In Metro DC, a Dead Mall Now Provides Housing for the Homeless

This post by Steve Dubb appeared in NPO (Nonprofit Quarterly) In Metro DC on July 11, 2018

By Payton Chung from DCA, USA (Dead mall: Landmark, Alexandria, Va.) [CC BY 2.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons

July 6, 2018; Washington Post

Last month, writing for Business Insider, Leanna Garfield noted that, “Hundreds of malls and thousands of mall-based stores have shuttered in the past two decades, and many more may close within the next 10 years.” Meanwhile, homelessness, which had been declining as the Great Recession faded, has started to rise again. The federal government in 2017 reported that there were 554,000 homeless nationwide, including nearly 58,000 families with children.

In Arlington, Virginia, a nonprofit asked if a recently shuttered mall might provide shelter for those who needed it. As Terrence McCoy writes in the Washington Post, the transformation of Alexandria’s Landmark Mall into a homeless shelter is representative of “a new way of thinking that is bringing together three economic phenomena: the collapse of the brick-and-mortar retail industry, the disappearance of affordable housing in America’s boom towns, and the struggle to reduce homelessness.”

The availability of surplus commercial real estate resulting from the decline of shopping malls is not in doubt. As Christopher Leinberger, chair of the Center for Real Estate and Urban Analysis at George Washington University, explained a year ago to NPR’s Robert Siegel, “It’s the middle-market malls that are in biggest danger of going dark.” Overall, the number of malls in the United States has fallen from 1,500 in the mid-1990s to roughly 1,000 today.

In 2017, a record 105 million square feet of retail space closed. (That’s enough to hold around 400 of Wal-Mart’s monster-sized Superstores.) This year is on pace to exceed that amount. CNBC helpfully has created a map of big box stores across the US expected to close in 2018. Few communities remain untouched.

The options for repurposing malls are nearly endless. But the reality is that many abandoned malls remain… well, abandoned. Such was the case with the Landmark Mall in Alexandria, which shut down in January 2017. The mall, which opened in 1965 and boasted that “it was the first mall in the DC region to feature three department stores as anchors,” had been faltering for a number of years prior to its final closure 18 months ago.

The Alexandria nonprofit Carpenter’s Shelter was inspired in its founding by Father Tony Casey of Blessed Sacrament Church, who from 1982 to 1988 housed homeless people in the church’s basement until the building was torn down. In 1988, after the church building was gone, the nonprofit formed to preserve homeless support. Over the next 30 years, the nonprofit “evolved from a small group of concerned citizens providing little more than bedding on cold nights in Alexandria churches and warehouses into a leader in finding solutions that permanently end and prevent homelessness.” In 2016, according to its Form 990 filing, its revenues totaled $2.26 million.

Executive director Shannon Steene needed a place that could “fit 60 beds, had at least 10 rooms, and was within walking distance of public transportation.” When other options proved unworkable, Steene, despite his initial skepticism, set to putting the mall to use as a shelter. Now, notes McCoy, Steene’s office is located “in a corner that had until recently been home to women’s active apparel” in what was once a Macy’s department store.

The mall’s landlord is Howard Hughes Corp., based in Dallas. McCoy explains the rest,

There, a senior official named Mark Bulmash, who had grown up in Flint, Michigan, and knew what it meant to be poor, received an interesting proposition. Could the homeless move in? The company’s agenda was to redevelop the entire space, but those plans were years away, and, meanwhile, all of that empty space would be just sitting there. 

“It would have been silly not to help,” said Bulmash. So he did, even throwing in free rent.

The nonprofit, notes McCoy, had funding for “twelve weeks to gut the building of all that was Macy’s and then in its place build bedrooms, install bathrooms, and furnish a recreation room and cafeteria.” This June, the store reopened as a homeless shelter.

Could the Alexandria project be a model? “The fact is that there will be millions upon millions of square feet of retail space that are not going to be used over the next five years,” notes Amanda Nicholson, a professor of retail practice at Syracuse University. “I think it would be an inspired idea.”

McCoy notes that, “Developers and city officials, both in the Washington region and beyond, are starting to agree.” Christy Respress, executive director of Pathways to Housing DC, recalls a conversation with a real estate broker who asked if her nonprofit could use empty business park space. Respress says her concerns are the same as she would have with any housing proposal; access to public transportation, schools and employment are especially important. But, she adds, she is excited to see people “talking about creative things that can be done.”—Steve Dubb

ABOUT STEVE DUBB

Steve Dubb is a senior editor at NPQ. Steve has worked with cooperatives and nonprofits for over two decades, including twelve years at The Democracy Collaborative and three years as executive director of NASCO (North American Students of Cooperation). In his work, Steve has authored, co-authored and edited numerous reports; participated in and facilitated learning cohorts; designed community building strategies; and helped build the field of community wealth building. Steve is the lead author of Building Wealth: The Asset-Based Approach to Solving Social and Economic Problems (Aspen 2005) and coauthor (with Rita Hodges) of The Road Half Traveled: University Engagement at a Crossroads, published by MSU Press in 2012. In 2016, Steve curated and authored Conversations on Community Wealth Building, a collection of interviews of community builders that Steve had conducted over the previous decade.

https://nonprofitquarterly.org/2018/07/11/in-metro-dc-a-dead-mall-now-provides-housing-for-the-homeless/?utm_campaign=SocialWarfare&utm_content=81666323&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&hss_channel=fbp-201100766585851

Domino Effect: Sweet Playground At Old NYC Sugar Refinery

This article by SA Rogers was originally published on the Web Urbanist page by SA Rogers, filed under Offices & Commercial in the Architecture category

Sweetwater playground at the former Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn, New York is a colorful children’s fun park that’s dandy as old-fashioned candy.

A park with good taste? It’s more likely than you think thanks to locally-based artist Mark Reigelman and what used to be the world’s largest sugar refinery. A Williamsburg waterfront icon for the better part of two centuries, the old Domino Sugar Refinery has been transformed into Domino Park boasting a site-specific play environment called Sweetwater: “the sweetest playground in New York City.”

How Sweet It Was

Reigelman set out to create more than just a playground, though the result is eminently playable on its own. Instead, the artist elected to pay homage to the former Domino Sugar Refinery and, by extension, the long history of sugar manufacturing in America’s vibrant northeast. In a glazed nutshell, the playground invites children to explore the sugar refining process without getting their hands sticky, no matter what the weather..

Sweet (American) Dreams

The Domino Sugar Refinery was built in 1856 and additional infrastructure made it the world’s largest sugar refinery by 1882. The location on the banks of the East River facilitated the import of raw sugar cane from around the world. The factory employed approximately 4,500 people at its height, giving countless numbers of immigrants a boost into the American workforce – melting pots made for sugar AND people (though not at the same time).

Let the Dominos Fall

The factory ceased sugar refining operations in 2004 and stood abandoned until 2017, when the James Corner Field Operations-designed waterfront space known as Domino Park was created. Opened to the public on June 10th of 2018, Domino Park invites visitors of all ages to enjoy the remnants of this historic site, the soaring Williamsburg bridge, and the iconic Manhattan skyline. The youngest among us might have the most fun, however, as they climb up and down ramps, worm their way through tubes, trundle across conveyor belts and zip down slides from one end of Sweetwater to the other.

Sucrose For Comfort

Reigelman designed Sweetwater in three distinct interconnected stages: Sugarcane Cabin, Sweetwater Silo, and Sugar Cube Centrifuge. Following the path of raw sugarcane as it arrived at the refinery in days of yore, kids will be chopped up and crushed inside a replica industrial cabin, strained and filtered into sweet water syrup, and finally emerge fully-processed into freshly refined raw sugar… figuratively, of course. Fear not, helicopter parents, your precious progeny will return as sweet (or sour) as they entered.

Fun Factory

Reigelman’s tribute to the old sugar factory relies much on the inclusion of preserved and replica industrial artifacts scavenged from the old refinery complex. Wood floor planks enjoy a second life on the walls of the elevated cabin while colorfully-painted valve wheels cast from the original factory artifacts allow park guests to get a “hands-on” feeling of what the factory was like. Reigelman also sought to disabuse any thoughts of grim Industrial Age workhouses by liberally employing the vibrant yellow, turquoise, green and brushed metal hues that made up the original factory color palette.

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A Reawakening

By Jon Dunnemann

The Awakening of the Negro

Strewn here across what were once blank pages are the choice words from a stirred up soul passing through its many stages.

It cries and it hollers aloud, with heavy etchings of noise and fury carved up into neat little stories far away from the crowd. While some of them will quite easily be forgotten others are still being revisited or reworked for the benefit of those who at times may feel tremendously downtrodden.

Like a voice being shaped into many notes, scribbled, then assembled, and orchestrated into a crafty fate with the main objective being to try and capture the attention of others well before it's too late. 

An added hope is for everyone to be able to discern very clearly what my soul is attempting to propose in light of all that it has been struggled so arduously to compose.

Here it is, laid out for all to see, the rather troubling life and times of one man's misguided journey. Lifted from memory, unraveled and placed on full display, it is ready to be exposed, criticized, generalized and italicized, although it may fail to ever really be recognized for what it must truly be: the remnants of a smoldering personal calamity.

There's no more left, nothing exactly right, everything has been brought out of hiding and into the glaring light. Although I find myself slightly burdened still at the anxious prospect of other people's chiding. Frankly though, to tell you the truth, it is a quarter past the time to face the music out of the fear of forever losing my spiritual sight.

Like the tempestuous strike of fool's gold, on occasion I can not just simply leave well enough alone. Therefore, on this day I set about to climb on top of my high horse, gallop out into the open field, and then when in an unfamiliar place and as if I were attached to a fishing reel, I cast myself out so that my sordid life can be explicitly revealed.

Yes, right there out in that wide open space is where I finally became totally undone in utter naked disgrace. This recurring nightmare of a dream for me has not been the least bit fun or at all easy to face. But it's okay, it's all good because now I feel more complete after having decided to finally share this awkward truth for me, for you, and for everyone else in the hope that it might help you to avoid an awkward, unfortunate and unnecessary repeat.

Let me assure you, that in the process of this reawakening all manner of disturbance is gone. Lord, I am so enormously grateful to you for having given me the necessary strength to carry on.

It is unimaginably sanctifying to be reawakened my friend. On such an important matter as this, I assure that I most certainly would never pretend. There comes a time when we have to unpretentiously lose ourselves before we can ever finally win.

Go now my brother, my sister, my friend, and ride on ever so gently upon the steady and stable wings of the spring wind!

May this story bring you some solace. Now it's your turn to ready yourself and to begin again. That's why I have called this little snippet a reawakening.

The Rebuilders of Chicago's Southland

This post was originally published in the April 24, 2017 edition of Crain's Chicago Business

THE
REBUILDERS

OF CHICAGO'S SOUTHLAND

A small set of urban pioneers is buying property on the South Side and in the south suburbs, not with gentrification or house-flipping—let alone price appreciation—in mind. Rather, they're staking a claim, hoping to recapture something that has been lost: a community that may not be prosperous now but could be again if more people were to follow their lead. 

By Dennis Rodkin

Charnese Davis bought a house in Chicago's Woodlawn neighborhood for herself and her three sons in November, knowing, she says, that several years into the future, it might still be worth only the $151,000 she paid for it.

In the six years since April Washington bought her house in south suburban Park Forest, its value has sunk by at least 35 percent, while her property taxes have gone up more than 70 percent.

And in Englewood, Mary Jo Hayden lives in the house her parents bought 52 years ago. It's worth maybe $81,000, which she says is less than its value in 2008, when she took title to the property after her father's death. "We deal with it," says Hayden, who shared the home with family members. "We know this house is worth something, even if it's just memories."

In a broad swath of Chicago's south neighborhoods and suburbs, where a sustained recovery in home values has yet to arrive more than a decade after the housing bust, homeownership has become a different kind of investment. It's detached from the 20th-century notion of steadily advancing home values as a builder of household wealth.

JOHN R. BOEHM

"I HAVE A HOUSE WHERE MY SONS AND I CAN LIVE. I CAN'T WORRY ABOUT WHAT IT'S GOING TO BE WORTH LATER."

— CHARNESE DAVIS

"That was something our parents knew," Davis says, "that owning your home helped you build up your finances. But there were jobs for them for life. Now it feels like what our parents did is out of reach for us. We have to look at it differently. I have a house where my sons and I can live. I can't worry about what it's going to be worth later."

COLD REALITY SPURS NEW THINKING

The shift in mindset is in part an adjustment to the cold reality of a recovery that has lifted some affluent North Side neighborhoods and north suburbs beyond their pre-bust peaks while leaving their southern counterparts waiting.

But it's also something more: It's a nascent movement to rebuild Chicago's once-thriving south, household by household, from the effects of decades of disinvestment, race-based struggle and epidemic violence. "It's counter to the pessimism that exists in our community," says the Rev. Kevin-Andre Brooks, pastor of Greater St. John AME Church, the oldest black church in Englewood. "It's saying we are going to make these into communities where people sit on the front porch, and children play out front, and run up and down the block again."

Brooks and the others say they're fully aware that they are running against a strong headwind, particularly now, amid seemingly unstoppable violence in some Chicago neighborhoods. "But we're not just going to let go of it," Hayden says, "let go of everything our parents built."

In the baby-boom generation, middle-class blacks "saw buying homes as the next step in the evolution of achieving the American Dream," says Deborah Moore, director of neighborhood planning and strategy at Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago, a nonprofit that focuses on revitalizing struggling areas. "You were building household wealth that you could pass down to your children and grandchildren."

In today's generation of young adults, she says, "we're seeing a lot of that interest in buying as a pioneer, to stake your claim in a community and help it build back up to the kind of place the earlier generation knew."

If the generations of post-World War II middle-class blacks were “the builders,” as Brooks calls them, these are the rebuilders.

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Historic Northwest Rising: A Lesson in Inclusive Community Activism

This post by Monica Diodati originally appeared on the Better Block Foundation blog on May 2, 2017

While West Palm Beach’s Northwest Historic District is unique to its region, its story has been heard over and over in the South: A historically black neighborhood that once thrived has been systematically neglected for decades, and now struggles to keep its identity in the face of revitalization. The district was created in the 1890s when the African American community of The Styx moved west out of Palm Beach. It later served as the city’s first segregated black community during the mid-1900s, and remains a majority black neighborhood today. It sits along the railroad tracks, bordered on two sides by a large parking garage and a cement plant. This, combined with decades of disinvestment and neighborhood fracturing left behind a majority low-income, high crime area whose stigma haunts it to this day.

The neighborhood is anchored by an iconic historic jazz club, The Sunset Lounge. Built in 1923, the club was part of a string of nightclubs designated as safe and welcoming for African American performers during the era of segregation. Artists who came through the circuit included Sam Cooke, Etta James, James Brown, and Ray Charles, among many others. Unlike many other venues on the circuit, The Sunset Lounge is still operating today as a local bar and music venue, though the building is in need of renovations and repair. The lounge, along with the neighborhood as a whole, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Goal

In recent years, the City of West Palm Beach Community Redevelopment Agency has been working in the Northwest neighborhood and acquired The Sunset Lounge and the parcels immediately surrounding it. The CRA has plans to leverage the cultural significance of the site and the community around it to improve the quality of life in the neighborhood and bring back the vibrancy that once existed. Above all, the CRA wants to include the community in the planning process and avoid displacing the population that currently resides there. As part of this plan, Better Block and 8 80 Cities were brought in under a Knight Foundation grant to find out what the community needed and wanted from the historic site and to bring those ideas to life.

Engaging the Community

Led by 8 80 Cities, our team conducted a number of trips to survey the current and past residents, stakeholders, and business leaders in the neighborhood to find out how to best move forward with the project. We asked what made the neighborhood unique, what residents would like to see at the Sunset, what they’d like to see in the other public spaces, and what would make them feel safer.

Overwhelmingly, the community focused on the youth. They wanted a place for kids to go and safely play after school, resources for job training, homework groups, and family-friendly activities like sports equipment, outdoor movies, cookouts, and playgrounds. So, we set to work making a concept for the public space that included outdoor seating, increased lighting for safety, greenery and beautification, kids play areas, and a visible connection between the Sunset Lounge and the community outside its doors.

We teamed up with another local event, Heart and Soul Festival, and took over half of the event space with green walkways, light posts, benches, and signage highlighting the historical significance of the neighborhood. We also added a parklet, interactive street murals, and a crosswalk between the club and the park, and painted a basketball court on the other half of the street. An iconic tree sat in the middle of the lot, which we outfitted with string lights, lanterns, a tire swing, and a hammock. From the minute we put up the tire swing, there was a line of children from the neighborhood waiting to use it. A partnership with Kaboom resulted in an Imagination Playground being installed at the site, which was also popular with the young ones in the community.

The Importance of Activism Over Marketing

The idea, like all Better Block projects, was that the community would help build these components, lending a sense of ownership and empowerment to take on future initiatives after we left. However, we struggled to recruit volunteers from the community and ended up building many of the components ourselves or with the local team. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why this happened, but we learned some lessons along the way. Volunteer recruitment always works best when performed by a local within the community, but, this time, we treated the task as if it were marketing. While we did have a high percentage of local residents come to the event itself, we didn’t have the same showing at the workshops leading up to it. Our recruitment plan didn’t place enough importance on the face-to-face connections that are necessary to bolster civic engagement and get people invested in the process. What we needed, we concluded, was an activist or an involved neighborhood leader who can lead by example and knock on some doors. Flyers and social media posts can only go so far.

Luckily, the community surveying and engagement process helped us identify who these people are, so, for future projects, we know whom to reach out to. Another encouraging phenomenon was that, while not many residents signed up for workshops, once they saw our team working out in the park, they were eager to come out and help. Parents and kids ran over after school and picked up paintbrushes, helped make streamers, and asked how they could get involved. Seeing this eagerness and enthusiasm proves that the resources and energy exist in the neighborhood, we just need to be better about tapping into it in the future.

The Day Of

The initial feedback from the community was overwhelmingly positive. Kids were asking how long the elements could stay, and offering to act as neighborhood watchmen so the basketball hoops didn’t get stolen (they did, unfortunately, along with most of the other elements.) Residents and business owners were encouraged by the fact that we came back and did what we said we were going to do, helping to restore some trust in the planning process and in the CRA’s initiatives moving forward. We also heard that simply visualizing the space as a park helped shift people’s view of the space as an unsafe, late night hangout for bar-goers to a community gathering place. Now, plans that call for a park in front of a nightclub don’t seem so outlandish after seeing the kids and families in the neighborhoods embrace it.

Next Steps

The CRA is now hoping to put together a committee of local residents who have indicated that they’d like to stay involved in the project, and consulting them on any future plans for the area. There are also plans to make certain elements permanent, like the tire swing and hammock, which the kids couldn’t get enough of. The Kaboom playset is being donated to a local youth organization for use in its after school programs, and the elements that did not get stolen from the park are being stored at The Sunset for future activations throughout the year. 

Currently, 8 80 Cities is tallying the surveys and putting together all of the public feedback from the project into a report. We’ll be back with more once we receive those results.

http://betterblock.org/blog/2017/05/02/historic-northwest-rising-a-lesson-in-inclusive-community-activism-2/

In the Bronx, a hip-hop architecture camp teaches students about creative placemaking

Architect Mike Ford fosters interest in urban planning and design through the lens of hip-hop

This post by Ameena Walker, originally appeared on CURBED New York Aug 16, 2018

M.O.D. Media Photography

Perhaps moreso than any other genre of music, hip-hop is shaped by its environment. The genre’s origins date back to one sweaty summer night in the Bronx in 1973, when DJ Kool Herc debuted a new style of spinning records at his sister’s back-to-school party. And as the style became more popular and took off, one thing linked the artists who shaped it: they were often influenced by what they saw in their own neighborhoods.

For example, in Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s 1982 hit “The Message,” the group raps about its South Bronx home: “Broken glass everywhere / People pissing on the stairs, you know they just don’t care / I can’t take the smell, can’t take the noise / Got no money to move out, I guess I got no choice.”

Though the connection isn’t made explicit, those lyrics, about a part of New York City that came to epitomize urban blight, also underscore the planning decisions that severed the South Bronx from the rest of the city. Even though the song is more than 30 years old, one thing hasn’t changed: Thanks to the lack of diversity within the field of architecture, decisions that impact neighborhoods like the South Bronx are often left in the hands of people who don’t come from them.

But one architect wants to change that: Mike Ford has spent the past decade working to connect the seemingly disparate fields of architecture and hip-hop by highlighting how both seek to address urban and social issues. Ford, who has been tapped to design the forthcoming Universal Hip-Hop Museum in the Bronx, is now using the lens of hip-hop to stimulate an interest in architecture among children in underrepresented neighborhoods.

“Diversity numbers in architecture are horrible,” says Ford. “People are spending a ton of money and have been conducting diversity efforts for years, but we still have less than three percent of architects of color from all that money and all those years.”

Ford decided to take a different approach, launching the Hip-Hop Architecture Camp in 2017. The week-long, intensive program provides its students with exposure to creative placemaking framed by the perspective of hip-hop culture. A sponsorship with software company Autodesk allows the program to be offered to students free of charge. And this spring, Ford brought his camp to the Bronx’s Cornerstone Academy for Social Action, with more than a dozen students partaking.

The camp kicked off with an interactive quiz that brought to light the lesser-known connections between the worlds of hip-hop and design; did you know, for instance, that Ice Cube studied architectural drafting? Or that Pharrell Williams and the late Zaha Hadid collaborated on plans for a prefab house?

A PowerPoint presentation followed, showcasing buildings helmed by architects of color, like David Adjaye’s Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Then, the students were given a task: They were asked to design model cities, using lyrics from songs like Nas’s “I Know I Can” and Childish Gambino’s “This is America” as inspiration for their designs. Once the foundations were laid out using Lego Architecture kits, they moved on to working with Autodesk Tinkercad software, where they practiced working with 3D design.

Photo by Ameena Walker

Through each phase of the program, Ford encouraged the students to look for ways in which their designs can address community issues. “I think to myself, how do I get the students to not just plop things down,” Ford explains, “but think about the problems we face in our community [that are] embedded in hip-hop lyrics, and then make architecture that eradicates or at least solves some of these issues.”

That line about broken glass from Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message” led one young girl to design a city that would one would imagine when they hear the lyric—green and yellow Legos scattered about that represent broken bottles and urine. But Ford challenged her further; he asked, “How can we make it so that no one ever has to rap about this again?,” and encouraged her to imagine utilizing “broken glass” for an artistic building facade.

Another student, inspired by a line from Slick Rick’s “Children’s Story,” crafted a model city with a focus on prison reform. “I saw the Kalief Browder story and I don’t think justice has stood for people like him,” the student explained. “It’s not right that he had to stay in Rikers Island and that the jail is so bad that they have to shut it down.” His model city includes a police station that “represents a better city where people aren’t falsely accused of crimes.”

M.O.D. Media Photography

Ford put a competitive edge on the camp, offering several prizes to students who come up with the best designs. And at the end, they were also given the opportunity to write raps explaining their designs; in the final step, they would create a corresponding music video—filmed in the Bronx—that speaks to the importance of urban planning in communities like their own.

Ford brings in artists like the Bronx’s Grand Wizzard Theodore—credited with inventing the turntable scratching technique widely used by DJs today—and rapper Chino XL to help the kids along the way with their rhymes and designs, while also keeping the turntables going.

“Architecture is all around us—even this turntable is architecture,” says Grand Wizzard Theodore. “Many of these kids haven’t been out of the Bronx or out of New York, so for them to be able to learn stuff about architecture, going to the studio, writing, and just being inspired to do other stuff, we steer them in the right direction.”

https://ny.curbed.com/2018/8/16/17623000/mike-ford-hip-hop-architecture-camp

Open My Eyes That I May See

By Jon Dunnemann

On Tuesday, May 11th, 2010, I made a clear decision to begin writing a manuscript based on personal experience, to share important information that would hopefully address how today’s youth might go about avoiding a certain “self-blindness,” and thereby find their way to future happiness and success in life? It was important for me to start by pointing out upfront that I am not a theologian, pastor or a psychologist or an educator.

What I have to offer originated from having been a child that grew up on welfare in a single parented household headed by my Mother. It included an early home life with my older brother, Jeffrey and my younger sister, Michele.

Because I often found myself submerged in mischief and a habitual runaway, I became a ward of the State of New Jersey and as a result, lived under multiple legal guardians from age 12 up until I became 21 years old.

Were it not for the empathy and compassion that I received from others, I could easily have fallen victim to my own “insensibility, foolishness, and injustice of opinions” . I did not know my ‘ inner self’ back then nor was I entirely aware of the possible negative effects of the then prevailing cultural, economic, educational, family, social or spiritual environment.

Through my participation in the federal government’s Fresh Air Fund sponsored free summer camps, YMCA membership, The CETA program enacted in 1973 to train workers and give them jobs in the public service as well as other summer job opportunities offered to low-income high school students at the time, and my ongoing involvement in church, school sports, and various other extracurricular activities, I managed to stay sheltered from the dangers of drugs, gangs and violence.

Later, under affirmative action, I gained admission to and successfully graduated from Holy Cross College in 1978 with a B.A. in Sociology. Shortly afterwards, I began an extended career in the banking industry where I became a Vice President for Bankers Trust Company New York (BTCo NY) later Deutsche Bank Trust Company America (DBTCA) where in my last job, I served as a Client Integration and On-boarding Consultant at 60 Wall Street in New York City.

For more than thirty years, I’ve been married to Dr. Wilda I. Smithers-Dunnemann a physician specializing in internal medicine who is an attentive, beautiful, devoted, and loving wife. Wilda is a fabulous mother to our only son Daniel, who we are both proud to say, is a very compassionate, honest, intelligent, kind, and humble young man now well on his way to becoming a talented graphic designer and ethical business professional.

There are three primary reasons why I have chosen to share this detailed narrative with you about my personal transition from adolescence to adulthood and they are;

1. To hopefully help others in their discovery of more effective ways to regulate ones emotional and social behavior,
2. To possibly give further clues on how to develop thoughts, feelings and actions that better serve others in their efforts to “perfect themselves”, and finally
3. Because “the capacity to exercise control over the nature and quality of one’s life is the essence of our humanness” (Bandura, 2001).

We all share in the universal wish to perfect ourselves, to round off our careers with the knowledge and graces of [good] taste. How many people would not gladly undertake some branch of serious study, so that they might not die under the reproach of having lived and died without ever really having known anything about anything! It is not an absence of want that prevents them. It is, first, the absence of willpower – not the will to begin, but the will to continue; and, second, [having] a mental apparatus which is out of condition, “puffy,” “weedy,” through sheer neglect. The remedy, then, divides itself into two parts, the cultivation of willpower, and the getting into condition of the mental apparatus. And these two branches of the cure [most assuredly], must be worked concurrently. 

At this point in my life, it is difficult for me to imagine anything that would be more important or personally meaningful than being able to spend quality time contributing to the positive experiential learning efforts of others in communities where local youth are poorly served.

For me, this entails providing adolescent youth, children, toddlers and their parents with information, methods, practices, and tools that are all properly directed at marshaling strengths to meet today’s challenges, making sense of, and inspiring a) respect for self, b) respect for others, c) civic responsibility, and d) respect for the natural environment (Hanley, 1989). 

Over the course of the last several years, I have been heavily involved in researching and writing about different aspects of character, ethics, dialogue, faith, personal and social development, and the important role of religion and spirituality in our lives. I became engaged in this activity because I am immensely determined to find and provide sound and constructive ways to best ignite and foster a heart-awakening hunger for knowledge, balance, meaning, purpose, and inner calm in a person’s daily living and to reduce the risks and vulnerability that youth face and that can often stem from unwelcome peer pressure.

According to Richards, Ellis and Neill, effectiveness in life — at school, home, or work is possibly the key issue for all people. However, it is not a single dimension. It is not just a matter of self-concept, or of social or physical skill. As an example, high performance requires inclusion of the following components;

Compassion for others,

1. Positive thinking,
2. Deep listening skills,
3. Emotional intelligence (EQ)
4. Spiritual intelligence (SQ)
5. Service to others,
6. Commitment, integrity, self-sacrifice, and
7. Being able to draw a personal map from memory not from the atlas.

A complementary goal of mine is to convey to others how devoting attention to the concept of “contemplation”, “mindfulness” or “reflection” can greatly facilitate a healthy level of awareness and “presence” thereby helping youth today to see more clearly and to widely embrace its application as a workable and valuable ongoing life practice. The average person immersed in their own thoughts, seldom becomes fully aware of what is actually going on around them. A good grasp of mindfulness is increasingly proving on so many levels that it is essential to the embracing of one’s personal effectiveness if one is to navigate, seek, and find human flourishing that includes a significant number of positive characteristics. For example,

Learning to experience clarity and peace of mind through

1. Self-reflection and physical well-being, and the significant,
2. Appreciating the other as s/he is, and
3. Experiencing oneness and contributing to the common good for all of humanity.

If by chance, it interests you to learn more about my journey please click here.

The progressive potential of kid-friendly urban design

For cities seeking to hang on to their young families, Toronto offers an example to keep an eye on

By Patrick Sisson

This post originally appeared on CURBED.com Nov 14, 2017, 12:00pm EST

The Bayside development in Toronto shows how the child care’s outdoor space was located on the 2nd level by taking a ‘bite’ out of the building. This alternative massing solution was a response to a constrained site and involved cooperation between the developer (Waterfront Toronto), City Planning and Children Services.  Tridel

For young adults in U.S. cities, the life cycle of urban living can seem as prescribed and predictable as the life cycle of a butterfly. Head downtown after school, get a job and career, meet a partner, have a child, and then, as if called by some great migratory urge, wait until right before the kids hit school age and head to the suburbs.

While major cities have seen steady, and many hope sustainable, growth in their young-adult populations since the recession, the same can’t necessarily be said of families and children. Between a lack of affordable family-friendly housing stock and neighborhoods without enough playspaces and child-friendly streets, cities can seem designed to discourage parents from staying around and raising children. Just try getting a stroller through the New York City subway system.

Demographics reflect how these hurdles are discouraging family life downtown. In Washington, D.C., between 2000 and 2010, the city’s population of children decreased by 14,000. In Seattle, in the midst of a tech and real estate boom attracting high-income young workers, just 2 percent of the city’s affordable apartment stock has three or more bedrooms. In San Francisco, which famously has 80,000 more dogs than children, the population of children dropped from 22 percent in 1970 to 13.4 percent in 2010. A survey that year found that half of the parents of young kids were planning to leave in the next three years.

“A lot of people come into the city, have small kids, and when the time comes for them to afford school, they can’t afford a private education and they leave the city,” says Kaid Benfield, a planner and urban designer at PlaceMakers. “That’s obviously not the healthiest population dynamic if you want a diverse, modern city. “

Suburbs, and the siren call of high-performing public schools, is undoubtedly a key factor in young families leaving cities. But that’s far from the only factor. That’s what makes a new initiative from Toronto, a holistic approach to re-envisioning urban space for children and families, so progressive.

Planning for a city with children at the center

In May, the Toronto City Council approved “Growing Up: Planning for Children in New Vertical Communities,” a set of guidelines for developing more family- and kid-friendly condos. According to Ann-Marie Nasr, manager of strategic initiatives at City Planning Toronto, one of the things that makes this first-of-its-kind plan stand out is the way it approached the problem.

Growing Up emerged from the realization that Toronto was becoming taller, denser, and filled with larger households (44 percent of households in the city have children). The city predicts 83 percent of its growth will come from vertical communities, says Nasr, and growing populations of immigrants and families will find high-rise living uncomfortable or even impossible without larger, family-friendly units.

But even more importantly, and perhaps transformative, is the way the idea came to be. Developed through extensive outreach and resident feedback—during “condo hack” sessions, designers and planners visited homes to glean what families felt was missing, and how they made due in constricted units—the results, which will be finalized and rolled out as guidelines for two neighborhoods in 2018, also have developer buy-in. Jim Ritchie, a senior vice president of sales and marketing for Tridel, a local developer, told the Toronto Star that “there is definitely a marker for larger homes,” and expressed interest in the program.

Designing for kids on a neighborhood scale City Planning Toronto

The guidelines have been broken into three sections: unit, building, and neighborhood. The neighborhood guidelines include recommendations for mobility, such as protected bike lanes, improved access to play space, and co-located child care facilities. Building and unit guidelines focus on more spacious, open living units, as well as integrating common spaces throughout new buildings. They recommend units with sightlines so parents can more easily keep an eye on their kids, more storage and flexible unit design, and hallways and common spaces designed for social interaction, so they function more like play areas than hotel lobbies.

The combined nature of the guidelines addresses a big problem in a lot of park expansion plans, according to Benfield: a lack of integration with building design, which would make them more efficient and equitable.

While guidelines, by definition, are suggestions, Growing Up Toronto isn’t just an exercise. Developers will need to explain how future developments measure up to these guidelines during the permitting process. The guidelines also inform a new planning framework for downtown Toronto which will be statutory, which will mandate that new high-rises contain 15 percent two-bedroom units and 10 percent three-bedroom units, while also proposing a vision and commitment for sustainable growth.

“There are some developers who know that’s where their future market is, and they see this report as a real insight,” says Nasr.

Proposed layout for a two-bedroom apartment City Planning Toronto

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Let's put our minds together and see what we can come up with to help children learn and practice thinking critically about how they can thrive and flourish within their local community

by Jon Dunnemann

How can we embark on making the best possible use of our collective education, life experience, job skills, past history, financial resources and relationships, and imaginations as adults with the goal of more fully empowering disadvantaged, single-parented children and youth to become engaged, intentional, and values-driven in their efforts to overcome the day-to-day challenges that they are likely to face and must be well equipped to respond to despite often having limited encouragement, opportunity, time, resources, and outside support? 

Can we possibly figure out a way to monopolize the challenges of disadvantage, disinvestment, dropping out of school, inequality, life hardship, neglect of public services, (such as schools, building, street, and park maintenance; garbage collection; and transportation), discriminatory housing and loan policies, the disappearance  of factory jobs and massive unemployment, and stress and trauma (stemming from bullying, gang violence, police profiling, and mass incarceration of family members) in an effort to teach children and youth how to creatively game their way to alternative life choices, opportunity, sound judgement, and regular practices that will safely point them towards flourishing, good health, pathways for long-term success, and personal safety and well-being? 

Is it viable to build a board game, a reclaimed space, a springboard or test lab for the ultimate conquest of anxiety, cluelessness, depression, fear, hopelessness, poverty, rejection, suffering, suicidal thoughts, tragedy, and the predictable neighborhood acts of exploitation, violence and abuse?

It certainly would do some good for a us to try. What do you think? I happen to believe that try we must.

We use critical thinking skills every day. They help us to make good decisions, understand the consequences of our actions and solve problems. These incredibly important skills are used in everything from putting together puzzles to mapping out the best route to work. It’s the process of using focus and self-control to solve problems and set and follow through on goals. It utilizes other important life skills like making connections, perspective taking and communicating. Basically, critical thinking helps us make good, sound decisions.

- Kylie Rymanowicz

Whether we decide to focus on urban, rural or suburban landscapes they all consist of the following three things:

• streets
• spaces
• facilities

It is probably fair to say that adults, youth, and children alike all desire and deserve to enjoy physical safety, environmentally clean air and water, free of harmful toxins, green spaces, attractive public and quality sacred spaces, and easily traversed walkways and streets in their neighborhoods.

The lived in spaces that we commonly occupy are often shared with others but they can also afford us rare and enjoyable moments of solitude if they are thoughtfully designed to include greenery, nearby parks and waterways, indoor and outdoor markets, and rich and diverse cultural/performing arts and small and large recreational centers of activity that are within walking distance or a short bike ride away just to name a few of the many possible amenities that people are able to enjoy in a more complete and well integrated neighborhood.

Facilities on the other hand encompass the varied educational, historical, political, religious/spiritual, socioeconomic (commercial and residential) and environmental structures. To children and youth these built structures can either be quite imposing or warmly inviting. 

Here are a number questions that I recently thought of asking children and youth in an effort to learn more about how they presently view day-to day life within their local community:

1. What do you want in your community that does not exist there today (i.e., skate parks, bike paths, indoor malls, outdoor markets and street festivals, etc.)?
2. What do you think should be done with the abandoned buildings and vacant lots in your community (i.e., cafes and shops, a community center, cooperative apartment buildings, medical, dental, mental health, and drug and alcohol addiction counseling, and job readiness training facilities and vocational and trade school programming, etc.)?
3. What would a space that caters to children and youth look like and what activities should it include (i.e., a Cinema School to facilitate student storytelling, a state-of-the-art recording studio, playhouse and dance academy, a place for artists and musicians to mentor children and youth, etc.)?
4. What do you think should be done to rebuild or restore your community block by block (i.e., microloans, commercial and residential building 'repurposing with a purpose', economic enterprise zones, etc.?
5. What if any changes do you think would make you feel really good about your community (i.e., to have the option of attending African-centered Private Elementary and Middle Schools, to have a voice and to be deeply listened to, to have our greatest concerns, issues, and threats taken seriously, mitigated, and substantively acted upon, etc.)?
6. Have you every visited another community that you thought had more of the things that you would like to see made available in your community (i.e, access to computers and the internet, after-school programming, free public transportation, youth church and athletic sports league, etc.)?
7. What does the word community mean to you (i.e., a place where people of all ages, different cultures, faith traditions, income levels, and races join together to co-create a safe, nurturing and environmentally-friendly space where they can to be of service to one another and experience economic-prosperity, joy, love, peace, and relationship, etc.)?
8. What is the one thing in your community that you feel most threatens your safety and general well-being (i.e., abandonment, becoming incarcerated, being looked down upon by others, gang violence, getting beat up, homelessness, indifference, isolation and cramped conditions, lack of food, clothing or other necessities, neglect, not having enough money, physical, sexual or substance abuse, a sense of limited hope for the future, treating children as problems, not solutions, unfairness, unsafe and unsanitary living conditions, etc.)?

If you've got kids of your very own or are involved in working with them in one way or another can you please make the time to ask them some if not all of these questions and then kindly let me know what you come to discover?

It's my strongly held belief that if we can collectively commit to use whatever we learn to do everything in our power and imagination to see to it that those among us who are less fortunate for a variety of reasons, most especially the children, are listened to and given a chance to plan and design welcoming spaces in their community then they will not be left to experience so much dis-ease or to needlessly suffer in vain. Rather, they will be well on their way to thriving and flourishing in a community where dignity, fulfillment, hope, inclusion, love, joy, and engagement is blossoming in abundance.

Thank you and many blessings.

JD

Why Kids Who Believe in Something Are Happier and Healthier

by Lisa Miller

This post originally appeared on the TIME.com website on April 17, 2015

Johan Ödmann—Copyright Johner Bildbyra AB

Despite more than a decade of widespread attention on happiness and the benefits of positive psychology, there is an epidemic of unhappiness in children and teens. Quite severe unhappiness. Health statistics over the past decade show that beyond the 20% to 25% of teens with major depression are another 40% (yes, that’s a total of 65%) who struggle with intrusive levels of depression symptoms at some point, and often with anxiety and substance abuse as well.

Kids of middle-class and more affluent families—kids who would seem to have everything going for them—have far higher rates of depression, anxiety, substance abuse and anti-social tendencies than their less privileged peers. Why has the mass happiness initiative failed our kids? Science is bringing the problem into resolution.

An increasingly narcissistic culture and the constant reward for achievement, whether on the playing field, the music stage or the math test, creates what I call in my book the unbalanced “performance self” of the child; a child who feels his or her worth is founded on ability and accomplishment.

We want our children to have grit to persist and win, the optimism that they will be more successful, but where does it lead? Children come to believe they are no better than their last success and suffer a sense of worthlessness when there is loss or even moderate failure. Where love is conditional on performance, children suffer.

Now the antidote. A new study just published online in the Journal of Religion and Health by my lab at Columbia University shows that happiness and the character traits of grit and persistence go “hand in hand” with a deeper inner asset: spirituality, which this study measured as a deep spiritual connection with a sense of a sacred world.

More generally my research of more than 20 years on adolescence, depression and spirituality shows more specifically how putting a priority on performance stunts development of a child’s inner life and the single most powerful protection against depression and suffering, the spiritual self.

What we have learned is that children are born with an innate capacity for spirituality, just as they are born with the capability to learn a language, read and think. But just as it takes time and effort to develop the ability to speak or read, it also takes time and effort to develop our innate sense of the spiritual.

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Discovering a Sense of Hope and Purpose

by Jon Dunnemann

When I was a boy, my Mother exposed me to the teachings of Christianity undoubtedly with the hope that I would grow up and become good, acceptable, and pleasing in the eyes of the Lord. This vision resonated in me throughout my life and to this day I am grateful for the moral standard and sense of hope and purpose that I gained through belonging to a family of faith consisting of men and women who strive to show their “Christian walk” through the wonderful qualities of love, humility, and spiritual practice. Their example and my involvement in various church related activities, at the First Presbyterian Church of Caldwell, New Jersey, helped me learn to appreciate that “to one who is given much, much is expected.” In line with this understanding, Christianity also teaches us that we have a clear obligation to make ourselves available to God holding nothing back. For these reasons, I would like to give my time to making right, restoring, and uniting what in others has become disconnected, shattered, and fragmented.

Throughout my youth, I saw the sacred rituals and faith traditions of various Protestant denominations along with Jewish, Greek Orthodox, and Roman Catholic belief systems being practiced by my classmates, friends, and taught to me by different church leadership. I am fortunate to have observed first hand that when people live out their faith, in and outside of their homes, they are able to offer a common core of virtues, spiritual principles, examples of hospitality, the gift of making others feel listened to, and as significant, their felt sense of duty to encourage whether children, adolescents or young adults to dream big dreams. Having this kind of role modeling demonstrated to me through the strongly integrated lives of close African-American, Hispanic, Irish, Italian, Greek, German and Polish families in my neighborhood provided me with a tremendously “rich hope” for the future. “This particular hope comes from the willingness of people to take one another seriously, to acknowledge the vitality of the beliefs that separate adherents of different faiths and [not their] lethal potential.”1 I thank Almighty God for lighting their path, shaping their hearts, and endowing so many of them with the capacity to give unconditional love to others, most especially, when it was love and concern that most clearly represented their greatest unmet need in the moment.

Now it is time for me to begin repaying the debt that I owe for all the love and concern that I have received throughout my life. I therefore intend to carry out this task by offering my best fruits to persons facing life circumstances similar to what I have experienced throughout my childhood. Taking into consideration the milieu that we are living in, I have decided to take the following comprehensive approach:

• Determine what to teach and how to teach it,
• Establish the discrepancy between youths’ existing knowledge, perceptions, skills, and attitude compared to where they could be as more competent, hope-filled, and spiritually mature and vision-led children and youth, and by
• Identifying, designing, and providing evidence-based instructional strategies and assessment tools for regular use in achieving excellence when it comes to healthy living, academic and extracurricular performance, and in the overall sustainability of their freely chosen religious, spiritual, atheist or secular ethical practices.

1 Niehbuhr, G., (2007). BEYOND Tolerance How People Across America Are Building Bridges Between Faiths. Penquin Books: New York, NY.