I spent some time this week on a solo episode talking about my personal needs to defy gentrification. My hot topic is something I’ve been boiling over for decades, teen curfews.
Also, I apologize for the rough audio, I had to do another take and didn’t realize my mic wasn’t working well.
But, I figured out how to upload the main episode feed here with a transcript! However, I would love it if you still streamed on Apple and Spotify, to continue to grow my numbers and catch up on any episodes you may have missed! We are at 500 downloads and counting with a month into being back on the podcast mic! Also, please rate and review at those platforms as well.
Finally, if you want to upload the raw RSS feed into your favorite podcast player, you can do so as well.
RSSfeed
Or you can listen to all episodes right here on WordPress:
Then Senator Kamala Harris in 2017 in Virginia with Virginians (United States Senate — The Office of Kamala Harris, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
Welcome back to what I call my UnGentrified Front Porch, the home each week for my essay of the week and some of my vlogs and project photos from my other social media accounts. Soon, I’ll resume hosting a weekly livestream Q&A and releasing new episodes of my podcast Defying Gentrification. However,you can head to YouTube to listen to any streams and episodes you may have missed! And read below to my thoughts this week, on the inevitability of our first (Black, South Asian) woman president in the so-called United States and how it really feels when we need a stronger image and push of liberation.
It’s no secret that I am depressed. Well, it started as anxiety, and it’s clinically complex post-traumatic stress disorder (cPTSD), but it’s a regular feeling of malaise.
If you found my words because of Substack sending you here, you might just think this is a well-written grief project about the effects of gentrification on my body, mind, and career in urban planning and nonprofit communication across the lower 48 of the so-called United States.
If LinkedIn is how you found me, you might consider me “bold” or “courageous” for being so real about how my career has been affected not just by the places I live, but the messiness of being in the empire’s service. Depending on your occupation and political leanings, you may either be joyfully in agreement or cautiously curious or concerned with care about me even calling it “the messiness of being in the empire’s service.”
If you’ve listened to my podcast or ever heard one of my speeches, interviews, or panels, you’ll hear everything I just said in my slightly flattened Southern (US) accent. This accent indicates that I am the daughter who migrated far from home. It also shows me as an entity and vessel of the shame that comes from moving about the country and feeling the pressure to conform and contort, but I make sure I still carry my roots in my voice.
This brings me to my analysis of our President-Elect. Yes, I’m speaking it into existence, because unlike in 2016, a few things have happened that tell me this is going on to be the time and place. And such as it is, my Black queer radical working-class feminist personage has the fruitful intersectionality to tell you what’s about to happen and has happened.
In this so-called country, with its tepid values of freedom, if we are putting a Black (yes, even a light-skinned and also South Asian) woman in charge of ourselves, then we absolutely require her to say all the “right things”.
Even if they are terrible things.
And yes, there’s good mixed in and there is honest care and concern. Yes, she probably has moments and family and friends you can relate to.
And yes, you might see yourself as beyond all of this. You’re even working on all levels, first in your body, then your immediate community, and chosen family towards resistance and renewal. You’re blocking as much of this fascism and conformity as you can, pulling those roots and building from it a better, more inclusive space.
But we share a citizenry and land space with those who have a very different view and when you average it all out, you get what you saw at the Democratic National Convention (DNC).
You get a president-elect, who will be a president-elect, that fits the moment. And that moment is a muddy stew of everything of which we are complicit.
However, I want this to be a moment where you think hard about how you really feel about Black women and those who present partially or fully as what we consider feminine in this society.
For those of us who are Black embodied in such a way, what do you see when you look in the mirror. What has respectability told you, you “need to do”?
This is where I ask you why you might be bothered at me telling the truth of how it is, instead of more bothered that yet we have another sista/sibling who has had to for lack of a better illustration “ high-tech shuck and jive” so that we can save our lives. Lives that in some cases would turn right on back around and snuff ours out, because they are on their way to getting theirs.
And to my non-Black melanated siblings, especially at this moment to those who are so bent on being that model minority instead of weeping and wailing with me at the loss of your autonomy of the stewardship on your lands, what say you in the mirror?
Also, some of y’all are radical and want to think you know us, and believe that we only come in the flavor of respectability outside of your bookshelf or social media feed, but where are your in-person, on the group chat comrades who look, feel, and sound like me? When we do rebuild the system, are we really there? Or will you be just as carceral to us as you were to the old system because you think that anti-Blackness is always okay and that our skin and ways still preclude our globe from ever being clean?
And then we get to those under white skin. Even some of you who have shaken off gender, race, and ability limitations and prejudices. Your elders and peers got us here. You can’t ignore them. And maybe blame their lust for bombs and guns and control for getting us here. For seducing us with propagandas that make us feel good, but are full of worms.
This is where we are on this globe. But we can do better. And it starts with the mirror. Rest with it, be with it. And then let’s talk about what we can or can’t do.
****
I want to end this letter on a different note, that I’m glad I was able to get to Podcast Movement and the National Book Festival this week. It reminded me of the roots of my creative practice and I was overjoyed that so many of my fellow creatives were able to connect and that I likewise got to meet some of you. Oh and we snuck in a Washington Mystics Game that included a Hall of Fame Ceremony for Alana Beard
Here are my short films of:
My experience on Day 2 of the Podcast Movement
The Washington Mystics Game
And, the National Book Festival
Now, I’m hunkered down and still testing negative, but I am glad I got to experience these things. And yes, crochet carried me through, both on my body and in my hands!
There are limits to power and fame in an imperialistic society. Let this be the week and the century that we create a better society, from joy and grounded peace.
Many of you have noticed changes in my Twitter and Instagram bio, that I’ve been “interested” in more queer events on Facebook, and others have had the pleasure to meet Les, my partner, in person or you’ve known her from her own work in faith-based LGBTQ and transportation advocacy (and you should get to know her videos and life coaching and endometriosis advocacy and our merch line we colaborated on together!). She’s been with me on all my speaking visits over the past two years and we’ve both been helping each other with our various business and community ventures.
Plus, two years ago today, on National Coming Out Day 2018, after a wonderful date night at Midlands after years of knowing each other casually, we decided to start a life journey together, as lovers and friends.
However, in the past and directly, I’ve been hesitant to talk about this part of my life and it has affected how I do this work and how much I pride myself on being transparent. Yet, I believe that this is the time to address this. I wrote a draft of this about 18 months ago, but I believe today is the day to bring this draft into the light.
Before I get started, a warning to both family who are reading this and finding out for the first time and family who may have spoken to my mom or who are concerned about my mom.
First of all, I still love you all and if that love doesn’t extend back to me, I understand. Secondly , I told mom privately when I was last home in Greensboro in the spring of 2019 and I ask that you allow her the space to process this and that you refrain from asking her any questions or making judgements on her and how she’s raised me and treated me over the years.
If you are tempted to make these and other similar judgements, please remember that this is not about you. This is not an attack on my mom (or on you, mom), our family, our reputation and as church people. This is not an attack on my family raising me in the best way they knew how. This is not me wasting my beauty or my brain or giving up.
I identify as a pansexual polyamorous non-binary femme (pronouns she/her/they), who is willing and able and has fallen into a committed, loving, monogamous relationship no matter who or how that person presents/is. This also does not mean I’m turning into a male person or will start presenting more masculine as a rule. I still like all the same things I like. I’m happy with my body and how it’s proportioned. Also, I support all other sexual and gender expressions that are loving and consensual.
I know this is an agree-to-disagree notion some of you. I believe we were born holy, are always holy, but sometimes fall astray and need reminders from God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and folks sanctioned under their power to share this truth. I also know everything under the banner of gender and sexual uniqueness is under the purview of the perfect creation of God. The verses that explciitly condem same-sex or gender-noncomformity I believe have a context for which they were written, that doesn’t necessarily affect our situations. I also believe that we can support civil rights for everyone, without necessarily understanding each individual. We were not all created queer and not every queer expression, just like not every hetero expression of love is holy. But some of us were created queer, our queerness is holy and we need to acknowledge this in our faith communities.
One way I illustrate this is that many of us, especially in the black church, have no issue with allowing women to participate in the full body of worship, namely being or speaking in the pulpit. Yet, the Apostle Paul found that to be a distraction in one of the churches he was writing to and he told those specific women to not speak. However, women spoke and were active in church work in other places, plus, there were lots of women doing work for Jesus and all through the Old Testament. I believe that the scripture we have was God’s word for those specific people and much like God spoke directly to them, they (and yes they, I’ll save that for another post), still speak to us and work with us with the situations they gave us to live out.
And yes, I made a choice, but it’s only a choice to no longer live a lie.
I’m suffering through purple rage and I need to let it go to keep my business and creativity alive.
I built this site nearly a decade ago (and my work on blogs over the last 15 years) to be real, raw and honest about what we can do for the community. Over these years, I’ve been exposed to so much outside of my childhood bubble and I’ve grown so much. Yet, not addressing this directly and firmly has been eating away at me and making me publicly rageful, jealous and resentful. If you’ve been at a happy hour (or even on a few Zoom calls) with me recently, you’ve witnessed some of this. I apologize for anyone I hurt with this behavior, but know I’ve been trying to sort through things a lot of us do as teenagers. Writing this post is helping me heal and start the process of healing relationships–both with people as well as with my work and visibility. I also forgive you, but understand if you can’t forgive me.
We need to stop being prejudiced, racist, and genderphobic in our own community of queer people and in how we apply our urbanism.
I’m sick of the white gay men purporting to speak for (or in some cases use their power to tear down) neighborhoods and spaces that have rich culture and life without them getting into the mix and meddling with what makes those communities special or even better, using their priviledge as white bodies to help us be heard or raise money. This is the root of a lot of the protesting around prides over the last few years, that in their corporatization, they’ve started to mirror non-queer society in how they margialize non-cis, non-white bodies. I’ve felt compelled to always live in cities and move to larger ones, because I’m committed to building community in the black queer community. Because of what I shared above, we struggle a little more at times. Love is defintely love, but it’s really sweet when I can wake up next to my black lesbian partner and have her understand what we need and the struggles. I also hope that as more folks feel comfort in being out and proud, that we get more diversity in expressions and more people feel comfortable dating each other. However, we do not need to favor whiteness or cisness or even wealth. We all have worth and value.
The Death of a Inspiration
The person that helped me to start unpack my harmful theology, not just around queerness, but around patriarchy and white supremacy in our churches and our faith, Rachel Held Evans, died on Saturday May 4, 2019 from complications of the flu, a UTI and an antibiotic she took to heal those other two. She was only 37 (just four years older than me!) and left behind a husband, a three-year-old and a barely one-year old. She was white, grew up in the Evangelical bubble (church, college and also early writings on faith and action), straight and cis and she had her own blind spots around race and even with our affirmation as queer. But she got up daily for over a decade and through her blog and books confronted the notion that only straight cis white men get messages from God that hold weight and authority. Her breakdown of Proverbs 31, her attempt to follow all the rules in the Bible for women, her making peace with needing a different worship experience and now, all the people across the Christian world who have something positive to say about how she challenged them, and challenged them in the way those of us who are current or past evangelicals know and appreciate, with lots of well-stated scripture and a heart for love. She truly had a prophetic voice and it’s this voice that continues to inspire me to speak truth to power, over myself and over our communities.
I’m in love and she’s my best friend and she makes me a better urbanist, a better Christian and a better citizen, friend, daughter, etc. Our urbanism needs to make room for queerness that isn’t just white and cis male. Our faith communities really need to examine how we look at the words that God has given us and the internal words that the Spirit speaks to us. Also, for those of you who don’t practice or hold different beliefs outside of the Christian fold, know that I love and respect you too and just like I’m Black, I’m also queer and Christian and that’s the spirit of where this comes from.
Finally, this is something I’ve known about myself since puberty and something that I take one day at a time. However, I do believe it is time for me to speak about this so that I can know where I stand with everyone in my life and so we can continue the greater work of restoration in our communities.
Recently, I was made aware of and responded to this series of threads on Twitter, that among my colleagues in the D.C. area, there’s a concern over how many practitioners of place, especially planners, exist in the metro area and how many folks want to be planners by name, versus just doing the work in many different aspects of the field. I’ve heard this before, from planners and related advocates, architects, engineers and others who do community work of all races and from all other regions of the U.S. I’m not surprised and I do know why I hear this so much. I’ve talked about it before, but as I’ll mention in the final section, I want to shift my thoughts and takes back to this site, where I own the server space and have plenty of room to link to things. First, few clients exist in need of architecture and building services as well as transportation planning and operations, that don’t already have existing contracts and people they use. Even for general environmental planning, or acceptance of environmental injustice, there’s a drought. Your client base/employment options are limited greatly. The one most people are aware of are government entities, which have all kinds of requirements to ensure fairness and equity in the awarding of work contracts to firms, but sometimes can be cumbersome and create competitive environments. Also, for legal reasons, which yes, have merit, you have to be careful what you talk about and who you talk to when it comes to these competitions. Which can be hard when most of the people you compete with were at one point studio classmates or internship cubemates. Or even better, roommates or lovers. Plus, if you elect to work in-house with a government entity, you have other ethical considerations and gag orders, which again, are often necessary. Finally, some things, like public transit, just make more sense to be governed by you know, the government and for their privatization to be regulated, if there’s privatization at all. Or, you work with private for or non-profit developers, without government funding, some who are in the business to create things that make our world better and some are in the business to take from others and make gobs of money from themselves. Now for-profit doesn’t always mean capitalist monster, just like non-profit doesn’t always mean charitable and for the people. Many places need to build or renovate homes, build or renovate transportation systems and honestly, build or renovate a lot of other pieces of the built environment or society. However, there’s even a limit there to how much people can build and operate. Speaking of the nonprofits, you could be or work with an advocacy group with a dash of service provision, but you’re often getting your money from government grants, private grants or private banks, so there’s not that much difference from what I mentioned above. There’s also a size issue, some contracting firms might as well be power brokers, while others like me are just small shingles. Basically, if you’re new to the idea of planners/architects/engineers/contracting, all these firms operate and build like law firms and attorneys as well as media outlets and journalists. We also have lawyers in our clubhouse too and they can tell you what their lives have been like as they’ve seen a shortage in labor and emphasis on big versus small especially over the last 10 years. And this site, if you haven’t already picked that up is a journalistic outfit ;). The next big argument against a growing class of capital p planners is the public will of the citizenry. Some well-meaning folks, as well as your usual villains in many jurisdictions and metro areas, fail to provide adequate funding, maintenance and even just the creation of adequate transportation, housing, environmental quality, and education systems. For that, I do suggest that more people with a good grasp of land use planning, construction, and operations, run for elective office and approve budgets that fund these things, as well as go to public meetings, especially ones that offer you the chance to pick budget items to fund or for items that are in active stages of construction or pre-construction, where changes can be made. Then there’s human prejudice, marginalization and power dynamics unrelated to land use and planning, that still affect the profession. This encompasses the lingering hurt and harm done to those of us who started as enthusiasts or hobbyists of architecture or transportation systems, as well as the marginalization of community groups or communities period, especially black, brown, queer and poor groups. Plus, some groups just don’t talk to each other or talk over each other. I can’t tell you how many arguments, especially online, would be solved if the two entities would do a thorough review of the bodies of work and life experiences that have been shared, on the internet, as well as in offline resources. Not just professional work, but considering how lived experiences affect how people see the world, especially the environment which we all battle over. All this gets wrapped up into how we interact and I think that to go forward, we have to address this elephant. This conversation hits me so much because it’s directly related to why I’m going through a tough time. In doing my reader’s survey, I learned that many of you started following me (or at least those of you still paying attention enough to fill out my survey), in or after 2014. Since that’s the case, you may have only realized in passing how much the loss of my dad in 2013 has reshaped almost every aspect of my life. I think that taking a detour into what brought me to this post today, which has been discussed in other parts of the site before, is valid because some of you have yet to peruse the archives! When he was living, my dad was a very an active force on how I approached the built environment. From him teaching me how to ride and care for a bike, to me going along on some of his electrical contracting jobs and sometimes to the school buildings he helped maintain, to the way he never met a stranger and how proud he was of my achievements (my degrees were on HIS resume), he had a very outsized presence in my life and loved being part of my online stories and life. He also understood what it’s like to struggle with the ups and downs of having a professional services business, and also needing a job to pay benefits. He went through open discrimination on the job. When I would cry about my own similar issues, instead of just leaving things as that’s the way it is (and he would say that in a Walter Cronkite voice impression), we would scheme about how to change and fix it. Neither of us would accept no for an answer and we didn’t accept that just because that’s the way it is, that’s the way it should stay. Then, all of a sudden, 50% of him was gone due to a major accident in 2010 and finally, all of him was gone over Memorial Day weekend of 2013. Not having my parent to debate the ways of the world unconditionally with, lurched me into a state of trying to find that in other family members, friends and colleagues. It, along with the awareness of middle-class, suburban Black American police shootings and other random racialized violence and incidents, plus microaggressions that ballooned in my post-graduate school, post-2013 working environments drew me into the state of rage that James Baldwin so eloquently illustrated. It also fuels, much like Baldwin, my want and love of travel and moving away from bad situations. Additionally, my mom and several other family members with similar experiences of racism and business-making are more private people and that’s why I share very little of them on here. While I love how connected the Internet makes us, I’m a firm believer in respecting privacy and that some things will always remain secret. However, I wouldn’t have felt the need to move so much, if one, there were other options professionally to fix the mistake that got me fired from my design services firm in Greensboro in 2014 and the dating life I’ve not really had anywhere, especially given my sensitivity to partners, namely male, respecting my brain and ambitions. Plus, political work often leaves you with more enemies than friends and such a critical analysis of what’s wrong with society, it’s very difficult to see and embrace what’s working right. I’m dealing with the opposite of what my colleague Chuck Marohn has shared recently. There’s very little of the negative I don’t see, I just don’t comment on everything and clearly, this website has been stringing cobwebs as I just realized this is my first full blog post that isn’t a newsletter copy I’ve written in 2018. When I left North Carolina for Kansas City in 2015, I felt like I was giving up on North Carolina, as I discussed in great detail last year. I felt like I couldn’t be a die-hard supporter of the betterment of my home state without being in said state. On the other hand of the lack of urbanist media focus on North Carolina, alternatives to car transportation, alternatives to certain kinds of single and multi-family housing, and the issues mentioned above, made me believe that I couldn’t do what I wanted to do in North Carolina. I brought that baggage with me to Kansas City, along with the pull of a partner who lived in what I considered the optimal environment for urbanist debate and planning, as it had some of the functions that we all advocate for, as well as again, a class of folks who love to debate and talk about it constantly. I would no longer get teased or harassed for only talking about this at the expense of other things. (Mind you, doing anything, including being an urbanist, in excess, is a recipe for disaster). So when I left Kansas City for D.C. in 2016, my goal was to establish myself in that greater collective of urbanist minds thinking through solutions on a national level. However, as has been well documented, this moving back east plan backfired. I’ve barely made any real money, wrecked my credit and ability to have credit lines, barely had health insurance and healthcare and of course, the relationship that was the foundation of my move to D.C. broke down. Somehow I’ve managed to scrape by, but it’s taken me moving all around and thankfully, folks still finding value in these kinds of writings on the sense of place and the experience of being out in the world. That and finding a flexible barista gig that will finally come with full benefits. And before that, having a community up in Baltimore that took me in when things got really tight and tough in D.C. Additionally, in many cities, including the ones in my home state, as well as the greater Kansas City region, we are a very culturally in-tune people and in cities where rail, bike-share, and enhanced bus services are available, we do park our cars and use those services. We also know how to park our cars and walk down our one-two main streets. And yes, there may only be a couple, but they are well utilized. This happens across class and race lines as well. I had to learn this the hard way as well, that I’ve been way too pretentious for my own good, in assuming that other cities would never be capable of the urbanity I so wanted from them. Finally, having traveled and worked in so many states and the District of Columbia, I’ve found that every state and the District has some form of discriminatory or structural issue that causes marginalization. Plus, migration as a whole creates multiple cultural awareness and needs to balance one’s personality with one’s environment. I hope that with this post, it’s clear, to both new and old followers and colleagues, exactly why I decided to leave North Carolina, come and go from Kansas City and come and go to the Greater Washington/Baltimore region, as well as travel often and broaden my ideals of land use and environmental thought, planning and doing. Additionally, this is how I would like to address the elephant of too many planners in too few places.
Acknowledge that all cities are different, and have different land use and planning needs, therefore creating many urbanisms/rualisms/placeisms, etc. Also, I’ve debated replacing my references to urbanism, with placeism. Placeism is the concern with all aspects of land use and natural environments, urbanism focuses mostly on the densification of those environments. Dr. Lisa Schweitzer has a great breakdown of how she uses the terminology and echoes things I’ve said in this post and in prior posts. I also invite anyone who is unfamiliar with the urban to rural transect to get to know more about that and use that to help as you advocate formally, design and build things and especially in these online arguments where people want to create a utopia in ten tweets. Also, feel free to engage ways that the transect is limiting and build upon this to establish a standard of broadening how we talk about the environments we inhabit. Coming to terms with the differences in terrain and resources is also helpful if you’re in the field in a jurisdiction that doesn’t have some of the infrastructure you want and need, to start productive conversations with people about that, that may yield the support system that you absolutely need to not go crazy like I did and jump off the proverbial cliff. Finally, let’s get out of the habit of saying X person or groups of people suck for having to drive or having to live in a cul-de-sac or only being able to shop at Walmart, when we need to be yelling at public officials, proposing new ordinances and maybe suing dishonest developers for creating this environment. Everyone shouldn’t have to be a planner to make sure we don’t get mistreated as citizens.
You don’t have to be a capital p planner, capital a architect, capital d developer, capital e engineer or some other bold-faced title to make it in this world, but it makes it easier if you have a history of discrimination or marginalization to have this layer of professional knowledge. This was the core of the most recent tweets, that you don’t have to be a planner to make a difference. However, we need to absolutely acknowledge that for some folks, especially from marginalized and disrespected backgrounds, it’s not so much that they need to have the job title, but the security of the letters next to their name or a paper certificate to be taken seriously. Let’s also make sure we stop making people feel the need to over-credential just to get paid what they are worth or recieve job and project assignments on which they will be excellent.
If someone says they want to launch a career in a land use and planning related field, offer to sit down with them and launch out a plan. You can plan a career and not get afoul of reporting requirements for government grants or even threaten your own job and space in the profession. I will say that in one conversation where I heard there were too many planners in D.C. and I was one of them, this person gave me some excellent book recommendations and jobs to consider. The tweet stream I reference also has good ideas of how other jobs can still allow you to make places better and stronger. Additionally, I’ve added a resources section to this site and developing some offline resources to help you and others make the right decisions about where to plant yourselves in the greater land use world. In the meantime, my short guide on figuring out your career in this world. Also, don’t be as stubborn as me and not listen when people do offer to help until it’s almost too late.
I wrote this post because I wanted to spell out in more than 250 characters tied into multiple threads, how much this subject of who does what in the land use and planning world, affects me. I feel like so much is lost in the current environment of Twitter and Facebook, where we value hot takes and yelling at the choir of our individual Facebook groups, over the long-form solution making that even venues like this often don’t meet. I also want to establish a standard for myself and our profession going forward. That we all sit at a big table, and there’s room for all of us, as long as we come to sit there with mutual respect and the mind that we will push for solutions, even if that solution is to do nothing and let things be. No one is perfect all the time, but no one is beyond reproof, restitution or forgiveness either. Finally, this site is about to look very different and will no longer just be me sharing ideas and resources. I’m looking forward to returning in a few weeks with new things that I believe will help us all become better at what we do. In the meantime, introducing my Resources page and my job/opportunities b
You can do this thing called life and you can do it in whatever city you need to as a young black professional. Why and how? I am.
You may remember I asked this question of myself and of my home state back in 2014. What does one need to do to find belonging and a sense of place in America, especially the America we currently sit in? How does one cope with double consciousness? How does one deal with microaggressions? How do we fight back or resist? Do we get to survive fighting back and resisting?
I decided I wanted to dive deeper in the things that I do to help cope with being a person in a particular place, especially when you choose to engage with the civic life and the placemaking aspects of it. In my next post, I’ll talk about what governments and institutions can do to make things easier for people living in their jurisdiction, no matter the size or the amenities. But here, the things I’m doing in an individual level, for self-care and self-improvement as I live my city life.
Making peace with my alone time
Even though I’ve moved to bigger cities to find more activities and people, they don’t always happen every night, people get busy and in my case, I can’t afford to go out every night. Plus, I don’t live with roommates in the traditional sense. With that said, I’ve started to feel better about watching TV and spending time on productive internet sites and reading actual books! The time to myself helps me come up with better ideas for writing and new ideas to work on my existing projects.
Finding my own personal hobbies and entertainment
Goes with the first step. But this deals with what I do outwardly. I’ve started to search Meetups. Through that meetup I found a really cool screenwriting club. I’m hoping to use Meetup it to bring me back to performing music. And to sort of re-launch Plan to Speak, my public speaking and presentation design course platform. I’ve started to meet people out of my normal circles and I’m starting to get way more positive energy, which helps me chase away the down moments.
Shifting productively from being the only one in a room, to one of many, back to being the only one again especially when it comes to race, class, gender and orientation
I’m used to having to do things and look around and watch my back. I still have to, but I also have started to notice that I’m not the only in the room. That’s giving me room to be more of myself in situations where I’m not being depended on to be the token or the “definitive black voice”. I will say, if you’re in a situation where you’re still the only, you still have no obligation to be this voice. It’s even more vital to find people, even if they are online and you have to Skype them to see them, who allow and encourage you to be 100% yourself. I have those kinds of people here in the flesh and it’s a great help when I begin to deal with the next bullet.
Recognizing and responding to insecurity, both in myself and in others.
I’ve had to realize that especially in the smaller places I’ve lived, that there’s often an unspoken competition between people in the same industry or of the same gender or racial identity or even just between where I think I should be versus where I actually am. The difference in where I am now is not that this spirit of competition has gone away, but that I’ve recognized it as simply machinations of insecurity. Insecurity isn’t just jealousy and envy, but sometimes it’s a more physical manifestation of lack of money or opportunity, i.e., the company that just doesn’t have a position open that fits your skills, just because you like them. They might be grant funded. Or in the case of the federal government at this writing, frozen from hiring. Really hitting the bullseye on this issue has helped me greatly in being able to understand what’s really going on in my career and in social interactions and helped me continue to find new places to thrive.
Being courageous and willing to try new things, as well as make moves.
The move I made almost six months ago was one of courage. So was the one I made in June of 2015. Many of us know the Nina Simone quote about walking away from the table when it’s not serving you. It’s vital to think about that quote when you make moves to find the things that do service you. I’ve been guilty of being on way too many civic boards and neglecting those personal entertainment activities. It took courage to stand up and say I need something different. But even if your city depends on you, you have to know when to say no (more on that in another bullet). You definitely need courage if you have to create the community to help yourself thrive. And patience. And the willingness to be one’s best advocate. Some of us who dwell in an introverted state or have been silenced may have to nudge this skill. However, in the bigger cities, you really have to fight for your right to party ;).
Being realistic about finances, along with being more resourceful
Cost of living is real. I wish I’d let myself really absorb that before I made this move and made some other moves that will take time and lots of creativity to repair. However, I’ve said it before and I’ve said it again, the price you pay to live in the place you want to live, whether that be a big city, a smaller town, a farm or even an island in the sea can only be determined by you. While I’d make some decisions differently, I have learned that surviving in a bigger city is not something I can’t do, even with money being tight. The key is that I’ve been pushing myself to leverage resources both on and offline in my current city. And if you choose to go somewhere because it’s cheaper on the surface, keep in mind the pull of spending more money on things and trips and how that can be just as ruinous on your finances. Find ways to quickly center your finances in a budget and don’t let emotion or fear rule the show here.
Loving myself and setting the right kinds of boundaries.
I still can’t be everywhere for everyone. I’m letting go of the guilt of leaving two very vibrant, but just not right for me communities behind. And with so many opportunities in my new city, it’s sometimes hard to say no, in the spirit of being more courageous as I mentioned above. But at the end of the day, no matter how busy my city is, I need my cocoon and I will cherish it.
Just like I mentioned in my post-election post, self-care is vital. However, we can engage in whatever city we are in for positive good and still be productive, giving citizens. Now, I will say if your safety is repeatedly challenged or you are in direct danger, run. You don’t have to put up with blatant abuse for the sake of being in a certain place or leading a particular community. You will thank yourself.
As always, all of this is a work in progress. I’m learning not to beat myself for having to go backwards sometimes. However, I wanted to share this, because I think we call all learn from the process. Also, review my last post if you need to do an even deeper career related dive.
I’m Kristen. I started blogging here to make sense of the built environment around me. You can find me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. You can find out more about me at my main website, www.kristenejeffers.com. Get job listings, interesting articles, links to future posts and more from me via my weekly email. Support my work on Patreon.
Hey, y’all. I have to confess something. I’ve been cheating on urbanism with my crocheting and fashion design. This will surprise no one who gets to see the bottom of my face these days, but this may surprise you.
Longtime followers of me will know that I grew up in one of the original textile capitals of the world, Greensboro, North Carolina. Therefore, clothing made my town a city.
So my forays into fashion design, namely crochet and sewing, with a dedicated space for such in our home, do have an urbanist tie for me, because my urbanism has always been holistic and not just trains, apartments, and whatever else is in walking distance.
It also involves the people who are there and the economic factors that make each city what it is.
And yes, ableism, racism, queer and trans antagonism are just as much economic and labor issues as classism, as they all stem from imperialism, which is the root of capitalism.
But that’s not the whole story for me.
To be honest, I wake up every day and read and review all the urbanism, good or bad, in the DC region, inclusive of Baltimore and Richmond. I am paid to do such, but that is dependent on me doing so from 7:45-10 am Eastern, which is also my prime creative writing time. It does provide my primary source of business income, but the number of hours I can bill has dropped.
Another factor that’s key is that often this work exposes me to urbanist politics, policy, and behavior that is discouraging to me on a lot of levels, based on who I am, and what I know about how cities work.
However, it has allowed me to launch this experiment of living in the heart of a multi-gentrified neighborhood, and to record how I’m defying that gentrification.
So, I needed a creative escape and that’s what crocheting and fashion design have given me. My mom has always sewn and it’s been a source of joy throughout her career as an educator and her coping with chronic illness. Plus, one of my sibling-cousins is big into the sewing communities online and I too have found kinship amongst other craftivists and crafters who make to overcome the world’s obstacles, especially fellow Black, disabled and/or queer folks.
I’m working on a special project to combine my passion for holistic urbanism and crafting without always having to go out to a farm or a far suburb for later in 2024.
And despite how Nazi and fascist the world and these platforms are becoming, I as Black queer human have a right to exist in the world and on the internet. Palestine, Congo, Tigray, Sudan, Haiti and all the other countries under active genocide, and to take it all the way back, my ancestors and those already here on this land and who are still colonized to this day, have a right to not be slaughtered off the face of the earth for someone’s chance at living the high life. Or a life. So the bullhorn is going to be loud.
But, I am on my COVID sickbed and writing this in notes on my phone lying flat in the time that I give myself because I am committed to radical rest and my medication working right.
I will continue to mitigate and mask post recovery but we are at the point where we need HEPA, Far UV, and universal testing along with the shots and liberal use of antivirals and ample paid time to rest, recover, and cover our bills, along with fashionable respirators that are breathable.
In 2024, as I feel better, I want to be more present for those of you who rock with me no matter what and who love this kind of holistic urbanism, that defies gentrification and crafts liberation. Hence our new newsletter name (for the Substackers) — and tagline here Defying Gentrification and Crafting Liberation.
In each newsletter I’ll share ways I see myself and others defying gentrification and I’ll share what I’m doing in my craftivism craft room. And, I will link out to what’s happening on my YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, and Instagram accounts. And X, until the doors fall all the way off.
Many of you have noticed changes in my Twitter and Instagram bio, that I’ve been “interested” in more queer events on Facebook, and others have had the pleasure to meet Les, my partner, in person or you’ve known her from her own work in faith-based LGBTQ and transportation advocacy (and you should get to know her videos and life coaching and endometriosis advocacy and our merch line we colaborated on together!). She’s been with me on all my speaking visits over the past two years and we’ve both been helping each other with our various business and community ventures.
Plus, two years ago today, on National Coming Out Day 2018, after a wonderful date night at Midlands after years of knowing each other casually, we decided to start a life journey together, as lovers and friends.
However, in the past and directly, I’ve been hesitant to talk about this part of my life and it has affected how I do this work and how much I pride myself on being transparent. Yet, I believe that this is the time to address this. I wrote a draft of this about 18 months ago, but I believe today is the day to bring this draft into the light.
Before I get started, a warning to both family who are reading this and finding out for the first time and family who may have spoken to my mom or who are concerned about my mom.
First of all, I still love you all and if that love doesn’t extend back to me, I understand. Secondly , I told mom privately when I was last home in Greensboro in the spring of 2019 and I ask that you allow her the space to process this and that you refrain from asking her any questions or making judgements on her and how she’s raised me and treated me over the years.
If you are tempted to make these and other similar judgements, please remember that this is not about you. This is not an attack on my mom (or on you, mom), our family, our reputation and as church people. This is not an attack on my family raising me in the best way they knew how. This is not me wasting my beauty or my brain or giving up.
I identify as a pansexual polyamorous non-binary femme (pronouns she/her/they), who is willing and able and has fallen into a committed, loving, monogamous relationship no matter who or how that person presents/is. This also does not mean I’m turning into a male person or will start presenting more masculine as a rule. I still like all the same things I like. I’m happy with my body and how it’s proportioned. Also, I support all other sexual and gender expressions that are loving and consensual.
I know this is an agree-to-disagree notion some of you. I believe we were born holy, are always holy, but sometimes fall astray and need reminders from God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and folks sanctioned under their power to share this truth. I also know everything under the banner of gender and sexual uniqueness is under the purview of the perfect creation of God. The verses that explciitly condem same-sex or gender-noncomformity I believe have a context for which they were written, that doesn’t necessarily affect our situations. I also believe that we can support civil rights for everyone, without necessarily understanding each individual. We were not all created queer and not every queer expression, just like not every hetero expression of love is holy. But some of us were created queer, our queerness is holy and we need to acknowledge this in our faith communities.
One way I illustrate this is that many of us, especially in the black church, have no issue with allowing women to participate in the full body of worship, namely being or speaking in the pulpit. Yet, the Apostle Paul found that to be a distraction in one of the churches he was writing to and he told those specific women to not speak. However, women spoke and were active in church work in other places, plus, there were lots of women doing work for Jesus and all through the Old Testament. I believe that the scripture we have was God’s word for those specific people and much like God spoke directly to them, they (and yes they, I’ll save that for another post), still speak to us and work with us with the situations they gave us to live out.
And yes, I made a choice, but it’s only a choice to no longer live a lie.
I’m suffering through purple rage and I need to let it go to keep my business and creativity alive.
I built this site nearly a decade ago (and my work on blogs over the last 15 years) to be real, raw and honest about what we can do for the community. Over these years, I’ve been exposed to so much outside of my childhood bubble and I’ve grown so much. Yet, not addressing this directly and firmly has been eating away at me and making me publicly rageful, jealous and resentful. If you’ve been at a happy hour (or even on a few Zoom calls) with me recently, you’ve witnessed some of this. I apologize for anyone I hurt with this behavior, but know I’ve been trying to sort through things a lot of us do as teenagers. Writing this post is helping me heal and start the process of healing relationships–both with people as well as with my work and visibility. I also forgive you, but understand if you can’t forgive me.
We need to stop being prejudiced, racist, and genderphobic in our own community of queer people and in how we apply our urbanism.
I’m sick of the white gay men purporting to speak for (or in some cases use their power to tear down) neighborhoods and spaces that have rich culture and life without them getting into the mix and meddling with what makes those communities special or even better, using their priviledge as white bodies to help us be heard or raise money. This is the root of a lot of the protesting around prides over the last few years, that in their corporatization, they’ve started to mirror non-queer society in how they margialize non-cis, non-white bodies. I’ve felt compelled to always live in cities and move to larger ones, because I’m committed to building community in the black queer community. Because of what I shared above, we struggle a little more at times. Love is defintely love, but it’s really sweet when I can wake up next to my black lesbian partner and have her understand what we need and the struggles. I also hope that as more folks feel comfort in being out and proud, that we get more diversity in expressions and more people feel comfortable dating each other. However, we do not need to favor whiteness or cisness or even wealth. We all have worth and value.
The Death of a Inspiration
The person that helped me to start unpack my harmful theology, not just around queerness, but around patriarchy and white supremacy in our churches and our faith, Rachel Held Evans, died on Saturday May 4, 2019 from complications of the flu, a UTI and an antibiotic she took to heal those other two. She was only 37 (just four years older than me!) and left behind a husband, a three-year-old and a barely one-year old. She was white, grew up in the Evangelical bubble (church, college and also early writings on faith and action), straight and cis and she had her own blind spots around race and even with our affirmation as queer. But she got up daily for over a decade and through her blog and books confronted the notion that only straight cis white men get messages from God that hold weight and authority. Her breakdown of Proverbs 31, her attempt to follow all the rules in the Bible for women, her making peace with needing a different worship experience and now, all the people across the Christian world who have something positive to say about how she challenged them, and challenged them in the way those of us who are current or past evangelicals know and appreciate, with lots of well-stated scripture and a heart for love. She truly had a prophetic voice and it’s this voice that continues to inspire me to speak truth to power, over myself and over our communities.
I’m in love and she’s my best friend and she makes me a better urbanist, a better Christian and a better citizen, friend, daughter, etc. Our urbanism needs to make room for queerness that isn’t just white and cis male. Our faith communities really need to examine how we look at the words that God has given us and the internal words that the Spirit speaks to us. Also, for those of you who don’t practice or hold different beliefs outside of the Christian fold, know that I love and respect you too and just like I’m Black, I’m also queer and Christian and that’s the spirit of where this comes from.
Finally, this is something I’ve known about myself since puberty and something that I take one day at a time. However, I do believe it is time for me to speak about this so that I can know where I stand with everyone in my life and so we can continue the greater work of restoration in our communities.
I never thought I would ever live or work outside of Greensboro again. I’ve always felt like if I wasn’t there that the city wouldn’t figure out how to fix itself. That if my work didn’t have a connection to home or if it wasn’t respected at home, then it was completely worthless. That if I didn’t keep up with or seem really concerned about events going on at home, then I’d advanced too far and I’d become too big for my britches.
However, we all know that I’ve left home and I’ve been successful away from home, despite many setbacks and issues. You listen to me talk to you roughly each week in countries all over the globe. I live in one of the most international metro regions in the country and I’ve managed to carve out my own version of survival in that region.
Plus, just having thoughts in a black body is still revolutionary in some circles, especially in this re-hashed climate of high white supremacy/patriarchy we are facing in the States. And on a local level, in some jurisdictions, the pressure to assimilate to a certain idea of what blackness or what fill-in-the-blankness is that isn’t whiteness or cis maleness is.
What I also wanted to address is the need to let go of a lot of these ideas. For the last two and a quarter years, I’ve been trying to live in two places at once. I’ve been trying to be home and yet not be home. I’ve also felt like not just an expat, but an exile.
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For those two and a quarter years and honestly many more, I’ve fought feeling like a hometown heroine (or hero) versus an American Expat in America.
I’ve fought through what it means to have civic pride, inferiority, nativism and absolutism. While having civic pride is awesome, possessing either civic inferiority or civic nativity or absolutism is not good.
Additionally, I’ve battled the idea that when we say we want new people, but increasingly we as cities only want a certain type of new person. The elusive young professional. The old retiree. Someone that looks like us and that can remember this obscure power outage that resulted in having to kill ten rats in 48 hours by you, but your friends and neighbors can recite the same story.
Or we fight all new people coming in. Whether it’s failing to fund new airports and train stations, or the extreme of banning certain people from entering the country or just making people “pay their dues” and say the “right things”, we fail to realize that closed systems eventually die out. Yes, with the right spark, they can continue on in infinity doing the same things, but it’s old energy. Or new energy gets sucked in, never to come back out again.
No part of me wants to be a closed system. In fact, a closed system chokes me to death.
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This year’s election has shown me that if people step up, there are metro areas that will vote for them to win. If people know where to sign up to run, if they are willing to canvass neighborhoods, hit wallets for small donations and take the heat from those who may not like their style of politics despite sharing a letter next to their name when it comes to party designation, people can do it.
I know I’m encouraged to get my name in the ring. However, it will be a few years from now and it will be where I’m currently living, which may or may not be Baltimore, but it won’t be Greensboro.
For it to be Greensboro, a lot has to change. We need to stop believing that gentrification, of downtown, of Revolution Mill, of other neighborhoods yet to be “discovered” or brought back to life will save us. We need more black, brown and Asian faces in our nonprofit sector and definitely more Latinx and Asian faces in political positions.
Yes, for the next four years our council will be majority women and will be without white men. However, how will we vote on things like corporate incentives, police oversight and transit?
Plus, I need to feel like that I’m ok as a single or single-without-child couple in the city. Although my mom has been great about not asking me for grandchildren, and encouraging me to find a partner who is a good friend first, others directly or casually ask me about this and yes, it hurts. Also, I was the student/girl who didn’t act out or try new things or go outside the box. It’s weird that some of my more “adventurous” classmates, are settled down and more conservative and sometimes more judgmental than I was even in my worse days of being the “Golden Child”.
I need everything surrounding my dad and how he’s no longer here and the house is no longer there to not hurt. I want to mark his grave, but I also want to be doing well. A lot of this travel and moving is for survival. So I don’t end up following in his footsteps.
Lastly, I need artists to be 100% supported. I need Black lives to matter, no matter how uncomfortable that process in making them all matter is. I need us to support fully all kinds of small business ventures.
And finally, I need us to not bully or belittle each other for choosing to be in service. I need us to realize that the truth is negative sometimes. Life is negative sometimes. But as long as we are still living, there’s that wonderful magnetism that comes when the positive and negative dance together and we let them dance together.
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Nine years ago, I moved home from Raleigh because I believed I could come home and make a difference and start my lifelong dream of being mayor of the city.
However, that’s been thwarted because I don’t believe that in my current state of being, notwithstanding the moves, I don’t think I could win. I’m too radical. I care too much about people. I think we should spend money on other things besides corporations and development schemes.
Additionally, I don’t think the kind of partner that would love me for all of me, leadership and all, exists there and would support me. Maybe you have been sitting back afraid of getting your foot in the door. Maybe you don’t live downtown and I’ve been expecting you to be there all these years, yet you check all the other boxes and understand why my life’s work is important to me. Right now, I feel like you live somewhere else (Hopefully somewhere in D.C or Baltimore or in between ;)).
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One last word. I am proud of the fact that I decided to see what’s outside of my hometown. I still love it, even when it doesn’t love me back. I left Kansas City far too soon and it was just starting to crank up and be great and I miss it. However, I don’t see where I would fit in out there either and I need an airport that works better for the nature of my work now. D.C. is just not where people go when they want to start new things and “bootstrap”. Baltimore is making sure I’m sleeping and eating, but I might need to move on from there too at some point.
I WILL ALWAYS CARE ABOUT ALL THOSE PLACES.
Raleigh and Durham too. It’s weird that my campus gets a Target, but the side of Baltimore I’m on can’t keep one. I digress.
So here we are. I’m a proud American Expat in America, lover of all things connected and thriving metro areas and eager to find a space to both plant a few roots, along with being able to fly around and see how other places are doing things.
It will only make these stories better and this space grow.
I’m Kristen. Seven years ago, I started blogging here to make sense of the built environment around me. You can find me onFacebook,TwitterandInstagram. You can find out more about me at my main website,www.kristenejeffers.com.Support this project on Patreon for as little as one dollar a month.
So here we are, the first true Baltimore-centric post. It took me two months because as I said in my 2017 birthday post, I was scared. This is a city where people get hurt and get hurt often. Especially by people who claim they want to do the right thing. The last thing I needed was for my post to come along and stir up another hornet’s nest. I’m trying as much as possible to fly under the radar.
However, I do have thoughts and thus far, I can say the city’s giving me exactly what I need. Plus, it truly feels like every city that I’ve lived in decided to put all their DNA in a test tube and let it gestate. The irony in this is that Baltimore was born before all the other cities I’ve lived in. However, I can see where it stagnated and where it’s got room to be reborn. So let’s talk about these common things.
Harris Teeter=Every City I Lived in In North Carolina
And it’s legit. There is a whole row of House-Autry flour mixes. House-Autry flour mixes are one of the nine pillars of modern North Carolina cuisine and it’s awesome that this most obscure of the nine is right here where I can get my hands on it in a short drive to the grocery store. Oh and there’s not just one, but two Harris Teeters. However, like Harris Teeter pretty much everywhere these days, the demographics of the neighborhoods around them tend to be the whitest and the wealthiest of town. Still, I got a car, I got money, I got a belly. Y’all gon see me! And help me make myself at home. (For those of you curious to what the nine pillars of modern North Carolina cuisine are, I got you in a future post).
Power Plant Live!= Power and Light in Kansas City
I’ve been told it’s by the same developer and it shows. Bars that attract the average citizen. Average meaning more likely to be obnoxious by the end of the night. They do have some good concerts there though, I hated missing St. Paul and the Broken Bones and people rave about when Tech 9ine does a hometown show at Power and Light. Also, one of the best parties I attended in Kansas City, was the streetcar progressive party which ended at one of the event spaces in Power and Light. There’s a nice co-working space at Power Plant Live!, as well as a newish Mediterranean/Middle Eastern spot that’s great for folks who when they aren’t consuming the cuisine of their home state, are trying to avoid over-proccessed foods.
The MTA Metro Subway=The WMATA Metrorail Blue Line
I say the Blue Line and the part of the line from Capitol South to Largo Town Center because it does cover similar demographic areas. Also, while the MTA Metro Subway is rumored to go nowhere, it does go to a few places, if you just happen to need to go to Hopkins Hospital, the Maryland State Office Buildings, the Upton Market, the replacement shopping thing at Owings Mills and the two other shopping malls that sit off from it. Oh or the homes, the dense row homes, that happen to sit back off the parking lots. Similar things are happening on the WMATA Metrorail Blue Line. Government buildings. A hospital (or a major medical office). A new shopping center that has some issues, along with a nearby public educational institution. Public food markets. A sports stadium, although arguably one has more activity around it than the other. And yes, I’m including racial dynamics in this as well. Who lives around these stations as the stations move from downtown to the suburbs also mirror each other. (Spoiler, they get blacker as you go out, although Baltimore City’s population is still predominately black, so that skews things a bit too).
The Light Rail= The D.C. and the K.C. Streetcars
The Light Rail works when it works. That’s why it gets to be lumped in with Kansas City’s system, that’s continuing to meet and exceed expectations. When it doesn’t work, it reminds me of D.C.’s poor little H Street line. It’s like the Little Engine That Could. It thinks it can and it does, but it has a lot of work to do to get there. Baltimore’s light rail will take you to the airport, the convention center, Orioles Park at Camden Yards, M&T Stadium, the Symphony Hall, and a some lovely bars, public markets, food halls and neighborhoods on a north/south axis that’s perpendicular to my current neighborhood. However, I can’t trust when it comes, because the systems on there are in need of renewing. I hear they are tied up in red tape. That’s unfortunate. Yes, if you haven’t heard, I’ve added a car back to my urban travel mix.
The Rowhouse Blocks and the Turrets=D.C.
I mentioned in a prior newsletter that the house where the Underwoods on House of Cards live/lived (mild spoiler there), is actually a house in Baltimore passing for D.C. Much like the rib place he always goes too and a number of other exterior and some interior shots. If all you know of Baltimore on TV is The Wire, then you’re missing out. One day, we might get a show up here that actually shows all the parts of the city, for better or worse. Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to actually being able to afford a turret one day.
The Sprawl=Kansas City
You don’t have a bisecting state line, but you do see the results of building out road corridors and parkways in the years prior to World War II. You see the homes start to get newer and newer, in addition to areas of empty lots and some urban renewal that breaks the patterns, along with the newer downtown towers and the convention center. I think that my time in D.C. drove it home that I’m just going to have to adjust to at least a 15 minute drive to a Target. Well, at least Amazon delivers door-to-door here.
The Love of a Singular Food Object So Much it Defines Your City=Kansas City
Sweet Barbecue & Burnt Ends> Crabs. Crab cakes however are in contention. I’m allergic to crabs alone so I’m a little bit biased. Again, and I attribute this to knowing one cuisine solely for 28 years, North Carolina is so much more than one thing. Again, I will be discussing this claim in a future post.
The Hospitality= North Carolina
Maryland is a southern state. And the friends and colleagues I have here do mimic the ones I have back at home. Plus, I’m here thanks to their hospitality and their nudging. And I do feel ties to being at home. I will say though that there were a handful of folks in Kansas City that did their part. Plus, I’m in less need of a safety net these days, but I have it. So there goes. Argue among yourselves as who’s the nicest.
30% of the License Plates=North Carolina
I asked someone how this could be. Then I was told that a lot of Baltimore undergraduate (and graduate!) students come from North Carolina. I have yet to meet an adult friend who also grew up in North Carolina and is just here, but I have met a few of the former. It’s nice to be able to drive around, squinch your vision and think you’re back in either Charlotte (because stadiums and light rail) or Raleigh (skyline and colleges). We do not have the row house situation in North Carolina, clearly I gave that to D.C. above, but we do have a lot of vehicles that seem to belong to maybe parents that live in North Carolina.
And so that’s it. I’ve got more serious thoughts on Baltimore coming over the next few months, but for now, these are my initial, fun, observations of the city I’m making home for now. Oh and Royal Farms chicken is great, it’s just not equal to Bojangles in the same way and therefore, doesn’t warrant it’s own section of this post.
I’m Kristen. For seven years I’ve used this space and a few others to make sense of the world around me. Learn more about me and read more of my archives. Subscribe to my newsletter (which comes out mostly weekly) and stay up to date with me. Or, come be one of those Twitter folks who make me think a little harder about what I do. Or I can talk to you, with my co-host and friend and fellow urbanist Katrina Johnston-Zimmerman, roughly every week as well about the next wave of urbanism.
Image of a line of row houses and cars parked on the street on a sunny day in Baltimore’s Reservoir Hill neighborhood. Image via Wikimedia Commons by Smallbones – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18756953
People have been asking me why I moved. I’ve given them answers and sometimes they’ve not been as foolproof as I’d liked for them to be. And now a month out from the move, I feel like I can answer the question a bit better.
“But you can buy a cheaper house here. Food’s really expensive out there. You know, there’s racism everywhere. No, we didn’t call all the time and it may have seemed we weren’t there for you, but we were.”
I’d like to remind everyone that I’m from North Carolina. I heard all these things when I left for Kansas City and then some.
This is not to lay shade on any one factor of why I ultimately decided that Kansas City wasn’t going to be end game. In fact I’m going to start with a pretty easy one.
I can walk here. And when I walk, I find myself at a reasonable destination. And when I can’t walk, there’s a bus within 10 minutes and maybe even a bike too. It sometimes takes me 30 minutes to an hour to get somewhere across DC. It used to take the same to do so in KC.
What’s the difference? It’s been both necessary and fulfilling to have to propel myself. Granted, the weather here hasn’t been horrible, besides being wet, yet. But I now own real winter clothing, I can get through the winter just fine. I thought saying goodbye to my beloved Betsy (and yes I did love my car a lot), was going to be more shocking than it has been. In fact, even as folks consider getting cars with all the turmoil with Metrorail and suburbanizing jobs, the stress of calling an Uber after a missed bus pales to being faced with hundreds of dollars in fines and maintenance.
Secondly, DC, if we go with how the Great Migration went, is my natural second homeland. If I was going to leave for a greener pasture, this is the one that my ancestors had chosen over and over again, with the help of rail lines and even horse and buggy. Plus, if I need to travel in and out of DC, I don’t feel like I’m constantly making a mini Great Migration of my own. I constantly felt like I was living in two worlds and I needed to be cultivating both.
Speaking of those two worlds, it was really three. I’d already moved my heart to DC, long before I moved my body and my body was forever punishing me for being without its soul. It wasn’t as bad when I lived in North Carolina, because my body always knew its soul was only a 5.5 hour drive away (and yes only five and a half because I drive efficiently up I-95 or U.S. 29). And now that I’m in DC, and have both parts of my being connected, I feel less like I’m fighting.
And at the end of the day, a new cut of barbecue couldn’t make up for the absence of the community and my soul I was desperately seeking in the metro.
You guys know I’m all about full disclosure at this page. So I’m going to bring something up that the Kansas Citians don’t always like for folks to know about. That thing is the one-year freeze. I get it, if you only expect people to come and go. If a person starts showing signs early that they are plotting an exit, why engage?
If I had been honest to myself in the early days, it probably wouldn’t have bothered me so much that I didn’t make as deep of connections as I wanted to in Kansas City. Now as I said before, folks made it clear that if I was dying, they would know about it or they would make sure I didn’t die. But what about making sure I don’t cry? What about making sure I don’t have to beg and plead for what I need?
I’m going to pause the post for a minute to lighten the mood and put in my musical interlude of my new D.C. centric Spotify playlist:
And if you want a nice movie to watch that shows non-political Washington and has a nice indie love story vibe and you’re an Amazon Prime member, check out Last Night.
I left town for the first time since I moved when I went to Roanoke for CityWorksXPO the other week. I cancelled the rest of my trip home to Greensboro, for two reasons. One, I don’t like driving in the rain. And two, I worried that I wouldn’t be able to go home on I-95.
Let’s take a moment and notice what I did there.
Now no shade to Greensboro. It taught me the sheer joy of popping out of the Dupont Circle metro and meeting Krispy Kreme’s hot light. I recognize that bit of Texas Pete-drenched breader in the Bojangles smell I smell faintly at the Union Station metro stop. When I carry my Harris Teeter reusable bag with the big N.C. State block S on it, even the Carolina fans stop and say hello. We then ask each other where we got our best Nats and D.C. United gear. One day we’ll get pro baseball and soccer in our home state, but until then, we can borrow DC’s.
And of course, had people before me not taken that migration up I-95, I wouldn’t know the joy of Busting Loose in the Chocolate City.
Speaking of Nats. Can I get the right Natty’s on a tap? We’re regional. And seriously Cookout and Biscuitville, it’s time, come on up the road. Lots of hungry Carolinian Washingtonians are waiting for you.
In the meantime, I’m off to the corner cafe with the croaker fish and that hot dog spot that carries slaw along with its chili, mambo sauce and those half-smoke things people keep telling me about, that in all my visiting, I’ve never had chance to eat. I’ll be riding there on Capital Bikeshare and I’ll be trusting Metrorail to get me home, as long as it still continues to run late in the evening.
I’ll still use Kansas City in my banner. You guys possess one of the coolest things in the world and that’s being in the center of it all. And the better streetcar. And a can-do spirit that rivals so many. Plus, DC really doesn’t have a skyline and you guys do and I like dramatic illustrations of my love for all things urban and cities.
Plus, I won’t be a stranger. But when I come back to visit, I’ll come back with my soul in tact.
I’m Kristen. Six years ago, I started blogging here to make sense of the built environment around me. You can find me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. You can find out more about me at my main website, www.kristenejeffers.com.
Anyone who’s owned at least one bike, even if it was just a tri-cycle, has a story. As I’ve added to my fleet recently, here’s my story.
It was Christmas of 1988. I can’t spell out any other details, but there’s photographic evidence, snapped by a parent of mine really being geeked out by my third Christmas. In the photo below, you can see it and you can also see in the foreground, the handlebars and basket of a lavender trike. I suspect my mom had a role in choosing the color, but it was dad making sure it was recorded for posterity. Oh and it was also his idea that I stuff myself into the empty Kid Sister box that you can just see in the corner.
Yet, this wasn’t even my first trike. I had this big hot wheel sucker, that I really don’t remember riding around very much outside the house. What you see here in this picture, of me riding in the living room, is pretty much what you get.
By age 6, I was starting to get creative. I’d moved up to my first set of training wheels. However, not to leave my old trike behind, I decided to go out back and hitch the old gal up to my new bike. My motivations for this twine-fueled activity are dusty now, but it did make for another fun picture.
The next Christmas brought me my next bike, this time, without training wheels. There’s photographic evidence of it in all its pink and green glory, next to a pile of other things, including roller skates (my other favorite wheeled activity).
Yet, that evidence did not make it to the digital cannon. I will note that this was the bike that started me riding regularly with my dad. I rode by myself in a nearby traffic circle, that was only occupied by elderly folks in city-sponsored senior housing and practically empty of cars. I rode with my dad up the mild Piedmonty hills and across stroady roads (when in doubt, ride into the turn lane, look both ways again, then cross the street) and through more calmer neighborhood streets to a few of my favorite playgrounds and a slightly longer route (maybe about 2-4 miles each way) to the home of a cousin).
By bike number 4, there were plans for us to make longer treks. It was a 15-speed junior mountain bike, which I begged my dad for. Not that I understood mountain biking as it is today. If I’d understood the concept of the commuter/hybrid bike, then this is what I would have asked for, because all I wanted to do was get over some of our bigger hills in town. If I could only take little me here to Kansas City and show her that nothing Greensboro offered in hills could compare to some of what’s available here. Then maybe I would have truly understood mountain biking. ;). I digress. There she is, just as I’m ready to say goodbye to her to move away from Greensboro to Kansas City.
But wait, why was she your only bike from age 10–29? Well, the short story of that was that I lost interest in biking. Not because I hated the feeling of riding or thought the distances were too long, but after my parents separating and divorcing and moving to different houses, biking just didn’t feel the same. My dad had a handful of adult sized bikes at his house, and I would borrow them. Technically, I still have one of his old bikes, living in storage with a few of my other things in Greensboro.
The main reason biking didn’t feel the same was that I was getting teased a lot by my neighbors. I was already a somewhat nerdy and quiet child, and by my teen years that was amplified. And then on top of me not riding the bike, some meaner neighbors stole my bike out of our garage (which was open just enough to get inside and out). A nicer adult neighbor saw the thieves and helped me get it back, though. I knew one of the thieves casually from school and I’ve always speculated that it was a stunt for that person to get cool points, not that they actually didn’t like me.
Still college came and I was warned that taking a bike there might result in a theft and that I’d do better walking. And then younger adulthood came and I was too busy driving to and from work and other activities. Plus, I’d honestly outgrown the thing by this time.
Which prompted me to go to REI and get one of those nice, shiny new Novara women’s hybrids. However, it wasn’t really in the budget and it went into storage and then eventually back to the store. Yes, even after I’d driven to Raleigh, and made all the effort to test ride it, get the right size and secure it to the back of my car so it wouldn’t fall off at 65 miles an hour for the hour and a half back to Greensboro. I still dreamed of having one though, this is from last spring, dreaming of what I could get. Still not in the budget though and so it stayed at REI.
I think a bit of this story was also driven by my desire to ride like I did at CNU 19 in Madison, WS. I’d had a Trek hybrid rental (I’m not sure of it’s specs, but it feels a lot like my newest acquisition, one of the women’s FXs) and I had no trouble zipping around town on all the different paths and boulevards and in the lanes. I locked it wrong and it still felt ok. I also got to try this newfangled thing called B-cycle, a kiosk rental service, where you could take bikes between the kiosks and then return them. We had free codes and they stopped giving them out to attendees after a while, because people wanted to keep them overnight. I had no idea that B-cycle would come back in my life in a big way in the future, but it did. Here’s a foreshadowing, testing out B-cycle in Greensboro in 2013 as part of my role in the bikeshare task force that Action Greensboro has convened off and on since 2013:
And just a few weeks ago testing out bike loading on the KC Streetcar (image by David Johnson)
Meanwhile, the purple mountain bike still collected dust in my mom’s garage. Its size didn’t stop my dad from attempting to ride it the day I moved to my downtown Greensboro apartment (and having some success on it, despite him being just a few inches taller and wider). After seeing that, I took it for one more spin. As you see here.
But it was obvious the frame was too small and I’m sure the inner tubes were dead. Upon my migration to Kansas City, it left my mom’s garage and my life for good and went to Goodwill.
With me working for a bike advocacy group and my lifelong love for bikes, not having one wasn’t acceptable. I just wish I’d taken a bit of time before I bought Lulu.
You know her. She looks great in pictures. Also, there’s something kind of cool about riding a pink bike. Yet, what’s not cool is that as a cruiser, she’s way too heavy. As a bike from Target, that’s not just because of all the extra components, it’s because those bikes are made of heavier metal, than the ones that come from Trek, REI and other companies that only make bikes and make them for racers, as well as casual riders. And with the hills and just the inability to push the bike long distances, Lulu really only went from my apartment to the office ( a flat, quarter-mile distance).
But I couldn’t be satisfied. Meet Lina, short for the Spanish language pronunciation of Carolina.
She’s bright. She’s a 7.3 Trek FX. She will need some comfort modifications (namely fenders and panniers ), but right now, she and I have already been on a number of trips, including several that Lulu and I made, with a bit less success. And Lulu never went to the grounds of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, as seen above. She’s been a big hit so far and brought lots of joy to my bike-loving office and to me.
And there you have it. The story of a woman and her bikes.
I’m Kristen, by the way. I started writing this site to tell my story of being a black urbanist and a lover of all things place and community. Learn more about me. Follow me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Subscribe to my email list. Learn more about my work with BikeWalkKC , namely our Women Bike KC initiative to get more women on bikes confidently and safely.
Movement and migration is constantly on my mind. And whenever I hear someone claim to know where black people are moving to and why, my ears really perk up. Especially when they do what USA Today did recently and crunch some U.S. Census numbers and make the kind of maps they did in their recent story on what’s been called the reverse migration.
Some background. The Great Migration is the term given to the movement of 6 million African-Americans from southeastern cities to northeastern, midwestern and far western U.S. cities from 1910 to 1970. The Wiki on is comprehensive and legit, especially for our purposes today of getting into why this movement is actually going into reverse.
More background. This panel I served on back in 2012 and this amazing book by Isabel Wilkerson called The Warmth of Other Suns. Wilkerson’s book, which we discuss in the panel, talks to people who actually did the moving and asks them why they moved and what they learned. For three unique people, each who left different corners of the Southeast and each went to the Northeast (Harlem, Manhattan); Midwest (South Side of Chicago); and California (Los Angeles), it gets into their backstories of several years of their lives in the South.
That included: educations and running in high society in the Atlanta black community, then a solo car trip that was much longer than it should have been due to racism; an abusive marriage and fleeing a sharecropping Mississippi experience via the train; and organizing fellow orange grove workers, then needing to flee from the fear of lynching via train. It also gets into their regrets, as their new spouses and children, as well as working conditions and homes often did not meet their dreams and expectations.
Wilkerson recently posted on her very informative Facebook page , that her subjects learned that you unfortunately can’t escape discrimination, outright racism and even bad family trauma, by moving to a different region of the U.S. She encouraged all her followers and their families to find the warmth of the sun in their backyard and combat those issues wherever they are.
Back to our panel. I,myself, warned panelists that moving South doesn’t mean you escape the racism and discrimination that we as black folks often experience. It doesn’t guarantee a home, a good education and that police and other public service officials and fellow neighbors of other backgrounds will see you as human. And I also, having not made my move to Kansas City, was intrigued about why people would want to move back to a place that still had so many issues with how people are seen and treated.
Having now made that move, I now understand better. It really comes down to property, affordability and proximity to services, even if political and social power is not as realized.
Places Journal’s recent article on Memphis and how its black community was developed and treated is a really telling story of how cities can do right and wrong by its black community, such that certain communities develop better reputations for black success and leadership than others. It contrasts Memphis with Atlanta, where black people were encouraged to buy property and to become leaders.
Atlanta still has had issues with housing its poor black populations and there’s still the MARTA issue, but compared to Memphis, it looks like a global city. Whole swaths of Memphis were destroyed and white families continued to move further and further out of the city and the city continued to follow them with annexations.
Yet, at a certain point, much like here in Kansas City, communities annexed themselves and became autonomous suburbs. Recently some of those Memphis suburbs broke their school systems out of the very recently merged county-city system, claiming that they were being asked to fund schools they didn’t want to fund, which sadly is often coded language for racism. Some Charlotte parents are threatening to do the same in the Mecklenburg County system. Kansas City has an extremely high number of municipal school districts, religious schools, traditional independent schools and charter schools. Of course, Kansas City proper also covers three counties, which is another bit of inefficiency, that goes beyond this conversation of migration patterns.
Meanwhile, back in my home county of Guilford, in North Carolina, all public school students, save the ones at the handful of charters and independent schools, go to school in the same municipal district. While there are calls for Title 1 schools, as schools with high percentages of disadvantaged schools are termed throughout the U.S., there aren’t whole, very small, municipal school districts of Title 1 schools. That wasn’t always the case in Guilford County, but since 1993, my second grade year, our district has been merged, and we are now boasting an 85% graduation rate and we now have Say Yes to Education, which will fill in funding gaps for all forms of public or private post-secondary education in the county.
Couple that consistency in school funding and curriculum county-wide with the ability to purchase 3 bedroom/2 bathroom basic starter homes in good condition for less than $200,000 and 4 bed/2.5 bathroom homes for less than $300,000, even in the good school “zones.” In addition, because our county and metro doesn’t sprawl out of control, no services or major national chain stores or restaurants are more than 20 minutes away from any home in the county. Actually, if you live in the Greensboro city limits or any city limits in the metro, you are no more than 15 minutes away from at least a Walmart. We also have seven colleges and universities, including two historically black ones and a very robust community college system.
In my youth, we still had the textile, tobacco and other mill jobs that paid more than average across the South. Office jobs were stable and before all metros began to have stagnant wages and high rents, anyone who had a regular job, even at a department store or as a restaurant manager or regular shift worker could afford a home of the sort I just listed above. Our housing projects were built for both races. Neighborhoods were mostly victims of white flight and not of extreme redlining and complete denial. And the neighborhoods left were still high quality housing stock, and builders cared about making sure that places were up to code. We have slumlords, but they still have a minimum housing standard that has to be met or the home will be seized by the city and torn down, with the bill as the responsibility of the property owner.
Similar situations exist in the Research Triangle region counties and in the North Carolina counties around Charlotte. Politically we’re considered a purple state. All three downtowns are vibrant, so there’s a dense option and a more suburban/rural option in all three cities. Those downtowns have at least a green/organic grocer, a slew or bars and restaurants, and an open space to gather.
All three are connected by 3, soon 5, daily roundtrips on Amtrak, which take just about 3.5 hours now and will take 2.5 when recent track work and expansion along the route is done. The drive between the three is about 3.5 hours now, so soon, there will be a time savings. Already, professors and such who live in Cary, just west of Raleigh ( one of the fastest and wealthiest areas of growth in the state period, not just with Black Americans looking to return to the south) and Carolina Panthers fans who live both there and Greensboro, take the train to their classes and games in Greensboro and Charlotte and points in between. In the meantime I-40 and I-85 are clean, well-lit and well-marked guideways to a trip that if you start in the middle at Greensboro only take you an hour and half tops each way. All three cities have airports and the Charlotte one is a major international and domestic hub, Raleigh can take you to Toronto, Paris and London, plus Atlanta and Washington, without headache. Greensboro has these nice seasonal flights direct to and from Denver and Detroit, which outside of me in KC, house the outer reaches of my black family who have done some form of the classic migration.
Granted, on the USA Today maps, the census shows a net loss of people to Greensboro. To Charlotte and Raleigh though, it’s as if they’ve become the New York and Chicago of today. Atlanta is the poster child for the return migration, and DC, which has always been a source of black migration and wealth generation, even when it’s center city was in decline, is still a magnet for black migration. And then there are the Texas cities, which also offer cheap property, high salaries and in some areas, strong school districts.
I’m often asked this post’s title as a question. It’s been four years since I sat on that panel. I got on that panel because I wanted to challenge cities and also families to consider the benefits of light density on their lives. I want people to have the choice of apartment vs. house with yard. I don’t want them in their cars for 20 minutes just to go to the grocery store or the bank. I don’t want them in their cars at all really, save to go on long road trips or to pick up things that can’t be delivered or to ride with their friend as a groups to fun activities.
And above all, I want them to live in a place that sees them as 100% human and capable of contributing to civic society. I want us to have our own things and have the freedom to come and go as we please. This is why we move. We move for freedom and peace.
NOTE: This piece is very focused on the migration of African-Americans who were slaves or are slave descendant. We also need to discuss and include African immigrants of recent times, a handful who are doing their own return migration to countries that are much more stable and even competitive with some cities in the U.S. as far as housing, jobs and civic power. Also, I don’t see the data properly covering millennial movement, except of those who moved back South to attend colleges, namely historically black serving colleges. Also, the maps U.S. Today created don’t use Census data from the last five years. Oh and KC does have high outmigration. But you can call me an outlier. Sometimes, even “bad” cities can be beacons of opportunity.
All it took in many cities for development in the old days was one man who bought up bunches of land and started building houses on it, which he turned around and put up for sale.
One man. Probably white and already wealthy.
Several plots of farmland. Land which used to be fields and served that purpose, is now a whole neighborhood. In the early years, these neighborhoods were connected throughout with sidewalks, with access to streetcars, with plots designated for community retail, such as a market. Many of these older style neighborhoods were still bedroom communities, but they were connected. In the case of J.C. Nichols here in KC and others, there was emphasis placed on who could and couldn’t purchase those homes, which unfortunately was codified in the federal mortgage-making code. Oh and the official history of his Country Club Plaza flat out states that he was just one man that changed the city.
So to say that other developers and even you milling around and buying (and being sold) properties can’t change the city (or, at least a chunk of it) with your money, ideas and landownings is crazy. It really comes down to money and respect of who holds said money. Eventually, you can change your city with ideas and small investments. Eventually.
This still keeps me up at night, because unfortunately, I feel the only way to enact wholesale change on cities overnight, is to purchase wide swaths of empty land or existing properties and create my own fiefdom. Let’s chat about that fiefdom shall we?
Let’s first assume that I’m in KC and I bought up a chunk of abandoned or less-loved area East of Troost, but still in KCMO.
Restricitve covenants are illegal these days, but often rent and asking prices are such that certain people are excluded. I’d put up a for-sale sign on the residential properties and tell people the amenities and then invite them to propose a price for it. I would take millions from some and I’d hand out some for free. I’d do it lottery style, so the goal would be to get a diverse amount of people, but let Providence handle who was picked and wasn’t picked. No credit checks. Some people would get jobs handling transportation, doing landscaping, teaching at the educational campus or working at the marketplace and they would get homes that I’ll set aside for workers and families. The lottery will be for folks who don’t live in the neighborhood.
For the transportation, Transportation to and from my fiefdom would be free and would include all types, appropriate to the context. I’d give the money to get the Linwood streetcar built, and restore older ones. Troost and Prospect would get streetcars too. Remaining bus lines and the streetcars would have every-15-minutes bus service. There would be free car-share vehicles for trips to stores and other neighborhoods (fiefdoms). There would be bikes. And the sidewalks would be clear. If you still insist on bringing a car after I told you all this, you would have a place to park. But only if you make a compelling case to need one (you use it for your business, you are disabled and use it to cover long distances, you’re an Uber driver, you drive to a far-flung place that doesn’t have rail or bus or air service enough for you to go there as often as you need). While not directly in my KC fiefdom, I’d also donate money to get a streetcar or true light-rail (our existing vehicles can actualy do both!) to the airport. You’d start at the River Market stop, then wind your way through the Northland (possibly tunneled, possibly in the highway median), such that it’s only a 30 minute trip each way. Yes, it would go that fast too. Our existing vehicles can safely run at 35 miles an hour.
There will be one central marketplace, which the community owns and staffs. There will be all kinds of healthy food options, with an eye to conscious omnivores on down to complete vegans. Subtracting staff salaries and real food costs, care will be made to make sure that people eat. You’d be able to get other things there too, either shipped directly to the store, to your home or inside the building. Yes, this is sounding like Walmart, but my Walmart would look like Target and pay like Costco. Actually, it would look like the City Market, because there would be room for both basic needs stores and also some fun stores. Just like homes, there will be different sizes for all. Also, services like doctors, yoga studios, and credit unions will be in this space too.
There will be many open parks, with playgrounds and racket courts and basketball courts and even a fountain. This is KC. It seems that I must have a fountain to be a legit fiefdom.
There will also be one school, a campus if need be, that provides all that a kid would need as they grow. That includes any kid with a special need. If we can’t provide it, we will make arrangements free-of-charge for the kid to get the education they need, right by their own home. Or, if the kid was game, we’d bus them across town to another campus, which has mastered something we don’t quite have yet and gives them an opportunity to meet people who don’t live and work in their neighborhood.
But there’s a problem here. It should not take people buying up land and creating fiefdoms to provide education, food, education for all ages and all other needed and wanted services. Also, this could turn into separate-but-equal really quick, especially here in KC and in other places that still have very defined lines of where people of certain races and cultures live, exclusive of their actual income. My economics are probably way off, but I wanted to err on the side of providing homes and jobs and basic needs. I’m assuimg that I’m crazy rich already and can make up the difference.
But that’s what we have, fiefdoms, in an alliance under one city. Or in most cases, we have multiple cities, of multiple fiefdoms, doing whatever they feel like doing to provide basic services. Essentially, separate, but unequal, with a wee bit of separate-but-equal.
So what can we do?
I believe that as an alliance of cities and fiefdoms, we can set a goal to provide co-op grocery and markets, centralized and fulfilling K-12 and secondary education, and free and prompt transportation options. We can continue to provide places to gather, for various schools of thought, pending no one emerges from these meetings with the attempt to do real harm.
I think we could do this today, because these are our things that we can drop money on right now and shift the conversation and how we live.
I believe we can start looking at each other as human beings worthy of mutual respect and sympathy. I think we could switch to a system of true rehabilitation and re-training, to help those who truly have criminal minds (and not just those we THINK) do.
And housing. If we are going to spend money to build something, let us ensure our water and sewer systems are clean. Always. That there’s always a place to go when we are sick and going there doesn’t automatically bankrupt us and won’t bankrupt us down the line. We provide basic shelter, maybe communal at first, then small dwellings to people on a sliding scale. Then, because we’ve stopped servicing some of our other social welfare issues as hard or as inadequately as we were doing, we can zero in on the problems with costs and making sure people have adequate roofs, at the privacy level they so desire.
No city is perfect. Yet, we cannot keep going with the inadequate ones we are fielding today. And we cannot end with separate but equal.
Each week, I send out an email with these kinds of posts, things that I’m working on and other articles you should read. Leave me your information below and you’ll start to see it on Tuesdays.
I learned a lot about place this year. Yet, those many lessons coalesced into these three big lessons: a progressive, inclusive, tactical charrette process, people over money and the need to legally live in more than one place, to help you guys out there learn more about your own towns and cities. Let’s dig into those lessons.
You Can Have a Progressive, Inclusive, Tactical Charrette Process
I was invited to come to Chattanooga back in April to participate in the Next Big Thing, a design charrette centered on the Glass Street area of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Having grown up and really come up politically in Greensboro, cities like Chattanooga and Greenville, SC are aspirational places to the governments and stakeholders of other smaller cities like Greensboro. In fact, a delegation of Greensboro folks was in town doing a comparison shopping tour, while I was there working on a lesser-loved area of town.
Despite its status as lesser loved and its lack of waterfront view and mountain height, the Glass Street area doesn’t lack for good people and good infrastructure. The group that brought us all together, The Glass House Collective, is embedded and dedicated to the betterment of this community.
On the surface, the Glass Street area seems like your typical predominately black community, that as a result of redlining and legal integration, has a double whammy of having good housing stock, but not being a place that even Blacks of means want to invest in. Well, besides liquor stores, clubs, and various houses of worship, that, unfortunately, don’t work together and have even been the sites of murders and thefts.
Yet, there was this diner, The Glass Street Breakfast and Lunch House, on the corner of Glass and Dodson, across the street from the building where we set up shop. The woman who owns it wasn’t on my team, but I could see and feel her energy and excitement throughout the process. All of our teams had community members, mostly Black property owners and other stakeholders local to the area. What was also key, was that there were a number of other Black American planners and group facilitators. There were white Chattanoogans from the other sides of town, who wanted to see a sustainable development (more on this dynamic later in the post). Yet, it was seeing this Black woman, believe in the power of her building, which outside of the fresh paint job, with the mural of the yummy-looking bowl of something on the outside, was nothing more than an old gas station, which in another context could look like a shack, that inspired me myself to look into the power of taking buildings and spaces, no matter their shape, and infuse value into them.
Even if her venture ultimately fails (as more ventures do, despite the race and energy level of their owners), it’s the intent, the ability to try. Oh and I hear her food was awesome. I was, unfortunately, battling the need to drive back down I-75 to make my flight and return my rental car at the Atlanta airport because flying into Chattanooga’s airport was nothing short of impractical, so I couldn’t try her food out. (Another problem for another day, like the need for someone to help her out with a website).
More on people-power later, on the big scale. At the root of this lesson is that you can have energy in the room and people, especially the people of color and low-wealth that may be in your charrette room, are just as powerful and can add just as much to your charrette process, as you. Even if you have a foot in both the elite, mostly white and wealthy, architecture, planning and development world and another in the mostly black neighborhoods, labeled as slums and ghettos even if there were at one point rich cultural assets, you can be valued and you can be heard in the charrette room. Charrettes, public workshops and other community listening processes have to have this going forward and they have to have a means of action.
In the meantime, I needed to not just see places, but immerse myself in places for longer than just a week…
You Can’t Really Be a Global, or Even Just a National Urbanist, If You’ve Only Lived in One State
Ultimately, I can come into a city and tell people what to do 365 days a year. I could do it on this blog 24 hours a day. It, however, doesn’t compare to actually being a resident and investing in two metro areas, if not three, simultaneously.
This is the first year that I’ve ever lived in two cities. Even when I was younger and going back and forth between the Piedmont Triad and the Research Triangle (they are different, if you click on their names you’ll know why they are different), I was still in the same state. I could get most of the same food (although Biscuitville is a uniquely Greensboro thing and Bojangles only hands out free sweet tea at their Triangle-area locations). I knew the names of the local politicos. I knew my sales tax rate. My license plates were the same (and there was only need for one of them). School districts tend to cover counties, not just a pod of a couple of elementary schools that feed into one middle and high school. Cities tend to only extend to county lines and if they do jump a line, it’s only a few blocks or a few neighborhoods.
Kansas City takes up pieces of four different counties. That’s just on the Missouri side. On the Kansas side, what we refer to as KCK, is also the entirety, save a place called Bonner Springs, of the county of Wyandotte. And then there’s everything wrapped up in Johnson County and the areas around the University of Kansas and the military operations. Having been East Coast-centered my whole life, I only knew of DC’s interesting position of being a bi-state metro area. Likewise with the New York City region. Charlotte’s also rapidly becoming as much a South Carolina major metro, much like Western Kansas propels that state’s entire economy.
To me, being a bi-state, bi-county area isn’t so bad, if you have a completely connected public transit system, so everyone has equal access to jobs. Likewise, when your school curriculums and calendars and resources are in sync. When you have the same tax rates and the same mix of national stores. Your local institutions are empowered and service the area equally. I have yet to see that in many regions and I feel like the communities I know and love back east do this better than the KC metro. It’s one thing to have a frontier/pioneer spirit. It’s another to have it so bad that you can’t be interdependent, much like the folks who were native to the land you built on.
Having lived in a totally different region, I feel like I have more fodder for writing this blog and my planning and development practice than ever before. I can properly compare the effects of how public policy, especially housing, tax and education policy, shape a city’s development. It’s deeper than those city trips where they show you all the pretty things. I was doing a radio pre-show interview and the producers asked me to describe Kansas City for a person hopping off at the airport and going to the convention hall. I think we can all do that, even if our only relationship to a city is going to its airport and convention hall. (Bonus aside, read my case for a new Kansas City Airport). But you have to go deeper than that if you are like me and you are involved in the development and maintenance of your city.
I also re-introduced and fortified the concept this year of the American Expat. Before, it was something I knew about in abstraction, having had several aunts and uncles who’d moved away for work and only came home at major holidays. There are parts of both metros that they love and embrace, so much so that I think my aunt may never move back to North Carolina.
For me, I’m still in the city audition process. Ultimately, I know that wherever I choose to plant my home base, it will have 75% of the values and things I recommend out of the gate. Or, it will have a solid group of people, committed to sustaining it and making it better. I will always come back to North Carolina and rejuvenate, due to this being my homeland and that of so many people I love and who helped me grow in my formative years. Speaking of the content and concept of people sustaining a place, though…
Money is Magic, People are Sustaining
If we had millions of dollars, everything we want to happen on Glass Street (and your street) could happen tomorrow. However, a lot of the things that were proposed for Glass Street, like the street and sidewalk improvements, as well as the façade improvements and the addition of more than just tax preparers, liquor stores and some solid restaurants, require PEOPLE to patronize the store and bring the money to them.
The Glass Street area was labeled as a food desert, due to the loss of a grocery store, ironically right behind the Glass Street Breakfast and Lunch House. In my group in Chattanooga, I introduced the idea of a co-op grocery, something that’s happening twice in Greensboro, in two very different contexts. Many people are familiar with our downtown natural food co-op market and deli/bakery, as a natural extension of a community supported agriculture delivery membership and provider of a downtown option, which is still not where developers want it to be to do a traditional supermarket concept. You may also be familiar with our other co-op, founded due to the lack of a major supermarket company, wanting to locate where it had no problems operating 30 years ago, a mostly Black, middle-class community. With some financial help from a local Black church and our city and the usual major foundation nonprofits with mostly white leadership, that community has funded a supermarket that will look more like Harris Teeter or at the very least, restore some of the character that the Winn-Dixie left.
While they are still waiting on the magic of money to come through, they are a determined group of people, a lesson that as we also honor the Kwanzaa week, is relevant in placemaking and all year.
Right now, city leaders and stakeholders are waiting on money to turn a once vibrant, but now vacant lot into our next Broadway-caliber performing arts center. Much money was pledged for this effort and they’ve unfortunately come up short. In turn, they are calling on people and their money, to help get this spot to the end. In the meantime, there were lots of people doing business on this big lot. There were a gas station and hospital and hotel here once upon a time. Then, just before demolition, there was a jazz club and doctors offices and hair salons and the chamber of commerce. I feel those things could have remained on that lot until the last dollar needed was in hand and then the demolition could start and within just a few short months, the new arts building would appear. (Edit on 12/31/15: The chamber is in fact still standing. But just barely. The building almost has no parking lot. Again, an institution that helps us to be capitalist can stand, but some aspects of capital can’t stand and we still don’t have the art we were promised. Hopefully, the money will be raised, but until then, I use caution in talking about this particular project as an economic driver and a value-add to Downtown Greensboro).
This gets me to a major lesson I want us all to learn this year and in coming years, to get back to a simple economy, where we can start paying things in full. Granted, the credit economy is what allowed us to grow as even things we take for granted, such as our rail system and certain shopping malls needed mortgages and loans to get started. Yet, what if even back then, people valued things at whatever could be given at the time? What if we made all houses less than $5,000? There could be variation in the market, but the idea is that things like houses, modes of transportation and education have a basic cost, that is keeping in mind that people need these things to get started as adults. Then, over time, other things could be valued more. While I don’t think we need to eliminate capitalism or financing systems like loans and mortgages, I think we need to become more people-centered with how we spend and loan money and less about creating magic tricks with our money. Next week, we are in 2016 and I’ll be dropping my wishes for the year and evaluating how some of my 2015 wishes did. Let me know what some of your placemaking lessons were onTwitter,Facebook,LinkedInon my pages or at least, share this article with your own commentary on those social networks.Keep up with me on a regular basis through my Tuesday emails.
What should cities give us? Safety? Diversity? A place to live? A place to work? Places to eat? Places to learn?
This is the time of year where across the world, we turn our attention to gifts and what we can give people and what we have been given.
While this week marked the beginning of the church year and the season of giving that many Christian churches mark as Advent, representing the gift of the Christ-child, a more secular beginning also happened this weekend, as this weekend’s trifecta of Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday marked the beginning of the major buying season. While the origins of why the days after Thanksgiving (plus now Giving Tuesday, which is today) have become THE ABSOLUTE DAYS YOU MUST SHOP AND GIVE OR ELSE are a bit muddy, the ideas of giving and getting are as old as time.
Since this is a city blog (and since I thanked cities last week in honor of the United States celebration of Thanksgiving), I wanted to take the time and mention three things this week that cities should give us, if they want us to think of themselves as cities.
Basic Needs
If you are calling yourself a city or town, legally or for the sake of a marketing brochure and you don’t have a health clinic, a school or system of schools or even just a library that can educate people from 0-100, a place where people can either sell their wares and make a living or make wares for someone else and get a paycheck, then you aren’t a city. Also, I’d add that you need a variety of housing at different sizes and price points. You may be a community without these things, maybe even a village, but not a city.
Most of the major cities we think about are nation-states, even in a country like the US that also grants a federal and state layer of governance on top of their cities. In regions like the one I currently reside in (and our Nations’s Capital), the city and its suburbs cross multiple state and county lines, yet function together as a symbiotic whole.
Yet, some of these legal cities and towns are just neighborhoods with a civic building or some other bare minimum standard of being a legal entity capable of taxing or not taxing people. Let’s not even start with how many of these places have created school districts, police and fire departments and still legal means of housing discrimination such as only selling homes in a certain price range, to try to control their populations.
While I don’t like what you are doing if that’s the kind of municipality you are, I’ll give you a pass if you stop calling yourself a city. If you want to be a city, open yourself up to providing the basics, plus diversity, which I’ll explain in the next section.
Diversity
While there are plenty of homogenous neighborhoods, especially in countries like the US, Canada, France and Australia that have grown into cities by adding those basic needs I just mentioned above, I think some neighborhoods still lack the capacity to be a city.
A city allows people to come into it with whatever they have and contribute that service or product. Again, it provides the basic needs, so that a person can then contribute their unique contribution. For example, a cupcake baker sets up shop. They know that their kids, if they have them, can go to school. They themselves can get some extra educational help because some sort of adult learning experience exists, even if it’s just a public library or a culinary school.
A city is also not afraid of the variety of people it has. Actual, known criminals are dealt with, in a way that doesn’t strip them of their humanity, but helps them get back to life after learning some lessons. There are housing types at every size and price level. The difference in housing comes in basic, safe, bare minimum functions and high-end, luxury finishes. Far too many developers and cities are trying to build luxury-only and they wonder why we have a housing crisis. Same with groceries, hair salons and sadly hospitals, clinics and schools. Paying extra should be an enrichment and entertainment experience, not a do-or-die thing.
One would say that schools are winning at diversity, at least when you look at a metro area. However, that diversity diminishes when you have different school districts, with different tax rates, yet in a close geographic area. I believe that school systems that incorporate a singular taxing entity and operate on a county level or in partnership with more than one county, especially if the city extends into said county, do better.
Having one pot of money, plus one centralized superintendent, with regional superintendents, lifts up the value of the entire district. Instead of writing off schools in poorer neighborhoods, the school system is seen as a common good and outside of PTA money and other grants that go to schools on a more individual basis, the district as a whole invests the same amount of money and the same level of basic resources such as buildings and textbooks into the system as a whole. But I could digress here. Schools have their own thing going on and I’m planning on writing more about them at a future date. Let’s move on the final city need, mobility.
Mobility
If your citizens can’t navigate on two feet (or in a motorized wheelchair) safely, you’ve failed the first test of city mobility. The second test is if your citizens can cycle safely, on more than residential streets. The third test is if the transportation you provide, connects all major regions and neighborhoods, in a timely manner, for able-bodied people, not just for folks to who you are mandated to provide curb-side service.
Many cities are failing at the mobility piece. It’s part of why I’m in the line of work I’m in, to push the needle forward in having adequate ways to get around.
Plus, on a romantic level, so many cities are associated with their transit and transportation systems. These entities are often stand alone characters in the books and shows and movies that highlight a particular city. One example that comes to the top of my head is the movie Coming to America and how the subway seemed to shut the door on a romance. Getting out of the movies, I’ve heard many stories of people who don’t date people who live on a certain train line because it takes time to get to that part of New York. Yet, at least they can take the train. Think of how many people consider long-distance relationships the inability to drive an hour or two. Think of folks like me who regularly meet a significant other at the other end of a cross-country flight or train ride.
Think of not having anything but the open highway to get us where we need to go. Yet, everybody can’t drive. Every trip, especially those “glass-of-milk-on-the-corner” trips should not be a car trip. Some cities are even seeing property values rise when they put in things like streetcars. Yet, transportation entities should lift all boats, not just the ones in the special district where the cars will run.
But what about governance?
You may notice governance is missing in what cities should give, at least in the bullet points above. Here’s the thing, it doesn’t take much to be governed. Even if you claim to be stateless and off the grid, some entity, even if it’s just the federal government, will eventually show up at your yurt and tell you these are the rules you have to follow. Essentially you don’t have to live in a city to be a citizen.
Yet, if an entity wants to incorporate itself, and tax its residents above and beyond what federal and states are doing, then this is what my tax dollars should go to ensuring. Also, if tax dollars are going to some businesses, there should be a central entity, much like the school board governs schools and the city council handles basic city workings like fire, police and water, maybe power and telecommunications, that governs how much and when any company can ask for tax abatements or unrestricted grant money from the city.
I believe that so many lawsuits and a major cause of political debate and contention could be eliminated if we didn’t give out tax incentives based on what we perceive would be a major investment. Instead, we could support our own companies, so they can make a decent living at places like the City Market shown above.
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So that’s what I think cities should give us. I’d be remiss during this season of giving (and wishes) if I didn’t mention the gifts I have for you. A year ago today, I published my first print volume of essays and blogs A Black Urbanist: Essays Vol. 1. Yet I’ve felt like I need to print more, not just of that book, but more of my writings in general. While I’m still working a major full-length volume, in the meantime, I’m launching The Black Urbanist Monthly. For $25 a month, starting in January of 2016 you’ll get a print magazine edition of the blog, with both stories and images that you can take offline and share with your colleagues. The first five people to sign up will get a free, signed copy of A Black Urbanist: Essays Vol. 1. Also, your subscription will help me continue to grow my writing, podcasting and in-person speaking and training opportunities. Learn more and sign up here.
Should we even worry about residential gentrification, when in a few years, the very people who make certain blocks hot, don’t even care about those blocks anymore? Is that something that only those of means and of the right color have to worry about? Do people rebuild the cultures that die in new places or do they just hang up their guitars and stop singing along to songs?
As I prepare to spend the holidays back in Greensboro, I want to think about what that means. At the beginning of November, it started to dawn on me that only had a few more weeks to endure Kansas City, at least for 2015.
In the midst of that thought, the Royals won the World Series. People started running through the streets (ok, about a handful of drunk guys jogged down my sidewalk) and the mood that had already been heightened by buildings turning blue at night, became even more electric.
I got a chance to express how I felt about Kansas City and some of the other issues I encountered here on the local NPR last week. On the other hand, I’d written a few months ago about how I was happy to be here in Kansas City.
Even he knows when to hit the road. Image by Flickr user Caren Pilgrim
I can relate to the fickleness of a city being cool.
Especially after Allen Johnson, the head of the editorial page over at the Greensboro News and Record (who so graciously allowed me to write this about a time when I felt like Greensboro was dying and needed to come back to life), wrote his own reflection about what it used to mean to go Uptown.
That brought back my parents’ relayed memories of what it meant when Greensboro was Uptown and all the major department and other stores thrived there. Both Johnson and my parents echoed that there were still some remnants of people not being treated well or served well, but the atmosphere was festive. All three mention a shift in activity, when it happened and how they lived through the transformation.
My own memories of the fun of going through abandoned storefronts, seeing eveyrone in the city on various festival days as a child, teen and young adult and finally, living in downtown and all the happy moments that came from it, along with the trying times of feeling like others didn’t want me around or my income bracket didn’t really belong there.
Then I read this note, from a writer in the New York Times, who reminds us that cool is subjective, even if we don’t always like to admit it. This paragraph stuck out so much to me, I had to think about it even stronger.
I can sympathize. But I think there’s more to these “the city is dead now” complaints than money. People have pronounced St. Marks Place dead many times over the past centuries — when it became poor, and then again when it became rich, and then again when it returned to being poor, and so on. My theory is that the neighborhood hasn’t stopped being cool because it’s too expensive now; it stops being cool for each generation the second we stop feeling cool there. Any claim to objectivity is clouded by one’s former glory.
She goes on to admonish someone who claims that people don’t brunch anymore, by telling her in so many words that she only hates brunch because brunch doesn’t work for her anymore. Not that it’s not making money for businesses and defining New York City for other people in a positive way.
I will say, her piece has a degree of privilege baked in. It assumes that people find a new place to live and they re-sew all those cool things that used to be somewhere else. It assumes that the government or a landlord didn’t want you out. (Speaking of which, ProPublica wants to know about you New Yorkers with unfair rents).
However, when it comes to certain areas, areas like New York that still continue to attract tourists, propel businesses and even house people, I wonder if some of our concerns, the ones not attached to pure gentrification, are valid.
I only ate here once in DC and it was excellent. It’s gone now. Does that make DC less cool? Won’t somebody step up in a city that has that kind of wealth and create something new and similar and better?
As much as we like certain restaurants, no matter where they are, many close down. We outgrow certain activities because we are no longer of a certain size or age. Some of those cool activities were destructive and moving away from them makes sense.
Again, as I’ve said before, subjective measures like this do not excuse city governments from providing basic services like transit, trash collection, medical, fire and even policing. City coolness is at the top of the Mazlow hierarchy, primarily because those other things I just mentioned are at the bottom.
But if you are at the top of the hierarchy and complaining about something not feeling right. By all means, do, as I encouraged you in this previous post. Do remember though, that “cool” is very subjective and it’s one of many valid feelings one can have about a space.
Only time will tell if your block, your city routine, where you need to live, will stand the test of your time.
This is The Black Urbanist Weekly, an email newsletter that highlights the Black Queer Feminist Urbanist thoughts and commentary of me, Kristen Jeffers, an internationally-known urban planner,fiber designer, andcontributing editor. Think of this as an editorial page column, but directly in your email. This week I wanted to check in with one of my first sites of considering urbanism, which seems to get popular around this time of year — the mall.Also, we have a special message from the University of California at San Diego.Learn more about how you can advertise in this newsletter. Prices start at just $75 a week with a four-week commitment. You can also become aPatreonas an individual and support this work for as little as $5 a month.
I had other plans to end my year of this newsletter, but right after I pulled my wishes together for this year, I realized I had a couple more things to say that were very relevant to this time of year. Hence why this week’s newsletter is in your inboxes and online today and on Monday, I’ll be revisiting and updating my post on Kwanzaa from a Black queer feminist urbanist perspective, but this week, I wanted to take us back to the mall.
This past Saturday, I snapped the photo that leads this post, showing the far northwest corner of Tyson’s Corner Center at full parking capacity. I was in the middle of one of my many social distancing parking lot picnics with Les, my partner, at the Silver Diner across the street. This diner bills itself as part of the mall, but is really only connected by a pedestrian signal and a sidewalk that still has you battling six lanes of traffic, plus one of the mall access roads that can still be treacherous to cross as a pedestrian to one of the many side doors the of the mall.
I digress, but do I really?
Those of you who have been reading my work for the past decade and some change know that I’ve struggled, as many in the journalism community have, with writing accurately about the built environment. I’ve had a particular struggle in writing about an environment that, confirming my suspicions, doesn’t want to support me at my income level and sometimes my skin tone and whom I choose to love, and how I choose to adorn myself.
Yet, despite evidence to the contrary, Cinnabon, Jamba Juice, Barnes and Noble (B&N), Kohls, Sephora, Target, and Michaels seem to be happy to have me, especially on bad days, when the mall is empty enough to social distance and I can take that bun and juice back to the car and grieve over deceased relatives and new health challenges.
I get back home and I curl up into my new sweatsuits that fit my new size with my shiny new crochet hook set and experiment with making machine-washable sweaters. I do so while listening to podcasts or audiobooks I saw the covers of at B&N. Sometimes I color, because lo and behold, not only does B&N have craft magazines, they still have adult coloring books and pencils. Sometimes I just polish off stacks of memoirs. Sometimes Les and I grab a cheesecake or two, like the Golden Girls, to polish off when we get home.
Ok, that is a digression, but right now, just trying to stay alive in a pandemic while having side illnesses and creating our own self-care network that goes beyond the limitations of the built environment on our bodies, has been vital.
And yes, one of those sites of self and community care for us is the enclosed shopping mall and its power center cousins.
Plus, we live in the DC region and several of our shopping malls and plazas are a half-mile or less from the Metro. Others have bus routes. One is the original central business district, which also has transit access, right next to its local yarn store. One is a power center, but by next May, it will have a Metro stop, after years of plans. I dream of the day when its enormous parking lot stops being an asphalt heat island, but a covered lot like The District Wharf with lots of fun restaurants and shops up top.
In addition, some of the best formal architectural and planning work on how to make these shopping districts better has come from feminine-presenting people, which in general the mall loves the most or thinks is more likely to part with their money. I first found the work of architects Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson on retrofitting suburbia and I was thrilled to do a special chat with them in March of 2021 they released their newest set of Retrofitting Suburbia case studies. Another collective of planners writing online, managed by Nancy Thompson, AICP, has written this article for people who need steps to turn their back mall into something productive.
And I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that so many of these shopping centers are failing because they see themselves as just shopping centers at best and tax shelters at worst. So many suburbs built and “abandoned” have become sites of opportunity for folks like me who are lower income, small business owners, LGBTQIA+, immigrants and their descendants, and/or descendants of the Black/African enslaved, and who use mobility devices and other disabilities to make a life for ourselves. Many malls and shopping plazas servicing us are reviving, just in a different way. Meanwhile, other places that were built as money schemes are unfortunately failing, especially if they aren’t properly connecting with the communities that use them.
Because of these kinds of closures and disinvestments, it might be too late for several malls in Les’s home region of Hampton Roads/Tidewater, Virginia. The area is a cluster of small cities with large land areas, divided up by a substantial waterfront, harbor, and naval operations. Some malls are becoming town centers, including one that she and I both visited a lot in our younger years, and went to in August of 2021 before more of it closed down. Others are just doing their best to share holiday cheer before they go away.
However, the malls and town centers I spent my formative years in Northwest and Southwest Greensboro, Winston-Salem, Durham, and just outside the beltline and midtown Raleigh are not all dead but have had a lot of demographic and physical shifts. I spoke in this presentation in January of 2021 about the death and “re-birth” of two (I set this to start at the part where I start talking about this, then I move on from that around the 38-minute mark). I wrote a slightly humorous holiday tale about a few in 2015. If anything, my hometown malls are showing resilience, in the face of so many of the corporate and manufacturing facets of the goods that fill them moving away over two decades ago.
Finally, you might not have thought much about these shopping centers and you may see them with disdain. Hopefully, it’s not because you find yourself lesser than for admitting you shop at these stores. Instead, I hope you consider standing with all the retail workers who make far too little making and serving the items we adore so much, with a glimmer of hope that they can get a store discount, much less a living wage. I hope you also think about how and where we choose to trade and barter goods and services we make with joy and in right-relationship with the environment, much like I did in my 2020 Sierra Magazine piece.
And I hope whichever holidays you choose to observe this year, you do so with joy. Since it took me a minute to get you this week’s newsletter, I’ll be right back in your inbox on Monday, with a revisit of my 2012 post on Kwanzaa as a community holiday, on its first day this year, and how it can become more queer and feminist along with being Black and urbanist.
If you’re new here, I write out my grand thesis of the week above, then I share other articles/videos that were noteworthy for me this week in this section. Apologies in advance for things behind a paywall. Some things I subscribe to and others I grab just before the wall comes down on me. I will start marking these articles and describing them.
Nearly an hour after posting this tweet last week about suburbs of survival, I finished editing this piece for GGWash of fellow urbanist writer Addison Del Mastro,on the wild and winding history of this Pizza Hut in what we consider the central part of Prince Georges County, MD. I was also captivated by his article on the suburbs as we know them being a “first draft”. I’ll be revisiting these ideas in the new year, of changing definitions and feelings of “suburbia”.
Meanwhile, I received other confirmation/affirmation in my Black queer feminist journey from this examination of the late Black feminist Toni Cade Bambara’s 1970s questioning of the gender roles placed upon us as Black folks and Black construction company executive Deryl McKissack’s article from 2021 on her perspective on defining yourself for yourself. I plan on taking lots of time over this week to not be on social and finding inspiration from within myself and non-digital or digitized written sources.
And I considered holding this link until next week, but I know many of you are either going to be a Black Santa or you’re looking for one and I really loved how my friend and brilliant Baltimore-based essayist Alanna Nicole Davis described how Baltimore’s holiday celebrations can still be discriminatory and segregated through the hook of a Black Santa everywhere, but Hampden, which is internationally known for its neighborhood Christmas celebrations. (This may be paywalled for you).
The folks at the University of California, San Diego would love for you to know about not just one, but two tenue-track jobs they have available next year. Plus, some housekeeping about our little space. First the two jobs.
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN URBAN STUDIES AND PLANNING
The Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of California, San Diego invites
applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor working in the area of urban studies and
planning to begin July 1, 2023.
This is a position for a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Urban Studies and
Planning at UC San Diego, a rapidly-growing department with strategic emphases on social and spatial justice; climate justice; and multinational planning.
The department is interested in candidates who have demonstrated commitment to excellence by strong engagement in teaching, research, and service toward building an equitable and diverse scholarly environment. The successful candidate will be an excellent scholar with an active research program in one or more of the following areas: transportation planning; climate change mitigation and adaptation; environment and land use planning; health and wellness, and/or spatial analytics.
The University of California, San Diego is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer advancing inclusive excellence. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, age, covered veteran status, or other protected categories covered by the UC nondiscrimination policy.
Next review date: Tuesday, Jan 31, 2023 at 11:59pm (Pacific Time)
Apply by this date to ensure full consideration by the committee.
Final date: Friday, Mar 31, 2023 at 11:59pm (Pacific Time)
Applications will continue to be accepted until this date, but those received after the review date will only be considered if the position has not yet been filled.
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And…
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN URBAN STUDIES AND PLANNING WITH A
FOCUS ON DESIGNING JUST FUTURES
The Department of Urban Studies and Planning seeks faculty candidates at the level of Assistant Professor whose research, teaching, and service will advance scholarship and institutional solutions for designing more just and equitable systems and structures.
This faculty member will advance UC San Diego’s commitment to the inclusion of Indigenous, Black, and migrant communities, anti-racism, anti-oppression, equity, and social justice. We especially welcome candidates whose professional experience, community engagement, and personal background have facilitated their understanding of and ability to better serve students from Indigenous and other underrepresented populations.
Faculty hired under this Initiative will join the UC San Diego campus, the UC San Diego Design Lab (https://designlab.ucsd.edu/), and the Indigenous Futures Institute (https://ifi.ucsd.edu/) to forge a new paradigm of engagement and collaboration that draws on the geographic, academic, institutional, and cultural strengths of our tri-national region across Southern California, Baja California, and the Kumeyaay region.
This search is part of a UC San Diego-wide cluster hire on Designing Just Futures (https://www.design-just-futures.ucsd.edu/) that aims to recruit scholars who can contribute to the advancement of design, social justice, and Indigenous, Black, and migrant futures and seeks engagement with scholars across disciplines to address issues of territory, access, and equity, and social and political debates pertinent to Indigenous, Black, border, and migrant communities, while also working within their home departments and professional communities.
Next review date: Tuesday, Jan 31, 2023 at 11:59pm (Pacific Time)
Apply by this date to ensure full consideration by the committee.
Final date: Friday, Mar 31, 2023 at 11:59pm (Pacific Time)
Applications will continue to be accepted until this date, but those received after the review date will only be considered if the position has not yet been filled.
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I know I’ve been promising that I’ll be live on LinkedIn and YouTube and Instagram and I haven’t forgotten! I’ll be doing my wishes video live on Wednesday, December 28 and a video about these two holiday-themed newsletters Thursday, December 29. Both of these will go live around the noon hour Eastern.
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I have created a special landing page, www.theblackurbanist.com/books, that’s not only a home for my upcoming volume, A Black Urbanist Journey to a Queer Feminist Future, which I just chatted with my editor with this week, but I have embedded my Bookshop.org booklists here as well since we were having so many issues with the link. Go here for all things books I’ve read and my book when it comes out!
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As of today, I am on holiday break from any client projects. I’ll be releasing my Kwanzaa email, making those videos, and doing some 2023 strategic planning and newsletter writing. I’ll release my 2023 Capabilities Deck in the first weeks of January along with a video to pair to explain what my calendar will look like in 2023 and how you can plug into it this year.
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Thank you for supporting last year’s capital campaign. Thanks to you, this year, I was able to cover my web hosting, enhance this newsletter, and position myself to take on some other client projects. However, if you want to send me money for quick expenses or like a tip jar, you can Venmo me. I will also be introducing a paid tier for Substack and Medium users to also function like a tip jar.
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Happy holidays and talk soon,
Kristen
Many of you have noticed changes in my Twitter and Instagram bio, that I’ve been “interested” in more queer events on Facebook, and others have had the pleasure to meet Les, my partner, in person or you’ve known her from her own work in faith-based LGBTQ and transportation advocacy (and you should get to know her videos and life coaching and endometriosis advocacy and our merch line we colaborated on together!). She’s been with me on all my speaking visits over the past two years and we’ve both been helping each other with our various business and community ventures.
Plus, two years ago today, on National Coming Out Day 2018, after a wonderful date night at Midlands after years of knowing each other casually, we decided to start a life journey together, as lovers and friends.
However, in the past and directly, I’ve been hesitant to talk about this part of my life and it has affected how I do this work and how much I pride myself on being transparent. Yet, I believe that this is the time to address this. I wrote a draft of this about 18 months ago, but I believe today is the day to bring this draft into the light.
Before I get started, a warning to both family who are reading this and finding out for the first time and family who may have spoken to my mom or who are concerned about my mom.
First of all, I still love you all and if that love doesn’t extend back to me, I understand. Secondly , I told mom privately when I was last home in Greensboro in the spring of 2019 and I ask that you allow her the space to process this and that you refrain from asking her any questions or making judgements on her and how she’s raised me and treated me over the years.
If you are tempted to make these and other similar judgements, please remember that this is not about you. This is not an attack on my mom (or on you, mom), our family, our reputation and as church people. This is not an attack on my family raising me in the best way they knew how. This is not me wasting my beauty or my brain or giving up.
I identify as a pansexual polyamorous non-binary femme (pronouns she/her/they), who is willing and able and has fallen into a committed, loving, monogamous relationship no matter who or how that person presents/is. This also does not mean I’m turning into a male person or will start presenting more masculine as a rule. I still like all the same things I like. I’m happy with my body and how it’s proportioned. Also, I support all other sexual and gender expressions that are loving and consensual.
I know this is an agree-to-disagree notion some of you. I believe we were born holy, are always holy, but sometimes fall astray and need reminders from God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and folks sanctioned under their power to share this truth. I also know everything under the banner of gender and sexual uniqueness is under the purview of the perfect creation of God. The verses that explciitly condem same-sex or gender-noncomformity I believe have a context for which they were written, that doesn’t necessarily affect our situations. I also believe that we can support civil rights for everyone, without necessarily understanding each individual. We were not all created queer and not every queer expression, just like not every hetero expression of love is holy. But some of us were created queer, our queerness is holy and we need to acknowledge this in our faith communities.
One way I illustrate this is that many of us, especially in the black church, have no issue with allowing women to participate in the full body of worship, namely being or speaking in the pulpit. Yet, the Apostle Paul found that to be a distraction in one of the churches he was writing to and he told those specific women to not speak. However, women spoke and were active in church work in other places, plus, there were lots of women doing work for Jesus and all through the Old Testament. I believe that the scripture we have was God’s word for those specific people and much like God spoke directly to them, they (and yes they, I’ll save that for another post), still speak to us and work with us with the situations they gave us to live out.
And yes, I made a choice, but it’s only a choice to no longer live a lie.
I’m suffering through purple rage and I need to let it go to keep my business and creativity alive.
I built this site nearly a decade ago (and my work on blogs over the last 15 years) to be real, raw and honest about what we can do for the community. Over these years, I’ve been exposed to so much outside of my childhood bubble and I’ve grown so much. Yet, not addressing this directly and firmly has been eating away at me and making me publicly rageful, jealous and resentful. If you’ve been at a happy hour (or even on a few Zoom calls) with me recently, you’ve witnessed some of this. I apologize for anyone I hurt with this behavior, but know I’ve been trying to sort through things a lot of us do as teenagers. Writing this post is helping me heal and start the process of healing relationships–both with people as well as with my work and visibility. I also forgive you, but understand if you can’t forgive me.
We need to stop being prejudiced, racist, and genderphobic in our own community of queer people and in how we apply our urbanism.
I’m sick of the white gay men purporting to speak for (or in some cases use their power to tear down) neighborhoods and spaces that have rich culture and life without them getting into the mix and meddling with what makes those communities special or even better, using their priviledge as white bodies to help us be heard or raise money. This is the root of a lot of the protesting around prides over the last few years, that in their corporatization, they’ve started to mirror non-queer society in how they margialize non-cis, non-white bodies. I’ve felt compelled to always live in cities and move to larger ones, because I’m committed to building community in the black queer community. Because of what I shared above, we struggle a little more at times. Love is defintely love, but it’s really sweet when I can wake up next to my black lesbian partner and have her understand what we need and the struggles. I also hope that as more folks feel comfort in being out and proud, that we get more diversity in expressions and more people feel comfortable dating each other. However, we do not need to favor whiteness or cisness or even wealth. We all have worth and value.
The Death of a Inspiration
The person that helped me to start unpack my harmful theology, not just around queerness, but around patriarchy and white supremacy in our churches and our faith, Rachel Held Evans, died on Saturday May 4, 2019 from complications of the flu, a UTI and an antibiotic she took to heal those other two. She was only 37 (just four years older than me!) and left behind a husband, a three-year-old and a barely one-year old. She was white, grew up in the Evangelical bubble (church, college and also early writings on faith and action), straight and cis and she had her own blind spots around race and even with our affirmation as queer. But she got up daily for over a decade and through her blog and books confronted the notion that only straight cis white men get messages from God that hold weight and authority. Her breakdown of Proverbs 31, her attempt to follow all the rules in the Bible for women, her making peace with needing a different worship experience and now, all the people across the Christian world who have something positive to say about how she challenged them, and challenged them in the way those of us who are current or past evangelicals know and appreciate, with lots of well-stated scripture and a heart for love. She truly had a prophetic voice and it’s this voice that continues to inspire me to speak truth to power, over myself and over our communities.
I’m in love and she’s my best friend and she makes me a better urbanist, a better Christian and a better citizen, friend, daughter, etc. Our urbanism needs to make room for queerness that isn’t just white and cis male. Our faith communities really need to examine how we look at the words that God has given us and the internal words that the Spirit speaks to us. Also, for those of you who don’t practice or hold different beliefs outside of the Christian fold, know that I love and respect you too and just like I’m Black, I’m also queer and Christian and that’s the spirit of where this comes from.
Finally, this is something I’ve known about myself since puberty and something that I take one day at a time. However, I do believe it is time for me to speak about this so that I can know where I stand with everyone in my life and so we can continue the greater work of restoration in our communities.
So here we are, the first true Baltimore-centric post. It took me two months because as I said in my 2017 birthday post, I was scared. This is a city where people get hurt and get hurt often. Especially by people who claim they want to do the right thing. The last thing I needed was for my post to come along and stir up another hornet’s nest. I’m trying as much as possible to fly under the radar.
However, I do have thoughts and thus far, I can say the city’s giving me exactly what I need. Plus, it truly feels like every city that I’ve lived in decided to put all their DNA in a test tube and let it gestate. The irony in this is that Baltimore was born before all the other cities I’ve lived in. However, I can see where it stagnated and where it’s got room to be reborn. So let’s talk about these common things.
Harris Teeter=Every City I Lived in In North Carolina
And it’s legit. There is a whole row of House-Autry flour mixes. House-Autry flour mixes are one of the nine pillars of modern North Carolina cuisine and it’s awesome that this most obscure of the nine is right here where I can get my hands on it in a short drive to the grocery store. Oh and there’s not just one, but two Harris Teeters. However, like Harris Teeter pretty much everywhere these days, the demographics of the neighborhoods around them tend to be the whitest and the wealthiest of town. Still, I got a car, I got money, I got a belly. Y’all gon see me! And help me make myself at home. (For those of you curious to what the nine pillars of modern North Carolina cuisine are, I got you in a future post).
Power Plant Live!= Power and Light in Kansas City
I’ve been told it’s by the same developer and it shows. Bars that attract the average citizen. Average meaning more likely to be obnoxious by the end of the night. They do have some good concerts there though, I hated missing St. Paul and the Broken Bones and people rave about when Tech 9ine does a hometown show at Power and Light. Also, one of the best parties I attended in Kansas City, was the streetcar progressive party which ended at one of the event spaces in Power and Light. There’s a nice co-working space at Power Plant Live!, as well as a newish Mediterranean/Middle Eastern spot that’s great for folks who when they aren’t consuming the cuisine of their home state, are trying to avoid over-proccessed foods.
The MTA Metro Subway=The WMATA Metrorail Blue Line
I say the Blue Line and the part of the line from Capitol South to Largo Town Center because it does cover similar demographic areas. Also, while the MTA Metro Subway is rumored to go nowhere, it does go to a few places, if you just happen to need to go to Hopkins Hospital, the Maryland State Office Buildings, the Upton Market, the replacement shopping thing at Owings Mills and the two other shopping malls that sit off from it. Oh or the homes, the dense row homes, that happen to sit back off the parking lots. Similar things are happening on the WMATA Metrorail Blue Line. Government buildings. A hospital (or a major medical office). A new shopping center that has some issues, along with a nearby public educational institution. Public food markets. A sports stadium, although arguably one has more activity around it than the other. And yes, I’m including racial dynamics in this as well. Who lives around these stations as the stations move from downtown to the suburbs also mirror each other. (Spoiler, they get blacker as you go out, although Baltimore City’s population is still predominately black, so that skews things a bit too).
The Light Rail= The D.C. and the K.C. Streetcars
The Light Rail works when it works. That’s why it gets to be lumped in with Kansas City’s system, that’s continuing to meet and exceed expectations. When it doesn’t work, it reminds me of D.C.’s poor little H Street line. It’s like the Little Engine That Could. It thinks it can and it does, but it has a lot of work to do to get there. Baltimore’s light rail will take you to the airport, the convention center, Orioles Park at Camden Yards, M&T Stadium, the Symphony Hall, and a some lovely bars, public markets, food halls and neighborhoods on a north/south axis that’s perpendicular to my current neighborhood. However, I can’t trust when it comes, because the systems on there are in need of renewing. I hear they are tied up in red tape. That’s unfortunate. Yes, if you haven’t heard, I’ve added a car back to my urban travel mix.
The Rowhouse Blocks and the Turrets=D.C.
I mentioned in a prior newsletter that the house where the Underwoods on House of Cards live/lived (mild spoiler there), is actually a house in Baltimore passing for D.C. Much like the rib place he always goes too and a number of other exterior and some interior shots. If all you know of Baltimore on TV is The Wire, then you’re missing out. One day, we might get a show up here that actually shows all the parts of the city, for better or worse. Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to actually being able to afford a turret one day.
The Sprawl=Kansas City
You don’t have a bisecting state line, but you do see the results of building out road corridors and parkways in the years prior to World War II. You see the homes start to get newer and newer, in addition to areas of empty lots and some urban renewal that breaks the patterns, along with the newer downtown towers and the convention center. I think that my time in D.C. drove it home that I’m just going to have to adjust to at least a 15 minute drive to a Target. Well, at least Amazon delivers door-to-door here.
The Love of a Singular Food Object So Much it Defines Your City=Kansas City
Sweet Barbecue & Burnt Ends> Crabs. Crab cakes however are in contention. I’m allergic to crabs alone so I’m a little bit biased. Again, and I attribute this to knowing one cuisine solely for 28 years, North Carolina is so much more than one thing. Again, I will be discussing this claim in a future post.
The Hospitality= North Carolina
Maryland is a southern state. And the friends and colleagues I have here do mimic the ones I have back at home. Plus, I’m here thanks to their hospitality and their nudging. And I do feel ties to being at home. I will say though that there were a handful of folks in Kansas City that did their part. Plus, I’m in less need of a safety net these days, but I have it. So there goes. Argue among yourselves as who’s the nicest.
30% of the License Plates=North Carolina
I asked someone how this could be. Then I was told that a lot of Baltimore undergraduate (and graduate!) students come from North Carolina. I have yet to meet an adult friend who also grew up in North Carolina and is just here, but I have met a few of the former. It’s nice to be able to drive around, squinch your vision and think you’re back in either Charlotte (because stadiums and light rail) or Raleigh (skyline and colleges). We do not have the row house situation in North Carolina, clearly I gave that to D.C. above, but we do have a lot of vehicles that seem to belong to maybe parents that live in North Carolina.
And so that’s it. I’ve got more serious thoughts on Baltimore coming over the next few months, but for now, these are my initial, fun, observations of the city I’m making home for now. Oh and Royal Farms chicken is great, it’s just not equal to Bojangles in the same way and therefore, doesn’t warrant it’s own section of this post.
I’m Kristen. For seven years I’ve used this space and a few others to make sense of the world around me. Learn more about me and read more of my archives. Subscribe to my newsletter (which comes out mostly weekly) and stay up to date with me. Or, come be one of those Twitter folks who make me think a little harder about what I do. Or I can talk to you, with my co-host and friend and fellow urbanist Katrina Johnston-Zimmerman, roughly every week as well about the next wave of urbanism.
Image of a line of row houses and cars parked on the street on a sunny day in Baltimore’s Reservoir Hill neighborhood. Image via Wikimedia Commons by Smallbones – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18756953
I’m finally getting around to doing a fantasy transit map.
My inspiration? My trip home from D.C. to Greensboro via the train.
It takes approximately 8 hours to do it in the daylight and 5.5 hours to do it in the middle of the night. And those are the only choices, just the two trains a day.
However, years ago, there were at least 5 trains a day, if not more. I think we could get back to that point and do so quite cheaply. Also, I think there’s no real excuse why we can’t have trains going to every major city, at at least 60 miles, if not 90 miles an hour.
This idea actually was planted in me years before I decided to do planning work, but not long after my first ever train trip just before I started kindergarten.
North Carolinian fourth and eighth graders study their home state in social studies classes. Being the social studies and history nerd I still am and was very much so then, I read my textbook from cover to cover.
My fourth grade social studies textbook. This was the only image I could find.
There was a section in it that talked about life in North Carolina in 2032. Part of that life was being able to have lunch on the coast and dinner in the mountains (And I’m sure breakfast in one of the three regions and other meals on other coasts, but still, you can wake up one place, lunch in another and dinner in yet another).
As it stands right now, thanks to the routing of the Carolinian and the Piedmont, you can have an early breakfast in NoDA in Charlotte, a high noon lunch at Natty Greene’s in Greensboro and a dinner at one of Ashley Christensen’s fabulous James Beard Award-winning joints in Raleigh. You could do all of this in reverse. (probably need a different breakfast spot though…)
However, what if you could have dinner at the Chef and the Farmer in Kinston instead of that dinner in Raleigh and still get back to Greensboro before midnight?
That’s the fantasy I’m creating with my North Carolina Passenger Rail Map.
Before I reveal the map, a few rules that I worked with:
1.This assumes that we can start putting commuter rail stops and tracks down the interstates and state highway medians immediately.
2. This is not by any means parallel or inspired by the existing maps for the High Speed Rail corridor or any strategic plans. Please do dig up the strategic plans, especially for the Durham-Orange Corridor, the Wake County Corridor. The regional transit authority sites are good places to start for this and I may be back here to add those links in.
3. In the interest of still keeping some realistic planning in place, I’m using those highway medians with the assumption that the lanes lost in the process would be absorbed by people taking the train more often, especially in the Charlotte Raleigh corridor. Also, the costs would be lower, as basically this can be rolled into the existing plan to add second rail from Charlotte to Raleigh and also highway resurfacing and widening.
4.I decided to overlay a Google Map, because all the work is done for me. The map is blurry, yes, but it’s really just there for perspective and once I started drawing the lines and circles over top, I didn’t want to re-center it. I will revisit this later as well.
So, all aboard (couldn’t resist)! In my fantasy world, you can get to just about any city in the state in less than 5 hours, many within 2-3 hours.
My trunk line is the existing Piedmont routing. I’m assuming that almost everyone, save the folks on Asheville to Wilmington line, will come through Greensboro, Raleigh or Charlotte at some point.
(Here are the raw distance calculations, using Google Maps and following existing interstate, U.S. or state highway routes where possible).
I imagine these stations will be massive park and rides, utilizing space right next to highway interchanges for cars and regional buses to areas that still can’t be served by rail efficiently. These buses will still sync up directly with arrivals and departures and will leave the cities they originate in promptly. Also, there will be transit to major commercial areas in the cities represented.
Or, I could go even more fantastical and make all these stations downtown stations, much like all the existing ones are. A lot of these places will need new track anyway, why not go downtown to downtown and save money on parking and buses.
Now, what you’ve been waiting for, the map!
Existing Amtrak service is represented by blue lines. Fantasy service is represented, with slight approximations, by the green lines. In the Google Drive, distance is calculated using state highways, of which many do have a passenger or freight railroad paralleling or hugging anyway.
Also, if you’ve not seen the infrastructure maps, especially the railroad maps, the Washington Post recently published, you should. It will also point out that a lot of my fantasy map, could become very real and very viable–if only we reinstated some of the old railroads or allowed more passenger traffic on the ones we have.
Finally, there’s some great information on the N.C. By Rail website, including this awesome video of the progress and modifications to the primary state-owned and operated route that the Piedmont travels.
I expect you to critique the mess out of this. Can’t wait to hear your thoughts!
I’m Kristen. I started blogging here to make sense of the built environment around me. You can find me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. You can find out more about me at my portfolio website, www.kristenejeffers.com. Or get an email from me weekly on Tuesday’s with links, other posts and job/fellowship opportunities.
Many of you have noticed changes in my Twitter and Instagram bio, that I’ve been “interested” in more queer events on Facebook, and others have had the pleasure to meet Les, my partner, in person or you’ve known her from her own work in faith-based LGBTQ and transportation advocacy (and you should get to know her videos and life coaching and endometriosis advocacy and our merch line we colaborated on together!). She’s been with me on all my speaking visits over the past two years and we’ve both been helping each other with our various business and community ventures.
Plus, two years ago today, on National Coming Out Day 2018, after a wonderful date night at Midlands after years of knowing each other casually, we decided to start a life journey together, as lovers and friends.
However, in the past and directly, I’ve been hesitant to talk about this part of my life and it has affected how I do this work and how much I pride myself on being transparent. Yet, I believe that this is the time to address this. I wrote a draft of this about 18 months ago, but I believe today is the day to bring this draft into the light.
Before I get started, a warning to both family who are reading this and finding out for the first time and family who may have spoken to my mom or who are concerned about my mom.
First of all, I still love you all and if that love doesn’t extend back to me, I understand. Secondly , I told mom privately when I was last home in Greensboro in the spring of 2019 and I ask that you allow her the space to process this and that you refrain from asking her any questions or making judgements on her and how she’s raised me and treated me over the years.
If you are tempted to make these and other similar judgements, please remember that this is not about you. This is not an attack on my mom (or on you, mom), our family, our reputation and as church people. This is not an attack on my family raising me in the best way they knew how. This is not me wasting my beauty or my brain or giving up.
I identify as a pansexual polyamorous non-binary femme (pronouns she/her/they), who is willing and able and has fallen into a committed, loving, monogamous relationship no matter who or how that person presents/is. This also does not mean I’m turning into a male person or will start presenting more masculine as a rule. I still like all the same things I like. I’m happy with my body and how it’s proportioned. Also, I support all other sexual and gender expressions that are loving and consensual.
I know this is an agree-to-disagree notion some of you. I believe we were born holy, are always holy, but sometimes fall astray and need reminders from God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and folks sanctioned under their power to share this truth. I also know everything under the banner of gender and sexual uniqueness is under the purview of the perfect creation of God. The verses that explciitly condem same-sex or gender-noncomformity I believe have a context for which they were written, that doesn’t necessarily affect our situations. I also believe that we can support civil rights for everyone, without necessarily understanding each individual. We were not all created queer and not every queer expression, just like not every hetero expression of love is holy. But some of us were created queer, our queerness is holy and we need to acknowledge this in our faith communities.
One way I illustrate this is that many of us, especially in the black church, have no issue with allowing women to participate in the full body of worship, namely being or speaking in the pulpit. Yet, the Apostle Paul found that to be a distraction in one of the churches he was writing to and he told those specific women to not speak. However, women spoke and were active in church work in other places, plus, there were lots of women doing work for Jesus and all through the Old Testament. I believe that the scripture we have was God’s word for those specific people and much like God spoke directly to them, they (and yes they, I’ll save that for another post), still speak to us and work with us with the situations they gave us to live out.
And yes, I made a choice, but it’s only a choice to no longer live a lie.
I’m suffering through purple rage and I need to let it go to keep my business and creativity alive.
I built this site nearly a decade ago (and my work on blogs over the last 15 years) to be real, raw and honest about what we can do for the community. Over these years, I’ve been exposed to so much outside of my childhood bubble and I’ve grown so much. Yet, not addressing this directly and firmly has been eating away at me and making me publicly rageful, jealous and resentful. If you’ve been at a happy hour (or even on a few Zoom calls) with me recently, you’ve witnessed some of this. I apologize for anyone I hurt with this behavior, but know I’ve been trying to sort through things a lot of us do as teenagers. Writing this post is helping me heal and start the process of healing relationships–both with people as well as with my work and visibility. I also forgive you, but understand if you can’t forgive me.
We need to stop being prejudiced, racist, and genderphobic in our own community of queer people and in how we apply our urbanism.
I’m sick of the white gay men purporting to speak for (or in some cases use their power to tear down) neighborhoods and spaces that have rich culture and life without them getting into the mix and meddling with what makes those communities special or even better, using their priviledge as white bodies to help us be heard or raise money. This is the root of a lot of the protesting around prides over the last few years, that in their corporatization, they’ve started to mirror non-queer society in how they margialize non-cis, non-white bodies. I’ve felt compelled to always live in cities and move to larger ones, because I’m committed to building community in the black queer community. Because of what I shared above, we struggle a little more at times. Love is defintely love, but it’s really sweet when I can wake up next to my black lesbian partner and have her understand what we need and the struggles. I also hope that as more folks feel comfort in being out and proud, that we get more diversity in expressions and more people feel comfortable dating each other. However, we do not need to favor whiteness or cisness or even wealth. We all have worth and value.
The Death of a Inspiration
The person that helped me to start unpack my harmful theology, not just around queerness, but around patriarchy and white supremacy in our churches and our faith, Rachel Held Evans, died on Saturday May 4, 2019 from complications of the flu, a UTI and an antibiotic she took to heal those other two. She was only 37 (just four years older than me!) and left behind a husband, a three-year-old and a barely one-year old. She was white, grew up in the Evangelical bubble (church, college and also early writings on faith and action), straight and cis and she had her own blind spots around race and even with our affirmation as queer. But she got up daily for over a decade and through her blog and books confronted the notion that only straight cis white men get messages from God that hold weight and authority. Her breakdown of Proverbs 31, her attempt to follow all the rules in the Bible for women, her making peace with needing a different worship experience and now, all the people across the Christian world who have something positive to say about how she challenged them, and challenged them in the way those of us who are current or past evangelicals know and appreciate, with lots of well-stated scripture and a heart for love. She truly had a prophetic voice and it’s this voice that continues to inspire me to speak truth to power, over myself and over our communities.
I’m in love and she’s my best friend and she makes me a better urbanist, a better Christian and a better citizen, friend, daughter, etc. Our urbanism needs to make room for queerness that isn’t just white and cis male. Our faith communities really need to examine how we look at the words that God has given us and the internal words that the Spirit speaks to us. Also, for those of you who don’t practice or hold different beliefs outside of the Christian fold, know that I love and respect you too and just like I’m Black, I’m also queer and Christian and that’s the spirit of where this comes from.
Finally, this is something I’ve known about myself since puberty and something that I take one day at a time. However, I do believe it is time for me to speak about this so that I can know where I stand with everyone in my life and so we can continue the greater work of restoration in our communities.
Recently, I was made aware of and responded to this series of threads on Twitter, that among my colleagues in the D.C. area, there’s a concern over how many practitioners of place, especially planners, exist in the metro area and how many folks want to be planners by name, versus just doing the work in many different aspects of the field. I’ve heard this before, from planners and related advocates, architects, engineers and others who do community work of all races and from all other regions of the U.S. I’m not surprised and I do know why I hear this so much. I’ve talked about it before, but as I’ll mention in the final section, I want to shift my thoughts and takes back to this site, where I own the server space and have plenty of room to link to things. First, few clients exist in need of architecture and building services as well as transportation planning and operations, that don’t already have existing contracts and people they use. Even for general environmental planning, or acceptance of environmental injustice, there’s a drought. Your client base/employment options are limited greatly. The one most people are aware of are government entities, which have all kinds of requirements to ensure fairness and equity in the awarding of work contracts to firms, but sometimes can be cumbersome and create competitive environments. Also, for legal reasons, which yes, have merit, you have to be careful what you talk about and who you talk to when it comes to these competitions. Which can be hard when most of the people you compete with were at one point studio classmates or internship cubemates. Or even better, roommates or lovers. Plus, if you elect to work in-house with a government entity, you have other ethical considerations and gag orders, which again, are often necessary. Finally, some things, like public transit, just make more sense to be governed by you know, the government and for their privatization to be regulated, if there’s privatization at all. Or, you work with private for or non-profit developers, without government funding, some who are in the business to create things that make our world better and some are in the business to take from others and make gobs of money from themselves. Now for-profit doesn’t always mean capitalist monster, just like non-profit doesn’t always mean charitable and for the people. Many places need to build or renovate homes, build or renovate transportation systems and honestly, build or renovate a lot of other pieces of the built environment or society. However, there’s even a limit there to how much people can build and operate. Speaking of the nonprofits, you could be or work with an advocacy group with a dash of service provision, but you’re often getting your money from government grants, private grants or private banks, so there’s not that much difference from what I mentioned above. There’s also a size issue, some contracting firms might as well be power brokers, while others like me are just small shingles. Basically, if you’re new to the idea of planners/architects/engineers/contracting, all these firms operate and build like law firms and attorneys as well as media outlets and journalists. We also have lawyers in our clubhouse too and they can tell you what their lives have been like as they’ve seen a shortage in labor and emphasis on big versus small especially over the last 10 years. And this site, if you haven’t already picked that up is a journalistic outfit ;). The next big argument against a growing class of capital p planners is the public will of the citizenry. Some well-meaning folks, as well as your usual villains in many jurisdictions and metro areas, fail to provide adequate funding, maintenance and even just the creation of adequate transportation, housing, environmental quality, and education systems. For that, I do suggest that more people with a good grasp of land use planning, construction, and operations, run for elective office and approve budgets that fund these things, as well as go to public meetings, especially ones that offer you the chance to pick budget items to fund or for items that are in active stages of construction or pre-construction, where changes can be made. Then there’s human prejudice, marginalization and power dynamics unrelated to land use and planning, that still affect the profession. This encompasses the lingering hurt and harm done to those of us who started as enthusiasts or hobbyists of architecture or transportation systems, as well as the marginalization of community groups or communities period, especially black, brown, queer and poor groups. Plus, some groups just don’t talk to each other or talk over each other. I can’t tell you how many arguments, especially online, would be solved if the two entities would do a thorough review of the bodies of work and life experiences that have been shared, on the internet, as well as in offline resources. Not just professional work, but considering how lived experiences affect how people see the world, especially the environment which we all battle over. All this gets wrapped up into how we interact and I think that to go forward, we have to address this elephant. This conversation hits me so much because it’s directly related to why I’m going through a tough time. In doing my reader’s survey, I learned that many of you started following me (or at least those of you still paying attention enough to fill out my survey), in or after 2014. Since that’s the case, you may have only realized in passing how much the loss of my dad in 2013 has reshaped almost every aspect of my life. I think that taking a detour into what brought me to this post today, which has been discussed in other parts of the site before, is valid because some of you have yet to peruse the archives! When he was living, my dad was a very an active force on how I approached the built environment. From him teaching me how to ride and care for a bike, to me going along on some of his electrical contracting jobs and sometimes to the school buildings he helped maintain, to the way he never met a stranger and how proud he was of my achievements (my degrees were on HIS resume), he had a very outsized presence in my life and loved being part of my online stories and life. He also understood what it’s like to struggle with the ups and downs of having a professional services business, and also needing a job to pay benefits. He went through open discrimination on the job. When I would cry about my own similar issues, instead of just leaving things as that’s the way it is (and he would say that in a Walter Cronkite voice impression), we would scheme about how to change and fix it. Neither of us would accept no for an answer and we didn’t accept that just because that’s the way it is, that’s the way it should stay. Then, all of a sudden, 50% of him was gone due to a major accident in 2010 and finally, all of him was gone over Memorial Day weekend of 2013. Not having my parent to debate the ways of the world unconditionally with, lurched me into a state of trying to find that in other family members, friends and colleagues. It, along with the awareness of middle-class, suburban Black American police shootings and other random racialized violence and incidents, plus microaggressions that ballooned in my post-graduate school, post-2013 working environments drew me into the state of rage that James Baldwin so eloquently illustrated. It also fuels, much like Baldwin, my want and love of travel and moving away from bad situations. Additionally, my mom and several other family members with similar experiences of racism and business-making are more private people and that’s why I share very little of them on here. While I love how connected the Internet makes us, I’m a firm believer in respecting privacy and that some things will always remain secret. However, I wouldn’t have felt the need to move so much, if one, there were other options professionally to fix the mistake that got me fired from my design services firm in Greensboro in 2014 and the dating life I’ve not really had anywhere, especially given my sensitivity to partners, namely male, respecting my brain and ambitions. Plus, political work often leaves you with more enemies than friends and such a critical analysis of what’s wrong with society, it’s very difficult to see and embrace what’s working right. I’m dealing with the opposite of what my colleague Chuck Marohn has shared recently. There’s very little of the negative I don’t see, I just don’t comment on everything and clearly, this website has been stringing cobwebs as I just realized this is my first full blog post that isn’t a newsletter copy I’ve written in 2018. When I left North Carolina for Kansas City in 2015, I felt like I was giving up on North Carolina, as I discussed in great detail last year. I felt like I couldn’t be a die-hard supporter of the betterment of my home state without being in said state. On the other hand of the lack of urbanist media focus on North Carolina, alternatives to car transportation, alternatives to certain kinds of single and multi-family housing, and the issues mentioned above, made me believe that I couldn’t do what I wanted to do in North Carolina. I brought that baggage with me to Kansas City, along with the pull of a partner who lived in what I considered the optimal environment for urbanist debate and planning, as it had some of the functions that we all advocate for, as well as again, a class of folks who love to debate and talk about it constantly. I would no longer get teased or harassed for only talking about this at the expense of other things. (Mind you, doing anything, including being an urbanist, in excess, is a recipe for disaster). So when I left Kansas City for D.C. in 2016, my goal was to establish myself in that greater collective of urbanist minds thinking through solutions on a national level. However, as has been well documented, this moving back east plan backfired. I’ve barely made any real money, wrecked my credit and ability to have credit lines, barely had health insurance and healthcare and of course, the relationship that was the foundation of my move to D.C. broke down. Somehow I’ve managed to scrape by, but it’s taken me moving all around and thankfully, folks still finding value in these kinds of writings on the sense of place and the experience of being out in the world. That and finding a flexible barista gig that will finally come with full benefits. And before that, having a community up in Baltimore that took me in when things got really tight and tough in D.C. Additionally, in many cities, including the ones in my home state, as well as the greater Kansas City region, we are a very culturally in-tune people and in cities where rail, bike-share, and enhanced bus services are available, we do park our cars and use those services. We also know how to park our cars and walk down our one-two main streets. And yes, there may only be a couple, but they are well utilized. This happens across class and race lines as well. I had to learn this the hard way as well, that I’ve been way too pretentious for my own good, in assuming that other cities would never be capable of the urbanity I so wanted from them. Finally, having traveled and worked in so many states and the District of Columbia, I’ve found that every state and the District has some form of discriminatory or structural issue that causes marginalization. Plus, migration as a whole creates multiple cultural awareness and needs to balance one’s personality with one’s environment. I hope that with this post, it’s clear, to both new and old followers and colleagues, exactly why I decided to leave North Carolina, come and go from Kansas City and come and go to the Greater Washington/Baltimore region, as well as travel often and broaden my ideals of land use and environmental thought, planning and doing. Additionally, this is how I would like to address the elephant of too many planners in too few places.
Acknowledge that all cities are different, and have different land use and planning needs, therefore creating many urbanisms/rualisms/placeisms, etc. Also, I’ve debated replacing my references to urbanism, with placeism. Placeism is the concern with all aspects of land use and natural environments, urbanism focuses mostly on the densification of those environments. Dr. Lisa Schweitzer has a great breakdown of how she uses the terminology and echoes things I’ve said in this post and in prior posts. I also invite anyone who is unfamiliar with the urban to rural transect to get to know more about that and use that to help as you advocate formally, design and build things and especially in these online arguments where people want to create a utopia in ten tweets. Also, feel free to engage ways that the transect is limiting and build upon this to establish a standard of broadening how we talk about the environments we inhabit. Coming to terms with the differences in terrain and resources is also helpful if you’re in the field in a jurisdiction that doesn’t have some of the infrastructure you want and need, to start productive conversations with people about that, that may yield the support system that you absolutely need to not go crazy like I did and jump off the proverbial cliff. Finally, let’s get out of the habit of saying X person or groups of people suck for having to drive or having to live in a cul-de-sac or only being able to shop at Walmart, when we need to be yelling at public officials, proposing new ordinances and maybe suing dishonest developers for creating this environment. Everyone shouldn’t have to be a planner to make sure we don’t get mistreated as citizens.
You don’t have to be a capital p planner, capital a architect, capital d developer, capital e engineer or some other bold-faced title to make it in this world, but it makes it easier if you have a history of discrimination or marginalization to have this layer of professional knowledge. This was the core of the most recent tweets, that you don’t have to be a planner to make a difference. However, we need to absolutely acknowledge that for some folks, especially from marginalized and disrespected backgrounds, it’s not so much that they need to have the job title, but the security of the letters next to their name or a paper certificate to be taken seriously. Let’s also make sure we stop making people feel the need to over-credential just to get paid what they are worth or recieve job and project assignments on which they will be excellent.
If someone says they want to launch a career in a land use and planning related field, offer to sit down with them and launch out a plan. You can plan a career and not get afoul of reporting requirements for government grants or even threaten your own job and space in the profession. I will say that in one conversation where I heard there were too many planners in D.C. and I was one of them, this person gave me some excellent book recommendations and jobs to consider. The tweet stream I reference also has good ideas of how other jobs can still allow you to make places better and stronger. Additionally, I’ve added a resources section to this site and developing some offline resources to help you and others make the right decisions about where to plant yourselves in the greater land use world. In the meantime, my short guide on figuring out your career in this world. Also, don’t be as stubborn as me and not listen when people do offer to help until it’s almost too late.
I wrote this post because I wanted to spell out in more than 250 characters tied into multiple threads, how much this subject of who does what in the land use and planning world, affects me. I feel like so much is lost in the current environment of Twitter and Facebook, where we value hot takes and yelling at the choir of our individual Facebook groups, over the long-form solution making that even venues like this often don’t meet. I also want to establish a standard for myself and our profession going forward. That we all sit at a big table, and there’s room for all of us, as long as we come to sit there with mutual respect and the mind that we will push for solutions, even if that solution is to do nothing and let things be. No one is perfect all the time, but no one is beyond reproof, restitution or forgiveness either. Finally, this site is about to look very different and will no longer just be me sharing ideas and resources. I’m looking forward to returning in a few weeks with new things that I believe will help us all become better at what we do. In the meantime, introducing my Resources page and my job/opportunities b
Many of you have noticed changes in my Twitter and Instagram bio, that I’ve been “interested” in more queer events on Facebook, and others have had the pleasure to meet Les, my partner, in person or you’ve known her from her own work in faith-based LGBTQ and transportation advocacy (and you should get to know her videos and life coaching and endometriosis advocacy and our merch line we colaborated on together!). She’s been with me on all my speaking visits over the past two years and we’ve both been helping each other with our various business and community ventures.
Plus, two years ago today, on National Coming Out Day 2018, after a wonderful date night at Midlands after years of knowing each other casually, we decided to start a life journey together, as lovers and friends.
However, in the past and directly, I’ve been hesitant to talk about this part of my life and it has affected how I do this work and how much I pride myself on being transparent. Yet, I believe that this is the time to address this. I wrote a draft of this about 18 months ago, but I believe today is the day to bring this draft into the light.
Before I get started, a warning to both family who are reading this and finding out for the first time and family who may have spoken to my mom or who are concerned about my mom.
First of all, I still love you all and if that love doesn’t extend back to me, I understand. Secondly , I told mom privately when I was last home in Greensboro in the spring of 2019 and I ask that you allow her the space to process this and that you refrain from asking her any questions or making judgements on her and how she’s raised me and treated me over the years.
If you are tempted to make these and other similar judgements, please remember that this is not about you. This is not an attack on my mom (or on you, mom), our family, our reputation and as church people. This is not an attack on my family raising me in the best way they knew how. This is not me wasting my beauty or my brain or giving up.
I identify as a pansexual polyamorous non-binary femme (pronouns she/her/they), who is willing and able and has fallen into a committed, loving, monogamous relationship no matter who or how that person presents/is. This also does not mean I’m turning into a male person or will start presenting more masculine as a rule. I still like all the same things I like. I’m happy with my body and how it’s proportioned. Also, I support all other sexual and gender expressions that are loving and consensual.
I know this is an agree-to-disagree notion some of you. I believe we were born holy, are always holy, but sometimes fall astray and need reminders from God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and folks sanctioned under their power to share this truth. I also know everything under the banner of gender and sexual uniqueness is under the purview of the perfect creation of God. The verses that explciitly condem same-sex or gender-noncomformity I believe have a context for which they were written, that doesn’t necessarily affect our situations. I also believe that we can support civil rights for everyone, without necessarily understanding each individual. We were not all created queer and not every queer expression, just like not every hetero expression of love is holy. But some of us were created queer, our queerness is holy and we need to acknowledge this in our faith communities.
One way I illustrate this is that many of us, especially in the black church, have no issue with allowing women to participate in the full body of worship, namely being or speaking in the pulpit. Yet, the Apostle Paul found that to be a distraction in one of the churches he was writing to and he told those specific women to not speak. However, women spoke and were active in church work in other places, plus, there were lots of women doing work for Jesus and all through the Old Testament. I believe that the scripture we have was God’s word for those specific people and much like God spoke directly to them, they (and yes they, I’ll save that for another post), still speak to us and work with us with the situations they gave us to live out.
And yes, I made a choice, but it’s only a choice to no longer live a lie.
I’m suffering through purple rage and I need to let it go to keep my business and creativity alive.
I built this site nearly a decade ago (and my work on blogs over the last 15 years) to be real, raw and honest about what we can do for the community. Over these years, I’ve been exposed to so much outside of my childhood bubble and I’ve grown so much. Yet, not addressing this directly and firmly has been eating away at me and making me publicly rageful, jealous and resentful. If you’ve been at a happy hour (or even on a few Zoom calls) with me recently, you’ve witnessed some of this. I apologize for anyone I hurt with this behavior, but know I’ve been trying to sort through things a lot of us do as teenagers. Writing this post is helping me heal and start the process of healing relationships–both with people as well as with my work and visibility. I also forgive you, but understand if you can’t forgive me.
We need to stop being prejudiced, racist, and genderphobic in our own community of queer people and in how we apply our urbanism.
I’m sick of the white gay men purporting to speak for (or in some cases use their power to tear down) neighborhoods and spaces that have rich culture and life without them getting into the mix and meddling with what makes those communities special or even better, using their priviledge as white bodies to help us be heard or raise money. This is the root of a lot of the protesting around prides over the last few years, that in their corporatization, they’ve started to mirror non-queer society in how they margialize non-cis, non-white bodies. I’ve felt compelled to always live in cities and move to larger ones, because I’m committed to building community in the black queer community. Because of what I shared above, we struggle a little more at times. Love is defintely love, but it’s really sweet when I can wake up next to my black lesbian partner and have her understand what we need and the struggles. I also hope that as more folks feel comfort in being out and proud, that we get more diversity in expressions and more people feel comfortable dating each other. However, we do not need to favor whiteness or cisness or even wealth. We all have worth and value.
The Death of a Inspiration
The person that helped me to start unpack my harmful theology, not just around queerness, but around patriarchy and white supremacy in our churches and our faith, Rachel Held Evans, died on Saturday May 4, 2019 from complications of the flu, a UTI and an antibiotic she took to heal those other two. She was only 37 (just four years older than me!) and left behind a husband, a three-year-old and a barely one-year old. She was white, grew up in the Evangelical bubble (church, college and also early writings on faith and action), straight and cis and she had her own blind spots around race and even with our affirmation as queer. But she got up daily for over a decade and through her blog and books confronted the notion that only straight cis white men get messages from God that hold weight and authority. Her breakdown of Proverbs 31, her attempt to follow all the rules in the Bible for women, her making peace with needing a different worship experience and now, all the people across the Christian world who have something positive to say about how she challenged them, and challenged them in the way those of us who are current or past evangelicals know and appreciate, with lots of well-stated scripture and a heart for love. She truly had a prophetic voice and it’s this voice that continues to inspire me to speak truth to power, over myself and over our communities.
I’m in love and she’s my best friend and she makes me a better urbanist, a better Christian and a better citizen, friend, daughter, etc. Our urbanism needs to make room for queerness that isn’t just white and cis male. Our faith communities really need to examine how we look at the words that God has given us and the internal words that the Spirit speaks to us. Also, for those of you who don’t practice or hold different beliefs outside of the Christian fold, know that I love and respect you too and just like I’m Black, I’m also queer and Christian and that’s the spirit of where this comes from.
Finally, this is something I’ve known about myself since puberty and something that I take one day at a time. However, I do believe it is time for me to speak about this so that I can know where I stand with everyone in my life and so we can continue the greater work of restoration in our communities.
Recently, I was made aware of and responded to this series of threads on Twitter, that among my colleagues in the D.C. area, there’s a concern over how many practitioners of place, especially planners, exist in the metro area and how many folks want to be planners by name, versus just doing the work in many different aspects of the field. I’ve heard this before, from planners and related advocates, architects, engineers and others who do community work of all races and from all other regions of the U.S. I’m not surprised and I do know why I hear this so much. I’ve talked about it before, but as I’ll mention in the final section, I want to shift my thoughts and takes back to this site, where I own the server space and have plenty of room to link to things. First, few clients exist in need of architecture and building services as well as transportation planning and operations, that don’t already have existing contracts and people they use. Even for general environmental planning, or acceptance of environmental injustice, there’s a drought. Your client base/employment options are limited greatly. The one most people are aware of are government entities, which have all kinds of requirements to ensure fairness and equity in the awarding of work contracts to firms, but sometimes can be cumbersome and create competitive environments. Also, for legal reasons, which yes, have merit, you have to be careful what you talk about and who you talk to when it comes to these competitions. Which can be hard when most of the people you compete with were at one point studio classmates or internship cubemates. Or even better, roommates or lovers. Plus, if you elect to work in-house with a government entity, you have other ethical considerations and gag orders, which again, are often necessary. Finally, some things, like public transit, just make more sense to be governed by you know, the government and for their privatization to be regulated, if there’s privatization at all. Or, you work with private for or non-profit developers, without government funding, some who are in the business to create things that make our world better and some are in the business to take from others and make gobs of money from themselves. Now for-profit doesn’t always mean capitalist monster, just like non-profit doesn’t always mean charitable and for the people. Many places need to build or renovate homes, build or renovate transportation systems and honestly, build or renovate a lot of other pieces of the built environment or society. However, there’s even a limit there to how much people can build and operate. Speaking of the nonprofits, you could be or work with an advocacy group with a dash of service provision, but you’re often getting your money from government grants, private grants or private banks, so there’s not that much difference from what I mentioned above. There’s also a size issue, some contracting firms might as well be power brokers, while others like me are just small shingles. Basically, if you’re new to the idea of planners/architects/engineers/contracting, all these firms operate and build like law firms and attorneys as well as media outlets and journalists. We also have lawyers in our clubhouse too and they can tell you what their lives have been like as they’ve seen a shortage in labor and emphasis on big versus small especially over the last 10 years. And this site, if you haven’t already picked that up is a journalistic outfit ;). The next big argument against a growing class of capital p planners is the public will of the citizenry. Some well-meaning folks, as well as your usual villains in many jurisdictions and metro areas, fail to provide adequate funding, maintenance and even just the creation of adequate transportation, housing, environmental quality, and education systems. For that, I do suggest that more people with a good grasp of land use planning, construction, and operations, run for elective office and approve budgets that fund these things, as well as go to public meetings, especially ones that offer you the chance to pick budget items to fund or for items that are in active stages of construction or pre-construction, where changes can be made. Then there’s human prejudice, marginalization and power dynamics unrelated to land use and planning, that still affect the profession. This encompasses the lingering hurt and harm done to those of us who started as enthusiasts or hobbyists of architecture or transportation systems, as well as the marginalization of community groups or communities period, especially black, brown, queer and poor groups. Plus, some groups just don’t talk to each other or talk over each other. I can’t tell you how many arguments, especially online, would be solved if the two entities would do a thorough review of the bodies of work and life experiences that have been shared, on the internet, as well as in offline resources. Not just professional work, but considering how lived experiences affect how people see the world, especially the environment which we all battle over. All this gets wrapped up into how we interact and I think that to go forward, we have to address this elephant. This conversation hits me so much because it’s directly related to why I’m going through a tough time. In doing my reader’s survey, I learned that many of you started following me (or at least those of you still paying attention enough to fill out my survey), in or after 2014. Since that’s the case, you may have only realized in passing how much the loss of my dad in 2013 has reshaped almost every aspect of my life. I think that taking a detour into what brought me to this post today, which has been discussed in other parts of the site before, is valid because some of you have yet to peruse the archives! When he was living, my dad was a very an active force on how I approached the built environment. From him teaching me how to ride and care for a bike, to me going along on some of his electrical contracting jobs and sometimes to the school buildings he helped maintain, to the way he never met a stranger and how proud he was of my achievements (my degrees were on HIS resume), he had a very outsized presence in my life and loved being part of my online stories and life. He also understood what it’s like to struggle with the ups and downs of having a professional services business, and also needing a job to pay benefits. He went through open discrimination on the job. When I would cry about my own similar issues, instead of just leaving things as that’s the way it is (and he would say that in a Walter Cronkite voice impression), we would scheme about how to change and fix it. Neither of us would accept no for an answer and we didn’t accept that just because that’s the way it is, that’s the way it should stay. Then, all of a sudden, 50% of him was gone due to a major accident in 2010 and finally, all of him was gone over Memorial Day weekend of 2013. Not having my parent to debate the ways of the world unconditionally with, lurched me into a state of trying to find that in other family members, friends and colleagues. It, along with the awareness of middle-class, suburban Black American police shootings and other random racialized violence and incidents, plus microaggressions that ballooned in my post-graduate school, post-2013 working environments drew me into the state of rage that James Baldwin so eloquently illustrated. It also fuels, much like Baldwin, my want and love of travel and moving away from bad situations. Additionally, my mom and several other family members with similar experiences of racism and business-making are more private people and that’s why I share very little of them on here. While I love how connected the Internet makes us, I’m a firm believer in respecting privacy and that some things will always remain secret. However, I wouldn’t have felt the need to move so much, if one, there were other options professionally to fix the mistake that got me fired from my design services firm in Greensboro in 2014 and the dating life I’ve not really had anywhere, especially given my sensitivity to partners, namely male, respecting my brain and ambitions. Plus, political work often leaves you with more enemies than friends and such a critical analysis of what’s wrong with society, it’s very difficult to see and embrace what’s working right. I’m dealing with the opposite of what my colleague Chuck Marohn has shared recently. There’s very little of the negative I don’t see, I just don’t comment on everything and clearly, this website has been stringing cobwebs as I just realized this is my first full blog post that isn’t a newsletter copy I’ve written in 2018. When I left North Carolina for Kansas City in 2015, I felt like I was giving up on North Carolina, as I discussed in great detail last year. I felt like I couldn’t be a die-hard supporter of the betterment of my home state without being in said state. On the other hand of the lack of urbanist media focus on North Carolina, alternatives to car transportation, alternatives to certain kinds of single and multi-family housing, and the issues mentioned above, made me believe that I couldn’t do what I wanted to do in North Carolina. I brought that baggage with me to Kansas City, along with the pull of a partner who lived in what I considered the optimal environment for urbanist debate and planning, as it had some of the functions that we all advocate for, as well as again, a class of folks who love to debate and talk about it constantly. I would no longer get teased or harassed for only talking about this at the expense of other things. (Mind you, doing anything, including being an urbanist, in excess, is a recipe for disaster). So when I left Kansas City for D.C. in 2016, my goal was to establish myself in that greater collective of urbanist minds thinking through solutions on a national level. However, as has been well documented, this moving back east plan backfired. I’ve barely made any real money, wrecked my credit and ability to have credit lines, barely had health insurance and healthcare and of course, the relationship that was the foundation of my move to D.C. broke down. Somehow I’ve managed to scrape by, but it’s taken me moving all around and thankfully, folks still finding value in these kinds of writings on the sense of place and the experience of being out in the world. That and finding a flexible barista gig that will finally come with full benefits. And before that, having a community up in Baltimore that took me in when things got really tight and tough in D.C. Additionally, in many cities, including the ones in my home state, as well as the greater Kansas City region, we are a very culturally in-tune people and in cities where rail, bike-share, and enhanced bus services are available, we do park our cars and use those services. We also know how to park our cars and walk down our one-two main streets. And yes, there may only be a couple, but they are well utilized. This happens across class and race lines as well. I had to learn this the hard way as well, that I’ve been way too pretentious for my own good, in assuming that other cities would never be capable of the urbanity I so wanted from them. Finally, having traveled and worked in so many states and the District of Columbia, I’ve found that every state and the District has some form of discriminatory or structural issue that causes marginalization. Plus, migration as a whole creates multiple cultural awareness and needs to balance one’s personality with one’s environment. I hope that with this post, it’s clear, to both new and old followers and colleagues, exactly why I decided to leave North Carolina, come and go from Kansas City and come and go to the Greater Washington/Baltimore region, as well as travel often and broaden my ideals of land use and environmental thought, planning and doing. Additionally, this is how I would like to address the elephant of too many planners in too few places.
Acknowledge that all cities are different, and have different land use and planning needs, therefore creating many urbanisms/rualisms/placeisms, etc. Also, I’ve debated replacing my references to urbanism, with placeism. Placeism is the concern with all aspects of land use and natural environments, urbanism focuses mostly on the densification of those environments. Dr. Lisa Schweitzer has a great breakdown of how she uses the terminology and echoes things I’ve said in this post and in prior posts. I also invite anyone who is unfamiliar with the urban to rural transect to get to know more about that and use that to help as you advocate formally, design and build things and especially in these online arguments where people want to create a utopia in ten tweets. Also, feel free to engage ways that the transect is limiting and build upon this to establish a standard of broadening how we talk about the environments we inhabit. Coming to terms with the differences in terrain and resources is also helpful if you’re in the field in a jurisdiction that doesn’t have some of the infrastructure you want and need, to start productive conversations with people about that, that may yield the support system that you absolutely need to not go crazy like I did and jump off the proverbial cliff. Finally, let’s get out of the habit of saying X person or groups of people suck for having to drive or having to live in a cul-de-sac or only being able to shop at Walmart, when we need to be yelling at public officials, proposing new ordinances and maybe suing dishonest developers for creating this environment. Everyone shouldn’t have to be a planner to make sure we don’t get mistreated as citizens.
You don’t have to be a capital p planner, capital a architect, capital d developer, capital e engineer or some other bold-faced title to make it in this world, but it makes it easier if you have a history of discrimination or marginalization to have this layer of professional knowledge. This was the core of the most recent tweets, that you don’t have to be a planner to make a difference. However, we need to absolutely acknowledge that for some folks, especially from marginalized and disrespected backgrounds, it’s not so much that they need to have the job title, but the security of the letters next to their name or a paper certificate to be taken seriously. Let’s also make sure we stop making people feel the need to over-credential just to get paid what they are worth or recieve job and project assignments on which they will be excellent.
If someone says they want to launch a career in a land use and planning related field, offer to sit down with them and launch out a plan. You can plan a career and not get afoul of reporting requirements for government grants or even threaten your own job and space in the profession. I will say that in one conversation where I heard there were too many planners in D.C. and I was one of them, this person gave me some excellent book recommendations and jobs to consider. The tweet stream I reference also has good ideas of how other jobs can still allow you to make places better and stronger. Additionally, I’ve added a resources section to this site and developing some offline resources to help you and others make the right decisions about where to plant yourselves in the greater land use world. In the meantime, my short guide on figuring out your career in this world. Also, don’t be as stubborn as me and not listen when people do offer to help until it’s almost too late.
I wrote this post because I wanted to spell out in more than 250 characters tied into multiple threads, how much this subject of who does what in the land use and planning world, affects me. I feel like so much is lost in the current environment of Twitter and Facebook, where we value hot takes and yelling at the choir of our individual Facebook groups, over the long-form solution making that even venues like this often don’t meet. I also want to establish a standard for myself and our profession going forward. That we all sit at a big table, and there’s room for all of us, as long as we come to sit there with mutual respect and the mind that we will push for solutions, even if that solution is to do nothing and let things be. No one is perfect all the time, but no one is beyond reproof, restitution or forgiveness either. Finally, this site is about to look very different and will no longer just be me sharing ideas and resources. I’m looking forward to returning in a few weeks with new things that I believe will help us all become better at what we do. In the meantime, introducing my Resources page and my job/opportunities b
Happy New Year folks! We did it! It’s 2017. It could be bad or worse and it can be good or better. And in that spirit, I am coming to you with my 7th annual set of wishes. Depending on my mood and the mood of the industry, sometimes I do more personal wishes and sometimes I do wishes that are more general. 2017 is going to blend both. Take a look at wishes from 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016. And now, for 2017, I wish:
That I wasn’t so afraid of the future and neither were so many other people
This is the linchpin to me of the most recent round of elections in the United States, as well as the last few election cycles. We’re afraid to die. We’re afraid of losing control. We’re afraid of never being in control. This is just a portion of the phenomenon that allows evil to raise up through our civic spaces, but it’s worth looking at by itself.
On a more personal level, I’ve been more afraid since the election. Mostly because I was afraid long before the election. I feel safe to say that I left both my hometown and the one I adopted from June 2015-September 2016 because I was afraid of being myself in the spaces I conducted myself in. I feared that I wasn’t square enough to be in elected and appointed politics. I felt super black, and not in a good, fists up, I matter kind of way. I felt smaller and smaller. I felt like I had to be involved in small town nitpicky things. I felt like I was running out of people. And energy. And time. So I’m in the D.C. Metro finally. I can’t say that it’s for good, only because life happens and life happens outside of me.
For our greater populace, we may not like each other. We may feel like people are invading our personal space and messing with our ego, but the world needs some of that. We need all kinds of spaces, safe, and unsafe. We need dense and open spaces. May we continue headfirst to the transect and may we look at everyone first and foremost as worthy of love and worthy of the best. Then stop building bad things, taking away good social programs that work and condemning folks to judgment places that probably don’t look like what you think they do in your head.
That we could shift more of our economy to community ownership and bartering
I like having options just like the next person. I don’t think we need to start wearing uniforms or burlap sacks in the name of unity. We can have different kinds of living situations. Yet, we can improve on our market. Last year brought the opening of the Renaissance Community Co-op in Greensboro and the return of full-service grocery to a side of town that really needed it. Plus, instead of being a profit center, it’s a community center. I do hope they can continue to be successful and that we can continue to share these models, farmers markets, craft fairs, community clinics, community schools and the like so that nice things don’t have to be tied to having lots of income and wealth. Speaking of income and wealth…
That we can become a people who aren’t jealous or greedy
This is the other piece that I feel explains politics in the United States. Those of you reading from other nations who seem to be doing a bit better in this, please share. I think we need to all look in the mirror, be at peace with who we are now and then make decisions based on things we want. I think we also as leaders, need to not hoard resources for ourselves and realize that not everyone has the privilege to navel-gaze. Build things, sell things, but not at the expense of others and not because you need to do it better or bigger. And I want to get to the point where I stop making comparisons to others and how popular they appear and how wealthy they appear. I want to do things because they are good and they are good for me.
That I can buy a house by the end of the year
I live in a metro area where this may continue to be a wish into 2018. However, I know that I’m probably wrong. I’ll keep y’all posted on this one. Revisit my thoughts on buying my dream house in a world of mass gentrification.
That I can cut my consumer debt in half by next year
Same as the prior wish. I feel good about this too. I wrote about the fact that I struggle with not being good money, while I’m yet good with making connections and writing things people like back in the fall.
As usual, tweet, Facebook or just comment about your wishes for this year. And yes, I do believe that many of us will see 2018. And if we don’t, this time on earth has mattered and we will call up your spirit in many ways over the coming years. Likewise, this will live on somewhere even if I’m gone.
I’m Kristen. I started blogging here to make sense of the built environment around me. You can find me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. You can find out more about me at my main website, www.kristenejeffers.com. Also, if you want to follow my playlist for 2017, here it is!
I have always owed a great debt to the work of Sara Zewde, especially the usage of the term black urbanist and talking about black urbanism. Zewde is currently a principal at Asakura Robinson a designer at the Seattle-based firm GGN and in 2010, published her MIT graduate thesis, Theory, place, and opportunity: black urbanism as a design strategy for the potential removal of the Claiborne Expressway in New Orleans.
When I started this page, she had the only reference I could find online to the concept of black urbanism, especially as an architectural vernacular (style). Later on, fellow planner and blogger Pete Saunders addressed the term here and here. These authors have provided an African continent-centered focus on black or African urbanism. The most compelling chapter I’ve found in a recent Google search to see if other writers had used the term in recent years. Somehow I missed this chapter in Adam J. Bank’s 2006 book Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground.
I especially want to draw attention to Melvin Mitchell’s theories which are highlighted in the chapter, which I’ve taken a snapshot of below:
With this being said, and with the new political environment that we are facing, what’s next for black urbanism? I’d like to take a stab at naming a few things that need to happen:
Insist Black buildings and Black neighborhoods (and other ethnic and poor and marginalized neighborhoods) are just as deserving of historic preservation as others. While it saddens me that so many of the historic Victorian and Warder row-homes here in DC are so expensive, at least they are still standing in their present form. Additionally, the modern homes in the wealthier Black areas of Chicago are just as worthy as anything Frank Lloyd Wright has built. If we can keep the D.C Chinatown and even enhance it by building the archway, we can also prioritize historic structures even as we densify. Likewise, being mindful (again)that black urbanism is also an architectural vernacular. This gets back to Mitchell’s ideas. I will say that strategically placed public buildings like the new National Museum of African-American History and Culture can be culturally sensitive and still help the black community, even though they were built for primarily white institutions.
Create and honor homeownership or long-term leases, as well as create shopping centers and service plazas that service all income levels. As much as I’d love a certain bullseye-clad big box store to be a bit closer to my home, I’d like it even better if we had neighborhood businesses that are smaller, more focused sections of the department store, such as a stationary store, or grocery or clothing. Neighborhood businesses that are co-ops or otherwise under less pressure for profit and more pressure to create livelihoods and provide good service. Likewise, continuing to promote and provide home purchasing and renovation services, as well as a wide variety of rental options for multiple budgets.
Push for the restoration of the traditional public school system, and turn the charter system into an alternative educational mechanism. I get it, charters promise parents more control and you can do things in charters that the regular public instruction doesn’t allow (like boarding schools, religious instruction, etc.). However, nothing is stopping a group of parents from creating extracurricular education groups for their children, even in marginalized areas. This is where the new charter apparatus would come in, by providing supplemental funding for programming outside of the classic school day, as well as forming a coalition with other adult and child social service providers. I think we need to push for a strong public education system and we need to focus our own extracurricular activities into ensuring that all children have opportunities for after school art, sports, and extra career and trade education. We need our youth to know they can be creative and they can create a new future out of the ashes.
Acknowledge climate change, especially the kind done by fracking, regular oil pipelines. mining and even landfills near residential areas. I feel like this will be the one thing that the administration has pushed that will affect everyone and potentially exterminate us. So many black communities have battled living near factories, landfills, and other toxic waste for years and many lives have been lost silently to cancers and other diseases.
File civil suits for every constitutional amendment or social issue violation that happens. I’ve been kicking money back to the ACLU for years and I’m going to increase that donation to them and the Southern Policy Law Center. Also, not just court cases, but standing up for all kinds of marginalized people and recognizing that there are many successful kinds of lifestyles for adults, children and families and creating communities that allow for diverse lifestyles and cultures, without pushing the supremacy or harm of one or the other.
Being careful that we make it clear online when we are speaking our opinion, being satirical or using facts. Yes, facts still exist, and so does opinion. I want to do my best to only spread ideas as ideas that I think better society and make it clear where facts come from.
Recognizing that activism for black folks and other marginalized people does not disqualify a person from professional or political practice or office.Activism is also a form of tactical urbanism. Recognizing that people of color and marginalized folks are going to be even angrier and oppressed and the microaggressions and outright neoliberalism and the systemic classism, racism, and homophobia are going to be worse. Don’t be that person in your planning or architectural practice, your pursuit for good governance or internally with your friends and colleagues. Understand fully or try to understand the righteous anger and/or the burden of practice, especially against oppressive systems. Constantly check yourself. Also, there’s fine line between a practice that is rooted in cultural vernaculars and only being the voice for that culture. Let’s be mindful if and when we choose to token and know that while it can be necessary, it can also be just as harmful. Also, having a culturally-sensitive urbanism doesn’t exclude or excuse anyone, if practiced properly.
And if you are marginalized, rail against the system, but also tap into your creative side. If we had better, more sustainable systems, we could abandon the old ones causing us harm. I know for many of us, we just want to survive or get a piece of the pie. But what if we knew how to bake our own pies and could share? Forgive yourself and forgive those who are evil. You don’t have to forget, but you will need all that energy for the new creations and new worlds we are walking into. Let go of the shame of the words of the oppressor and remember they are wrong and you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t have a purpose. Don’t do things that turn you into the oppressor. Teach or find someone willing to teach others how to respect cultural tradition and vernacular. Oh, and this is the part where I type SELF-CARE, SELF-CARE, SELF-CARE, SELF CARE…in all caps and repeatedly.
Finally, don’t give up. We will survive someway and somehow, as we always have as a people. Even if that means we are a people in exile.
I’m Kristen. Six years ago, I started blogging here to make sense of the built environment around me. You can find me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. You can find out more about me at my main website, www.kristenejeffers.com. Support me on Patreon.
It’s that time again, where I rub my lamp and hope that several things in the world of placemaking come true. I’ve made a set of wishes in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015 and I’m honored to share another set of dreams for 2016.
And without further ado, this year’s four wishes.
Truly Safe Streets
It’s my list, I can keep wishing the same things. Especially if those things have yet to come to pass. We need to reconcile the need to reduce traffic incidents, with the greater need for law enforcement to treat citizens like citizens and not enemies of war. Some people are sharing the road with fellow passengers. Others yet are working with their police departments and reducing violent crimes among themselves. Let us continue to wish that our most common public space is the safest. My friend Naomi Doerner makes a great case for combining #visionzero and #campaignzero.
Steady Rents and Mortgages
Every city that has at least a major employer; homes that resemble craftsman bungalows, art deco apartments or colonial row houses;has a college or two or three; and has reasonable diversity in population is seeing some form of gentrification, proportional to the average median household income. Every city has people who can’t make ends meet and in some places, it’s worse than others, because salaries are holding steady for a lot of industries, especially at the minimum wage and entry levels. But, if the housing market could as a whole lower their costs by maybe 10% on services, rents and the like (as well as themselves start to rely less on bank loans and a bit more on cash), maybe we could fix this. This will be a continuing wish, because I know what I just proposed isn’t practical. What however is practical, is empowering people to create craft and trade guilds and turn neighborhood association funds into a means to fund labor and supplies for these maintenance and building crews. My friend John Anderson has a great argument for continuing to mentor and cultivate tradesmen, especially in underserved communities who need lots of housework done, but may not have what it takes to hire outside workers.
Understanding of How Housing Policy and some Transportation Policy Has Created A Number of Social Ills.
Again, this combines elements of the two wishes above. People need to know the history of their neighborhoods, their states and their country. If you don’t like not having public transit, find out where the stops are and why your system exists. Same with your neighborhood and why you may have seen a restrictive covenant in the deed, even though technically those are illegal. At the very least understand why your Realtor still may have suggested a certain group of neighborhoods and why certain neighborhoods command high values (It’s not just because of proximity to Trader Joe’s). I want to use this space and other forums to help people understand why so many of our urban and suburban racial battles have roots back even further than the greater civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Maybe you weren’t aware of the origins of Oregon, but this post touches on that and how in least one state, capturing the American Dream was completely banned well into the 20th Century. (I’m also aware of the irony of this link in the light of the other link from wish 1.)
A Commitment By Powerful Interests to Creating Comprehensive Public Transit in More than a Few Cities.
And finally, separating out this wish into its own space, because transportation is easier to change than where houses sit and where people live. Maybe your parents want a huge suburban house and they are willing to pay all the costs to have that house. Namely paying for their own transit service, their sidewalks and bike lanes on their stroads. Even better if we can convince the powers-to-be to increase service frequencies and add weekend and evening services back to commuter routes. I wouldn’t drive into Kansas at all, if I knew I could use the JO commuter service to go to the Target in Mission or Downtown Overland Park at times I have the extra time to do so. I’ve seen the benefits of added MARC service in being able to go more places between DC and Baltimore. This doesn’t excuse new suburbs from popping up and contributing to sprawl. This makes it necessary for municipalities that want to be connected to a greater metro area to be part of said area. I don’t have any specific links for this one, other than read any post that you see from your hometown newspapers, national mainstream magazines and maybe even write an op/ed of your own or a long Facebook post that’s sharable, to tell the world we need better transit.
So here we are, new year, new wishes. Be sure to keep with me via email and on social media to see my progress with the wishes, as well as my commentary on how the world is doing with them.
I learned a lot about place this year. Yet, those many lessons coalesced into these three big lessons: a progressive, inclusive, tactical charrette process, people over money and the need to legally live in more than one place, to help you guys out there learn more about your own towns and cities. Let’s dig into those lessons.
You Can Have a Progressive, Inclusive, Tactical Charrette Process
I was invited to come to Chattanooga back in April to participate in the Next Big Thing, a design charrette centered on the Glass Street area of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Having grown up and really come up politically in Greensboro, cities like Chattanooga and Greenville, SC are aspirational places to the governments and stakeholders of other smaller cities like Greensboro. In fact, a delegation of Greensboro folks was in town doing a comparison shopping tour, while I was there working on a lesser-loved area of town.
Despite its status as lesser loved and its lack of waterfront view and mountain height, the Glass Street area doesn’t lack for good people and good infrastructure. The group that brought us all together, The Glass House Collective, is embedded and dedicated to the betterment of this community.
On the surface, the Glass Street area seems like your typical predominately black community, that as a result of redlining and legal integration, has a double whammy of having good housing stock, but not being a place that even Blacks of means want to invest in. Well, besides liquor stores, clubs, and various houses of worship, that, unfortunately, don’t work together and have even been the sites of murders and thefts.
Yet, there was this diner, The Glass Street Breakfast and Lunch House, on the corner of Glass and Dodson, across the street from the building where we set up shop. The woman who owns it wasn’t on my team, but I could see and feel her energy and excitement throughout the process. All of our teams had community members, mostly Black property owners and other stakeholders local to the area. What was also key, was that there were a number of other Black American planners and group facilitators. There were white Chattanoogans from the other sides of town, who wanted to see a sustainable development (more on this dynamic later in the post). Yet, it was seeing this Black woman, believe in the power of her building, which outside of the fresh paint job, with the mural of the yummy-looking bowl of something on the outside, was nothing more than an old gas station, which in another context could look like a shack, that inspired me myself to look into the power of taking buildings and spaces, no matter their shape, and infuse value into them.
Even if her venture ultimately fails (as more ventures do, despite the race and energy level of their owners), it’s the intent, the ability to try. Oh and I hear her food was awesome. I was, unfortunately, battling the need to drive back down I-75 to make my flight and return my rental car at the Atlanta airport because flying into Chattanooga’s airport was nothing short of impractical, so I couldn’t try her food out. (Another problem for another day, like the need for someone to help her out with a website).
More on people-power later, on the big scale. At the root of this lesson is that you can have energy in the room and people, especially the people of color and low-wealth that may be in your charrette room, are just as powerful and can add just as much to your charrette process, as you. Even if you have a foot in both the elite, mostly white and wealthy, architecture, planning and development world and another in the mostly black neighborhoods, labeled as slums and ghettos even if there were at one point rich cultural assets, you can be valued and you can be heard in the charrette room. Charrettes, public workshops and other community listening processes have to have this going forward and they have to have a means of action.
In the meantime, I needed to not just see places, but immerse myself in places for longer than just a week…
You Can’t Really Be a Global, or Even Just a National Urbanist, If You’ve Only Lived in One State
Ultimately, I can come into a city and tell people what to do 365 days a year. I could do it on this blog 24 hours a day. It, however, doesn’t compare to actually being a resident and investing in two metro areas, if not three, simultaneously.
This is the first year that I’ve ever lived in two cities. Even when I was younger and going back and forth between the Piedmont Triad and the Research Triangle (they are different, if you click on their names you’ll know why they are different), I was still in the same state. I could get most of the same food (although Biscuitville is a uniquely Greensboro thing and Bojangles only hands out free sweet tea at their Triangle-area locations). I knew the names of the local politicos. I knew my sales tax rate. My license plates were the same (and there was only need for one of them). School districts tend to cover counties, not just a pod of a couple of elementary schools that feed into one middle and high school. Cities tend to only extend to county lines and if they do jump a line, it’s only a few blocks or a few neighborhoods.
Kansas City takes up pieces of four different counties. That’s just on the Missouri side. On the Kansas side, what we refer to as KCK, is also the entirety, save a place called Bonner Springs, of the county of Wyandotte. And then there’s everything wrapped up in Johnson County and the areas around the University of Kansas and the military operations. Having been East Coast-centered my whole life, I only knew of DC’s interesting position of being a bi-state metro area. Likewise with the New York City region. Charlotte’s also rapidly becoming as much a South Carolina major metro, much like Western Kansas propels that state’s entire economy.
To me, being a bi-state, bi-county area isn’t so bad, if you have a completely connected public transit system, so everyone has equal access to jobs. Likewise, when your school curriculums and calendars and resources are in sync. When you have the same tax rates and the same mix of national stores. Your local institutions are empowered and service the area equally. I have yet to see that in many regions and I feel like the communities I know and love back east do this better than the KC metro. It’s one thing to have a frontier/pioneer spirit. It’s another to have it so bad that you can’t be interdependent, much like the folks who were native to the land you built on.
Having lived in a totally different region, I feel like I have more fodder for writing this blog and my planning and development practice than ever before. I can properly compare the effects of how public policy, especially housing, tax and education policy, shape a city’s development. It’s deeper than those city trips where they show you all the pretty things. I was doing a radio pre-show interview and the producers asked me to describe Kansas City for a person hopping off at the airport and going to the convention hall. I think we can all do that, even if our only relationship to a city is going to its airport and convention hall. (Bonus aside, read my case for a new Kansas City Airport). But you have to go deeper than that if you are like me and you are involved in the development and maintenance of your city.
I also re-introduced and fortified the concept this year of the American Expat. Before, it was something I knew about in abstraction, having had several aunts and uncles who’d moved away for work and only came home at major holidays. There are parts of both metros that they love and embrace, so much so that I think my aunt may never move back to North Carolina.
For me, I’m still in the city audition process. Ultimately, I know that wherever I choose to plant my home base, it will have 75% of the values and things I recommend out of the gate. Or, it will have a solid group of people, committed to sustaining it and making it better. I will always come back to North Carolina and rejuvenate, due to this being my homeland and that of so many people I love and who helped me grow in my formative years. Speaking of the content and concept of people sustaining a place, though…
Money is Magic, People are Sustaining
If we had millions of dollars, everything we want to happen on Glass Street (and your street) could happen tomorrow. However, a lot of the things that were proposed for Glass Street, like the street and sidewalk improvements, as well as the façade improvements and the addition of more than just tax preparers, liquor stores and some solid restaurants, require PEOPLE to patronize the store and bring the money to them.
The Glass Street area was labeled as a food desert, due to the loss of a grocery store, ironically right behind the Glass Street Breakfast and Lunch House. In my group in Chattanooga, I introduced the idea of a co-op grocery, something that’s happening twice in Greensboro, in two very different contexts. Many people are familiar with our downtown natural food co-op market and deli/bakery, as a natural extension of a community supported agriculture delivery membership and provider of a downtown option, which is still not where developers want it to be to do a traditional supermarket concept. You may also be familiar with our other co-op, founded due to the lack of a major supermarket company, wanting to locate where it had no problems operating 30 years ago, a mostly Black, middle-class community. With some financial help from a local Black church and our city and the usual major foundation nonprofits with mostly white leadership, that community has funded a supermarket that will look more like Harris Teeter or at the very least, restore some of the character that the Winn-Dixie left.
While they are still waiting on the magic of money to come through, they are a determined group of people, a lesson that as we also honor the Kwanzaa week, is relevant in placemaking and all year.
Right now, city leaders and stakeholders are waiting on money to turn a once vibrant, but now vacant lot into our next Broadway-caliber performing arts center. Much money was pledged for this effort and they’ve unfortunately come up short. In turn, they are calling on people and their money, to help get this spot to the end. In the meantime, there were lots of people doing business on this big lot. There were a gas station and hospital and hotel here once upon a time. Then, just before demolition, there was a jazz club and doctors offices and hair salons and the chamber of commerce. I feel those things could have remained on that lot until the last dollar needed was in hand and then the demolition could start and within just a few short months, the new arts building would appear. (Edit on 12/31/15: The chamber is in fact still standing. But just barely. The building almost has no parking lot. Again, an institution that helps us to be capitalist can stand, but some aspects of capital can’t stand and we still don’t have the art we were promised. Hopefully, the money will be raised, but until then, I use caution in talking about this particular project as an economic driver and a value-add to Downtown Greensboro).
This gets me to a major lesson I want us all to learn this year and in coming years, to get back to a simple economy, where we can start paying things in full. Granted, the credit economy is what allowed us to grow as even things we take for granted, such as our rail system and certain shopping malls needed mortgages and loans to get started. Yet, what if even back then, people valued things at whatever could be given at the time? What if we made all houses less than $5,000? There could be variation in the market, but the idea is that things like houses, modes of transportation and education have a basic cost, that is keeping in mind that people need these things to get started as adults. Then, over time, other things could be valued more. While I don’t think we need to eliminate capitalism or financing systems like loans and mortgages, I think we need to become more people-centered with how we spend and loan money and less about creating magic tricks with our money. Next week, we are in 2016 and I’ll be dropping my wishes for the year and evaluating how some of my 2015 wishes did. Let me know what some of your placemaking lessons were onTwitter,Facebook,LinkedInon my pages or at least, share this article with your own commentary on those social networks.Keep up with me on a regular basis through my Tuesday emails.
This year I decided to go ahead and talk about how to buy gifts. I feel this list can be applied to any time a year and any holiday. After all, these things are unique and they’re always greatly appreciated by any urbanist I know. I would ask your urbanist for some guidance because they may want some things more than others. Shall we get started?
Books
Especially textbooks. For the longest time I though like my urbanist practice was dependent on just how much I was able to write and how profound that writing was. Maybe it was because I came from an academic background in studying community and economic development plus having hung around architecture and design departments in the past. I’ve always written books, even before I was writing about urbanism. And so it seems has everybody else that I meet up with at conferences and who actually speaks say conferences. Also textbooks are expensive and if you’re not a student anymore it’s true but not quite starchitect level, you’ll squee anytime you get an actual book.
Experiences
This can be anything from plane tickets hotel gift certificate/rooms, show tickets, food and restaurant gift certificates, and transit passes. As much as you think we already have all the hip urban stuff, again a free ticket to a hot show like Hamilton in New York is super valuable. Bonus points if it’s something like a house tour or a transit tour that’s not normally open to the public or only happens rarely.
Things to Make or Make With
I know this one is really cliché but still who doesn’t like Lego architecture sets or model train sets. For those who are more realistic in their building and making , gift certificates to home-improvement stores, art and craft stores and home design stores as well as museum stores also work well. Or you can buy specific supplies like nice pens, markers, pencils or paper.
Clothing Actually Made for Commuting
This goes beyond a pair of sneakers that match a formal suit. This gets into rain coats that actually wick off water, shirts and pants and skirts that breathe and come with pockets and undergarments that keep things you don’t want to see out of sight. Also, leisure weekend wear like bike kits is nice too. Again, ask your urbanist, but they’ll be glad you’ve considered their commuting habits in the first place.
Donations to Organizations that Support Urbanism
They are probably getting those notices already to donate to their favorite charities related to these different issues and causes. They may also be the type that has everything that we’ve already listed above. So how about just going ahead and sending all good chunk of money to an organization that they care about, namely the one for whom they work. That way, not only do they benefit but their home city and the causes that they care a lot about do as well.
You may notice that I’ve not actually listed places to get these items. I leave it up to you to choose vendors,books, nonprofits, stores and experiences that speak to the even deeper held values of your individual placemaker. I’ve also listed vague categories of items, again, because I want you to still exercise some creativity. Know that you can and will find the perfect gift for your placemaker.
Design can’t be everything. Ask your kid who goes to Disney World and doesn’t like Mickey or Cinderella Castle. All they want to do is ride Space Mountain a bunch of times. That’s right. They’d rather go on a ride that strips away your sense of knowing where you are going and makes you trust your other four senses. Now this ride’s mechanics and even some of the cool spacey stuff are designed well, but it’s really about the feeling.
Your kid throws away their Goofy hat when you get home, but he starts figuring out how to create that feeling that he had in Space Mountain. Which probably means they are playing in their room in the dark. But they are still happy about their trip to Disney World. And it is more about what they could feel than the actual design of the thing.
Magic Kingdom’s Space Mountain via Wikimedia
We can apply the same idea to our cities.
But before we get deep into that conversation, let’s talk about that time Disney made an actual city. Celebration, Florida was conceived as the second effort (EPCOT was the first) to create the ideal 21st Century city. Borrowing some from the new urbanism movement, which had just been chartered, a small town was created on some Disney-owned land. I’ve written about the town before, namely the book written by a family who moved there as one of the first families in the new town. Another book, with a darker, more pedantic tone was written by a single man who moved into an apartment near the town square.
While both sets of people had praise for the community at first, the single man found that he was isolated and that the community didn’t have much to offer for singles. The family and families like them, had issues with the school. It prided itself on being very progressive from grades K-12. One of those progressive tenants was a non-traditional grading system, that didn’t even consider conversions of said grades into the A-F scale sought by most, if not all colleges. This ultimately caused some parents to leave the school. Also dead was the idea of a neighborhood school. The school split into a lower and upper school, with the upper school on a totally different side of the community.
Eventually the family in the book moved back to their New England home and to a traditional school. The other guy moved on too. Others stayed in the community, but not without encountering other struggles. Many moved there hoping that the Disney magical feeling would fall over them. Yet, this was a town, not a theme park. You can’t always create the feeling you want in a place.
Or can you? How do you find a place that has the right feel? How do I determine that feel? This is what I do.
First, I assess the variety of activities, living situations, transportation situations and other tangible places and experiences. Am I forced to live in a house or can I get an apartment. Do I have to drive all the time or can I take the bus, walk or ride a bike? Do people tend to cluster in diverse groups of friends or do people tend to only have friends who look like them? Does the music scene have more than one genre that’s predominant or at least have my favorite style of music? What kinds of things can I eat? Are their cool third places like libraries, parks, arcades and other places where I can go and not just go to work or home or eat? Who can fix my hair the way I like? This also ties into another metric i use, mobility. How easy can I get in, out and around town?
Kansas City’s Historic City Market. One of the great urban markets and examples of variety in cities. Image by Kristen Jeffers
Second, I look at level of respectpeople have for each other and their differences. Do actual criminals get punished? Do people assume others are automatically criminals because of their skin color, their body type and size or some other arbitrary type? Do people have to join certain groups or churches or have attended certain schools to be able to affect change in the city? Is there a voice for the poor, the downtrodden, the powerless? Could I walk safely without the worry of a person yelling at me, thinking this is the only way he could get my attention? Even in a room of “professional” people, will those guys carry on a conversation with me that doesn’t reek of “I need to take her home with me”? Will the women see me not as a threat, but a potential friend? Will they all have stupid, and in some cases completely offensive ideas about me as a black woman? I’m doing my best to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, will they do that for me?
Third, how resilient is the city? Does it mope and moan when major companies don’t pick it or when those companies shut down?Does it recognize why its young college students are leaving? Does it get stuck in its old ways or think things can only happen one way? When natural disasters show up, is it ready to evacuate or properly house people on better ground? Is it constantly complaining about how much it has to clean up? Is it doing all that it can to help people come back to where they were or is it sitting, ready to gentrify the land that those devastated homes sit on?
As our Disney examples earlier illustrated, you could have the perfectly designed city, both real like Celebration or more fake like EPCOT and the rest of the theme park. Yet, if someone doesn’t feel comfortable there, then all of your efforts are wasted. Or, sometimes people just want a feeling, and don’t need special designs or programs or events. They just want to be put in the right environment and be allowed to fend for themselves.
This doesn’t excuse efforts to help people feel better about needed changes, i.e. our friends who feel bike lanes, while open to everyone, are part of the residential gentrification going on in DC and other places. This again underscores why we need to ask open-ended questions.
Finally, quantitative measures are great, especially when they help us keep our streets clean and our buses coming on time. But if they don’t feel right, then they are doomed to fail too, just like our cities as a whole.
Interested in my thoughts about Kansas City and how I feel about it so far? I’m talking about that live on KCUR’s Central Standard at 1o a.m. Central/11 a.m. Eastern Tuesday November 10 (which is today if you are reading this post within its first 24 hours). You can always catch a replay of it as well. Both can be found at this link. Also, catch me on Twitter and Facebook.
Happy New Year folks! I’m posting this with about 12 hours to go on the East Coast, but I believe we’ll make it just in time. And as always at year’s end, I am here with a few things that I hope all of us placemakers and citizens can see in 2015:
Truly Open Streets
Remember this picture of me? I was playing on a B-cycle demonstration bike on the street that I helped paint, to have an open streets event there. Yet, from then to now, not just in Greensboro, but in many other cities, the streets haven’t been so open. In fact, many have been hostile. My wish is that we can start looking at people on our streets, not as threats, not as people to shake money out of, not as places to speculate our real estate futures and to shoot to kill, but as places where we can celebrate our achievements and what it means to be human. I might be wishing this every year, but I’m going to get us started there. If we block the streets in 2015, I pray that it’s to have a party, be at peace and be better neighbors.
High-Speed Rail
I’ve been on more trains and planes than I can count on my fingers this year. I’m reading Tom Zoellner’s Train. I’ve met and mingled with so many of my transit nerd herd folks this year. Hold the though of mingling with people to my next wish. I want to put out there that it would be nice for at least the routes outlined in green above to get started this year. Thanks to the US High Speed Rail Association for putting the map above together. (Check out the interactive version). Congrats to the Texas Central Railway and California High Speed Rail Authority for breaking ground in 2014. Kudos to All Aboard Florida for setting a 2015 start date. Yes, high-speed rail is a sticky issue. However, it’s an issue that we need to resolve. Streetcars are nice. But a 90 minute trip between major cities like DC and New York would be even better.
Seeing More of You and Making Better Places Together
As I mentioned above, I flew and rode trains more than I’ve ever done in my life this year and it was great! I gave my first solo keynote,which is pictured above and you can watch here. I’m looking forward to seeing many of you at Transportation Camp DC and festivities surrounding the Transportation Review Board Annual Meeting in a few weeks. North Carolina folks, namely those in and around Greensboro are invited to join me at Scuppernong Books at 7 p.m. on January 17th for a book event. I will read from A Black Urbanist and will sign any copies you have. A very limited number will be for sale. Go ahead and grab a print copy here. There will be a DC book event on January 11 at 7 p.m. during the TRB festivities. I’ll post more information in the next few days on both events. CNU, CCDA and New Partners for Smart Growth are also on the tentative agenda as well. And if you want to help me make this wish come true contact me here.
Again, Happy New Year! See you in 2015!
After several years of writing, two months of editing and final writing and several bouts of fear and confidence, my first blog-related, adult book, A Black Urbanist, is now available for your purchase.
It is available in the following formats:
Print— you want me to sign it and hold it in your hand. That privilege will cost more, so keep that in mind. The current link will take you to Blurb to order a non-signed copy. If you would like to order a signed copy, click here.
iBooks–The best of the digital editions, outside of the PDF, will be perfect for my fellow Apple heads, who may be reading on iPads and iPhones.
Kindle— for my folks who are stuck on their Kindles and like the mimicry of the book experience. However, I spent hours trying to get it just so and it still looks a bit wonky. Also, depending on the country, I get less royalties. However, for my international folks, this might be your best bet.
Gumroad—this is a nice protected PDF, with some color, and in a nice 8×10 paper size. You could print this if you wanted. I also get all the proceeds from these sales. Clicking on the photo of the book on my sidebar will always take you here first. Also, Gumroad has an app for iPhone and Android, that allows you to read it there. Search for it, it’s free.
The book is $10 on all digital formats and is $12.83 plus shipping in print and $25 pre-signed. All print prices include shipping and handling.
Once again, you can click here and get it instantly for $10 in a PDF format.
Also, if you are a fellow blogger, member of the traditional press, podcaster, TV person or anybody who is willing to either review or let me come on your blog/podcast/program to talk about the book, please fill out the form below email me here and I’ll be back to you with a review copy in PDF format.
Thanks to all my family and friends and happy reading!
Many of you have noticed changes in my Twitter and Instagram bio, that I’ve been “interested” in more queer events on Facebook, and others have had the pleasure to meet Les, my partner, in person or you’ve known her from her own work in faith-based LGBTQ and transportation advocacy (and you should get to know her videos and life coaching and endometriosis advocacy and our merch line we colaborated on together!). She’s been with me on all my speaking visits over the past two years and we’ve both been helping each other with our various business and community ventures.
Plus, two years ago today, on National Coming Out Day 2018, after a wonderful date night at Midlands after years of knowing each other casually, we decided to start a life journey together, as lovers and friends.
However, in the past and directly, I’ve been hesitant to talk about this part of my life and it has affected how I do this work and how much I pride myself on being transparent. Yet, I believe that this is the time to address this. I wrote a draft of this about 18 months ago, but I believe today is the day to bring this draft into the light.
Before I get started, a warning to both family who are reading this and finding out for the first time and family who may have spoken to my mom or who are concerned about my mom.
First of all, I still love you all and if that love doesn’t extend back to me, I understand. Secondly , I told mom privately when I was last home in Greensboro in the spring of 2019 and I ask that you allow her the space to process this and that you refrain from asking her any questions or making judgements on her and how she’s raised me and treated me over the years.
If you are tempted to make these and other similar judgements, please remember that this is not about you. This is not an attack on my mom (or on you, mom), our family, our reputation and as church people. This is not an attack on my family raising me in the best way they knew how. This is not me wasting my beauty or my brain or giving up.
I identify as a pansexual polyamorous non-binary femme (pronouns she/her/they), who is willing and able and has fallen into a committed, loving, monogamous relationship no matter who or how that person presents/is. This also does not mean I’m turning into a male person or will start presenting more masculine as a rule. I still like all the same things I like. I’m happy with my body and how it’s proportioned. Also, I support all other sexual and gender expressions that are loving and consensual.
I know this is an agree-to-disagree notion some of you. I believe we were born holy, are always holy, but sometimes fall astray and need reminders from God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and folks sanctioned under their power to share this truth. I also know everything under the banner of gender and sexual uniqueness is under the purview of the perfect creation of God. The verses that explciitly condem same-sex or gender-noncomformity I believe have a context for which they were written, that doesn’t necessarily affect our situations. I also believe that we can support civil rights for everyone, without necessarily understanding each individual. We were not all created queer and not every queer expression, just like not every hetero expression of love is holy. But some of us were created queer, our queerness is holy and we need to acknowledge this in our faith communities.
One way I illustrate this is that many of us, especially in the black church, have no issue with allowing women to participate in the full body of worship, namely being or speaking in the pulpit. Yet, the Apostle Paul found that to be a distraction in one of the churches he was writing to and he told those specific women to not speak. However, women spoke and were active in church work in other places, plus, there were lots of women doing work for Jesus and all through the Old Testament. I believe that the scripture we have was God’s word for those specific people and much like God spoke directly to them, they (and yes they, I’ll save that for another post), still speak to us and work with us with the situations they gave us to live out.
And yes, I made a choice, but it’s only a choice to no longer live a lie.
I’m suffering through purple rage and I need to let it go to keep my business and creativity alive.
I built this site nearly a decade ago (and my work on blogs over the last 15 years) to be real, raw and honest about what we can do for the community. Over these years, I’ve been exposed to so much outside of my childhood bubble and I’ve grown so much. Yet, not addressing this directly and firmly has been eating away at me and making me publicly rageful, jealous and resentful. If you’ve been at a happy hour (or even on a few Zoom calls) with me recently, you’ve witnessed some of this. I apologize for anyone I hurt with this behavior, but know I’ve been trying to sort through things a lot of us do as teenagers. Writing this post is helping me heal and start the process of healing relationships–both with people as well as with my work and visibility. I also forgive you, but understand if you can’t forgive me.
We need to stop being prejudiced, racist, and genderphobic in our own community of queer people and in how we apply our urbanism.
I’m sick of the white gay men purporting to speak for (or in some cases use their power to tear down) neighborhoods and spaces that have rich culture and life without them getting into the mix and meddling with what makes those communities special or even better, using their priviledge as white bodies to help us be heard or raise money. This is the root of a lot of the protesting around prides over the last few years, that in their corporatization, they’ve started to mirror non-queer society in how they margialize non-cis, non-white bodies. I’ve felt compelled to always live in cities and move to larger ones, because I’m committed to building community in the black queer community. Because of what I shared above, we struggle a little more at times. Love is defintely love, but it’s really sweet when I can wake up next to my black lesbian partner and have her understand what we need and the struggles. I also hope that as more folks feel comfort in being out and proud, that we get more diversity in expressions and more people feel comfortable dating each other. However, we do not need to favor whiteness or cisness or even wealth. We all have worth and value.
The Death of a Inspiration
The person that helped me to start unpack my harmful theology, not just around queerness, but around patriarchy and white supremacy in our churches and our faith, Rachel Held Evans, died on Saturday May 4, 2019 from complications of the flu, a UTI and an antibiotic she took to heal those other two. She was only 37 (just four years older than me!) and left behind a husband, a three-year-old and a barely one-year old. She was white, grew up in the Evangelical bubble (church, college and also early writings on faith and action), straight and cis and she had her own blind spots around race and even with our affirmation as queer. But she got up daily for over a decade and through her blog and books confronted the notion that only straight cis white men get messages from God that hold weight and authority. Her breakdown of Proverbs 31, her attempt to follow all the rules in the Bible for women, her making peace with needing a different worship experience and now, all the people across the Christian world who have something positive to say about how she challenged them, and challenged them in the way those of us who are current or past evangelicals know and appreciate, with lots of well-stated scripture and a heart for love. She truly had a prophetic voice and it’s this voice that continues to inspire me to speak truth to power, over myself and over our communities.
I’m in love and she’s my best friend and she makes me a better urbanist, a better Christian and a better citizen, friend, daughter, etc. Our urbanism needs to make room for queerness that isn’t just white and cis male. Our faith communities really need to examine how we look at the words that God has given us and the internal words that the Spirit speaks to us. Also, for those of you who don’t practice or hold different beliefs outside of the Christian fold, know that I love and respect you too and just like I’m Black, I’m also queer and Christian and that’s the spirit of where this comes from.
Finally, this is something I’ve known about myself since puberty and something that I take one day at a time. However, I do believe it is time for me to speak about this so that I can know where I stand with everyone in my life and so we can continue the greater work of restoration in our communities.
I think the best way to start my blog birthday/anniversary post for 2017 is to note that I’ve not been writing much over the past 12 months because I flat-out feel unworthy. However, I’m going to take the time to break out the struggle, talk about why this struggle matters and then talk about what I’m doing next.
A Summary of the Struggle
At first, I thought my struggle to write and feel worthy was because of all the bad things that have happened to me over the past few years. All the struggles and the pain and somehow still being in a challenging situation.
That somehow, people knew or learned I was struggling and don’t want to read, listen, hire or help me anymore. Likewise with the times I’ve been forthcoming on this blog and in the newsletter. That being so honest is why nobody with money or major influence wants to help or make sure I don’t fall behind again.
Then I realized something. Like much of the United States of America when it came to the presidential election, my thoughts on my career and my worth were determined by how things appeared on Facebook and Twitter.
If another news organization, policy organization or independent writer writes an op-ed or a reported feature first on something I’ve had in my head for years, then it’s not worth me writing it, because no one will read it. In my mind this blog has weight, but it’s still just a blog, run solely by me and not a major news organization or a the very least a major news nonprofit or urbanist organization.
Especially since I don’t often believe the site is reaching enough people and sadly, I’ve seen people tweet out an idea only if it comes from a major source. Never mind there are other, smaller sources, that have the same and maybe even more of a commitment to telling the story of people and how they interact with their environment.
Yet, I would only know about this one triggering article if I saw it on Facebook or Twitter. Still, it would ruin my day and I would shut off my laptop or cross out the words in my written notebook and become sad that sharing my thoughts doesn’t seem to matter.
(A side note to the times when I’d pitch these publications or organizations or independent writers or developers, get a lukewarm or sometimes hostile response and hold back publishing it on my page because of the glimmer of receiving a better payoff on the work. Never thinking that I have the same sharing and distribution and possibly even back-end of some of these sites and I can still reach the same amount of people on social media).
Likewise with conferences, workshops, gatherings and the like that I can’t get to because I have to work, or it’s too expensive or far away, or that I didn’t get invited to present or engage in. I would see all the pictures and sometimes read conference symposia and wish I’d had an opportunity to be part of the official record of work. Or at least be in the room to network and meet people face-to-face and then sell them on me as a person.
Again, so many of these activities I wouldn’t know about were it not for being advertised or hyped on social media.
Then, there’s the venting that I see happening on both platforms. If one of my “friends”, especially someone who knows me in real life from urbanism, is venting about a policy or a trend, then I must not have reached them soon enough and my words must not have penetrated. How am I to be trusted as an expert or the very least a theorist, if I can’t get my friends and family to understand what’s going on? Why does it take someone who’s not known as an urban theorist or expert, or even more of an urban theorist or expert to finally get people to see the light?
Or even as I wrote this draft, I was pinged on Twitter by someone who thought something I re-tweeted was problematic. I often get tagged and asked questions that I can’t answer immediately, but I feel the obligation to answer immediately because of the speed of the platform. Sometimes, these discussions get resolved, but other times, I carry an intense measure of guilt, because despite me trying to do the right thing, I was still wrong and I still hurt someone. Yet, I’m going to work on engaging in these conversations in a way that I can have peace with. Even if I walk away still being wrong, if I have to apologize or if I have to follow up later offline, I want to not let reasonable discussion or being challenged take me away from sharing my ideals.
Finally, there’s the basic needs of paying bills, rent, eating and also how that happens. I’ve chosen in some seasons to write this blog and promote this platform with the very real fear that it would write me out of jobs. I chose to leave Kansas City so I could make this blog my primary career and also switch into being a consultant. That part worked. I have been a consultant for the past year and some change. However, I didn’t properly prepare myself for the financial changes that would bring, as well as fully comprehend what moving to D.C. in 2016 to start a business would be like. I also foot the bill for so many things, both expected and unexpected, that have bankrupted me. With me bankrupting myself, I felt like I’d missed something and that again, I was unworthy of being a theorist or expert, because I had no or little cash flow. That’s of course wrong, but I’ve struggled with that too.
With the move to Baltimore, I allowed myself leeway to not force things to happen. Now things are happening. I’m in rebuilding mode and I’m dealing with all those Maslow’s triangle needs head on. Things aren’t perfect, but they are a lot better eight weeks in than they were eight weeks into my DC move last year. Also, I’d never been to Baltimore before February of this year. I had no real concept of what’s going on here, what needs to go on here and why all is not lost here and all is not perfect in D.C.
Why This All Matters on the Eve of My Seventh Blog Birthday
Ultimately, all this matters, because I started this page because I wanted to change the narrative. I wanted the mostly male and white urbanist blogging world to realize that there was more to life than their perfect, paper, urbanist cities.
I wanted my own black community to understand that a lot of what we’ve been fed as good urban policy is bad. That our family and friends who haven’t had it as well may be doing all they can to get ahead, but we still live in a world where we don’t control the entirety of our destiny. That every major change can’t happen over night. And when we do make major overnight changes, we still have to examine our motives and ensure that we aren’t just falling back onto the same patterns, just with different rulers, who might look like us.
I wanted women’s voices to be amplified. I wanted to remind our male urbanist friends and antagonists that yes, planning for strollers is not horrible. That sometimes we buy cars just to keep assholes from harassing us at night. That our schools and playgrounds and areas we take our kids matter.
In all cases, I wanted to break stereotypes and create an environment where we challenge ourselves and challenge others to do better by our environment, whether it was a farm or a row house block or even a pier full of carnival rides and tourist stores. I wanted to go past the stereotypes I mentioned above and create a stronger environment that incorporates all the things a person might need to thrive and be a positive contribution to society.
However, I wanted to eat my cake too and do this from a city that I deemed perfect and in no need of major changes. I wanted to coast along and just bask in the glory of a perfect urbanist environment.
But one, urbanism is grey. When I first used that analogy seven years ago, it was more of a racial analogy. The racial lens is still very important. However, I also see the need to talk about specific behaviors and how we blame the average person for doing things that we give leadership a pass to do. Two, I see myself needing to be more active in the stew of creating better environments,not just urban ones, and not just supporting them in the abstract.
I’ve been guilty of shaming people for how they choose to transport themselves, where they buy a home (which isn’t as much of a choice as we like to think),and how they choose to spend their time. I feel like I’m equally critical of policy and systems that preclude equal access to jobs, homes and transportation options. Yet, I’ve definitely not wanted to engage someone who wants me to believe that their McMansion is the only way to do life.
What I’ve forgotten and what some of us have forgotten is that in the last 20-30 years, that’s been the only housing option for which many people have been able to get loans. Residential redlining in pre-World War II urban neighborhoods still exists and in some cases those neighborhoods are being systematically hollowed out, until the right developer comes by and pays the right price to bring those homes back up to code. Or people are sitting on those homes waiting for the big payout. They may match the racial demographics of the community, but they are more motivated by profit and not community. Developers build these wackadoodle McMansion houses and then leave average people with the heating bills, the mortgages and sadly, the underwater values.
Likewise with transportation systems, education systems and regulation of industry and corporate entities. All of these need regulation. All of these need leaders that see everyone from an equitable, diverse and inclusionary lens, that is also willing to constantly improve what’s wrong and also keep doing what’s right, despite what balance sheets look like.
Blaming someone who’s driving a car because the bus keeps leaving them on the side of the road to get their kid to a school that’s not public, but doesn’t make them sick everyday and force them into the ever-increasing costs of the healthcare system, is not right.
Calling out our elected and appointed leaders, as well as complaining to corporate entities or even withholding money from said entities is the right move. Not pooping on our friend who’s just trying to get ahead. In fact, maybe we can have said friend over, feed them and then blow up the party lines of the government together.
What’s Next for Me?
So the first thing I’m going to do is to again, stop silencing myself. I’m going to be doing more frequent and casual writing, tweeting, audio making and video making.
I help people make media plans sometimes. I tell them to do this and that and it’s usually planned. But planning for me makes me write, and over write and over think and never do. What I will start with is a constant examination of my heart and ensuring good intent. Of seeking a collaborative space, but also being ok with asserting the times that I clearly did something myself.
For understanding that the past year of my life was an experiment. The experiment didn’t work out as planned, but I also created some dope byproducts that are reaping benefits.
Also, I ask of you, besides continuing to listen to our podcast, reviewing our show on the podcast sites, sharing our show on social media, sharing these posts on social and contributing to my Patreon (even the smallest bit counts), that you’re patient with me and that every once in a while, you ping me privately or let me know in some other way that you see me, you care and that I don’t have to be stuck because of what I’ve written above.
For the folks who have been doing that, thank you. My next goal is to be an even better friend and continue to recognize your blessings on the world. Also, to the bigger organizations, publications, practitioners and bloggers that have supported me and us–Thank You!
I’m creating a comprehensive event calendar, as well as a intranet/database where we can share resources. I’m going to test drive some of those things on my Facebook page and group, as well as in the Patreon platform and here. Pay attention to my posts on social, the newsletter and here to make sure you don’t miss out on those changes.
I’m soliciting for volunteers of all ages. I haven’t really grown the page out to being the comprehensive source of information and such that I want it to be, because it’s just me and I can write these posts for free from my bed. Yet, I see a need to be more present and I need more help to do that. I’m also applying for funding so I can make these paid positions.
Also, I’m also creating an informal advisory board, with the eye of creating a more formal board and exploring fiscal sponsorship or a clearer revenue model soon.
Whatever I do, it will be in the interest of what I’ve spelled out above. It will be fair, equitable, diverse, inclusive and open. We will make what we need and we will share our wealth and excess with others.
For now though, let us eat cupcakes and blow out the candles on another year!
I’m Kristen. For seven years I’ve used this space and a few others to make sense of the world around me. Learn more about me and read more of my archives. Subscribe to my newsletter (which comes out mostly weekly) and stay up to date with me. Or, come be one of those Twitter folks who make me think a little harder about what I do. Or I can talk to you, with my co-host and friend and fellow urbanist Katrina, roughly every week as well about the next wave of urbanism.
Or, you can listen to me somewhat read this post below. I do read parts of this post, as well as annotate what I wrote:
You can do this thing called life and you can do it in whatever city you need to as a young black professional. Why and how? I am.
You may remember I asked this question of myself and of my home state back in 2014. What does one need to do to find belonging and a sense of place in America, especially the America we currently sit in? How does one cope with double consciousness? How does one deal with microaggressions? How do we fight back or resist? Do we get to survive fighting back and resisting?
I decided I wanted to dive deeper in the things that I do to help cope with being a person in a particular place, especially when you choose to engage with the civic life and the placemaking aspects of it. In my next post, I’ll talk about what governments and institutions can do to make things easier for people living in their jurisdiction, no matter the size or the amenities. But here, the things I’m doing in an individual level, for self-care and self-improvement as I live my city life.
Making peace with my alone time
Even though I’ve moved to bigger cities to find more activities and people, they don’t always happen every night, people get busy and in my case, I can’t afford to go out every night. Plus, I don’t live with roommates in the traditional sense. With that said, I’ve started to feel better about watching TV and spending time on productive internet sites and reading actual books! The time to myself helps me come up with better ideas for writing and new ideas to work on my existing projects.
Finding my own personal hobbies and entertainment
Goes with the first step. But this deals with what I do outwardly. I’ve started to search Meetups. Through that meetup I found a really cool screenwriting club. I’m hoping to use Meetup it to bring me back to performing music. And to sort of re-launch Plan to Speak, my public speaking and presentation design course platform. I’ve started to meet people out of my normal circles and I’m starting to get way more positive energy, which helps me chase away the down moments.
Shifting productively from being the only one in a room, to one of many, back to being the only one again especially when it comes to race, class, gender and orientation
I’m used to having to do things and look around and watch my back. I still have to, but I also have started to notice that I’m not the only in the room. That’s giving me room to be more of myself in situations where I’m not being depended on to be the token or the “definitive black voice”. I will say, if you’re in a situation where you’re still the only, you still have no obligation to be this voice. It’s even more vital to find people, even if they are online and you have to Skype them to see them, who allow and encourage you to be 100% yourself. I have those kinds of people here in the flesh and it’s a great help when I begin to deal with the next bullet.
Recognizing and responding to insecurity, both in myself and in others.
I’ve had to realize that especially in the smaller places I’ve lived, that there’s often an unspoken competition between people in the same industry or of the same gender or racial identity or even just between where I think I should be versus where I actually am. The difference in where I am now is not that this spirit of competition has gone away, but that I’ve recognized it as simply machinations of insecurity. Insecurity isn’t just jealousy and envy, but sometimes it’s a more physical manifestation of lack of money or opportunity, i.e., the company that just doesn’t have a position open that fits your skills, just because you like them. They might be grant funded. Or in the case of the federal government at this writing, frozen from hiring. Really hitting the bullseye on this issue has helped me greatly in being able to understand what’s really going on in my career and in social interactions and helped me continue to find new places to thrive.
Being courageous and willing to try new things, as well as make moves.
The move I made almost six months ago was one of courage. So was the one I made in June of 2015. Many of us know the Nina Simone quote about walking away from the table when it’s not serving you. It’s vital to think about that quote when you make moves to find the things that do service you. I’ve been guilty of being on way too many civic boards and neglecting those personal entertainment activities. It took courage to stand up and say I need something different. But even if your city depends on you, you have to know when to say no (more on that in another bullet). You definitely need courage if you have to create the community to help yourself thrive. And patience. And the willingness to be one’s best advocate. Some of us who dwell in an introverted state or have been silenced may have to nudge this skill. However, in the bigger cities, you really have to fight for your right to party ;).
Being realistic about finances, along with being more resourceful
Cost of living is real. I wish I’d let myself really absorb that before I made this move and made some other moves that will take time and lots of creativity to repair. However, I’ve said it before and I’ve said it again, the price you pay to live in the place you want to live, whether that be a big city, a smaller town, a farm or even an island in the sea can only be determined by you. While I’d make some decisions differently, I have learned that surviving in a bigger city is not something I can’t do, even with money being tight. The key is that I’ve been pushing myself to leverage resources both on and offline in my current city. And if you choose to go somewhere because it’s cheaper on the surface, keep in mind the pull of spending more money on things and trips and how that can be just as ruinous on your finances. Find ways to quickly center your finances in a budget and don’t let emotion or fear rule the show here.
Loving myself and setting the right kinds of boundaries.
I still can’t be everywhere for everyone. I’m letting go of the guilt of leaving two very vibrant, but just not right for me communities behind. And with so many opportunities in my new city, it’s sometimes hard to say no, in the spirit of being more courageous as I mentioned above. But at the end of the day, no matter how busy my city is, I need my cocoon and I will cherish it.
Just like I mentioned in my post-election post, self-care is vital. However, we can engage in whatever city we are in for positive good and still be productive, giving citizens. Now, I will say if your safety is repeatedly challenged or you are in direct danger, run. You don’t have to put up with blatant abuse for the sake of being in a certain place or leading a particular community. You will thank yourself.
As always, all of this is a work in progress. I’m learning not to beat myself for having to go backwards sometimes. However, I wanted to share this, because I think we call all learn from the process. Also, review my last post if you need to do an even deeper career related dive.
I’m Kristen. I started blogging here to make sense of the built environment around me. You can find me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. You can find out more about me at my main website, www.kristenejeffers.com. Get job listings, interesting articles, links to future posts and more from me via my weekly email. Support my work on Patreon.
Kristen Jeffers writing at Union Station in Kansas City, MO, Spring 2016
Have you ever wondered how a person becomes involved in the world of placemaking and development as a career?
Is it just people buying up properties to manage and flip? Is it just people being city planners, working in their city’s zoning or long-range planning department? Could I be part of the industry as a writer, like you? Or, do real estate agents or tradespeople count? Could I just open a coffee shop in a neighborhood that needs one and open up my doors on a regular basis to community folks?
Also, what kind of schooling or training do I need to have? What’s right for me? There seem to be lots of choices and no one unique path for some of those choices. How do I make this work for me?
I’m going to assume in this conversation that you’re a person between the ages of 16-40, and you live in the United States or Canada and you haven’t made any money in the sector at all. Although some of these personal development exercises could be translated and applied to people in other countries or at different ages or even volunteer roles that have similar rules and roles around property development and management.
To get into the meat of the process there are nine questions to ask yourself, four traps to avoid and a handful of things to do next.These are all things I’ve thought through and learned as I build my business, all while considering new courses, contracts and bridge jobs to take to sustain myself.
Let’s start with the questions and my explanations of the smaller questions they generate:
What type of work do I want to do?
Do you want to build or refurbish homes by hand or as a trade contractor? Commercial spaces? Do you want to sell real estate? Do you want to be more like me and be a writer and theorist? Do you want to facilitate community meetings? Do you want to be a local government manager/planner/etc? Do you want to be an engineer or architect?
What specific skills do I want?
Do you want to draw? Write? Build? Make deals? Develop research or policy? If you choose the path of engineering or architecture, both inside and outside, there are things that you need to be aware of and certifications you absolutely have to have in order to be able to do work in your sector of the field. Also, if you are selling real estate, installing anything, planning anything or even working in an office or a university, you could do some of these things by yourself, without licensure, but licensure and continuing education credits make you look sharper and may help you make more money over time. Or even get you the job in the first place, in a complicated market.
What kind of debt am I willing to live with?
This isn’t just student debt. This is business debt. I’m currently starting a payback plan of debts I incurred when I decided to add being a public engagement specialist to my business. Also, while in the States, you can write things off, you often have to pay taxes on your business, especially if that’s all your doing and you don’t have an employer to absorb that. Some firms pay great, some don’t. Some sectors of our business allow you to make cash as fast as you can hang a light fixture. Others require you to intern at several places and create your own pathway, which may take years and lots of money. Don’t be like me and let the debt scare you or overtake you. Also, don’t let the idea of having to raise money or be in debt temporarily keep you away from the field, especially if it’s your ultimate purpose. More on that later. Lastly, do your best to avoid debt, by considering a graduated plan into the field or financial help.
Where do I want to do this work?
Selling houses in Florida is very different than selling houses in California. Same with building, designing and even how you promote homes and plan neighborhoods. Different cities have very different cultures around how work is done. Same with design firms. Also, you need to be moderately comfortable and able to find a social network, separate from the industry, wherever you are. You also need to be somewhere that you can be alone at, as often some of the best-paid local government jobs are in towns and cities you’ve possibly never heard of and may not have anyone who looks or thinks like you there.
How do I want to work?
Do you want to be on your computer in a cube or open office? Do you want to be in a closed-door office? Do you want to get dirty in the field? Do you want to talk to people? Do you want someone else to talk about your projects for you? The process and the procedure of how you do the work are not always what they look like on paper.
How will I cope with external setbacks?
This is a business where you will learn quickly that everyone is not your friend. Also, funding for design projects can change at the tip of a hat, especially if the money is coming from a government source. Plus, if you’re involved in active home building, supplies may not come on time. If you’re studying an urban phenomenon, you may find that your hypothesis is dead wrong and you may not be the expert in what you thought. You could be well loved in the field one day and hated the next. Which gets me to my next question.
How will I cope with swings in my mental health?
Having a therapist or at least a support group is critical. Even if it starts out as online, self-paid care and forums and you only do it once a month. I would not still be here today were it not for professionals trained to talk me through some of the mental blocks and changes that I’m going through right now. Also, I’ll add that you want other business coaching or mentoring, but often, these folks will not be your therapist. Also, family and friends can be great too, but often, they may not understand exactly the rigors of your profession and they may discourage you without meaning to because they operate under a slightly different set of workplace rules.
What alternatives am I willing to consider?
If being a licensed practitioner doesn’t work out, could you be happy joining the blogosphere? How about getting appointed to the zoning board? Or planning a block party or farmers market or concert or some sort of community event every month, that builds a community behind it? Placemaking and community building is not just the licensed and regulated trades.
What is my ultimate purpose?
This is the thing that gets you out of bed in the morning. This is what you’ll look back over your life and be happy you did. This is what you hope your involvement in the sector will do both to you and the community you’re working with.
With that said, let’s address a few traps to avoid:
Narrow ideas of your goal— gets back to the alternatives question. You should have a Plan B or C (maybe D, E and F).
Defining yourself strictly — some may mock you for having different talents or even wanting to have just one particular talent. Silence them by doing what you do well and being flexible and a lifelong learner.
Not defining yourself at all— You do want to have some idea of what you do, even if that idea is being a person known as a multi-passionate. This video and blog post is a great nudge to people like us who have many ideas. This person also bootstrapped their business by working in a completely different field. Oh and the field they’re in now is something that only a handful of people do well and understand. Sounds familiar…?
Depending on external validation (both to lift you up or to help you make the right decision in the moment) — This does not excuse you from making sure the measurements on the structure you’re building stand up. If you choose to go into architecture or engineering, your buildings do have to stand up. Even with decorating, designing and planning, you need a clear vision if the goal is to convince a neighborhood or developer to build or allow you to build. However, sometimes, you do know what’s best, especially if your measurement tool is actually a yardstick and not a subjective idea. And sometimes, you may be a junior planner on a project that going to ruin a neighborhood, but as a junior planner, there’s only so much you can say and you may not get all the validation you need. However, use this as a lesson to learn what you really want to do and know that you don’t have to just be a junior planner to have a role in creating and maintaining the world around you.
Ok. You’ve asked yourself the questions and you’ve made note of the traps. What’s next?
Create a list of schools, funding sources, and jobs you want to go after. Get to know what these opportunities require and create a plan to go after them.
Start talking to any and everyone in the business to get to know them. The journalist/activist in me would often go into these meetings with a heavy dose of skepticism, automatically assuming I knew what people would say or what they were about. However, as a student or at least student-minded, go into these meetings, listen and make notes of things you want to remember. Don’t be like me and learn this the hard way.
Make note also of HOW people conduct business, arrange their offices and even things such as grooming and body language.
Finally, recognize that even if you never nail a nail, or draft a plan, if you have any idea how you want your community to run or even a policy idea worth testing, you have a role in this space. Once upon a time, homes were built by gathering together all the able-bodied adults to create the raw materials and then put the frames up. Regulations and licenses aid in making sure that process can be done over and over, but every discipline started as someone’s idea in a sketchbook and got professionalized over time.
Good luck in your search! Feel free to reach out to me for more insight and support!
I’m Kristen. I started blogging here to make sense of the built environment around me. You can find me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. You can find out more about me at my main website, www.kristenejeffers.com. Get job listings, interesting articles, links to future posts and more from me via my weekly email. Support my work on Patreon.
Many of you have noticed changes in my Twitter and Instagram bio, that I’ve been “interested” in more queer events on Facebook, and others have had the pleasure to meet Les, my partner, in person or you’ve known her from her own work in faith-based LGBTQ and transportation advocacy (and you should get to know her videos and life coaching and endometriosis advocacy and our merch line we colaborated on together!). She’s been with me on all my speaking visits over the past two years and we’ve both been helping each other with our various business and community ventures.
Plus, two years ago today, on National Coming Out Day 2018, after a wonderful date night at Midlands after years of knowing each other casually, we decided to start a life journey together, as lovers and friends.
However, in the past and directly, I’ve been hesitant to talk about this part of my life and it has affected how I do this work and how much I pride myself on being transparent. Yet, I believe that this is the time to address this. I wrote a draft of this about 18 months ago, but I believe today is the day to bring this draft into the light.
Before I get started, a warning to both family who are reading this and finding out for the first time and family who may have spoken to my mom or who are concerned about my mom.
First of all, I still love you all and if that love doesn’t extend back to me, I understand. Secondly , I told mom privately when I was last home in Greensboro in the spring of 2019 and I ask that you allow her the space to process this and that you refrain from asking her any questions or making judgements on her and how she’s raised me and treated me over the years.
If you are tempted to make these and other similar judgements, please remember that this is not about you. This is not an attack on my mom (or on you, mom), our family, our reputation and as church people. This is not an attack on my family raising me in the best way they knew how. This is not me wasting my beauty or my brain or giving up.
I identify as a pansexual polyamorous non-binary femme (pronouns she/her/they), who is willing and able and has fallen into a committed, loving, monogamous relationship no matter who or how that person presents/is. This also does not mean I’m turning into a male person or will start presenting more masculine as a rule. I still like all the same things I like. I’m happy with my body and how it’s proportioned. Also, I support all other sexual and gender expressions that are loving and consensual.
I know this is an agree-to-disagree notion some of you. I believe we were born holy, are always holy, but sometimes fall astray and need reminders from God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and folks sanctioned under their power to share this truth. I also know everything under the banner of gender and sexual uniqueness is under the purview of the perfect creation of God. The verses that explciitly condem same-sex or gender-noncomformity I believe have a context for which they were written, that doesn’t necessarily affect our situations. I also believe that we can support civil rights for everyone, without necessarily understanding each individual. We were not all created queer and not every queer expression, just like not every hetero expression of love is holy. But some of us were created queer, our queerness is holy and we need to acknowledge this in our faith communities.
One way I illustrate this is that many of us, especially in the black church, have no issue with allowing women to participate in the full body of worship, namely being or speaking in the pulpit. Yet, the Apostle Paul found that to be a distraction in one of the churches he was writing to and he told those specific women to not speak. However, women spoke and were active in church work in other places, plus, there were lots of women doing work for Jesus and all through the Old Testament. I believe that the scripture we have was God’s word for those specific people and much like God spoke directly to them, they (and yes they, I’ll save that for another post), still speak to us and work with us with the situations they gave us to live out.
And yes, I made a choice, but it’s only a choice to no longer live a lie.
I’m suffering through purple rage and I need to let it go to keep my business and creativity alive.
I built this site nearly a decade ago (and my work on blogs over the last 15 years) to be real, raw and honest about what we can do for the community. Over these years, I’ve been exposed to so much outside of my childhood bubble and I’ve grown so much. Yet, not addressing this directly and firmly has been eating away at me and making me publicly rageful, jealous and resentful. If you’ve been at a happy hour (or even on a few Zoom calls) with me recently, you’ve witnessed some of this. I apologize for anyone I hurt with this behavior, but know I’ve been trying to sort through things a lot of us do as teenagers. Writing this post is helping me heal and start the process of healing relationships–both with people as well as with my work and visibility. I also forgive you, but understand if you can’t forgive me.
We need to stop being prejudiced, racist, and genderphobic in our own community of queer people and in how we apply our urbanism.
I’m sick of the white gay men purporting to speak for (or in some cases use their power to tear down) neighborhoods and spaces that have rich culture and life without them getting into the mix and meddling with what makes those communities special or even better, using their priviledge as white bodies to help us be heard or raise money. This is the root of a lot of the protesting around prides over the last few years, that in their corporatization, they’ve started to mirror non-queer society in how they margialize non-cis, non-white bodies. I’ve felt compelled to always live in cities and move to larger ones, because I’m committed to building community in the black queer community. Because of what I shared above, we struggle a little more at times. Love is defintely love, but it’s really sweet when I can wake up next to my black lesbian partner and have her understand what we need and the struggles. I also hope that as more folks feel comfort in being out and proud, that we get more diversity in expressions and more people feel comfortable dating each other. However, we do not need to favor whiteness or cisness or even wealth. We all have worth and value.
The Death of a Inspiration
The person that helped me to start unpack my harmful theology, not just around queerness, but around patriarchy and white supremacy in our churches and our faith, Rachel Held Evans, died on Saturday May 4, 2019 from complications of the flu, a UTI and an antibiotic she took to heal those other two. She was only 37 (just four years older than me!) and left behind a husband, a three-year-old and a barely one-year old. She was white, grew up in the Evangelical bubble (church, college and also early writings on faith and action), straight and cis and she had her own blind spots around race and even with our affirmation as queer. But she got up daily for over a decade and through her blog and books confronted the notion that only straight cis white men get messages from God that hold weight and authority. Her breakdown of Proverbs 31, her attempt to follow all the rules in the Bible for women, her making peace with needing a different worship experience and now, all the people across the Christian world who have something positive to say about how she challenged them, and challenged them in the way those of us who are current or past evangelicals know and appreciate, with lots of well-stated scripture and a heart for love. She truly had a prophetic voice and it’s this voice that continues to inspire me to speak truth to power, over myself and over our communities.
I’m in love and she’s my best friend and she makes me a better urbanist, a better Christian and a better citizen, friend, daughter, etc. Our urbanism needs to make room for queerness that isn’t just white and cis male. Our faith communities really need to examine how we look at the words that God has given us and the internal words that the Spirit speaks to us. Also, for those of you who don’t practice or hold different beliefs outside of the Christian fold, know that I love and respect you too and just like I’m Black, I’m also queer and Christian and that’s the spirit of where this comes from.
Finally, this is something I’ve known about myself since puberty and something that I take one day at a time. However, I do believe it is time for me to speak about this so that I can know where I stand with everyone in my life and so we can continue the greater work of restoration in our communities.
Then Senator Kamala Harris in 2017 in Virginia with Virginians (United States Senate — The Office of Kamala Harris, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
Recently, I was made aware of and responded to this series of threads on Twitter, that among my colleagues in the D.C. area, there’s a concern over how many practitioners of place, especially planners, exist in the metro area and how many folks want to be planners by name, versus just doing the work in many different aspects of the field. I’ve heard this before, from planners and related advocates, architects, engineers and others who do community work of all races and from all other regions of the U.S. I’m not surprised and I do know why I hear this so much. I’ve talked about it before, but as I’ll mention in the final section, I want to shift my thoughts and takes back to this site, where I own the server space and have plenty of room to link to things. First, few clients exist in need of architecture and building services as well as transportation planning and operations, that don’t already have existing contracts and people they use. Even for general environmental planning, or acceptance of environmental injustice, there’s a drought. Your client base/employment options are limited greatly. The one most people are aware of are government entities, which have all kinds of requirements to ensure fairness and equity in the awarding of work contracts to firms, but sometimes can be cumbersome and create competitive environments. Also, for legal reasons, which yes, have merit, you have to be careful what you talk about and who you talk to when it comes to these competitions. Which can be hard when most of the people you compete with were at one point studio classmates or internship cubemates. Or even better, roommates or lovers. Plus, if you elect to work in-house with a government entity, you have other ethical considerations and gag orders, which again, are often necessary. Finally, some things, like public transit, just make more sense to be governed by you know, the government and for their privatization to be regulated, if there’s privatization at all. Or, you work with private for or non-profit developers, without government funding, some who are in the business to create things that make our world better and some are in the business to take from others and make gobs of money from themselves. Now for-profit doesn’t always mean capitalist monster, just like non-profit doesn’t always mean charitable and for the people. Many places need to build or renovate homes, build or renovate transportation systems and honestly, build or renovate a lot of other pieces of the built environment or society. However, there’s even a limit there to how much people can build and operate. Speaking of the nonprofits, you could be or work with an advocacy group with a dash of service provision, but you’re often getting your money from government grants, private grants or private banks, so there’s not that much difference from what I mentioned above. There’s also a size issue, some contracting firms might as well be power brokers, while others like me are just small shingles. Basically, if you’re new to the idea of planners/architects/engineers/contracting, all these firms operate and build like law firms and attorneys as well as media outlets and journalists. We also have lawyers in our clubhouse too and they can tell you what their lives have been like as they’ve seen a shortage in labor and emphasis on big versus small especially over the last 10 years. And this site, if you haven’t already picked that up is a journalistic outfit ;). The next big argument against a growing class of capital p planners is the public will of the citizenry. Some well-meaning folks, as well as your usual villains in many jurisdictions and metro areas, fail to provide adequate funding, maintenance and even just the creation of adequate transportation, housing, environmental quality, and education systems. For that, I do suggest that more people with a good grasp of land use planning, construction, and operations, run for elective office and approve budgets that fund these things, as well as go to public meetings, especially ones that offer you the chance to pick budget items to fund or for items that are in active stages of construction or pre-construction, where changes can be made. Then there’s human prejudice, marginalization and power dynamics unrelated to land use and planning, that still affect the profession. This encompasses the lingering hurt and harm done to those of us who started as enthusiasts or hobbyists of architecture or transportation systems, as well as the marginalization of community groups or communities period, especially black, brown, queer and poor groups. Plus, some groups just don’t talk to each other or talk over each other. I can’t tell you how many arguments, especially online, would be solved if the two entities would do a thorough review of the bodies of work and life experiences that have been shared, on the internet, as well as in offline resources. Not just professional work, but considering how lived experiences affect how people see the world, especially the environment which we all battle over. All this gets wrapped up into how we interact and I think that to go forward, we have to address this elephant. This conversation hits me so much because it’s directly related to why I’m going through a tough time. In doing my reader’s survey, I learned that many of you started following me (or at least those of you still paying attention enough to fill out my survey), in or after 2014. Since that’s the case, you may have only realized in passing how much the loss of my dad in 2013 has reshaped almost every aspect of my life. I think that taking a detour into what brought me to this post today, which has been discussed in other parts of the site before, is valid because some of you have yet to peruse the archives! When he was living, my dad was a very an active force on how I approached the built environment. From him teaching me how to ride and care for a bike, to me going along on some of his electrical contracting jobs and sometimes to the school buildings he helped maintain, to the way he never met a stranger and how proud he was of my achievements (my degrees were on HIS resume), he had a very outsized presence in my life and loved being part of my online stories and life. He also understood what it’s like to struggle with the ups and downs of having a professional services business, and also needing a job to pay benefits. He went through open discrimination on the job. When I would cry about my own similar issues, instead of just leaving things as that’s the way it is (and he would say that in a Walter Cronkite voice impression), we would scheme about how to change and fix it. Neither of us would accept no for an answer and we didn’t accept that just because that’s the way it is, that’s the way it should stay. Then, all of a sudden, 50% of him was gone due to a major accident in 2010 and finally, all of him was gone over Memorial Day weekend of 2013. Not having my parent to debate the ways of the world unconditionally with, lurched me into a state of trying to find that in other family members, friends and colleagues. It, along with the awareness of middle-class, suburban Black American police shootings and other random racialized violence and incidents, plus microaggressions that ballooned in my post-graduate school, post-2013 working environments drew me into the state of rage that James Baldwin so eloquently illustrated. It also fuels, much like Baldwin, my want and love of travel and moving away from bad situations. Additionally, my mom and several other family members with similar experiences of racism and business-making are more private people and that’s why I share very little of them on here. While I love how connected the Internet makes us, I’m a firm believer in respecting privacy and that some things will always remain secret. However, I wouldn’t have felt the need to move so much, if one, there were other options professionally to fix the mistake that got me fired from my design services firm in Greensboro in 2014 and the dating life I’ve not really had anywhere, especially given my sensitivity to partners, namely male, respecting my brain and ambitions. Plus, political work often leaves you with more enemies than friends and such a critical analysis of what’s wrong with society, it’s very difficult to see and embrace what’s working right. I’m dealing with the opposite of what my colleague Chuck Marohn has shared recently. There’s very little of the negative I don’t see, I just don’t comment on everything and clearly, this website has been stringing cobwebs as I just realized this is my first full blog post that isn’t a newsletter copy I’ve written in 2018. When I left North Carolina for Kansas City in 2015, I felt like I was giving up on North Carolina, as I discussed in great detail last year. I felt like I couldn’t be a die-hard supporter of the betterment of my home state without being in said state. On the other hand of the lack of urbanist media focus on North Carolina, alternatives to car transportation, alternatives to certain kinds of single and multi-family housing, and the issues mentioned above, made me believe that I couldn’t do what I wanted to do in North Carolina. I brought that baggage with me to Kansas City, along with the pull of a partner who lived in what I considered the optimal environment for urbanist debate and planning, as it had some of the functions that we all advocate for, as well as again, a class of folks who love to debate and talk about it constantly. I would no longer get teased or harassed for only talking about this at the expense of other things. (Mind you, doing anything, including being an urbanist, in excess, is a recipe for disaster). So when I left Kansas City for D.C. in 2016, my goal was to establish myself in that greater collective of urbanist minds thinking through solutions on a national level. However, as has been well documented, this moving back east plan backfired. I’ve barely made any real money, wrecked my credit and ability to have credit lines, barely had health insurance and healthcare and of course, the relationship that was the foundation of my move to D.C. broke down. Somehow I’ve managed to scrape by, but it’s taken me moving all around and thankfully, folks still finding value in these kinds of writings on the sense of place and the experience of being out in the world. That and finding a flexible barista gig that will finally come with full benefits. And before that, having a community up in Baltimore that took me in when things got really tight and tough in D.C. Additionally, in many cities, including the ones in my home state, as well as the greater Kansas City region, we are a very culturally in-tune people and in cities where rail, bike-share, and enhanced bus services are available, we do park our cars and use those services. We also know how to park our cars and walk down our one-two main streets. And yes, there may only be a couple, but they are well utilized. This happens across class and race lines as well. I had to learn this the hard way as well, that I’ve been way too pretentious for my own good, in assuming that other cities would never be capable of the urbanity I so wanted from them. Finally, having traveled and worked in so many states and the District of Columbia, I’ve found that every state and the District has some form of discriminatory or structural issue that causes marginalization. Plus, migration as a whole creates multiple cultural awareness and needs to balance one’s personality with one’s environment. I hope that with this post, it’s clear, to both new and old followers and colleagues, exactly why I decided to leave North Carolina, come and go from Kansas City and come and go to the Greater Washington/Baltimore region, as well as travel often and broaden my ideals of land use and environmental thought, planning and doing. Additionally, this is how I would like to address the elephant of too many planners in too few places.
Even he knows when to hit the road. Image by Flickr user Caren Pilgrim
I only ate here once in DC and it was excellent. It’s gone now. Does that make DC less cool? Won’t somebody step up in a city that has that kind of wealth and create something new and similar and better?
My fourth grade social studies textbook. This was the only image I could find.
Magic Kingdom’s Space Mountain via Wikimedia
Kansas City’s Historic City Market. One of the great urban markets and examples of variety in cities. Image by Kristen Jeffers
Kristen Jeffers writing at Union Station in Kansas City, MO, Spring 2016