The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted communities around the world. However, Latinx, Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color have been disproportionately impacted due to existing social, environmental, and economic factors that make individuals more likely to have worsened COVID-19 outcomes.  The Link between Land Use, Air, and COVID-19 Racialized land use and lending practices, such as redlining, have disproportionately located heavy industrial development near Black and... Continue reading »

Summary Two related crises are afflicting US households: increasing housing costs and increasing incidence of eviction. One often overlooked component of these crises is transportation and its costs. This article explores some eviction and transportation data and argues that transportation costs play an integral part in the eviction crisis that affects so many families.   The US is experiencing a housing crisis The current US housing crisis began in the run-up to the Great... Continue reading »

You may not know it, but CNT has a small San Francisco outpost. As I sat on conference calls discussing how to make housing more resilient to climate change and the greenhouse gas benefits of transit in communities last week it all felt extra urgent, because the sky outside my window looked like this: Wildfire smoke from up and down the west coast has been affecting San Francisco for weeks, but when it combined with our fog to blot out the sun and cast an eerie orange glow so dark that... Continue reading »

When Overton Elementary School, located in Chicago’s Washington Park neighborhood, was closed in 2013, the future use of the campus was unknown. Many of the 43 schools that were shuttered in 2013 are still vacant today despite early promises that the school campuses would be transformed into community amenities. Overton was purchased by Washington Park Development Group, helmed by Ghian Foreman in 2015, and he has worked in partnership with Borderless Studio, founded and managed... Continue reading »

At this time, we are reckoning with the historic and current injustices that minoritized populations have faced in this country. These injustices are not limited to the “fast deaths” of obvious racist attacks; it includes the “slow deaths” occurring from the disproportionate effects of climate change and pollution. During this time, I am excited to join Center for Neighborhood Technology as a Project Associate on the Urban Resilience team. In my first few weeks, the discussions we’ve had have... Continue reading »

Black lives matter. Structural racism has enabled law enforcement to use incarceration and lethal violence upon Black men, women, and children, over-and-over, for centuries. These are people with names and families and stories. The current protests give voice to the suffering and righteous anger of Black communities across the nation. We humbly stand in solidarity and allyship with this movement. We will continue our internal journey of pursuing racial equity and justice through our work as... Continue reading »

Beyond all mainstream Obama-induced beliefs, structural racism is alive and well in this country.  This type of racism hasn’t even taken a day off.  Racism rears its head in many ways, but one of the ways it silently expresses itself is under the narrative of integration.  Our ancestors fought hard and persistently to grant us all the right to live and shop wherever we wanted, but the result behaves more like assimilation than integration.  Integration is the unification of... Continue reading »

Having always lived in a Black community, I have always had to travel to the next-town-over to buy full groceries. There was one exception.  As a child, I often walked to an exceptional grocery store.  It was built on the site of an existing forest, anchored economic development, then suddenly closed after seven years. It remains vacant more than twenty years later.  I will also note that the grocery store provided video rentals.  The lower cost and one-stop-shopping forced... Continue reading »

A food desert is commonly defined as a neighborhood area more than a mile away from full-service food access.   First, a little context: I am a Black female millennial who rents on the West Side of Chicago.  Grocery shopping is the only form of shopping I enjoy, I engage in it every other day. My parents moved me to an auto-oriented suburb when I was very young. Without anyone telling me it was so, I believed that when I saw a person walking they did so because they were destitute... Continue reading »

From inventories to public education, here's how local leaders can take action on lead An estimated 6 million leaded service lines deliver drinking water to households across the United States, and when these lines leach lead into drinking water, it poses a serious public health problem. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, states and cities are working to issue moratoriums on water shutoffs and reconnect service to those that have been shut off—but it’s important to... Continue reading »