Architect Jakob Tigges plans to erect a 1,000 meter tall artificial mountain in the middle of Berlin. [more inside]
posted by quoquo on Nov 11, 2009 - 36 comments

San Francisco's Black Exodus. Since the last report in 1990, San Francisco’s Black population has dropped by 40 percent, faster than any other major city in the country. In an effort to reverse the loss, Mayor Gavin Newsom started the African American Out-Migration Task force in 2007. [more inside]
posted by lunit on Aug 13, 2009 - 27 comments

The National Coalition for the Homeless announces that anti-homeless attacks are up, while Maryland becomes the first state to expand hate crimes legislation to include attacks on the homeless. [more inside]
posted by puckish on Aug 8, 2009 - 36 comments

"Ah, the mythical $100 home. We hear about these low-priced “opportunities” in down-on-their-luck cities like Detroit, Baltimore and Cleveland, but we never meet anyone who has taken the plunge. Understandable really, for if they were actually worth anything then they would cost real money, right? Who would do such a preposterous thing?" Amongst others, artists who have hope for the future and money to invest. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief on Mar 12, 2009 - 35 comments

A discussion about "white fear" and "black crime" [more inside]
posted by neroli on Dec 5, 2008 - 91 comments

Want to be a good neighbor but don't know how? Now there are checklists! (Chicago and SF focus) [more inside]
posted by puckish on Nov 17, 2008 - 17 comments

Newcomers, with the zeal of recent converts, are often the most vocal in resisting change to the neighborhood they have just discovered. An exploration of NIMBYism. If not in your backyard, then whose? Probably a low-income minority group. Opposition to affordable housing is often thinly-veiled racism. How NIMBYism affects a seven-year old boy on LA's skid row. [more inside]
posted by desjardins on Aug 25, 2008 - 61 comments

"No one told me there would be unremitting noise every Saturday for the rest of my life.” Historic Harlem drumming circle drives young white professionals drum crazy. Who will prevail?
posted by [NOT HERMITOSIS-IST] on Jul 9, 2008 - 151 comments

The United States Conference of Mayors will take place from June 20th-24th in Miami, FL. The agenda (pdf) includes rising energy costs, housing, water, transportation, street crime, public schools, gangs, health care quality and costs, secure airports and ports, illegal guns, drugs, and immigration with a special focus on climate protection initiatives. Not to mention speakers Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Bill Clinton. [more inside]
posted by lunit on Jun 18, 2008 - 2 comments

Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican? is a documentary produced by Claire Andrade-Watkins about the gentrification of Providence's once-thriving Cape Verdean community of Fox Point.
posted by lunit on May 5, 2008 - 7 comments

San Francisco's Hugo Hotel, the current home of Brian Goggin's Defenestration, has been seized by eminent domian and will probably be demolished. Fear not; San Francisco has many other ancient hotels.
posted by fandango_matt on Jan 28, 2008 - 17 comments

Toronto: Justice Denied. Mark Kingwell writes about Toronto. The article is a great read even if you've never stepped foot in the city.
posted by chunking express on Jan 10, 2008 - 34 comments

Harlem's commercial and cultural backbone, 125th Street, has been gentrifying fast; many of its Black-owned businesses have been forced out by high rents and replaced by branches of white-owned national chain stores. The street's best-known cultural centers remain (notably the Apollo Theater and the Studio Museum in Harlem), but now, its oldest surviving Black-owned store, The Record Shack, is facing eviction. Owner Shikulu Shange, along with other Harlem residents, will lead a town meeting next week to discuss strategies for keeping Black economic development alive in Harlem and in NYC (as of the 2000 U.S. Census, NYC's five boroughs were home to more than 98,000 of about 129,000 Black-owned businesses in all of New York State).
posted by allterrainbrain on Jul 7, 2007 - 52 comments

Tonic closes. At the end of a farewell performance, Marc Ribot and Rebecca Moore refused to leave the stage. They were arrested for trespassing, and hope to bring attention to New York's dwindling number of performance spaces for independent music. Previous discussions.
posted by Benjamin Nushmutt on Apr 17, 2007 - 73 comments

Bill Clinton Doesn't Care About Black People. (More. Protest Announcement.)
posted by bardic on Jul 24, 2006 - 79 comments

The War For Hasidic Williamsburg: Immediately after the recent death of the Satmar Grand Rebbe his two sons went to war over over which one will be the new leader of what is perhaps the largest Hasidic sect in the United States. This sect is extremely anti-modernist, even compared to other Hasidic groups, and it also strongly anti-Zionist. A former leader of the Satmars once blamed the Holocaust on the Zionist campaign for a Jewish homeland. But this internal battle is not the only threat to the community. The gentrification of Brooklyn (warning: pdf link) has both driven up the price of land, making it extremely difficult for the large families of the Satmar to obtain additional housing, and made it far more difficult for the youth to escape the corrupting moral values of the outside culture.
posted by spira on May 6, 2006 - 35 comments

2nd Ave Deli closed; may not reopen. The half-century old 2nd Ave Deli in New York City's East Village has closed; its rent was hiked 37% to $33,000 per month. The closure is described as temporary, but the owner acknowledges that it might open next "to clear out." [MI]
posted by rkent on Jan 6, 2006 - 222 comments

Help Save Chinatown Nope, not the Polanski classic, but London's Chinatown. I found this on the Reverend Rat's London street life blog, and the BBC seems to confirm it: London's Chinatown is becoming a victim of its own commercial success, in stark contrast to some others in the world which are shrinking dramatically or being superseded by the so-called ethnoburbs.
If you don't know much about Chinatowns, the Wiki entry is as a good place to start as any.
posted by runkelfinker on Dec 12, 2004 - 7 comments

The connections between post-war urban reconstruction, demographics, social engineering, and eugenics are explored in this treasure trove of links, from things magazine.
posted by monju_bosatsu on Dec 10, 2004 - 4 comments

"This is the toughest atmosphere for nightclubs in New York since Prohibition"
posted by palegirl on Aug 4, 2001 - 14 comments