By Adele Peters

Cooperative Capital lets people pool small amounts of money, vote on how they want to invest it to improve their neighborhood–and then generates returns.

Buying an abandoned house in Detroit, remodeling it, and then renting or reselling it can be a good investment, but it’s something that many people living in Detroit might not have the cash on hand to do. A new community-based fund that will launch later this year will change that: When neighbors invest a small amount in the fund, the fund can invest in housing, and as the community develops, community members will get a financial return.

“A lot of people want to participate in Detroit’s recovery, but unfortunately, they feel that because they’re not a billionaire, millionaire, celebrity or politician, they feel they can’t . . . the real desire was to create a situation where residents were able to come together to collectively invest and build up our community in a way that everyone benefits,” says Kwaku Osei, CEO of Cooperative Capital, the startup creating the new fund, which will be the first of its network of similar funds across the country.

Read more on FastCompany.com

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By Matt Barnum

The ability to opt out of a neighborhood school increases the likelihood that a black or Hispanic neighborhood will see an influx of wealthier residents.

When Francis Pearman was studying at Vanderbilt, he and a fellow graduate student noticed a striking phenomenon in Nashville: White, affluent families were moving into low-income neighborhoods without sending their children to the neighborhood schools.

“We were really curious to see what that relationship looked like at the national level,” said Pearman, now a professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

When he and that student, Walker Swain, looked at national data, a pattern emerged. The ability to opt out of the neighborhood school increased the likelihood that a mostly black or Hispanic neighborhood would see an influx of wealthier residents.

“As school choice expands, the likelihood that low-income communities of color experience gentrification increases,” Pearman said.

Their finding adds to the already-contentious policy debates over school choice, gentrification, and segregation. And now another study, focusing on Charlotte, North Carolina, has come to similar conclusions: Housing prices spiked in areas where students were given new ability to switch schools away from one deemed failing.

Read more on TheAtlantic.com

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By Zoë Beery

Only a small percentage of historical interpreters are black, and Cheyney McKnight is trying to change that.

On a cold, clear Wednesday afternoon on Staten Island, Cheyney McKnight shoveled coals from an open hearth fire and placed them under a small legged skillet crackling with hot oil. Drawing from a wooden bowl, she dropped in three spoonfuls of a pale batter she’d just made — cornmeal, black eyed pea flower, salt, and spices. The recipe for these fritters, which make a hearty snack for winter days, was a blend of historical research and interviews with McKnight’s neighbors in Harlem. “People in Nigeria and Ghana still eat these, but without the cornmeal,” she said. “That’s what makes the recipe African-American, and not just African.”

The American part mattered because McKnight, 28, was cooking from the perspective of an enslaved African-American women. As a guest interpreter at Historic Richmond Town, where costumed guides invite visitors to observe life from the 1600s through the late 1800s, she was in the middle of a demonstration on plantation cooking practices circa 1815. Domestic topics are her favorite, she said, because they allow for sneak attacks. “I think people’s guards go down when I talk about clothing and cooking,” she said. “But then it’s like — bam! Guess what? You are in a slavery lecture! And I’m not here to talk about a happy plantation narrative.”

There are dozens of historical sites dedicated to pre-Reconstruction America, and over a hundred Civil War re-enactments happen every year across the country. But of the thousands of people who work as interpreters or participate in re-enactments, only a tiny fraction are black. “At historic sites that have histories of slavery, those histories are often not present, or it’s some little barn tucked in a corner that you’d miss if you aren’t looking for it,” said Elon Cook-Lee, a public historian and museum activist who has collaborated with McKnight. “There should be enslaved people there, because there was a black enslaved population, but since you have no black interpreters, you’re erasing history.”

Read the full story on TheOutline.com

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By Molly Balzano

Boyle Heights, California; Camden, London; Greenpoint, Brooklyn; Kreuzberg, Berlin. The specifics differ, but the circumstances do not: community fabric is destroyed, housing costs rise, and activists rally against the forces and faces of global, neoliberal, urban gentrification. The forces are inexorable; the face is the latte-sipping, craft-building, meme-ified hipster. 

Perhaps no sociocultural group has been so universally reviled in the internet age as the hipster, evinced by the explosion of memes, Tumblrs, and articles documenting and inciting hatred of this 21st century class. The definition of hipster notwithstanding (you’d find little agreement online or off), activists have adopted this “narrative”: thick-rimmed glasses and artisanal mustards are the first salvos against a neighborhood’s history and character. Where the lumberjack-urban-pioneer moves to—the logic goes—the luxury high-rise follows. Around the globe, activists and long-term residents bristle at the arrival of the hipster: Boyle Heights locals rallied against the opening of a coffee shop; a writer in Camden, London, laments the opening of a hip cereal restaurant; a photographer in Williamsburg documents the changing urban landscape and name-checks Lena Dunham’s HBO show about down-and-out (yet mysteriously affluent) Brooklynites; tenants-right activists in Berlin chant slogans and scrawl graffiti warning the hipster away.

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By Molly Balzano

“What happens when historians leave out many of America's peoples? What happens when someone...describes our society, and 'you're not in it'? Such an experience can be disorienting — a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing."
- Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (52)

The history imbued in our spaces is political. There is a power in collective remembrance: out of common memories, we form a common identity. But our history is multivariate. It is a history of both liberation and of empire/expansion. The past has been redemptive for some, but subjugating for many others.

Collective memory — the stories we tell ourselves about our past and the material manifestation of those stories — forms part of our identity. It informs how we evolve as a society — what we venerate, who we value, who we other/oust/attack. This narrative has power; it has cultural capital.

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By Elizabeth Woyke

An ambitious project by Alphabet subsidiary Sidewalk Labs could reshape how we live, work, and play in urban neighborhoods.

On Toronto’s waterfront, where the eastern part of the city meets Lake Ontario, is a patchwork of cement and dirt. It’s home to plumbing and electrical supply shops, parking lots, winter boat storage, and a hulking silo built in 1943 to store soybeans—a relic of the area’s history as a shipping port.

Torontonians describe the site as blighted, underutilized, and contaminated. Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs wants to transform it into one of the world’s most innovative city neighborhoods. It will, in the company’s vision, be a place where driverless shuttle buses replace private cars; traffic lights track the flow of pedestrians, bicyclists, and vehicles; robots transport mail and garbage via underground tunnels; and modular buildings can be expanded to accommodate growing companies and families.

In the early 2000s, so-called smart cities were all the rage. Captivated by the idea of urban districts that would use technology to reduce energy consumption and pollution, make transportation more efficient, and lure affluent tenants, countries including China, South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates hired developers to transform large swaths of land into photogenic cities stuffed with the latest innovations.

All fell short of their lofty ambitions. Sidewalk Labs, which was founded in 2015 as a subsidiary of Alphabet to develop technology for alleviating urban problems, believes it can buck the trend by working closely with the community and tailoring the technology to local needs. “People have been trying to build the city of the future for more than 100 years,” says Rit Aggarwala, the executive in charge of Sidewalk Labs’ urban-systems planning. “But we really want to tap into [Toronto’s] existing vitality and character.”

Read more at TechnologyReview.com

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By Molly Balzano

On May 19th of this year, the City of New Orleans took down the last of four monuments in its city limits heralding white supremacy and heroes of the Confederacy. The final statute was of General Robert E. Lee, stern faced, arms crossed, and looming over the city. This past week, the removal of another statute of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, was the backdrop for violence and murder perpetrated by white supremacists. Contention over the preservation or removal of the Lee statues—and other Confederate monuments nationwide—reveals the need for a more sophisticated heritage discourse.

“That some would rally around a Confederate memorial as a symbol of their hateful worldview illustrates both the critical importance of what we do and the tough work ahead of us. Our complicated past not only lives on in the present, but has been distorted in too many minds by deliberate misinterpretation and silence. Now more than ever, we need to tell the full American story in an inclusive way, and draw attention to historic places that recognize the experiences, and embrace the contributions, of all our diverse citizens.”
- National Trust for Historic Preservation

Heritage studies is in its infancy, and, as such, the articulation and development of its theory has not reached the same level of sophistication as other disciplines. While much has been written about how to define heritage or what heritage encapsulates--such as Authorized Heritage Discourse, Cultural Heritage Management, and Values-Based Preservation--there is little critical theory addressing the formulation and critique of heritage interpretation.

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By Sarah Laskow

Commuting—the idea that home and work would require a journey of more than a mile or so—began in the United States in the 19th century, as Boston, Philadelphia, and other cities were connected by train lines to homes in the suburbs. By the second half of the 20th century, most American commuters were using cars.

According to the Department of Transportation, congestion in major American cities continues to creep up. While time spent in traffic decreased during the recession, when fewer people were driving to work, now car commutes are as onerous as ever. But the way that people commute is changing; in this country, for instance, the number of vehicle miles traveled per capita is still down compared to 2005. The population is growing and people are getting back to work, but fewer are depending on cars to get there. To a transportation expert, that counts as a dramatic development.

"We are seeing a sea change of reactions to transport innovations," says Kevin Krizek, a professor of environmental design at University of Colorado, Boulder, and author of the 2015 book The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport. (An updated third edition was released last year.) "The world is changing very quickly, and it’s influencing travel patterns in ways that are really tectonic."

Read more on Topic.com

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Photographs by Arko Datto

Human-induced climate change is causing the disappearance of Bangladesh’s important body of water, and its future remains in doubt

THE GANGES-BRAHMAPUTRA-MEGHNA DELTA—covering most of Bangladesh and part of India’s West Bengal—is the world's biggest delta and home to the Sundarbans, the largest contiguous halophytic (salt-tolerant) mangrove forest on earth. The Sundarbans, designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997, is now disappearing at a rapid rate.

Thanks to human-induced climate change, three-quarters of this brutal, ever-changing milieu—home to some 130 million people—risks destruction. Global warming is accompanied by other anthropogenic stress factors, including the exploitation of timber resources, agricultural expansion, and coastal development.

Read more on Topic.com

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By Rick Paulas

I live on an obnoxiously quaint block in South Berkeley, California, lined with trees and two-story houses. There’s a constant stream of sidewalk joggers before and after work, and plenty of (good) dogs in the yards. Trick-or-treaters from distant regions of the East Bay invade on Halloween.

Once a week, the serenity is interrupted by the sound of a horrific car crash. Sometimes, it’s a tire screech followed by the faint dint of metal on metal. Other times, a boom stirs the neighbors outside to gawk. It’s always at the intersection of Hillegass, my block, and Ashby, one of the city’s thoroughfares. It generally happens around rush hour, when the street is clogged with cars.

It wasn’t always this way. In 2001, the city designated the street as Berkeley’s first “bicycle boulevard,” presumably due to some combination of it being relatively free of traffic and its offer of a direct route from the UC Berkeley campus down into Oakland. But since that designation, another group has discovered the exploit. Here, for the hell of it, are other events that have occurred since 2001:

2005: Google Maps is launched.
2006: Waze is launched.
2009: Uber is founded.
2012: Lyft is founded.

“The phenomenon you’re experiencing is happening all over the U.S.,” says Alexandre Bayen, director of transportation studies at UC Berkeley.

Pull up a simple Google search for “neighborhood” and “Waze,” and you’re bombarded with local news stories about similar once-calm side streets now the host of rush-hour jams and late-night speed demons. It’s not only annoying as hell, it’s a scenario ripe for accidents; among the top causes of accidents are driver distraction(say, by looking at an app), unfamiliarity with the street (say, because an app took you down a new side street), and an increase in overall traffic.

Read more on NYMag.com

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By Barry Ritholtz

The children of baby boomers don't seek personal fulfillment through shopping.

Retail stores are on the front lines of an industry undergoing enormous and wrenching change amid huge shifts in consumer behavior. The simple complaint that online retailers are stealing sales from brick-and-mortar stores is unsatisfying. Online shopping may be convenient, offer an endless array of products, make price comparison easy, provide fast and cheap or even free delivery and so on. Yet despite these advantages, online sales amount to but 10 percent of all retail sales.

What is really going on?

American society has undergone a titanic secular transformation. Retail stores are the first to suffer the effects of this economic disruption. Generational change is affecting how consumers behave; not just how America shops, but for what, and for how much and even why.

Two broad economic trends set the backdrop: too much retail and too little gain in wages. America has built way too many stores and malls. Second, wages adjusted for inflation have been little changed for three decades; this has squeezed the middle class, especially when it comes to discretionary spending.

Read more on Bloomberg.com

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By BENJAMIN LESSER and RYAN MCNEILL

In the wake of a ferocious storm season, Reuters finds that homes built in violation of flood-mitigation rules add to the billions of dollars in claims on the already-broke federal flood insurance program.

PATTON VILLAGE, Texas – When Hurricane Harvey sent two feet of water rolling into this small community about 35 miles north of Houston, Alfredo Becerra had to flee his modest 1,500-square-foot house.

Muddy floodwater submerged the furniture and ruined carpet inside the construction worker’s longtime home. He has been living in temporary housing since the storm struck in August. He said the Federal Emergency Management Agency gave him $15,000 in aid.

One month later, across the Gulf of Mexico in Big Pine Key, Florida, moving company driver Byron Keeble lost about $10,000 worth of belongings, including a new sofa and his television, when Hurricane Irma sent a surge of seawater through his rented ground-floor apartment. Keeble said FEMA paid for him to stay in a hotel for a few weeks while he tried to figure out where he would go next.

Floodwaters aren’t the only common thread in the two men’s stories. Also linking them is this: Neither should have been living in harm’s way.

Becerra’s and Keeble’s homes were built or rented out in violation of National Flood Insurance Program rules. Like thousands of others in the hurricane-ravaged Florida Keys and on the Texas Gulf Coast, such houses are undermining efforts to limit flood damage, lower the cost of disaster assistance and reduce claims on the taxpayer-backed federal flood insurance program, a Reuters investigation found.

Similar rule-busting construction has happened in scores of communities across the United States, where local, state and federal officials have failed to enforce regulations intended to restrict building in areas at high risk of flooding.

Read more on Rueters.com

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By Hiroko Tabuchi

A team of researchers is destroying things — with wind, water and fire
— to help insurers manage the increasing risks of extreme weather.

WEST GLOCESTER, R.I. — In the backwoods of Rhode Island, a team of researchers spends whole days trying to destroy things: setting boxes on fire, shattering chunks of ice, hurling debris through the air at hurricane speed.

They work for an insurance company, FM Global, and the pandemonium simulates the hazards that are expected to strike with increasing frequency in this age of extreme weather.

“There’s a realization that hazards are changing, and we need to understand that,” said Louis Gritzo, the lab’s research manager, who has spent his career studying deadly risks. “This year will be a tipping point.”

Insurers have been vocal in warning of the dangers posed by climate change. Last year, total economic losses from natural disasters — many of them linked to climate change — reached $175 billion worldwide, the highest since 2012, according to the reinsurer Swiss Re.

Read more on NYTimes.com

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By Umair Irfan

Though seasonal wildfires are a natural occurrence in the Golden State, humans are making them worse and more dangerous every step of the way.

And California’s fires are just the latest unfolding tragedy in what has already been an epic fire season across the United States as a whole, with more than 9.2 million acres burned and smoke choking many parts of the West.

Fires are more damaging because we keep building in harm’s way

The California fires stretch the definition of “natural disaster” because human activities have exacerbated their likelihood, their extent, and their damage. Deliberate decisions and unintended consequences of urban development over decades have turned many parts of the state into a tinderbox.

This year’s blazes particularly stand out because of how close they are to suburbs and major cities.

“When we get wildfires close to residential areas, that’s what makes them extraordinary events,” said Heath Hockenberry, fire weather program manager at the National Weather Service. It’s also getting increasingly hard to keep people at a safe distance from the embers.

Read more on Vox.com

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By Antonia Hylton

In the last 15 years, one in three Detroit properties have been foreclosed on. When most people think of foreclosure, they think of people who can’t afford to pay off their mortgages.

But in Detroit, it’s often the result of people struggling to pay their property taxes. One big reason is that, in the years after the Great Recession, the city went bankrupt and failed to lower property assessments far enough to account for the impact of the housing crisis. While the value of residents’ homes fell, their taxes remained inordinately high, and tens of thousands of people fell so far behind on their inflated tax bills that the county seized their homes and sold them off at annual auctions.

In recent years, the city and county have lowered assessments and offered reduced interest rates to some homeowners. But they have no plans to stop punishing those who were overcharged in the past.

VICE News followed this year’s tax foreclosure auction and investigated how the county financially benefits from the process. As Detroit touts its comeback and celebrates its success in climbing out of the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history, many of the city’s residents remain on the brink of displacement.

Watch the video on Vice.com

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By Emily Badger

The places with the most opportunity used to attract the most new residents, in a cycle of fast-growing cities and rising prosperity. But no more.

The places that are booming in size aren’t the economic boomtowns — the regions with the greatest prosperity and highest productivity. In theory, we’d expect those metros, like the Bay Area, Boston and New York, to be rapidly expanding, as people move from regions with high unemployment and meager wages to those with high salaries and strong job markets.

That we’re not seeing such a pattern suggests that something is fundamentally amiss. The magnets aren’t working.

The metro areas that offered the highest pay in 2000 have grown by some of the slowest rates since then, while people have flocked to lower-wage metros like Las Vegas, Phoenix and Charlotte, N.C. Similarly, the metros with the highest G.D.P. per capita are barely adding workers relative to much less productive areas.

Some people aren’t moving into wealthy regions because they’re stuck in struggling ones. They have houses they can’t sell or government benefits they don’t want to lose. But the larger problem is that they’re blocked from moving to prosperous places by the shortage and cost of housing there. And that’s a deliberate decision these wealthy regions have made in opposing more housing construction, a prerequisite to make room for more people.

Read the full article on NYTimes.com

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By Anjali Nayar

Millions of people in cities rely on recorded nature sounds to manage sleep and stress, and scientists are slowly understanding why it works.

When Cale Holmes moved from Virginia to New York City for grad school, he started to have trouble sleeping.

All night long the trains thundered past his building, garbage trucks groaned, and police sirens wailed. In the mornings he was awoken by the sounds of construction: hammers banging, machines drilling, men shouting. He began to wear himself out every night before he got home, studying into the wee hours of the morning or hanging in bars drinking beer until he was ready to drop with exhaustion.

But one night, Holmes recalled how calm he used to feel whenever he visited a beach. He went to YouTube and ran a search for ocean sounds. Innumerable recordings of ocean waves popped up, some as long as 12 or 14 hours. He selected a nighttime version and let his room fill with the sound of the crashing of waves. He could also hear the wind howl and the cicadas chirp in the distance.

He lay back on his pillow.

The next thing he knew, warm sunlight was filtering in through the curtains. When he checked his laptop, he saw that the recording had paused at just after four minutes when the laptop had powered off.

Holmes had slipped into sleep effortlessly. “And I felt much better about the day the next morning,” he told me. “I felt my sleep was better. I even felt I had more self-esteem.”

How had the recording helped him so much? Was it that the sound had created a cocoon against the city noises? Or was there more to it? Several teams of researchers around the world have tried to find answers to these very questions.

Read more at Motherboard.vice.com

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By Alana Semuels

How can the country survive the next economic crash if millions of families still haven't recovered from the last one?

GLENDORA, California—In retrospect, refinancing their home was a bad idea. But the Santillan family never thought that it would lead them to foreclosure, or that they’d spend years bouncing among hotels and living in their car. The parents, Karina and Juan, never thought it would force three of their four children to leave the schools they’d been attending and take classes online, or require them to postpone college and their careers for years. They did not know they would still be recovering financially today, in 2017. “Having lived through everything I see life differently now,” Karina Santillan, who is now 47, told me. “I’m more cautious—I probably think through financial decisions three, four, five times.”

In the big picture, the U.S. economy has recovered from the Great Recession, which officially began a decade ago, in December of 2007. The current unemployment rate of 4.4 percent is lower than it was before the recession started, and there are more jobs in the economy than there were then (though the population is also bigger). But for some, the recession and its consequences are neverending, felt most strongly by families like the Santillans who lost jobs and homes. Understanding what these families have experienced, and why recovery has been so evasive, is key to assessing the economic risks the nation faces. Despite ever-sunnier economic conditions overall, the Great Recession is still rattling American families. When the next economic crisis hits, the losses could be even more profound. “There are people who still, to this day, are trying to get back on their feet,” Mark Zandi, the chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, told me. “These households are slowly finding their way back, but they’re still on a journey.”

Their struggles are present in the economic data, if you look closely enough. The labor-force participation rate, which measures the share of working-age adults who either have jobs or are looking for them, fell sharply during the recession, and remains at a decades-long low, at 62 percent. Lower-income families aren’t just not doing better; they are actually doing worse: The average household income of the bottom 20 percent of Americans fell $571 between 2006 and 2016, according to Census data, while for the top 20 percent of Americans it grew by $13,749.

Read more at TheAtlantic.com

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By Larissa MacFarquhar

As America’s rural communities stagnate, what can we learn from one that hasn’t?

 

range City, the county seat of Sioux County, Iowa, is a square mile and a half of town, more or less, population six thousand, surrounded by fields in every direction. Sioux County is in the northwest corner of the state, and Orange City is isolated from the world outside—an hour over slow roads to the interstate, more than two hours to the airport in Omaha, nearly four to Des Moines. Hawarden, another town, twenty miles away, is on the Big Sioux River, and was founded as a stop on the Northwestern Railroad in the eighteen-seventies; it had a constant stream of strangers coming through, with hotels to service them and drinking and gambling going on. But Orange City never had a river or a railroad, or, until recently, even a four-lane highway, and so its pure, hermetic culture has been preserved.

Orange City is small and cut off, but, unlike many such towns, it is not dying. Its Central Avenue is not the hollowed-out, boarded-up Main Street of twenty-first-century lore. Along a couple of blocks, there are two law offices, a real-estate office, an insurance brokerage, a coffee shop, a sewing shop, a store that sells Bibles, books, and gifts, a notions-and-antiques store, a hair-and-tanning salon, and a home-décor-and-clothing boutique, as well as the Sioux County farm bureau, the town hall, and the red brick Romanesque courthouse.

Read more on NewYorker.com

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By Hiroko Tabuchi

Bursting pipes. Leaks. Public health scares.

America is facing a crisis over its crumbling water infrastructure, and fixing it will be a monumental and expensive task.

Two powerful industries, plastic and iron, are locked in a lobbying war over the estimated $300 billion that local governments will spend on water and sewer pipes over the next decade.

It is a battle of titans, raging just inches beneath our feet.

“Things are moving so fast,” said Reese Tisdale, president of the water advisory firm Bluefield Research. And it’s a good thing, he says: “There are some pipes in the ground that are 150 years old.”

How the pipe wars play out — in city and town councils, in state capitals, in Washington — will determine how drinking water is delivered to homes across America for generations to come.

Read the full article on NYTimes.com

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