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
By Kristen Jeffers
Cityreads/creative class/Family and Place/Homelessness/Housing/Money and the City
The Quest for a Forever Home in an Era of Mass Gentrification
I’m on the quest to purchase my dream house, my forever home. Right now, that house is in Washington, DC and it’s one of the many row houses. It’s on a bus line or a flat street on which I can bike easily. Metro proximity is a bonus, but I’m
Why Are Black Folks Moving?
Movement and migration is constantly on my mind. And whenever I hear someone claim to know where black people are moving to and why, my ears really perk up. Especially when they do what USA Today did recently and crunch some U.S. Census numbers and make the kind of maps they
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
A Few of My Favorite Online Calculators
So in a previous post, I mentioned this concept of a sliding scale for home purchases. Today, I’m going to bring you the root of that concept, at least for me, the calculators that tickle my fancy. This is Potatoes and it’s the Wednesday series on The Black Urbanist. It’s when
Could Sliding Scale Home Purchases Work?
There are a litany of calculators out there for people to use when they are ready to calculate how much home they can afford. Put in the magic number and you get exactly what level of house you can afford, at precisely the perfect time. What if that magic number
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
Could You Really Survive In Your Car By Choice?
When one thinks of living in a car, it’s usually because they have gone broke or they are trying to build up something and housing is not a reasonable expense. Think of the laid off corporate worker, the family who has lost their home to foreclosure or the wannabe Holywood
Front Porch Sittin’ Time
I think it is safe to say, that at least in North Carolina, spring has arrived in earnest. It will shock me, but not by much, if we have one more hard freeze before May arrives. Yet, cold was nowhere this weekend, on the patio at Nattys where I
Placebook: War Zones and Playgrounds
What do we make of what I think is the real challenge presented by gentrification? That is, if people see the areas they are moving into or have lived in as war zones or playgrounds or both? For context, I define a war zone as an area where either residents
