Category Archives: Rural

Politics of Place, Rural, urbanism

Open Thoughts on the U.S. Election Results

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Looking back at San Francisco from the Rockridge Station in Oakland. I wanted to note one of last night's victories, more money for the BART system. Image by Malcolm Kenton
Looking back at San Francisco from the Rockridge Station in Oakland. I wanted to note one of last night’s victories, more money for the BART system. Image by Malcolm Kenton

I assume most of you are probably in a state of either shock or fear or a combination of the two. I wanted to write a note here, so you’ll know that someone is listening one and two, that you’re not alone and three, so I can process these things. The platform is here for a reason and I’m using it for this today.

First of all, at the local and state levels, some strong advocates and leaders were elected for the first time or re-elected. Some strong leaders were very close to winning. And the presidential election itself on a county-by-county level was very close. While there were some places that flipped, others stayed the same or were stable.

Additionally, I’m so proud of all the cities that voted for transit or other infrastructure bonds. There’s also been an idea that in the new presidential administration, that an infrastructure measure of great consequence may actually happen. I can see that, as many of the transit referenda went forth in places that went red last night.

Going forward, I do think we need to tackle that civic-inferiority complex, along with our own inferiority complexes. We need to listen to all people. We need to make sure they are all fed and have the opportunity for healthcare without the extreme financial burdens. We need to make sure they all have a place to live. We need to stay out of bedrooms and church houses and other places that if we don’t have to go, we don’t have to go. If someone isn’t attacking you, don’t be a bully. Believe what you believe, but don’t attack people or be a bully in the pursuit of your own feelings of needing a person to be a certain way for you to feel some kind of self-worth. Sometimes we deal with this in our own families or colleagues or classmates and even longtime friends. I think our first step is to accept who they are, discuss things tactfully and then when it’s clear that mindset change is not happening on a particular day, move on and focus back on ourselves and self-worth and self-love and our improvements that we’ve been told we should do, through various means.

I know that many times in the past six years, I’ve written people off, people who have no intention of being violent or who really just want answers to questions, because I don’t like how they say it or what they say. I think we have done this a lot over the past few years and really over the past 50 years since we decided collectively that all people should have rights, but on the flip side they only have rights if they do things our way and in our moralities. Do realize that this country is not unified under one moral code. Other than life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all. Also realize that we have built this country under systems that have always privileged a select few. However, because we had language in our constitution that stated otherwise, we as people in the United States have felt like we can have a fair shot at challenging those norms.

On the flip side, we need to redefine the American Dream such that it doesn’t require extreme wealth and the appearance of success to succeed. We need to stop making it about what we own as so much as to what we can offer in our own creativity and grit and love.

Our cities must continue to fix and maintain and build better transportation systems. We need to wipe the terms market-rate and affordable out of our housing conversation and just talk about housing. We need to commit to a common, free, lifelong education system. We need clean water and air. We need free or low-cost healthcare. Our first responders and protectors that seek to protect and serve, need do that not just fear and bully and kill. Our regions and cities should  their citizens before investing in corporations that may or may not stay around long enough to build the economy. We should respect the rural areas and the breadbasket of our nation and instead of shaming suburban people, looking at it for what it is and doing our best to create real, functional towns and villages out of the various sprigs of development that we have.

Additionally, I ask that you respect those of us, who may have chosen third parties and who may take this opportunity to choose another country of residence. We live on a globe, not just a flat piece of land and there are many more issues and places and ideas that we need to address. Many of us look to Copenhagen and Amsterdam for bike/ped infrastructure, and to South Korea for rail infrastructure. We need to be looking outside the box, especially if all that changes is that all of the new laws of the last eight years are repealed. If we are allowed to continue to exist as a democracy, if we aren’t at risk of deportation, or extreme public shunning or shaming, or being killed, we can start the conversations we need to have at the local and state level on new leadership. We can be more innovative with whom we choose as leaders. Or, much as I’m an American expat in America, we can visit and live and work in other places, build up income and experience and come back home and shift our country.

In 2020, I will be old enough to run for president. Not saying that I’ll exercise my right then and that it will be available, but I want us to think about what the world could look like as soon as next year, when there will be more elections and maybe local ones you can plug into and start building the seeds to help us get back to a better place.

And finally, let us be courageous and keep living our normal lives. The oppressor wins when we bow down and we change our lives. Let’s be our best selves until the end.

Rural, suburbs, tips for urbanist living

The Internal Urban Sprawl Killer: DIY and Service Delivery

Peapod Delivery Truck on a Single Family Residential Street. Image Credit #MsLoriTV
Peapod Delivery Truck on a Single Family Residential Street. Image Credit #MsLoriTV

I have to always admit, that not all urban sprawl is the fault of the homeowner or apartment renter. Thanks to how our economy and our government is structured, there are a lot of people who would prefer a downtown condo or townhome, but are priced out of the privilege of walking to all the restaurants and theaters. This is even more pronounced in cities like mine where there’s only one or two walkable dense areas. So what is one to do when they are priced out into sprawl? Get to know how to do-it-yourself or have things delivered to make up for lack of restaurants, inability to walk or bike to work, and entertaining yourself and your neighbors.

Conquering the Lack of Restaurants and Nearby Markets

First, there’s meal planning. Most days, one does not need to eat out or go to a restaurant to make sure they eat well. If you write a schedule of what you want to eat, how and when to cook it and make sure you purchase or have delivered storage containers, then you could eat fancy directly from your kitchen, at home or at work.  I recommend the Feast Bootcamp, to help you get started learning how to cook on a budget and in a way that makes sense for you. Once you know what you eat all the time, you can keep your list on your phone and do a monthly trip to the grocery store or find out what stores will deliver the groceries you use the most to your home.

Most moderate sized metro areas have a brick and mortar grocery that will deliver directly to your home for a fee. Here in North Carolina, Harris Teeter and Lowes Foods do. Chicago, New England, NYC DC and Philly have Peapod. Amazon delivers to everyone. Case in point, I used to order three weeks worth of oatmeal from them and I utilized their Subscribe and Save to make sure I kept the box coming . No matter what service you use, you may balk at delivery fees and some of the items may be more than you are used to paying.  However, imagine not having to battle lines and the sheer overwhelm of shopping at the big box close to home. Or, you can always take your reusable bag and walk on the safe paths to get to that store. Walking doesn’t end just because you are in sprawl.

In addition, if where you live has granted you a lot of land space, get to farming! Even if it’s just one squash plant or one tomato stalk, this will go a long way to reducing your household expenses and also allowing extra money for a once or twice a week jaunt into downtown to enjoy the amenities there. In addition, all you have to do is walk out to your backyard for several of your fruits and veggies. No time to farm? Get to a neighbor farmer with livestock who will sell you an animal and process all the meat for you or will deliver you a bag of produce. CSA’s are also helpful in this, but you may luck out and find that your nearest neighbor may be willing to barter with you, if you have some other service to provide.

Dealing with the Inability to Walk or Bike to Work, Amenities or  for Exercise

When I talked about food above, I said that walking doesn’t end. What walking does do, is get harder. You may have to walk on curb cuts or in mud or grass that may or may not be publicly owned. I hope you have good health and can walk fast or run, because you may need to to cross very busy suburban parkways to get to the stores and businesses. Biking is only a little bit better, because you might be able to pedal as fast as  car going less than or at 35 miles an hour. Good luck though with higher speeds. Oh, and some communities may have bike lanes/trails, because they are proven to boost fitness.

As far as commuting, there are some suburban areas served by their greater metro area’s transit system. Your government leaders at least recognize that people who live there have to go to work and they can’t all drive there. Find out when the bus or train comes, how long it will take to get to your job and bring a book or get some good music or podcasts to listen to on the way there and back.

If you don’t have transit options, you may have the option of carpooling with a few of your colleagues. Yes, this all depends on you liking the people you work with and the fact that you work for a big enough company to justifiably have enough people nearby going to the same workplace. This also works if you work in the same building or same office complex. Take turns driving. If you don’t have the car, get a driver’s licence and  consider being the driver and paying for all the gas.

There’s always telecommuting, developing a home-based business, buying in the subdivision closest to the office park or just driving and dealing with the repercussions of gas and maintenance. When I was reading about Celebration, FL over the past few weeks, many of the residents I read about had a home-based business or worked for Disney. Yet one guy, an urban planner for Tampa, sacrificed a cheap and short commute to continue his regular office job, but allow his family and himself on his downtime to experience the benefits that come from a compact community.

Lastly, don’t count out the hills and trails in your community. Thanks to our climate and terrain in Greensboro, many of our low-density neighborhoods actually still have hilly terrain built-in. There’s two very large hills near my mom’s house that were no joke on my bike when I was younger, so much so I gave up on biking. Yet, as an adult, I appreciate what it means to use nature to exercise and will be using those hills for such in the coming months. If you find yourself in unique terrain, then use it to your advantage. In addition, even if where you live is flat asphalt, people tend to not speed in parking lots and on residential streets. Start walking for fitness at least a few times a week and you may have company in your walk, or at the very least cars will slow down for you.

Entertaining Yourself

If you are comfortable with hosting people in your home or organizing parties, open up your home or help your street close down and have gatherings there. One major defense I hear from suburban dwellers is that where they live allows them to do this often, and sometimes without having to consult governing bodies or other neighbors (since they will be at the party too). Those of you who happen to be on a quiet street, consider having one house party or cookout and see if it works for your street. If your street is a party pooper, don’t be afraid to walk over to the next cul-de-sac or reach out to other neighborhood residents at a community meeting and check out what’s going on.

If it’s not the people you miss, but the content of the entertainment, don’t count out Netflix and Amazon and Hulu, as well as set-top boxes like Roku and Apple TV. That hot Broadway show or documentary may have been recorded and may be streaming on these services. It may take a few months or a year to reach you, but there are tons of other programs, documentaries and plays on these channels to entertain you. If you have friends that rave about these movies and plays and you fear missing out, then work with them to be in town (and stay with them) or schedule a weekend vacation while that particular cultural event is showing or first open. Plus, more smaller cities and towns are developing arts and cultural communities of their own. Don’t snub those communities, as they may also provide what you are missing.

Not Off The Hook

None of this gets developers, builders and resistant governments off the hook for not creating affordable, walkable areas that allow for community-level placemaking, as well as wealth generation and relationship building. However, the circumstances of not having an urban block or a nearby movie theater don’t have to keep you locked up inside or wasting money or gas in transit or in eating.

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Cities, Rural, suburbs

Why We May Never Have the Right Words for the Places We Live

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Previously, I’ve written about why words matter. Especially when we talk about what’s a town and what’s a suburb. Once again, people are people and places are places. So how should we talk about places?

First of all, if you have a city, with either two large cities, that are economic powers surrounded by several small towns with less economic power, then you have a metropolitan area. If you have a larger town with economic power, with smaller towns around it, you have a micropolitan area, the Census Bureau’s new word for smaller areas of concentrated economic power. A farm is still a farm.

I know, sounds technical right? And maybe a bit harsh. After all, one of my good urbanist friends reminded me that economically, some larger metros are justifiably suburbs. Yet, we’ve never really been good at this labeling the places we live anyway. Are all our streets streets? Or are they really roads, highways, boulevards, avenues,courts, ways, alleys, etc. Oh and some of those alleys aren’t really alleys. And when do you know when a road is a street? What if the road turns into a freeway after that traffic signal up ahead. Or is it a stoplight.

Anyway, thanks to our nuances in language by region, we don’t all use the same names for the places we live. And that’s ok. As long as you don’t make the racial euphemism mistake, you are ok by me. However, it’s worth checking out the thoughts of Ben Ross, the author of the new book Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism. This excerpt published on Greater Greater Washington has a lot to say on the many euphemisms we use in urban planning and other more casual conversations about place.:

In Briarcliff, New York, a spurned builder once wrote, the aim of zoning is to guarantee “that each newcomer must be wealthier than those who came before, but must be of a character to preserve the illusion that their poorer neighbors are as wealthy as they.” 

Such frank talk about land use is rare indeed. If you don’t want something built, an honest statement of objections invites defeat in court. If you do, plain speaking is unlikely to convince the zoning board, and it risks offending any neighbors who might be open to a compromise. 

Each party has an illusion to maintain, so words become tools of purposeful confusion. One side directs its linguistic creativity into salesmanship. Rowhouses turn into townhomes; garden apartments grow parked cars in the gardens; dead ends are translated into French as cul-de-sacs. The other, hiding its aims from the world at large and often from itself, has a weakness for phrases whose meaning slips away when carefully examined.

I couldn’t have written a better paragraph. Check out the rest of that excerpt here for more euphemism fails.

Another great wordsmith of place is my friend and colleague Steve Mouzon. When asked to not write so technically about the urban to rural transect and its effect on how people chose to walk, he went back and crossed out the technical language and added new, more concise and friendly language. Need I mention that this article is about a concept he calls Walk Appeal,  one of his many catchy phrases that help us all learn about how to live in and create better places.

I end with one more reminder for all of us to be literary when it comes to describing people and places. Add as many adverbs and adjectives as you need. Say what you really mean, even if it is slightly mean. It’s better than empty euphemisms, with meanings that come back to haunt you later.

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Cities, Family and Place, Rural

Cruising Down a Curved Road

Tail of the Dragon near Deals Gap, NC./ Wikipedia

For the holiday, I went to my grandmother’s house in rural Alamance County for dinner and family time. I’ve written about making the drive before, but this time I want to focus on the areas of curved roads that I encounter on the route. I’ve driven on mountainous curved roads that make you slow down and clutch your wheel. Yet, these curves, once one is skilled, can be taken at multiple speeds.

When I was younger, and still played video games, I loved playing games like Gran Turismo which featured road races. Many times I’d fall off the cliffs on the curved roads, but once I mastered them, they became my favorite parts of the game (that and the rally races, since they always allowed me to drive in the dirt).

Like many things, curved roads serve as a metaphor for life. The road is a defined path, but in those areas, they aren’t straight lines and they aren’t always on a level plain. That’s the purpose of the curves, to navigate hills and mountains and streams that get in the way of a straight path. It reminds me of how in my life, after seeing the challenges and facing the minor panic, I in turn navigate well through curves and come out one the stronger.

One would note, in many urban plans, curves are evil. We marvel at things like Lombard Street in San Francisco, but no one is rushing out to re-create curves or build hills to add to the urban landscape. In the Transect code, hills and valleys are in the T1-T2 place, natural wonders, but not places where people live who have a choice. But some people do make those choices to live there. Others don’t. Regardless, there are lessons for all in the curving of a road.

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Cities, Family and Place, gentrification, Rural

Are Historically-Black Towns History?

Photo credit: Drew Grimes/Wikimedia

Recently, I came across two sets of articles about Historically Black towns in Oklahoma and in Missouri. Part as a means of segregation and part as a means of dignity, self-respect and control of the civic space, African-Americans established or had help establishing their own towns after slavery. Unfortunately, the promises of economic growth and civic engagement were short-lived in many of these towns. Some were burned down. Others were disenfranchised or had other restrictions placed on them. Others died thanks to integration and increased opportunities for Blacks. In North Carolina, the town of Princeville, the first incorporated Black town in the United States. was nearly washed out by Hurricane Floyd in 1999. It has recovered, but as recently as 2012 had its town accounting taken over by the State of North Carolina.

Yet the opportunity exists for some of these towns to improve. Some can restore what architecture is left. Others can launch efforts to lure entrepreneurs and others interested in the slow food, do-it-yourself, and community placemaking movements. Plus, for those seeking refuge from higher rents in the city, but still wanting a walkable and vibrant neighborhood, they could become a newer version of whatever inner city neighborhood has died. For those who have outlived their usefulness or are too damaged for repair, care should be taken to preserve history through monuments and exhibits and folk festivals. Fellow planner and author Sheryse N. Dubose has called upon those, namely fellow Black Americans, who see themselves as being victims of gentrification, to gentrify their own selves, i.e. return to older towns and neighborhoods, purchase these homes that have value to other cultures and maintain unique characteristics such as eateries, music venues and corner stores that sell specific foods.

Something else that’s interesting, is how the struggles of black towns compare to struggles of black neighborhoods in bigger, integrated on paper, cities. It appears that in the times of segregation, that black towns were able to avoid issues of redlining, urban renewal and gentrification by enacting their own self governance. Their main threat, if the surrounding white towns did not care that they succeeded, appeared to be loss of commerce, no different than those predominately white small towns and rural townships. Other questions that arise are their ability to accept people of other cultures, such as Mexican farm workers or Asian refugees to regrow their population; if some major cities are defacto black towns now (i.e. Detroit) ;and can we continue our quest for integration, while preserving history and unique cultural businesses?

It is ultimately the question that has been the center of my blogging for the past 3 years: is black urbanism still a thing?

And with that, I invite you over to North Carolina Placebook for something that’s quite living, the latest news on governance and placemaking throughout North Carolina.

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.

Bicycling, Cities, Cleveland, Housing, Links, New York City, Philadelphia, Rural, Transportation

Placebook: Where Veggies Come From

Happy Thursday! Yesterday I ate the traditional collard greens and black eyed peas at my grandmother’s with my mom, some uncles, and my cousins. My grandmother’s house sits on a few acres of land out in the country, not far from Greensboro. It’s no longer an active farm and it was never a big time deal, but when I was younger, my grandparents grew several rows of strawberries,corn, tomatoes and yellow squash, along with a patch of mixed greens. I used to hate going out there, especially in these summer due to the bugs, but now, I really appreciate what it means to know the true origins of certain vegetables. An adjacent farm has cows and horses and mules, along with this lovely pond, which you can sort of see below.

Out at my grandparents. The fields were behind the white house and so are the adjacent field with the pond. The main house is on the left. (Photo credit: Kristen Jeffers).
Out at my grandparents. Their  fields were behind the white house and so are the adjacent fields with the pond. The main house is on the left. (Photo credit: Kristen Jeffers).

This land and the land of others in the family is part of the reason I love the urban environment so much and want very much for both rural and urban (and really good in-between areas) to keep their character. Enough about that, here’s some links for your Thursday:

One of the best commentaries I’ve seen yet of what’s to come for NYC. Also, this one from my good friend Sarah Goodyear(@buttermilk1) She also wrote this cool article on the second lives of a suburban staple, the Pizza Hut.

The Overhead Wire (@theoverheadwire) spotlights some great street signs that have bikes printed where the bikes would need to turn to follow the official paths set by the town of Lafayette, CA.

Fireworks over several significant skylines to bring in the New Year.

What’s the best thing your city has done this year? Leaders in a handful of major cities share.

Philadelphia gets serious about developing a land bank.

Mayor Bloomburg took the subway home on his last day as mayor. He, along with the rest of NYC, can no longer take a horse-drawn carriage ride like in the movies.

Older renters will drive demand for apartments in the next decade according to this report.

And finally, urbanism (and the whole civic environment), is black and white in Cleveland. Shout out to Richey Piiparinen (@richeypipes), who through Belt Magazine and his own blog tell it like it truly is in Cleveland and through out the Midwest/Rust Belt region.

Also, please suggest ideas for this list by tagging them #tbuplacebook. The goal is for this to happen every weekday, including some holidays, depending on how they fall and how I feel. Thanks for reading!

apartment living, Cities, Civic Inferiority Complex, creative placemaking, downtown, Family and Place, Greensboro, Issues and Ideas, Politics of Place, Rural, tips for urbanist living

The Privilege of Urbanism, The Democracy of Placemaking

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Privilege.

The one thing I can take from reading this article and reading my words back to myself on what it has been like living as a classical new urbanist over the past year. I cannot think of another way to illustrate how I feel vis-a-vis a young man, only two years younger than me, who’s trying to get his life back on his feet, facing challenges. It also brings me to a hard truth that my design-focused friends and followers will not want to hear.

Design, even new urbanist design, is out of reach or a major stretch for far too many people, including myself.

Prior to speaking with the reporter about the issues and frustrations I have with where I live, prior to the noise ordinance and curfew restrictions, I’d been thinking about a change in living situation.

However, I kept beating myself up with a major what-if: if I leave my apartment and go somewhere cheaper, then many of the theories I’ve put forth on this blog and in other forms would go unproven.

Isn’t that what a theory is though, an idea that hasn’t been proven? Is anything on this blog law?

No, it isn’t, and that’s actually a good thing.

One of the greatest new urbanist writers of our time is actually not quite an urbanist, in the sense that he doesn’t live in an apartment, near transit, by himself or with one or two other people. I would like to think his credibility on the subject is far superior to mine and the marketplace agrees (slowly but surely).

Yet, I still believed for the longest time, that the only way anyone would listen to my words and create a marketplace around them is if I lived the most extreme urbanism I knew how to live.

And it’s urbanism, but it’s not placemaking.

Placemaking does require an address, but it’s not necessarily an address in demand. Place can be made from old-line suburbia, where each neighbor can decide to grow a different vegetable and then teach the community how to clean and cook those vegetables, in order to eat healthier. The streets of that old-line suburbia could become woonerfs, places where cars automatically go slow and people take advantage of the sloping hills and winding curves and dead ends to get in workouts, that shed the pounds earned by sitting in cars commuting to ever further away jobs, or from sitting at home doing a job that no longer requires a specific location. They could carpool to stores. I think my reporter friend said it best in this article, “Even for a staunch new urbanist like myself, the logic is inescapable: If you want two or three bedrooms and you can afford a mortgage of about $100,000, you head for the suburbs.”

While I truly don’t want the center city to yield to the gilded class, I don’t want us to give up on making good places because we don’t live or can’t afford to do so. I also don’t want those of us with massive privilege to forget that it doesn’t take much for anyone to fall on hard times and not all dealing with hard times are lazy and uncommitted.

Whatever happens and whatever I decide to do in the coming months, my goal is to commit myself to a new theory, the democracy of placemaking. To create, to invent, to include, to incorporate, to adapt, to save and to grow. Let me not forget again, what it really means to be a placeist.

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Cities, Politics of Place, Rural

Words Matter: Why Development Types Do Not Equal Ethnic Groups

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During a conversation at the recent Streetsblog training in Kansas City, I was asked about the name of this site. I stated that often in the media, the word urban has been equated with the word black. Likewise, but not as much, other ethnicities have been tied to areas where they are very populous. With development types as a “safe” proxy for labeling something as an ethnic object or activity, the practice of using  development types  is now ubiquitous. Yet, I wanted to confront that issue head on, by naming my site in an oxymoronic matter. Still why is my site name an oxymoron? It shouldn’t be.

First of all, people of all races have lived in the three commonly recognized types of development: urban, suburban, and rural. A glance at the U.S. Census backs up my claim. Only in New York, Philadelphia and , until recently, DC and Chicago did  bad equations such as white=suburban and black-urban work perfectly. Segregation was and is more of a neighborhood by neighborhood phenomenon. Maybe that neighborhood was a neighborhood of farms and a church versus three-flats and a corner store, but the notion is the same. No one racial group can be tied to one city, unless that city was once an over-sized, segregated government housing project, a segregated suburb with cul-de-sacs and no city hall, or a segregated mill town. The key word here is segregated.

Secondly,  the issue primarily comes from the mainstream media.   Urban development is one thing, but naming something or someone as urban, when they are really just black is a problem. The terms used to describe development are very different than race. It is flat-out lazy for media outlets to continue the conflation of terms, when all it takes is one more pica to state the word development, with a hyphen, next to whatever type it is. Or even better, let’s use the word black (or African-American) or Latino or whatever culture. Political correctness is many times a shot in the foot. It’s great to see the AP back off of using illegal or schizophrenic to describe people, or many other news outlets stop using the full name of the Washington NFL team. Yet, can we get a stronger entry in the Stylebook for development types, that bans their use for people much like illegal?

What re-jogged my issue initially with words was several things, notably a performance of Clybourne Park . Set both a few days before the move of the Younger family in  A Raisin in the Sun‘s move into their new home and 50 years later when a white family wants to come back and tear down the home that was such a prize 50 years ago, I was compelled by what was and wasn’t said. How it wasn’t so much of a thing of race and gentrification as much as it was an issue of trusting one’s neighbors and feeling a shared affinity. How when all the ugly slurs and jokes were stated instead of implied, there appeared to be some sort of quiet resolution. No one leaves either scene happy, but there’s no hiding from any labels, not just racial or development-styles, but feminism, disabilities and even religion (or the practice thereof).

At this point, I want to point out what the dictionary actually lists as definitions for urban, suburban, and rural.  Urban, according to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary means “of, relating to, characteristic of, or constituting a city.” Sadly, the dictionary is now including online Faebook comments on entries. Even sadder was a woman who noted she’d taken an online quiz that stated she was an urban princess. She went on to state she thought urban meant black. (She appears to be African-American).

Moving on to suburb[an], Merriam-Webster notes three definitions:

  1. an outlying part of a city or town
  2. a smaller community adjacent to or within commuting distance of a city
  3. plural : the residential area on the outskirts of a city or large town

It’s the first definition I want to highlight, that even a suburb has to be defined by a city. As I’ve stated before, some places think they are suburbs when they aren’t. There is a broader provision for these under this definition, but so many are becoming their own cities and many were self-sufficient towns. Some still are. Nothing here says they equal white. What of Asian Chinatowns, Koreatowns and the like? Just because there’s been some Asian suburbanization does not mean we are losing the entire community to the suburbs. Still, thanks to marketing, as examined by the new book  Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America, much of what we think of as the “suburban” experience was racialized into a white American experience.

Now I come to rural, which  Merriam-Webster defines as “of or relating to the country, country people or life, or agriculture.” Once again, no race in the definition. A heavy Latino rural connection could be traced to the bracero program that brought the first  government-sancioned wave of Mexican migrants beginning in 1942 to work on farms. As time went on, as chronicled in Hannah Gill’s book The Latino Migration Experience in North Carolina: New Roots in the Old North State, migrant farmworkers began to settle in rural areas, some which resembled the rural states in Mexico that these later day migrants came from. She also talks about the growth of Siler City, an outpost I remember being about 20 minutes too long from my grandparents and having a good seafood restaurant. This area is now one of the most rapidly growing Latino communities in the state. None of this explains the “irony” of the large communities of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in New York City or Mexicans in Chicago, many who descended from the braceros who stayed behind after their visa expired. Of course, we forget that much of the Southwest, home to the majority of our remaining Native American population that is on reservation was part of Mexico. Many Mexicans claim a dual native/Spanish identity that has coalesced into the modern Hispanic/Latino.

As I come to a close, I want to make it clear  we have no room for racialized descriptions of development and development as euphemism for race. Currently, all ethnicities (and class levels) are experiencing some form of loss or pain, whether it’s home value, medical problems, rising tuition, job loss, or a combination of all these and more. People are losing ground in their own neighborhoods no matter where they are located. The mixed-use entertainment and novelty district,  suburban experiment , thinking that sustainability is only for one race, and the complete write-off of rural areas is not working. Sustainability is for all races, anyone who takes breaths of oxygen. If we can just focus on development, redevelopment, or maintenance, kindly nudging change in our communities, then we can finally jump over the hurdle of conflating race with a development type.

Family and Place, Food, Greensboro, Rural, Traveling as An Urbanist

Gratitude for a Country Road (And All of You!)

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Today is Thanksgiving Day in the United States and this afternoon I will I embark on my annual journey to see both sides of my family within a span of 5 hours. While many folks have the tradition of watching the Macy’s parade, watching football and eating copious amounts of food, my most unique Thanksgiving tradition involves one long country road.

On a regular basis, the concept of one road=one family rules my life. Within ten minutes I can be at my mom’s house. Five for my dad’s. Of course you’ve picked up on the houses being separate, but it’s been so long, I’ve worked at making sure it doesn’t feel like there was separation.

Meanwhile, on Thanksgiving, it’s worked out on many years that both family celebrations are within 30 minutes of each other, connected by one (technically four, but it’s close enough) country road.

I’m very thankful for that country road. It’s the same road I learned to drive on and it’s taught me the value of the rural environment. As I drive over the rolling hills of the North Carolina Piedmont, I see small farms. I see all types of home architecture, including one house that keeps adding turrets, stained glass windows and doors. My mom and I have bets on it being a bed-and-breakfast, but who knows? There’s even a small waterfall cresting from a dam at another point of the journey.

This road and the country surrounding it is why I love the urban transect so much. For those of you who aren’t urban planners, the urban transect is a system developed in the 1990’s to portray the optimal progression of land use. It goes from New York level urban density, to un-claimed natural land. In between there are levels for used farmland, small town main-streets and even lesser dense suburbs. It accounts for all the desired land uses in a way that honors compact living, efficient development and the need for some communities to have space from their neighbors. It allows for the rural areas much like the ones I’m visiting today to exist in a modern, urban-centric, placemaking scheme.

We talk about density and connectivity and the ability to bring communities together in the placemaking blogosphere on a regular basis. Thanks to this road, and the years both families gather on this road, I get to feel what it’s like to be a part of my first community, my own family.

And on that note, let me take the time to express my thanks and gratitude to everyone who has followed me on Twitter and Facebook, given me a byline in another publication, read and shared this blog, heard me speak , invited me to speak and all of the above and more. Let us all be grateful for the great places in our lives and work hard to preserve them all.