In 2005, my sister Heather was basically living inside her own real-life version of Friends. She and my brother-in-law were renting a two-bedroom apartment in a complex in Tustin, California, where no fewer than eight of their best friends and relatives had also taken up residence. A band of super-social newlyweds, they were hanging out all the time. Squeezing into … Read More
The Power of Small in Charleston
The highway overpass that funnels vacationers like me toward the high-end shops and million-dollar mansions of downtown Charleston, South Carolina, soars a hundred feet above a very different kind of neighborhood, a part of the city known as the Upper Peninsula. The homes here are small, interspersed among warehouses and union halls, and lived in primarily by low-income, African-American Charlestonians. … Read More
Stuff I’m Reading: Where Do Millennials Really Want to Live?
Everyone wants to figure out where Millennials are going to settle down, and the major theory is that they’re completely enamored of cities. But is that really true? Gizmodo’s Alissa Walker points out that about half of Millenials live in cities, but only 13 percent in downtown neighborhoods. The rest, like Americans in general, have wound up somewhere in a … Read More
I Would Live There: Roanoke, Virginia, edition
When people from, say, New York City ask me where I live, and I tell them “Blacksburg, Virginia,” sometimes I’ll add, by way of clarification, “Our nearest big city is Roanoke.” Then they sigh with relief and say, “Oh, I know where that is.” But they don’t. They hear “Roanoke” and their brains waddle to the mental card catalog and pull out “Roanoke, Lost … Read More
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