As famed Bronx, NY environmental activist Majoria Carter said, “I believe that you shouldn’t have to move to live in a better neighborhood.” Indeed, the best — and perhaps only — way for the rust belt to be reinvented as a sustainable, thriving, and inclusive region is by accomplishing the task in community after community … one at a
time.

The most valuable takeaway from the decade’s old civil rights movement is that, while workplace integration is achievable via legislative mandates and judicial rulings, no amount of governmental pressure can force individuals of different races to live side-by- side if they have no desire to do so.

Unfortunately, there’s a strong perception that small town people are clueless about “big city” life. While it’s true that the rural “deep South” is where many African Americans have faced (and continue to face) some of the worst discrimination, that does not mean small-town people are unprepared for transplanting to a black, inner city neighborhood. I grew up in an affluent suburb of Pittsburgh and my husband comes from a small town of about 4,000 residents. He was definitely more prepared for living in Hough than me. Why? Here are …

What do YOU think it’s like? Here’s an exclusive, behind-the-scenes look at the typical week for a white woman living in Hough, a 97% African-American neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio:

–Check email and Facebook every day. It’s way better than TV.
–Push my kids on the swings in our backyard.
–Feed our six chickens.
–Teach the neighborhood kids that eggs come from chickens.
–Do the laundry and then fall asleep and forget about it in the dryer and my husband has to fold
the clothes so our sons have pants to wear.

We write about transit on this blog a lot because we think it is essential to turning around our cities. The city of Detroit, more than others, has been undergoing a transit crisis. There are calls to finally develop a decent, sustainable system. We are hoping that they do.
In the meantime, here’s a taste of what Detroit’s transit dependent deal with on a day to day basis:

Faces of Transportation 11-30-11 from Project S.N.A.P. on Vimeo.
-A.S.

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I love TV’s The Wire. When I heard about this self-guided, Wire-themed tour of Baltimore, I thought, “That’s the self-guided tour of Baltimore I’ve been waiting for.” But I read something a few days later that paralyzed my ambitions. Christian Lander, author of the blog and book “Stuff White People Like,” explained in an interview:

When and how did you get the idea for the site?

January 18th. A friend and I were having an IM conversation about The Wire. He said, “Not enough white people watch The Wire.” I said, “Don’t worry, they do.” We started talking about what they’re doing instead of watching The Wire : therapy, getting divorced, going to plays…

One of the good things about having a blog is that you can use it as an excuse to meet people you admire. That is how I met Mansfield Frazier recently.

Mansfield is sort of a Cleveland celebrity, but unlike some of the regular suspects, he’s actually really interesting and smart. He is a regular contributor at the blog The Daily Beast, the Cleveland Free Times, the Cleveland Leader and also at Cool Cleveland. In addition, he is the tending to a new vineyard on formerly vacant land in inner-city Hough. He’s also an author and national expert on prisoner reentry. Oh, and he served five sentences in prison for counterfeiting, before turning his life around and becoming a successful entrepreneur and businessman.

Beyond all that, Mansfield Frazier is a thinking man — a thinking man who doesn’t hold his tongue. That’s a rarity in Cleveland. (Plus, we both despise the Plain Dealer’s Phillip Morris.)

Anyway, Mansfield was nice enough to let me interview him.

It’s that time of year again, guys! That time of year where I have an uncontrolled aneurysm as the result of the stupidity of Cleveland Magazine’s anticipated “Rating the Suburbs” issue.

Every year this plastic-surgeon-supported pamphlet makes a list of the most car-centric, culturally vapid, soulless tract-housing white-people ghettos in Northeast Ohio. Whichever suburb is the whitest, with the most big-box stores, is generally the runaway favorite for top prize.

Case in point is this year’s winner: Richfield Village. Does anyone want to guess what the racial makeup of this community is? Come on, guess! At the last Census, the village of Richfield was 96% white and 2% African American. You’d be hard pressed to find a whiter place in the region.

A reporter from a local radio station recently interviewed me for a story about “urban pioneers.”

I didn’t think much of it, until I started reading this amazing book called Missing Women, Missing News. Turns out, this term is based on some pretty suspect assumptions about cities and the people who inhabit them.

Author David Hugill points out that the term “pioneer” symbolizes a “frontier,” or sharp physical or social divide, between competing constituencies. In the case he explores in his book, the competing constituencies are the wealthy gentrifiers of Vancouver and the poor residents of the city’s Downtown Eastside neighborhood.

I wrote on Twitter recently that cupcakes are a metaphor for everything that’s happening in modern cities. I was only half serious, but it still sorta worries me.

I have to admit, I love cupcakes. The cake in a cup store in Tremont is like my personal version of the siren singers. Just the same, I can’t help but feel a twinge of middle-class guilt every time I step inside.

Of course, there are many reasons to love cupcakes. They are delicious. They are sold by local small business people in walkable, urban locations. They add to vibrancy to once downtrodden neighborhoods. In that sense, these stores have a psychic significance in the community that goes beyond its (no doubt minuscule) economic impact.

Among the myriad insights from the new Census is another blow to Milwaukee. The metro region was once again rated the most segregated in the country, beating out notoriously divided metros like Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago and LA.

We’ve written before about how metro Milwaukee’s development policies encourage sprawl, isolating people of color and the poor in the city (while degrading the environment in the suburbs). In its analysis, Salon takes another tack. Anti-transit policies, like the ones endorsed by former Milwaukee County executive and current governor Scott Walker, serve to further isolate the region’s disenfranchised populations. Salon elaborates on the local atmosphere: