Chris Arnade’s Dignity is a striking look into the faces of “back row” America—the poor, the homeless, the addicted, the forgotten. And it’s a challenge to us as a society to design policies that respond to their needs and values.
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This place is a work horse. It grows small businesses from scratch without recourse to bank loans or government subsidies. It provides products and experiences that are genuinely needed in the community. And it costs almost nothing to create.
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What would it actually cost to put a roof over the head of every person experiencing chronic homelessness? Some number crunching suggests not as much as you think, and an amount we could afford—especially given what it already costs not to.
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Ever heard someone say, “You can’t live in that part of town if you have kids. The schools are bad!” In this classic podcast episode from 2015, Chuck Marohn talks with Steven Shultis of Rational Urbanism about the myths vs. reality of urban schools.
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Whether at the neighborhood or metropolitan level, more job growth doesn’t seem to improve economic mobility. What does is social capital.
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Ferguson, Missouri is still relying on so-called “fines and forfeitures” for a significant amount of its revenue.
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When the housing market is depressed and you can’t get a return on your investment, there is little incentive to put any money into improvements. It’s a vicious cycle that several Akron nonprofits are trying to break.
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A city is a living organism, and we should tend to it as such. A city dies when it is treated as, and functions, as a machine.
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Using “urban acupuncture,” we acquire the worst vacant house on each block and renovate it.
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In the city of Milwaukee, like so many other communities, it is the poorest residents who bear the brunt of dangerous street design.
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Overheated rhetoric and protest from all sides over neighborhood change are a reflection of the insecurity many of us feel over the future of places we love.
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An all-or-nothing development environment creates a built-in bias toward big actors who can weather wide market swings and are in a position to exploit them for profit.
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If urbanists want a successful, lasting renaissance of inner-city neighborhoods, they should allow the people who stuck it out through the lean years a controlling stake in their neighborhoods' rebirth.
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The things that get labeled as “gentrification” refer to a set of real, meaningful, widely held concerns, and that choice of label should never be an excuse to dismiss those concerns.
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What makes one building worth saving and another worth destroying?
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Writer Chris Arnade talks about a life getting to know people on the margins of society—people living in poverty and dealing with addiction—and the struggles of small towns in America.
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Everyone seems to have an opinion on gentrification. But what does the word actually mean?
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Instead of trying to improve access to healthy food with a big, expensive bet that's bound to fail, why not work with successful existing businesses that residents already utilize?
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$46 million in government subsidies supported the construction of a supermarket to fill a need in a New Jersey food desert. A year and half later, it closed. What happened?
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The real impetus for the invention of zoning regulations was a desire to protect and enshrine the single-family home as the most virtuous and sacrosanct urban form.
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