Placemakers

Seattle’s Yesler Terrace was the first racially integrated housing project in the U.S. Today, it remains a multicultural nexus for the city. The Seattle Housing Authority and its partners at JPMorgan Chase have been hard at work rebuilding and rejuvenating this historic community’s infrastructure and investing in its economic sustainability. Join Brian Babylon as he explores how the city has tackled such an enormous revitalization ...

George Leonidas Leslie was perhaps the most sensational—and successful!—criminal in American history. An architect by training, he planned and pulled off a series of record-breaking bank robberies throughout the late 1800s and arguably ushered in the modern heist. On this episode of Placemakers, producer Mike Vuolo explores the unholy relationship between burglary and the built environment.

Long before the Black Lives Matter movement swept the U.S., Dallas’ police

chief tried to diffuse the anger and mistrust between minority communities and

police. His reforms made an impact. The number of people killed in confrontations

with police fell, just as crime fell. But Dallas was still torn apart by racial hate last

summer, leaving five officers dead and the city in shock. It fell on the police chief to

bring people back togethe...

How do you solve a problem like the suburbs? For one man in Arizona, it

means creating an agricultural utopia, replete with picket fences and a community

garden. He was inspired by one of our era's  most scathing critics of suburban

sprawl: James Howard Kunstler. We'll hear from both about what happens when

you try to remedy what Kunstler calls “the greatest misallocation of resources in the

history of the world.”

In the 1950s and ‘60s, Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard was a thriving commercial district beloved by New Orleans’ African-American community. After decades of disinvestment, the boulevard has turned a corner and is starting to blossom, once again, into a lively center for commerce and the arts. Down in the Big Easy, we explore how local businesspeople, JPMorgan Chase philanthropists, and creative community thinkers have brought the b...

Washington, D.C., may be the political center of the free world, but its

670,000 residents don’t have a say in the national legislature. What they do have is a

“non-voting delegate” in the House of Representatives. Eleanor Holmes Norton can

introduce legislation and vote in committee, but she can’t vote on the House floor.

Over the course of 13 terms, the so-called “Warrior on the Hill” been fighting to

change that.

Philadelphia has made a mission of making bike share attractive to low-

income and minority residents, trying to buck the national trend of bike-share users

being white, rich, educated, and male. The city has moved bike stations into

nonwhite neighborhoods. It’s used ambassadors. It’s hired a multiracial team to run

the bike-share program. And it’s tried and abandoned other ideas, in an attempt to

break the social stigma of riding a bik...

When Bennie Lee was only 13 years old he became a leader of the Apache Vice Lords, an African-American street gang on Chicago’s west side. In and out of prison for years, Lee eventually landed on death row in the aftermath of a deadly riot at the Pontiac Correctional Center in Illinois. Lee was acquitted, set himself straight, and is now helping the formerly incarcerated imagine a life on the outside.

After punk singer Steven DeCaprio learned how to legally acquire tax-

defaulted property in Oakland, California, by squatting, he decided to grow a

movement of political “squatter-activists” to take over the land. The group, known

as Land Action, seeks to provide access to land for purposes of social justice and

environmental organizing.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more infor...

Mary Poole has been a nurse, an arborist, a jewelry-maker, and a mom. But she’s never

been a politician or an activist. At least not until one heartbreaking photo from halfway around

the world changed everything for her. Now she’s on a mission to make her hometown of

Missoula, Montana, home to refugees fleeing conflict globally. But not everyone in this

conservative state is happy about it.

...

Over the last 40-plus years, Detroit has seen its economy falter and its population dwindle, leaving thousands of homes empty and starting a downward spiral of neighborhood decay. In this episode, join host Brian Babylon as he digs into how Loveland Technologies has used city support and funding from JPMorgan Chase to build an innovative crowdsourcing platform to help heal Detroit’s neighborhoods.

Chattanooga, Tennessee, has a lightning-fast, publicly-run broadband network that has

attracted a lot of tech talent to the city. But as the city builds an economy around technology,

one thing is becoming apparent: There’s a gaping divide between those who are tech-savvy,

and those who aren’t. In some neighborhoods, as few as one in five households has an internet

connection. Can Chattanooga bridge its digital divide?

Spirit on Lake looks a lot like any other apartment complex built over the past few years. But something very specific sets it apart from nearly every other apartment building in the nation: It’s an affordable-housing development aimed at gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender seniors. It was the brainchild of someone who deeply understands the unique challenges of this community – because as an 82-year-old transgender woman, she’s...

Majora Carter embraces the idea of “self-gentrification” in her native South Bronx. She founded a park in a spot slated to become a waste-transfer facility. She hires local gamers to test software and provide customer service for major tech outfits. And now she’s opened the first boutique coffee shop in Hunts Point, a marginalized neighborhood that, once upon a time, she swore she would leave forever.

It’s no secret that climbing rents are driving many creative entrepreneurs out of popular urban centers. When Seattle book publisher Ed Marquand stumbled across a dearth of cheap real estate in a struggling small town not far from the big city, he thought he may have found a solution to the problem. But will Marquand be received as a knight in shining armor, or a colonizer come to conquer and pillage?

Atlanta wanted an end to its public housing projects-- no more pockets of

poverty, crime, and despair. In the 1990s, the city started tearing the projects down,

replacing them with mixed-income neighborhoods. The shining success story of this

effort? East Lake, which turned “Little Vietnam” into a safe, beautiful community.

We’ll meet the people who made it happen. When so much can go wrong, how did

East Lake get it right?