flynn050

Mayor Rahm Emanuel and inventor Elon Musk don't only share memorable first names and national notoriety, they also both preside over troubled organizations: The Mayor over America's third largest city which is reeling from divisions by race, rising crime and a shrinking population, the inventor over  a highly valued company which has not made a profit yet and which is struggling to produce its most successful car model amidst rumors of sabotage . Banter among leaders in a failed subway station in Chicago (Tribune photo) Maybe the two had to find each other. This week the duo stood side by side in Chicago's underworld, specifically in the  mothballed $400 million super-station to nowhere, a silent witness to a transportation dream having gone wrong. Musk and Emmanuel both were clad in tieless white shirts with the top buttons open to praise their deal. The Mayor taps the entrepreneur to build a high speed transit tunnel from downtown to O'Hare airport, a deal that costs...

“Our Nation Is Moving Toward Two Societies, One Black, One White—Separate and Unequal” (Kerner Report 1968) In April 1968, one month after the release of the Kerner report, rioting broke out in more than 100 cities following the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. Sometimes the personal story told from another perspective has the power to cut through the clutter by striking at heart and mind at the same time. This happened to many when  Dr Sharon Sutton , FAIA addressed a packed house in the plenary keynote of the national  Association for Community Design  (ACD) at its annual conference which was organized this year  by the Baltimore Neighborhood Design Center on occasion of its 50th anniversary under the title Reverberations. Destiny Watford explaining Curtis Bay  Sutton (77) went over the familiar territory of the civil rights movement, the 1968 racial uprisings, Whitney Young's speech in front of the 1968 AIA convention in which he f...

The desired outcome The holy grail of successful neighborhood revitalization is a vibrant community in which lower income homeowners and renters of all races can enjoy the increased quality of life, better services and increased wealth of revitalization without being booted in the process. Yes to positive change but No to displacement requires an intricate combination of investment resources, protections for homeowners and renters and the willingness to accept change in the community. Investment without displacement. ( Reinvestment Fund ) The problem Investment resources need to be large because in disinvested communities money coming in for small, scattered improvements can disappear like a drop in the bucket. Only strategically placed  investment can leverage an increase of assessed values, a necessity in terms of making investments economically sustainable. Only if depressed real estate values increase will investment in the area make sense, even if the sources are public. It i...

When the Yale University's U.S. Health Justice Collaborative recently organized an event under the title “ Paved With Good Intentions: White Saviorism and the Nonprofit Industrial Complex " they hit a nerve. The event space wasn't large enough to hold the nearly 1,300 people that had declared interest and had to watch a live-stream of the event. Yale event In September of 2017 the Haitian government announced that it had banned the operations of 257 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Haiti because they were disconnected from the priorities and needs of the Haitian people, according to the announcement. The Minister of Planning and External Cooperation (MPCE), Aviol Fleurant, [said] that it was necessary to get Haiti out of the conceptual state of welfare, to move it into real development, [he]said that the 257 organizations had violated a September 14, 1989 decree regarding their functioning. Mr. Fleurant said that these institutions must finance what the Haitian pe...