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
By Kristen Jeffers
Cities/Cityreads/Commons/downtown/Family and Place/gentrification/Government/Housing/How-To/Issues and Ideas/Podcast/transit/urbanism
On the Second Presidential Debate of 2016 and Knowing Your Truth About Where You Live
I wanted to discuss a comment about cities that came up in the debate/ town hall last night. Note, this is not a post endorsing one or the other, although I’ll say that I’m with her. But the issue brought up is one that trips up a lot of people
We May Be Gentrified, But Our Culture Doesn’t Have to Die.
We are at peak gentrification. What’s next? Namely, what’s next for cultures and communities of color who are left in the wake of the racism and greed that drives many gentrification conversations in our cities. How do we overcome the drama of losing our homes and stores and schools and
By Kristen Jeffers
#transpo/Cityreads/Education/Food/gentrification/Government/Homelessness/Housing/How-To/Kansas City/Transportation/urbanism
To Create a Perfect City
All it took in many cities for development in the old days was one man who bought up bunches of land and started building houses on it, which he turned around and put up for sale. One man. Probably white and already wealthy. Several plots of farmland. Land which used
Place in A Time of Terror and Inequality
This post took so long to write. I wrote about two versions of it. Maybe you’ll see them in the next volume of essays. Maybe they’ll be here. Ultimately, it gets down to how place and motion matter in a time of heightened instances of tragedy, terror and oppressive power
Finding the Lines
Once upon a time, the Home Owners Loan Corporation, the New Deal era agency that refinanced struggling mortgages. graded neighborhoods based on race, country of origin and other more practical and less discriminatory methods. This practice, known as “redlining” looks different in every community. Hence, while there are lessons for everyone
Letting Ourselves Go
Of late I’ve been reading a lot of articles on how people don’t vote or don’t engage with their neighbors. There’s also been a sprinkling of how gentrification really happens and how it breaks down the neighborhood fabric. A few of those articles are right here (leaving the links inline
The Department Store of the Amazon and New Urbanist Age
As of this writing, I’ve just learned that the Belk at the Four Seasons Mall, the last remaining enclosed mall in Greensboro, will close at the beginning of 2015. I fully expect two things at that mall. One, it will go the way of the Carolina Circle Mall, our other
Wait, That’s Really a House?
My dad and I used to talk about how he was going to make himself an office in his backyard shed. He’d made a good amount of money putting electricity in other people’s dutch barns and other iterations of storage sheds/backyard workshops. It was only a matter of time that
Things That Should Never Be in Driving Distance
I was a good North Carolinian and went to vote in my recent election. As I’ve written about before, the district I sit in for US House is a snake district. As in it looks like a snake. And even worse, my polling place, which should be in walking distance,
