreated as citizens.
  • You don’t have to be a capital p planner, capital a architect, capital d developer, capital e engineer or some other bold-faced title to make it in this world, but it makes it easier if you have a history of discrimination or marginalization to have this layer of professional knowledge. This was the core of the most recent tweets, that you don’t have to be a planner to make a difference. However, we need to absolutely acknowledge that for some folks, especially from marginalized and disrespected backgrounds, it’s not so much that they need to have the job title, but the security of the letters next to their name or a paper certificate to be taken seriously. Let’s also make sure we stop making people feel the need to over-credential just to get paid what they are worth or recieve job and project assignments on which they will be excellent. 
  • If someone says they want to launch a career in a land use and planning related field, offer to sit down with them and launch out a plan. You can plan a career and not get afoul of reporting requirements for government grants or even threaten your own job and space in the profession. I will say that in one conversation where I heard there were too many planners in D.C. and I was one of them, this person gave me some excellent book recommendations and jobs to consider. The tweet stream I reference also has good ideas of how other jobs can still allow you to make places better and stronger.  Additionally, I’ve added a resources section to this site and developing some offline resources to help you and others make the right decisions about where to plant yourselves in the greater land use world. In the meantime, my short guide on figuring out your career in this world. Also, don’t be as stubborn as me and not listen when people do offer to help until it’s almost too late.
I wrote this post because I wanted to spell out in more than 250 characters tied into multiple threads, how much this subject of who does what in the land use and planning world, affects me. I feel like so much is lost in the current environment of Twitter and Facebook, where we value hot takes and yelling at the choir of our individual Facebook groups, over the long-form solution making that even venues like this often don’t meet.
 
I also want to establish a standard for myself and our profession going forward. That we all sit at a big table,  and there’s room for all of us, as long as we come to sit there with mutual respect and the mind that we will push for solutions, even if that solution is to do nothing and let things be. No one is perfect all the time, but no one is beyond reproof, restitution or forgiveness either.
Finally, this site is about to look very different and will no longer just be me sharing ideas and resources. I’m looking forward to returning in a few weeks with new things that I believe will help us all become better at what we do. In the meantime, introducing my Resources page and my job/opportunities b

Never heard of me before this post? come over here and let’s get to know each other better.  This platform doesn’t have a paywall,  but I still need to eat. Buy me a meal via PayPal or Cash App, or many meals via Patreon.

 

Cityreads, Education, Essay, gentrification

The One Key Reason Those Scary Housing Discrimination Maps Are Still True

The night before I wrote this post, I got a present. The present was that the National Geographic website dropped some of the HELOC  residential security maps, commonly known in the profession as the redlining maps,  into an article, highlighting the amazing work done by the Mapping Inequality Project.

If you haven’t already, go to that site and play with their maps. I was able to grab Kansas City.

Kansas City's 1930-1940s Real Estate Maps

And Greensboro.

Greensboro Real Estate Maps from the 1930s and 1940s

They left out Durham on this version of their maps, but here it is 

Screen Shot 2014-11-12 at 5.13.53 PM

And my current place of residence, which I happened to snap a shot of here, when I was at another event where another group of folks pulled together a wonderful exhibition of why this happened and where.

img_6953

This is why I talk about “redlining” when I talk about the creation of the hood.

The “hood”. The “barrio”, the “Whitetopia”, the “ghetto”…

…are real and they are real on maps and sadly, we are nowhere near getting away from these barriers. Yes, even in areas that are gentrifying and moving from red to yellow and blue.

The one key reason that those maps haven’t changed that much.

Education, namely education of our children.

But you say, we have so many choices and there are so many educational providers and I really just want my kids to get their best shot. Oh and my neighborhood didn’t exist back then. And we have black and brown neighbors and they are so nice. We let their kids play in our sunroom and on our wooden swing set.

Your kids, but what about all kids. What about that abandoned school down the block. The one they said was “low-performing” and had “low-enrollment”? And can we mention the mere fact that you have a sunroom and one of those wooden swing sets from Home Depot puts you in a different class level than quite a few Americans? Where did the remaining 5 kids go? You would hate to have a rotting building sitting in your neighborhood waiting for development, so why let that other neighborhood have one too. Or not turn it into the condo building that the “hipster” neighborhood did.

Ok, it’s “Kristen’s Personal Story Time”.

Today, I’m going to tell you about how I came out alright, despite starting my schooling in what were legally the “inner-city” schools when I started kindergarten in 1991.

My first caveat is that in North Carolina, we actually go to public schools under one county district, but many different zones. When I started school, I was still in the Greensboro City Schools District. My parents worked in the Guilford County Schools District and there was a High Point City Schools District. That all changed in 1993 when all the schools merged into one county district under the Guilford County Schools banner.

Yes, people fought. But fast forward 23 years and the Guilford County Schools district has an 86% graduation rate and we now have a program to ensure college gets funded for all kids. Oh and some schools, the ones we consider our high performing ones, graduate 100% of their students. And they pull students, by their personal choice and test scores, from across the entire county. And some of those schools are housed with students deemed troubled by their home schools. Others are your typical extremely “gifted” student holes. Others, the directionals, one which I’ll talk about going to in a bit, are what have become the “suburban” districts through migration, both of locals and of transplants used to a more segregated and suburbanized school environment.

However, that’s at the high school level. What about the elementary level?  When I went to kindergarten, my school was up the street and around the corner. I could have walked and sometimes we did but my mom was waiting for me most days in the car rider line. I wanted to ride the school bus, but we lived to close to the school.

However, my mom, who had taken a break from her own classroom teaching of middle schoolers and was raising and pre-schooling me at home while my dad continued to go work for the school system as an electrical maintenance man and wire homes and do other residential and small commercial electrical contracting jobs on the side, didn’t like my school.

I know I was getting teased a bit and I was also easily distracted, to the point I had to start going to school earlier, so I could adjust to my surroundings. My mom also tells me my classmates bothered me a whole lot more than I remembered. Plus, my teachers wanted me in “gifted” classes and my mom wanted me to be in a regular classroom, where everyone had a fair shot at learning the same things and I wouldn’t feel like I was so “gifted” I couldn’t learn anything any more and that I was too perfect to learn.

Rather than ship me out to the suburbs, which in reality, were just the 1990s subdivisions being built on old farmland around the existing farm towns and their respective “county” schools, I got moved to the school zone right next door. School became a 15 minute walk instead of a five-minute walk, but my mom was right there with me in the car rider line. Mom also made cookie bags for my classmates at Christmas, became friends with my teachers and was on the PTA, with a handful of other working class parents, some of color, some with English as a second language, all upwardly mobile in their own way.

In fact, many of those parents moved on, much like my mom and I did, but we moved on for a different reason and we now live in a similar, but further out neighborhood. Ok, she lives there, but that house in the neighborhood I went to my final elementary school in, is still there. Had we lived there and not the apartment we lived in when I was in the fourth and fifth grades, I could have walked to school, because the school is behind the houses on the next block. Or I could have stayed in our old house with dad and stayed in my same school. Gone to middle and high school not too far away.

However, for middle and high school, I got a special exception to join my mom in the county “suburban” school zone where she was teaching middle school. My own mortification and fear of failing in front of my classmates, many who my mom taught their seventh grade year, and in front of my mom’s teaching colleagues, kept me in line. At the time I attended my high school, it shared one of its buildings with my middle school and I went to my high school classes upstairs and came back to my mom’s classroom in the evenings to wait to go home. On 9/11/2001, I ran to my mom in the covered walkway between the high school and the shared building after school relieved that she and I was still alive. There was not a cloud in the sky that day…and as you see, I’ve digressed greatly.

However, a few things to wrap up my personal story. I had involved parents, who didn’t let their financial means keep them from trying to be engaged parents. But, both parents weren’t working and my mom had an education degree and still commanded even her PTA meetings much like she did her various classrooms over the years. There was funding for the special program at my second elementary school. By the time I got to my third elementary school, my mom was working again due to my parents’ divorce and my dad was servicing the schools in my zone of the district. People knew my parents and they knew me and they knew our struggles and they wanted to see me succeed.

However, there are other classmates of mine, especially at the second elementary school whose parents weren’t as involved, yet they still managed to find a way to success. I attribute it to the values set by the administrators and teachers at that school, to love us all equally. Plus, that neighborhood is one of the unique neighborhoods in Greensboro, in that it houses so many people of all races, income levels and education levels, it has resources and it has a people committed to political unity. If we want to put it in DC terms, I was in Takoma Park. And if that neighborhood (which will remain nameless, because things have changed a bit and I want this to be a universal story) and Takoma Park could do it, there are others that can too.

However, we need neighborhood schools, run by a central district over a reasonable geographic area, and we need diverse neighborhoods. Also, the other caveat, in the map above, some of our Takoma-style neighborhood was blue and some of it was green and yellow. It was never hazardous. Why Takoma was hazardous baffles me, but so do a lot of the maps.

I’d like to think that my parents beat the odds. I’d like to think my neighborhood was special. But it isn’t.

NPR recently reminded us of that when it talked about how much our school choice is dependent on the old redlining maps and is solidified by the loss of schools or the lack of investment or completely homogeneous by both race and class and language skill schools. And many of you have heard the This American Life episode series about the Chicago schools.

Many of you, who otherwise support walkable communities, transit improvements, diverse types of housing and other things seen as urbanist, get stuck when it comes to the schools. Even those of us of color get stuck, much like in this well known New York Times article.

I do think we can start chipping away at the education paradox of urbanism. But we have to start somewhere. Otherwise, those maps will forever be rainbow-colored and not in a good way.

I’m Kristen. Six years ago, I started blogging here to make sense of the built environment around me. You can find me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. You can find out more about me at my main website, www.kristenejeffers.com. 

Bicycling, Cityreads, Essay, Greensboro, Kansas City, Mobility

On a Woman and Her Bikes

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On a Woman and Her Bikes

Anyone who’s owned at least one bike, even if it was just a tri-cycle, has a story. As I’ve added to my fleet recently, here’s my story.

It was Christmas of 1988. I can’t spell out any other details, but there’s photographic evidence,  snapped by a parent of mine really being geeked out by my third Christmas. In the photo below, you can see it and you can also see in the foreground, the handlebars and basket of a lavender trike. I suspect my mom had a role in choosing the color, but it was dad making sure it was recorded for posterity. Oh and it was also his idea that I stuff myself into the empty Kid Sister box that you can just see in the corner.

 

Yet, this wasn’t even my first trike. I had this big hot wheel sucker, that I really don’t remember riding around very much outside the house. What you see here in this picture, of me riding in the living room, is pretty much what you get.

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By age 6, I was starting to get creative. I’d moved up to my first set of training wheels. However, not to leave my old trike behind, I decided to go out back and hitch the old gal up to my new bike. My motivations for this twine-fueled activity are dusty now, but it did make for another fun picture.

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The next Christmas brought me my next bike, this time, without training wheels. There’s photographic evidence of it in all its pink and green glory, next to a pile of other things, including roller skates (my other favorite wheeled activity).

Yet, that evidence did not make it to the digital cannon. I will note that this was the bike that started me riding regularly with my dad. I rode by myself in a nearby traffic circle, that was only occupied by elderly folks in city-sponsored senior housing and practically empty of cars. I rode with my dad up the mild Piedmonty hills and across stroady roads (when in doubt, ride into the turn lane, look both ways again, then cross the street) and through more calmer neighborhood streets to a few of my favorite playgrounds and a slightly longer route (maybe about 2-4 miles each way) to the home of a cousin).

By bike number 4, there were plans for us to make longer treks. It was a 15-speed junior mountain bike, which I begged my dad for. Not that I understood mountain biking as it is today. If I’d understood the concept of the commuter/hybrid bike, then this is what I would have asked for, because all I wanted to do was get over some of our bigger hills in town. If I could only take little me here to Kansas City and show her that nothing Greensboro offered in hills could compare to some of what’s available here. Then maybe I would have truly understood mountain biking. ;). I digress. There she is, just as I’m ready to say goodbye to her to move away from Greensboro to Kansas City.

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But wait, why was she your only bike from age 10–29? Well, the short story of that was that I lost interest in biking. Not because I hated the feeling of riding or thought the distances were too long, but after my parents separating and divorcing and moving to different houses, biking just didn’t feel the same. My dad had a handful of adult sized bikes at his house, and I would borrow them. Technically, I still have one of his old bikes, living in storage with a few of my other things in Greensboro.

The main reason biking didn’t feel the same was that I was getting teased a lot by my neighbors. I was already a somewhat nerdy and quiet child, and by my teen years that was amplified. And then on top of me not riding the bike, some meaner neighbors stole my bike out of our garage (which was open just enough to get inside and out). A nicer adult neighbor saw the thieves and helped me get it back, though. I knew one of the thieves casually from school and I’ve always speculated that it was a stunt for that person to get cool points, not that they actually didn’t like me.

Still college came and I was warned that taking a bike there might result in a theft and that I’d do better walking. And then younger adulthood came and I was too busy driving to and from work and other activities. Plus, I’d honestly outgrown the thing by this time.

Which prompted me to go to REI and get one of those nice, shiny new Novara women’s hybrids. However, it wasn’t really in the budget and it went into storage and then eventually back to the store. Yes, even after I’d driven to Raleigh, and made all the effort to test ride it, get the right size and secure it to the back of my car so it wouldn’t fall off at 65 miles an hour for the hour and a half back to Greensboro. I still dreamed of having one though, this is from last spring, dreaming of what I could get. Still not in the budget though and so it stayed at REI.

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I think a bit of this story was also driven by my desire to ride like I did at CNU 19 in Madison, WS. I’d had a Trek hybrid rental (I’m not sure of it’s specs, but it feels a lot like my newest acquisition, one of the women’s FXs) and I had no trouble zipping around town on all the different paths and boulevards and in the lanes. I locked it wrong and it still felt ok. I also got to try this newfangled thing called B-cycle, a kiosk rental service, where you could take bikes between the kiosks and then return them. We had free codes and they stopped giving them out to attendees after a while, because people wanted to keep them overnight. I had no idea that B-cycle would come back in my life in a big way in the future, but it did. Here’s a foreshadowing, testing out B-cycle in Greensboro in 2013 as part of my role in the bikeshare task force that Action Greensboro has convened off and on since 2013:

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And just a few weeks ago testing out bike loading on the KC Streetcar (image by David Johnson)

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Meanwhile, the purple mountain bike still collected dust in my mom’s garage. Its size didn’t stop my dad from attempting to ride it the day I moved to my downtown Greensboro apartment (and having some success on it, despite him being just a few inches taller and wider). After seeing that, I took it for one more spin. As you see here.

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But it was obvious the frame was too small and I’m sure the inner tubes were dead. Upon my migration to Kansas City, it left my mom’s garage and my life for good and went to Goodwill.

With me working for a bike advocacy group and my lifelong love for bikes, not having one wasn’t acceptable. I just wish I’d taken a bit of time before I bought Lulu.

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You know her. She looks great in pictures. Also, there’s something kind of cool about riding a pink bike. Yet, what’s not cool is that as a cruiser, she’s way too heavy. As a bike from Target, that’s not just because of all the extra components, it’s because those bikes are made of heavier metal, than the ones that come from Trek, REI and other companies that only make bikes and make them for racers, as well as casual riders. And with the hills and just the inability to push the bike long distances, Lulu really only went from my apartment to the office ( a flat, quarter-mile distance).

But I couldn’t be satisfied. Meet Lina, short for the Spanish language pronunciation of Carolina.

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She’s bright. She’s a 7.3 Trek FX. She will need some comfort modifications (namely fenders and panniers ), but right now, she and I have already been on a number of trips, including several that Lulu and I made, with a bit less success. And Lulu never went to the grounds of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, as seen above. She’s been a big hit so far and brought lots of joy to my bike-loving office and to me.

And there you have it. The story of a woman and her bikes.

I’m Kristen, by the way. I started writing this site to tell my story of being a black urbanist and a lover of all things place and community. Learn more about me. Follow me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Subscribe to my email list. Learn more about my work with BikeWalkKC , namely our Women Bike KC initiative to get more women on bikes confidently and safely.

 

 

Cities, Cityreads, Essay, Family and Place, Greensboro, Kansas City, transit, Transportation, urbanism, walking

From an Ambassador to Kansas City (Excerpt from Triad City Beat Fresh Eyes Column)

From an Ambassador to Kansas City

 

Roughly six weeks ago, after loading almost all of my worldly possessions into a moving truck, relatives helped me pack the rest into two cars and we departed our southwest Greensboro home at about 5 a.m., navigating the freeways past my father’s gravesite at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, on a hill created due to the cutting in of new highway.

Within an hour, I’d left the Triad. In roughly 48 more, I’d have wound my way in the caravan through six states and the entire length of Missouri, where I would disembark Interstate 70 into my new home: Kansas City…

How could I leave a city that supplied me endless Biscuitville, cupcakes worth standing in line for at Maxie B’s and food served at establishments owned by families of folks I considered friends, colleagues and classmates? Where not just one, but two fellow young black professionals are sitting on its city council? That, along with Winston-Salem, does festivals like no other (seriously, if you’re coming into town for the National Folk Festival, you will learn).

It’s simple. One must see that the grass they sometimes think is brown is really always green.

Head over to read the rest on the Triad City Beat website.

Thanks again guys for another chance to help you guys “sell” papers. If you are in the Triad area, or close enough to drive, pick up a print copy. They are free. If you have a business, they could use your advertising as well.

Conferences and Symposia, Essay, placemaking

Why I Love Conferences

Why I Love Conferences Kristen Jeffers The Black Urbanist

It is that time of year again when many of us who blog and write and speak gather at industry conferences. Or is it always that time of year?

Back in the day, maybe you went to your state American Planning Association (APA) conference or the big national one.  Architects had AIA or NOMA or maybe the Congress for New Urbanism.(CNU) Transportation folks did the  Transportation Review Board Annual Meeting , the National Bike Summit, Railvolution or something else similar. Anyway, you did your one conference, got your continuing education credits and came back to the nest (or bunker) and went at it another year.

Nowadays, between TEDx, Pecha Kucha, and Ignite in the tech/mainstream world and Transportation Camp and similar unconferences in our world, not to mention the South By Southwests, SparkCons and Middle of the Maps that just do a lot of everything.

And I can’t get enough of these gatherings, no matter where they are and what purpose they serve. I get a thrill from presenting my thoughts as a keynote. I love bringing together my friends to have a guided conversation. And of course, there are the social activities that come from these gatherings. This is networking at its finest.

Why do I love them so much? I think it’s one thing to write in isolation, with the occasional Facebook share, comment or email to a colleague that happens with an online or even printed article. Yet, for me, as an extroverted writer and speaker, the joy that comes from gathering with my fellow urbanists or marketers, or professional black women or young women with side gigs or just chillin’ with my best friends and family is healing. It’s why so many of us when we can or on a regular basis attend worship services or fellowship meetings or yoga classes. You grow and you change and you heal from being around like minds.

An additional piece I like about conferences and convening is that when done the right way, these events change lives outside the conference hall. One example in the placemaking movement is the Tactical Urbanism push, which started as a Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) NextGen conversation and has now been published into a full length book that’s making the rounds of the mainstream. I’ll never forget the time I participated in this effort to create a promenade on a local street: (I’m in the pink hoodie).

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I want to add that conferences that don’t have a good mix of keynotes, breakouts, formal and informal networking sessions fail. Some of the best connections and most valuable business deals happen in the exhibit hall. Another failure comes when your content isn’t compelling. I know occasionally, one has to explain the mechanics of a situation, especially in a continuing education class. Yet, we remember most the vibrant teachers, the ones who have found the human touch in the most boring of subjects.

I’m going to leave you with a set of videos produced on why people go to the CNU every year. I look forward to seeing you this season on the conference circuit. Subscribe to my email list (Go ahead and put your email in the box below)

You’ll be able to find out where I’m going, and who I’m going with. @blackurbanist on Twitter is your best real-time connection to what I’m doing on the convention floor. I’ll also be creating a running Storify. My Twitter is also a good place to find out about special events and opportunities to meet with me at these venues.

And finally, thanks to those of you who have brought me to your gatherings. If you want me to come and speak at your gathering, please contact me. Unless it’s local, I do ask that you work with me to offset travel costs and time spent preparing my remarks, but I can work with the smallest budget, to maximize both mine and your learning time.

Essay, Family and Place, Rural

Love Outside the City (or at Least the City Block)

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If you read this on the Sunday morning upon which it made its appearance on the internet, I’m about to sit down next to my mom and my grandmother and my great-aunt, with a multitude of family in the midst and praise the Lord in the only way we can in an old country AME church about 30 miles southeast of my apartment.

It is here, at this expression of love, where I want to drop the mic on my love of place, at least for the month of February, as this is the last Sunday in February and the last chance I’ll have to drop an essay on love in this month.

Anyway, back to the country.  I used to hate it. It’s a running joke in my family how much I just “had to get back to Greensboro.” The knowledge that the skyline is nearby is so ingrained in my psyche, so meaningful, so centering for me, even now and especially as a young child. Also, in my mind, bugs only existed in our backyard and they were insane in the country. Oh, and no Nickelodeon and Sesame Street came in fuzzy sometimes. Yet, one night, after an impulse decision, I woke up for the first time to CBS This Morning and my grandmother’s southern breakfast, by choice. My dad came and got me not long after breakfast, but I survived and it was a good night.

The irony that presents when the last time I willingly spent the night at my MeMe’s was two days before I would get life changing news. Originally, my dad was going to drive me to the big adventure that awaited me on the other side of RDU Airport and the terminals of  LaGuardia. Yet, I decided to drive myself directly from MeMe’s, since the flight was early, we were all gathering for a pre-Memorial Day cookout and her house is just a bit closer to RDU.

I returned home from New York into another cocoon of family and to the bedroom I spent ages 14-18 and 23-26 in. That bedroom, while possessing a Greensboro address, is in a neighborhood laid out like the best of car-dependent suburbia. I needed that, as the next few days would be a blur of funeral arrangements and family members I hadn’t seen and church members I hadn’t seen and just a feeling of wondering what I would do without the person who first taught me the value of place. Yet, I remembered, I still had the parent that gave me the places we had to live in the first place.

Those of us who are professionals or semi-professionals or armchair quarterbacks at this urban and regional planning thing, whether we make million dollar lifestyle centers or we buy new paint for our cookie-cutter house at Home Depot, or we make a park out of a parking space and a few old small shipping crates, can sometimes get self-righteous about what form is the best.

I believe the best place form begins with love.  If I’d become completely anti-country or anti-suburbia, I’d miss out on the love of my own family. Yeah, I’d probably found new people who only hang out at the bars and art galleries of the central business district and its blocks, but would they have my roots? Would they always be there to wipe my tears and clean up my scrapes? And are these new people even worthy enough to bring home? Some are,  some aren’t.

As I bring this to a close, the only thing I can really say about what makes a place great, is the presence of love. May you find that in whatever shape your primary habitation is.

Essay, Family and Place, Greensboro

Greensboro, A Love Letter

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Greensboro, A Love Letter-small

Dear Greensboro,

Hey, it’s Kristen. How are you?

Wait, yeah, I know there’s a lot of you to go around, but in my head, the sum of your whole is the skyline buildings and the trains and scrubby trees that I see right outside my window. To be honest, it’s always been like that. When I was six years old, I got the chicken pox. The only thing I missed was driving from our home just off of Freeman Mill Road to see your skyline, which for the most part was in its second year of the completion renovation and enhancement. I always loved the symmetry of the points and the flatness of the squares. It’s little wonder that I grew up to start writing this blog and that my current day job has to do with promoting the building of buildings.

But there’s more to you than the outside package, the first impression, the quick glance. There’s a heart and a soul inside of you, that I want the world to know about. And in this time of the year that we take a special day to promote love, I wanted to let you know and the world know, how much I really actually love you.

I also want to make it clear that the love we have is a tough love. You are not just buildings, but you are made up of citizens, real people, some that treat me well and others who sometimes mistreat me. Sometimes I don’t treat them well either and sometimes I am their best friend in the world. Sometimes you don’t have that restaurant or that grocery store or that  touring entertainer that I want and that makes me sad. Even worse, sometimes your people say and do such ugly things to each other, that I get really mad at you and i want to give up on you and run away.

But then I remember that you are a city that’s never shied away from its battles and the battles of the greater humanity. You provided the opportunity for four black men to take a sit, not a stand, but a sit, and change the course of history. You lost a lot of your major industry, yet, you have yet to go bankrupt. Your people have come together to build us ballparks and regular parks and  provide a decent shelter for those without one,  and stand up for public school teachers and its young students. 

You’re a work in progress, but so am I. Every good city grows and we are doing that, together. The old saying is that Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither are you Greensboro. I pray that I have the patience to endure your growing pains and that you continue to have the empathy to endure mine.

Love,

Kristen

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