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.

Placemakers

The Quest to Make the Perfect Place

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.

Paid Podcast: Uniting a Neighborhood

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.

When Good Placemakers Go Bad

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.

A City of Blue Ribbons

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.

Live Free or Die

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.”

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.

Fighting Blight in the Gateway City

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.

Paid Podcast: Elevating the Neighborhood

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.

The Warrior on the Hill

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.

Building a Better Bike Share

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.

The Recidivism Effect

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.

Placetaking: Squatting for House and Home

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?

Bigger, Better, Greener

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.

A Soft Landing in Missoula

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.

Paid Podcast: Mapping Urban Renewal

All communities face certain challenges. But some people see challenges as opportunities. On Placemakers, we bring you stories about the spaces we inhabit and the people who shape them. Join us as we criss-cross the country, introducing you to real people in real communities — people who make a difference in how we travel, work, and live. You’ll never look at your community the same way again.

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Placemakers

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