Five urbanist goodreads for a cold fall day.
Tonight and tomorrow are supposed to be windy, rainy and cold. Curl up with your favorite device and dive into these excellent long-reads.
Stroad Nation — Strong Towns
Decline isn’t a result of poverty. The converse is actually true: poverty is the result of decline. Once you understand that decline is baked into the process of building auto-oriented places, the poverty aspect of it becomes fairly predictable. The streets, the sidewalks, the houses and even the appliances were all built in the same time window. They all are going to go bad at roughly the same time. Because there is a delay of decades between when things are new and when they need to be fixed, maintaining stuff is not part of the initial financial equation. Cities are unprepared to fix things — the tax base just isn’t there — and so, to keep it all going, they try to get more easy growth while they take on lots of debt.
Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn dives into Ferguson and comes away with larger points about the way we design, build, and tax our communities.
Further Reading: BuzzFeed’s How Ferguson’s Rotting Suburbia Created A Powder Keg.
In America’s Poorest City, a Housing Breakthrough — CityLab
“Somebody who makes $8.50 an hour, they’re never asked, ‘What do you want?’” Mitchell-Bennett points out. “The longest part of it is getting them out of their shell.” The new process pays off in the clients’ sense of empowerment and ownership, he says. “By the end of the process … they designed this house.”
Over one third of Brownsville, Texas residents live below the poverty line. Amanda Kolson Hurley profiles an innovative partnership between a design studio and community development corporation that is bringing well designed affordable houses to the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
Come High Water: Preservation and Resilience in Cedar Rapids, Iowa -PreservationNation Blog
While the town has made many strides in restoring its historic commercial districts and neighborhoods in the wake of the flood, each day there is a reminder of the community’s past ordeal. But it’s often the most traumatic events that spur action.
Daniel Ronan writes about the cities successes and failures in preserving historic buildings after the great flood.
Liberalism and Gentrification — Jacobin Magazine
One advantage to living in DC is that these liberal niceties are being quickly thrust aside: here the word “gentrification” has lost its pejorative sense, ceasing to scandalize the yuppies who proudly reclaim the term as they “reclaim” homes and neighborhoods from the communities who have lived here for decades.
Gavin Mueller argues that the typical discussion around gentrification ignores the role of government and developers in the process in favor of the common narrative of old residents versus new ones. Rather that this narrative Mueller argues gentrification is the result of the choices made by governments and developers from the top down and manufactures strife between the poor and the middle class.
Gentrification May Actually Be Boon To Longtime Residents — NPR
But a series of new studies are now showing that gentrifying neighborhoods may be a boon to longtime residents as well — and that those residents may not be moving out after all.
Laura Sullivan’s article highlights studies that show that gentrification doesn’t push out older residents and might actually improve their quality of life.
