A New Way to Do Affirmative Action?
I was prepared to dislike Sheryll Cashin’s Place, Not Race, just based on the title. However, the author largely won me over.
A Voyeur’s View
The author's treatment of race is, at best, contradictory and, at worst, hypocritical and probably the book’s great failing.
How the Community Reinvestment Act Can Help Flint
The audacious and callous decisions leading to the tragedy in Flint, Michigan are cruel and beyond comprehension. What is needed is an all-out effort...
Interview with Ai-jen Poo, Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance
Ai-Jen Poo has been organizing with domestic workers for over 15 years, helping in New York to win some of the first statewide labor protections for occupations often exempt from labor laws, and expanding this campaign to a nationwide vision for a strong caregiving workforce and infrastructure for elder care. In 2014 she became a MacArthur Fellow, but this was hardly her first award.
Let’s Transform the Zip Codes
The counties and parishes in the Mid South characterized by persistent poverty have the highest unemployment rates, the lowest performing schools, and the worst health.
A Nation—and Neighborhoods—of Immigrants
The story of neighborhood populations changing with waves of migrants is a classic part of the history of American cities. We are, as most...
Filmmaker Needs to Look at the Whole Picture
I Got Schooled: The Unlikely Story of How a Moonlighting Moviemaker Learned the Five Keys to Closing America’s Achievement Gap, by M. Night Shyamalan. Simon & Schuster. 306 pp. $25.00 (hardcover). Purchase here.
Doubling Down on Community Resilience
Last month here in Rooflines, I argued that place-based community development can make low-income neighborhoods more resilient to climate...
The Urban, Dystopian Blame Game
Like any number of small- and big-screen thrillers, the film’s engagement with 9/11 is diffuse, more a matter of inference and ideas (chaos, fear,...
Rich Neighborhood in NYC Actually Gets a “Noxious” Use
A core environmental justice fight has long been the fair distribution of necessary nuisance uses throughout a city. Poor neighborhoods tend to be over-burdened...
Attitudes Toward Exploited Cities Helped Poison Flint
Flint’s water crisis started long before corrosive river water starting running through its pipes. Though there’s no question that those who signed off on...
What Have We Learned a Decade after the Gulf Coast Hurricanes?
As the housing community reflects in August on the tenth anniversary of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, what are the...
Detours on the Road Home
Serious flaws in the Road Home program have kept many hard-working homeowners from coming back to the Lower 9th Ward. Let’s not repeat them after the next disaster.
Building Multiculturally
One culture’s idea of the ideal house is different from another. Luckily, floor plans are adaptable.
The Justice Gap
The post-Katrina work of legal services lawyers shows that if you care about equity, legal aid belongs high on the list of crucial disaster recovery programs.
Learning to Stretch
Community development corporations find ways to embrace new immigrant communities and new challenges.
A Stubborn Gap
The difference in aggregate home value between blacks and whites in the American South has remained startlingly steady through periods of dramatic social change.
All Aboard, America
The weekend before Barack Obama and Joe Biden take the oath of office, I can’t help but remark on the seeming missed opportunity for...
Does a Sustainable Community Need a Good Drinking Establishment?
My friend Eliot Allen first introduced me to the concept of neighborhood completeness: that the quality of a place is defined in part by...
Poverty Today Looks Completely Different and That’s Important
This is Part 1 in a series about the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty. Click here for ...