Carl Jonard Technically Still Has a Blog

Atlanta and the Urban Future, Governing magazine:
(via Terminal Station via Creative Loafing via Pecanne Log)

“Old-timers are hopeful about what change means, because for the first time they’ve got a grocery store within walking distance and don’t have to take a bus five miles to get food,” says state Representative Stacey Abrams, a young African-American Democrat who represents a racially mixed — and gentrifying — district that includes Kirkwood. “On the other hand, when white folks come and start talking about how bad things are and how we have to fix them, it seems patronizing.”

But if disagreements are inevitable when you bring together whites and blacks, old-timers and newcomers, poor and prosperous, suburbanite and urbanite, what is just as striking is an emerging Atlanta in which those distinctions are being set aside in favor of addressing basic concerns about quality of life. After a period of racial division, for instance, the Kirkwood homeowners’ association has coalesced around the issues of public safety and improving the neighborhood’s public schools.