This week’s letter is a page out of my journal. I know, many of you think that this is my journal and it used to be, but I do write some things for myself these days. However, when I finished writing this one, it felt too much like a post/letter to share, and here it is. Plus, yes, I wrote this in bed between working with my yarn spool above that looks like a tomato and my comfort plushies. It’s been that kind of week, and I don’t mind sharing that with y’all. Yes, even y’all LinkedIn people. It’s Sunday, one and two, I’m a Black queer feminine person. Rest is resistance for me y’all. Here’s that entry, lightly edited.

For over a decade, I thought that if I just moved to the right place, with the perfect urban form, the perfect people would pop out and with the right urban form, everything would be ok.

However, over the past decade, I realized that my methods of making place for myself were not yielding and they were unrooted and unfriendly to advocacy.

Humans evolved into nomadic, then stationary people. Even when we were nomadic, but especially as stationary people, we became territorial, stagnant, and antagonistic. We began to embrace scarcity over abundance.

Now this isn’t to say we shouldn’t continue to ground ourselves, grounding is a key part of our connection with the Earth. 

But we lack balance in how we care for the Earth and that balance is reflected in how we care for others.

First and foremost, we should be practicing conservation, but not without compassion. 

Here’s some tangible examples of how we do that:

— Take our solutions to the root, rather than blame people for doing what they have to do in the moment to survive.

— Release our need to worship and honor defense, warmongering, and unrenewable resources.

— Ask ourselves what views and manifestations of the divine presence do we really serve and are those accurate manifestations or ones geared to a particular, singular goal of just one chosen people? 

I myself am releasing my own thoughts and beliefs about buildings first. 

I believe that we can regenerate buildings, but we can’t regenerate living creatures and beings. 

I believe our urbanist movement has failed because it failed to unpack why certain things were built where they were before considering how to fix those things under the current colonial economics.

It allowed not just racism (begat by capitalism) to stand, but also ableism and classism, and patriarchy.

The industry’s equity has failed us. Equity is no longer the standard, we need land liberation, restoration, and regeneration.

Our existing built environment organizations need to not just ensure their day-to-day activities and operations are mindful of ableism and classism, they need to root it out. Then problems like racism and transphobia and misogyny go away because at our core, we don’t use them as reasons to not build or honor what has been built, but in a different way.

Our overemphasis on policing and the limits of budgets is failing us. Our failure to nurture and teach building and development skills, then nurture the nature connections of communities, and their needs besides what a building looks like is causing a shift in my desire to promote and honor organizations that I used to worship as the gold standard.

I’m in defiance and I’m in search of a solution. I am creative and abundant. I am nomadic and grounded. 

Lastly, I realize that as an avid reader, I never had a lot of books that showed people like me in my home state thriving in communities. I was constantly reinforcing that something was wrong with my community because it only existed in my imagination.

And, as a child of an authoritarian religion that claimed the Earth would regenerate after some of us died and went to heaven and others went to hell, unpacking that level of trauma has also been a major goal and release of my past few years and I need real, reliable, affirming community to do so.

This is why I’m intent on defying gentrification and ending imperialism. 

This week on the podcast, I Zoomed with Christine Edwards and we talked about how we’ve been resourceful, with mentorship, and her work in helping Asheville with its groundbreaking reparations program. I’ve included the video version here on YouTube and I would love for you to subscribe over there, especially if you want to see these full video versions of the podcast.

And of course, please continue to listen on all other podcast platforms and rate and review there as well. Here’s all of the episodes at a glance.

The Grief that Gentrification Brings – Defying Gentrification

Even though this was a rough week for me, I decided that I wanted to let you in a bit and drop a few moments of a chat on how gentrification compounds my grief. This is a raw edit with no full ad and no full segments, just me reflecting on how I've been grieving this week for years and how gentrification adds to that.Purchase from Kristen's Bookshop.org store and support the podcast!Never miss an episode, subscribe to our Substack or on LinkedInYou can also find Kristen @blackurbanist or @kristpattern.

1. The Grief that Gentrification Brings 20:34
2. Past and Present Black Migrations for Liberation with Arionne Nettles 01:25:09
3. Resourcefulness and Reparations in North Carolina with Christine Edwards 01:09:25
4. Kristen's Personal Gentrification Defying Playbook 51:06
5. Reflecting on Atlanta and Baltimore Gentrification and Community Development with Derek Moore 01:27:55

Plus, you’re welcome to come by tomorrow morning, Monday, May 20 at 11 am Eastern, for my ask me anything, where you can ask me anything and comment on these thoughts, within reason. Register right here and I hope to see you there.