Placemakers

Imagine a place where you can stroll down the sidewalk, wave to your neighbors on their porch, then pick up your dry cleaning or have lunch at the café. That’s the kind of walkable, compact, mixed-use community envisioned by the founders of New Urbanism—including Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. But some people say there’s a reason one of Plater-Zyberk’s developments played a starring role in a memorable Hollywood film about overly constructed reality.

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 project. 

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 together in the aftermath.

How does a small group of people change politics? The Free State Project wants libertarians to concentrate themselves in New Hampshire and promote libertarian causes. Thousands have already moved, and thousands more are on the way. But not everyone is happy to see them coming.

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.”

Three stories from St. Louis highlight different ways to combat urban blight, from fighting urban decay on MLK Jr. Drive, to turning vacant lots into lush corner gardens. Whether it’s one street, one garden or one tree, it gets easier to imagine change when you literally see it take root.

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 boulevard back to life.

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 bike in poor neighborhoods.

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.

A decade ago, a tornado wiped out the small town of Greensburg. But the town decided to rebuild -- as a totally green community. Ten years out, has green rebuilding program been successful, and is this a model that might be used by other towns? Or is going green harder than it seems?

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 part of it.

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?

To understand the stories we'll tell on Placemakers, you must understand the ultimate placemaker: Jane Jacobs. She lacked formal training in city planning but became an urban visionary who promoted dense, mixed-use neighborhoods where people interacted on the street. She also became the nemesis of New York master builder Robert Moses. On our inaugural episode, we'll explore Jacobs' legacy and how the ideas and ideals of "Saint Jane" hold up today.

Starting August 1, host Rebecca Sheir introduces you to people facing challenges and trying to make a difference in 18 different communities across America.  .