Search Results for: homeless

Magen David and Me

Getty / Unsplash / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Marya Zilberberg | Longreads | February 2019 | 16 minutes (3,886 words)

​I don’t think my father ever took off his Star of David necklace from the day he put it on in the infancy of the Carter administration. It was always there, resting in a copse of chest hair, a silver target in the V of his open shirt collar. I never asked, when he was alive, what it meant to him, but I imagined he had started to wear it simply because he could, having just escaped more than four decades of oppression in the U.S.S.R., where he couldn’t. Or, perhaps, wouldn’t. ​

The necklace had first belonged to me; my parents bought it for me when I was 14, when we were in Rome awaiting our entry visas to the United States. I had only recently learned of such a thing and its significance when my mother’s cousin Zhenya came to visit us in Odessa from Moscow just before we emigrated in August 1976. I had never before met this cousin, and when I first saw her what jumped out at me was her weird hair, a brown helmet of large immobile waves with a dullness I’d associated with dolls. Thankfully I had by then acquired some tact and didn’t blurt out my first impression. Zhenya wore a necklace, a darkly patinated metal circle, smaller and thinner than a penny, about the size of the old Soviet kopek. Into it was etched a shiny six-pointed star. When I asked my dad what it was, he said, “A Magen David,” the shield of King David, a symbol of the Jewish people. Although his matter-of-factness surprised me, I didn’t press him, thinking I must be missing something.

By the time we were readying to leave, I had spent almost half my lifetime with the awareness of being a Jew, though with no clue as to its larger meaning. At 7, I took a ballroom dance class at the Palace of the Pioneers because my mother thought it might instill some grace into my otherwise clumsy build. At the end of the first lesson, our teacher lined us up against a bleached wall, boys in white shirts and brown pants sagging from their scrawny frames like laundry on a line, girls with pigtails tied in exuberant white bows the size of parachutes, all performing a silent ritual of respectful attention. She instructed us to bring to the next class information about our nationalities. When I asked my parents about it that evening over dinner, my dad, staring into his bowl of soup, said, “We are Jews.”
Read more…

It’s a Lovely Day for a Bike Ride

Photo by Mack Male via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Tom Justice was an Olympic cycling hopeful. Tom Justice’s life didn’t work out quite the way he’d hoped. Tom Justice found an unlikely escape hatch: bank robbery, but just for the thrills — not the cash. In October 1999, he robbed his second bank, the Lake Forest, Illinois, branch of Northern Trust, escaping by bike with over $3,000. He put the cash in paper bags and left them in spots where homeless people would find them.

He eventually robbed 26 banks of nearly $130,000 before descending into drug addiction. Steven Leckart‘s story in Chicago Magazine is as engaging and cinematic as one could want for this sad, twisted Robin Hood of a tale.

But before he could flash his lights, the cyclist pulled over and hopped off his bike. When Thompson pulled up, the guy was fidgeting with his back wheel. It started to drizzle again.

“Can I talk to you for a second?” Thompson asked through the open window of his patrol car.

“Hey, yeah, sorry, it’s gonna take me a second,” Tom said, continuing to tinker.

Thompson parked a few feet ahead, turned on his flashing red and blue lights, and walked back to the cyclist.

“I live in San Ramon. I’m riding home,” said Tom, pretending to adjust his brakes before climbing onto the bike and clicking his left foot into the pedal.

“Do you mind if I take a look in your bag?” Thompson asked the cyclist.

“Yeah, no problem. I just have to unclip,” replied Tom. “These pedals are actually counterbalanced, so I need to click into both in order to get out at the same time.”

There’s no such thing as counterbalanced pedals. But Thompson didn’t know that. He watched as the cyclist lifted his right foot, clicked down into the pedal, and — whoosh! — bolted into the street in a dead start as hellacious as any Tom had ever mustered on a velodrome.

“I knew it!” cried Thompson. He desperately grabbed his radio, but another officer was talking on the channel. The cyclist shot down Main Street and out of sight.

Read the story

You’re Just Too Good to Be True

Hulton Archive / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Kavita Das | Longreads | February 2019 | 27 minutes (6688 words)

New York City, 1980

Mommy and I had a deal. On our twice-a-week, 45-minute drive to speech therapy, I practiced singing South Indian Carnatic songs, the ones she grew up playing on the violin, and on the way back I was allowed to listen to anything I wanted. So, as soon as we hit the road from our house, she prompted me to begin with sa-pa-sa. Sa is the equivalent of do, the starting note in Western classical solfege, and pa the equivalent of sol, the fifth note above do. Singing these fifth intervals helped ground me in my pitch before I began any song.

Once that was done, Mommy picked from songs she had already taught me during previous car trips, or began a new one. She quizzed me on which raga, or key, it was in, and then we sang the scale of that raga together. Unlike Western keys, ragas might have different ascending and descending scales, which struck me as hazardous. Even if I knew my way up the mountain, taking the same path down might send me careening into a ravine of shame. Then, she began tapping out the talam, or the time signature, on the steering wheel of her deep blue Chevy Horizon hatchback, while navigating through traffic, and I followed along, tapping it out on my thigh or on the vinyl seat next to me. I began to sing. When I forgot a lyric or the melody, she piped up and sang alongside me, and then chided, “Start again and this time concentrate, and sing it correctly.”

We went from one song to the next as we made our way from our home in Bayside, Queens to Albert Einstein Medical Center in the Bronx, driving over highways, crossing bridges, stopping at lights, paying tolls. Sometimes we arrived at speech therapy mid-song, and then afterwards, when we got back in the car, instead of switching to my choice, per our deal, Mommy made me finish the song first, which meant I only got to my music when we were halfway home. So, I learned to gauge how close we were to the medical center and speed up my singing so that the end of the Carnatic song coincided with our arrival. This way, the whole car ride back was just for my music.

As soon as we were back in the car, our seat belts fastened, I popped in my favorite tape. It was “The Ultimate Engelbert Humperdinck,” one of the only non-Indian music albums my parents owned, by the first Western musician I was allowed to listen to. I loved everything about him and his music. He spoke to me, an almost-5-year-old who felt she already knew a thing or two about the world — having visited India, Japan, Hawaii, and New Jersey; not to mention endured the pain of multiple surgeries and the monotony of speech therapy for a cleft palate, and the loneliness of being an only child, who was not so much misunderstood as not understood, receiving quizzical looks whenever I spoke. He knew me and cared deeply for me — it was all there in the beautiful lyrics of his songs, and in the way he crooned them just to me. His voice oozed with feeling. It was as smooth and sweet as the caramel squares my grandfather loved so much that he asked me to climb a chair and sneak up to the candy box and fetch him some more.

My absolute favorite song off the tape was Killing Me Softly. Listening to it, I felt as if I was all grown up, sitting in the audience at a small café. I was the person he sang about, who comes undone by the lovelorn songs of a soulful troubadour. I sang out with abandon, the windows down, drowning out city noises. Strumming my pain with his fingers, singing my life with his words, killing me softly with his song, killing me softly. My mother continued to drive as I sang my little girl heart out all the way back to Queens.

I had named my dearest possession after him — my nubby pale blue woven blankie, which stayed steadfastly at my side as I played, before I carried it to bed each night, and which in turn carried me to my dreams. And when my 5th birthday rolled around, and preparations were being made for my party, I instructed my mother to invite Engelbert Humperdinck. My mother assured me that an invitation had been sent to him in England, where he lived and where my parents used to live before they migrated to the U.S. I was so excited, I ran around our basement swinging from the foundation poles, which usually served as the villains I lassoed as Wonder Woman. I could barely believe that in just a few days, Engelbert Humperdinck — I always called him by his full name — would be here in our basement. I wondered what to wear. None of my Indian stuff. Perhaps my powder blue shift and jacket, trimmed with white faux fur. It made me look like a lady, just like the long silk gowns my mother had gotten stitched for me in India. My powder blue number was a hit when I wore it in Japan — while we were snapping photos of the sights and surroundings, Japanese young women were asking my parents if they could snap photos of me in the photo-finish outfits Mommy bought, hand-stitched, or had tailored for me.

I decide that when he arrived, I would give him the frosted flowers from atop my Carvel ice cream cake, a token of my selfless love and admiration. I hoped he would sing Close to You — my second most favorite song, with perfect lyrics for celebrating me as the birthday girl. On the day that you were born the angels got together, And decided to create a dream come true, So they sprinkled moondust in your hair of gold and starlight in your eyes of blue. Well, hair of black and eyes of brown, but I still believed he meant me since Engelbert Humperdinck himself was no blonde-haired blue-eyed being.

I had taken out the album liner notes from the plastic cassette case so often to stare at the two jacket photos of him that the case had broken. He had a head of shiny blue-black hair that cascaded in waves over his smiling face, culminating in two sturdy pillars of sideburns. It reminded me of Daddy’s hair. Unlike Daddy, though, he didn’t have a mustache, which meant he wouldn’t scratch me when he kissed me on the cheek. His nose was pointy, but not too pointy, and his honey brown eyes seemed to twinkle at me like stars from the nursery rhymes I’d learned seemingly so long ago. Now that I was a 5-year-old, I had graduated from nursery school to kindergarten, from nursery rhymes to love ballads, and from imaginary play friends to real-life music idols. I imagined us holding hands, going to the park, and, of course, singing duets together. And sheepishly I wondered if maybe, when I grew up, we could get married. When Mommy and Daddy weren’t around, I pressed my lips against his in the jacket photo, the way I had seen grownups do in TV shows. I never saw any of the Indian uncles and aunties do it, but I knew it was something other grownups — white and Black — did when they loved someone. When I closed my eyes to make a wish, I sometimes focused on a Barbie doll, but other times I hoped for the chance to kiss Engelbert Humperdinck for real.
Read more…

O, Small-Bany! Part 3: Summer

Illustration by Senne Trip

Elisa Albert | Longreads | February 2019 | 17 minutes (4,343 words)

They never empty the dedicated shitcan in the dog park. It’s always full to the brim, overflowing with poop bags, swarming with flies and wasps. Which is odd, because all the other trash cans get emptied on the regular, and the fields are mown like clockwork, every other week. Dilapidated Department of General Services carts are often seen cruising around, taking care of park business. So what’s up with the perpetually overflowing dog park shitcan? It’s the enduring mystery of summer. You can smell it from forty paces in the infernal heat.

I call the DGS every couple days to complain about the overflowing shitcan, and always speak to the same lady. We are buds.

Hey, so the poop-bag thing still hasn’t been dealt with, I say.

Yeah, she says. Okay, gotcha. I’ll let them know.

I imagine writing a short story about our relationship, me and the DGS lady. About how we eventually come to share some singular kinship based on our limited exchanges. About how our different lives are ultimately defined by a common emotional struggles. Very Raymond Carver. Maybe we eventually have a fight, or a misunderstanding. Maybe we carry private knowledge of one another like a sacred oath, far into the future. Maybe we pass on the street and don’t register a thing.

Read more…

To Compromise With the Facts of Living

Candlepin bowling. (Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma)

Bradley Babendir | Longreads | Februrary 2019 | 8 minutes (2,181 words)

Elizabeth McCracken is great at beginnings. Take, for instance, the opening line of her new novel Bowlaway: “They found a body in the Salford Cemetery, but aboveground and alive.” Or, take the first line of “It’s Bad Luck To Die,” the first story in her debut collection Here’s Your Hat, What’s Your Hurry: “Maybe you wonder how a Jewish girl from Des Moines got Jesus Christ tattooed on her three times.” That book, originally published in 1993, is being reissued by Ecco Books this week alongside Bowlaway, so readers have an opportunity to skip backward and forward in time, reading McCracken’s past work alongside her latest, a sensation similar to what reading McCracken is always like: the past and the future mysteriously entangled, old endings flowing seamlessly into new beginnings. Read more…

Sidney Wants to Be Someone Else

Longreads Pick

At age 25, Sidney Gilstrap-Portley had enough of his current situation in Dallas, so he became Rashun Richardson, a homeless teenager who escaped Hurricane Harvey. But Gilstrap-Portley’s gift—he was an athletic slasher and scorer on the basketball court—ultimately doomed the facade he tried to build as Richardson.

Published: Jan 23, 2019
Length: 23 minutes (5,990 words)

The Indignities of Poverty, Compounded by the Requirement to Prove It

Getty / Hachette Books

Stephanie Land| Excerpt adapted from Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive | Hachette Book Group | January 2019 | 8 minutes (1,790 words)

 

My daughter learned to walk in a homeless shelter.

It was an afternoon in June, the day before her first birthday. I perched on the shelter’s threadbare love seat, holding up an old digital camera to capture her first steps. Mia’s tangled hair and thinly striped onesie contrasted with the determination in her brown eyes as she flexed and curled her toes for balance. From behind the camera, I took in the folds of her ankles, the rolls of her thighs, and the roundness of her belly. She babbled as she made her way toward me, barefoot across the tiled floor. Years of dirt were etched into that floor. As hard as I scrubbed, I could never get it clean.

It was the final week of our ninety-day stay in a cabin unit on the north side of town, allotted by the housing authority for those without a home. Next, we’d move into transitional housing—an old, run-down apartment complex with cement floors that doubled as a halfway house. However temporary, I had done my best to make the cabin a home for my daughter. I’d placed a yellow sheet over the love seat not only to warm the looming white walls and gray floors, but to offer something bright and cheerful during a dark time.

Read more…

Fruitland

Photo by David Black, via Light in the Attic Records

Steven KurutzTrue Story | December 2016 | 51 minutes (10,117 words)

 

Some years back, an unusual and astonishing album began circulating among record collectors and fans of lo-fi music. Will Louviere was one of the first to hear it. A Bay Area vinyl dealer, Louviere is an authority on private-press LPs from the 1960s and 1970s—records that were self-produced and released by amateur musicians and destined, in most cases, for the bins of thrift stores and flea markets. In a year, Louviere and his fellow collectors across the country might buy one thousand of these obscure albums between them. Of those, maybe ten would be artistically interesting. Maybe one would astonish.

This record had been sent to Louviere by a collector, but still, his expectations weren’t high. The group was a duo, Donnie and Joe Emerson. The cover featured a studio portrait of them: teenagers with feathered brown hair, faces dappled with acne, sincere eyes meeting the camera. They were posed against the swirly blue backdrop you’d see in a school photo, with the album’s title—Dreamin’ Wild—written above them in red bubble script. Both boys were dressed flamboyantly in matching spread-collared white jumpsuits, like the outfit Evel Knievel wore vaulting over Snake River Canyon, though the jumpsuits had name patches on the chest, like a mechanic’s work shirt, an odd counter to the attempt at showbiz slickness. Donnie, posed in the front, held a Les Paul and looked a little stoned.

Read more…

Land Not Theirs

VWPics via AP Images

Madison Davis | The Common | December 2018 | 31 minutes (6,125 words)

 

We are driving through downtown Columbus, away from the Greyhound station. I spent fifteen hours on a bus traveling from New York City to visit for Christmas, a holiday, my mother reminds me, that is not even about Jesus anymore. This is a thought she has reiterated over the years, yet it never prevented her from partaking in the holiday during my lifetime. The absence of a decorative tree and gifts reflected a lack of money, not a rejection of the commodification of religion.

As kids, we were encouraged to list our wishes for Santa, and even now in a post-Christian adulthood, I fantasize about the relief a Christmas miracle would provide. Because I have just a few weeks to come up with eight thousand dollars in order to register for spring classes. The most obvious resolution would be that I take the semester off, move back to Ohio, work hard, and live frugally so I can save enough money to return in the fall. But I know that the likelihood of returning to school after a long break is small, because most who leave do not return.

Read more…

Alternative Reality: ‘Dark Window’

Getty Images

I look forward to winter ever year, mostly because I like the snow, which quiets a city down, makes it more peaceful. I am aware my opinion may be an unpopular one — and that the snow makes life difficult and perhaps even impossible for the many homeless people in New York City (where I live) and beyond. Snow is no joke for those who are on the streets. I thought about that as I read Doyle Murphy’s long, keenly observed profile, in St Louis’ Riverfront Times, of a 22-year-old transgender woman named Jazmin, who is homeless and doubts that she will make it through the winter alive.

Several of the stories in this list highlight the ways in which cities have abandoned those who need them most. In addition to Jazmin in St. Louis, there was Anthony Benavidez, a 24-year-old man with schizophrenia who was shot and killed by Santa Fe police in his apartment last year, as Aaron Cantú details in his investigation for the Santa Fe Reporter.

Other stories veered from that theme. In the Charleston City Paper, Maura Hogan wrote a fascinating piece on the history of the city’s Garden and Gun Club, the defunct establishment that now lends its name to the magazine. Steven Hale of the Nashville Scene filed a sobering dispatch on the execution of David Earl Miller, Tennessee’s longest-serving incarcerated person on death row, who chose to die by electric chair. Debra Andres Arellano, in Maui Time, wrote an uplifting personal essay on a 51-day workers’ strike at the Sheraton Hotel in Maui that ended with better pay for union members.

For Boulder Weekly, Will Brendza wrote an interesting analysis on a new system that requires emergency medical responders to work from their vehicles all day, often without the possibility of downtime outside of their ambulances. And the Chicago Reader’s Maya Dukmasova interviewed a number of mayoral hopefuls who may not even make it onto the ballot in February but who have interesting stories nonetheless.

I came across many unique stories in alt-weeklies around the country for the third installment in this regular reading list.

1. “Downtown Businesses Consider Jazmin a Nuisance, But the Streets of St. Louis Are Her Home” (Doyle Murphy, November 28, 2018, Riverfront Times)

Doyle Murphy, a staff reporter for the Riverfront Times in St. Louis, paints a sympathetic portrait of Jazmin, a 22-year-old transgender woman from the Milwaukee area who is homeless and spends much of her time panhandling in a McDonald’s drive-through. Murphy follows Jazmin — also known as “Jaz” — through the city as she hops on an unlocked Lime scooter, buys K2 and has an uncomfortable run-in with her on-again, off-again boyfriend, a 43-year-old ex-convict named Courvoisier. Jaz is witty and loquacious — “It’s not Missouri,” she says of her chosen state, “It’s misery.” A portentous air hangs over this profile with the grim reality of a long St. Louis winter underway.

In another world, the 22-year-old would be finishing college about now, maybe starting a career. Her dream car is a Chrysler 300 “with the SRT” or a 2008 Volkswagen Jetta — “I don’t know why.” But she does not see a future that includes any of this. Instead, she wonders if she will survive the winter. “The way things are going, I think I’m finna to wind up dead.”

2. “How the Garden and Gun Club upended Charleston’s starched social order in just a few short years” (Maura Hogan, December 12, 2018, Charleston City Paper)

You may be familiar with Garden & Gun, the Charleston-based magazine that was founded in 2007 and has since raked in a number of National Magazine Awards. It’s the publication of choice among those who are too dainty for Guns & Ammo and perhaps too snooty for Better Homes & Gardens. But were you aware that its namesake is a former Charleston nightclub that one might describe as the Studio 54 of the South thanks to its louche atmosphere?

A recent cover story in the Charleston City Paper — South Carolina’s only independent alt-weekly — looks at the legendary club, which is now home to a restaurant called Hank’s Seafood. Its legacy lives on not just through the magazine that borrowed its name, as the theater critic Maura Hogan makes clear in her in-depth investigation.

From its Hayne Street locale to its original home two blocks away on King Street, the always-teeming, ever-joyous nightclub once reverberated so strongly throughout the city that it dramatically altered Charleston’s cultural and social landscape. It did so by encouraging a party-hardy, wildly convivial commingling of demographics that in Charleston cut an unprecedented swath through race, sexual orientation, social status, and income level — and tolerated nothing less than harmony throughout.

At the Garden and Gun Club, differences were checked at the door, so that Spoleto artists, Broad Street lawyers, freshly-out young gay men, Charlestonians of all races, and taffeta-wrapped socialites could get down, get down with anyone and everyone, on the frenetic, teeming dance floor. Side by side, they could belly up and raise a glass at the well-stocked, hard-liquor-fueled bar. They could costume up to great effect for the legendary Halloween party. From wall to flashing, flesh-pressing wall, they could express anything and everything — that is, except for judgment.

3. “The Execution of David Earl Miller” (Steven Hale, December 7, 2018, Nashville Scene)

Steven Hale, a staff writer for the Nashville Scene, recently bore witness to the execution of David Earl Miller, Tennessee’s longest-serving incarcerated person on death row. Miller chose to be executed by electric chair, forgoing a lethal injection. He and three other incarcerated people had filed a lawsuit asking to die by firing squad, “but the suit hasn’t been successful so far,” Hale writes, and Miller ran out of time. Hale describes Miller’s execution in an appropriately clinical tone, but he can’t help feeling unsettled.

Having witnessed Billy Ray Irick’s lethal injection in August, I underestimated how unnerving it would be to feel familiar with the whole production — to know the conference room where a TDOC staffer would offer coffee, to remember the route to the execution chamber, and to notice subtle changes in the prison’s lobby. On Thursday night, there was a Christmas tree covered in lights, and a new sign at the security desk reading, “You can’t have a good day with a bad attitude, and you can’t have a bad day with a good attitude.”

Miller’s similarly sanguine last words: “Beats being on death row.”

4. “Dark Window” (Aaron Cantú, December 11, 2018, Santa Fe Reporter)

Aaron Cantú looks at the short life of Anthony Benavidez, a 24-year-old with schizophrenia who was shot and killed last year in his home by Santa Fe police after a SWAT team was called in after Benavidez stabbed his social worker. For reasons that are unclear, one of the two officers who shot Benavidez turned off his body camera before entering the apartment — in apparent violation of SFPD policy. Rather than going to court, Benavidez’s family settled with the city last month for $400,000, paid for by Travelers, Santa Fe’s insurance carrier, which, Cantú writes, “will try to settle civil suits against the city even if the officers involved are criminally charged and prosecuted.” Widening the scope of his story, Cantú wonders how this setup protects the citizens of Santa Fe.

The only accountability for the killing so far comes from the city’s insurance carrier, a business that has the final say in legal complaints against SFPD officers. One law professor believes these private insurers, who bear most of the financial responsibility when cops in small and mid-sized towns get sued, may be the most powerful entities when it comes to regulating police behavior.

Mayor Alan Webber refused to be interviewed for this story. In a written statement, City Attorney Erin McSherry said: “The settlement was a financial decision determined by the city’s insurance carrier,” and that it was “not an admission of any wrongdoing by the officers or the city.”

With no one from the city offering a detailed explanation, a more fundamental question hangs in the air: If the bloodless calculation of a faceless insurance company is a family’s best option for justice from police violence, to whom are the city and police truly accountable?

5. “The People United Will Never Be Defeated” (Debra Andres Arellano, December 12, 2018, Maui Time)

Union workers at the Sheraton Hotel in Maui recently ended a 51-day strike after negotiating better hourly pay and safer working conditions, among other things. It was one of the longest strikes in Hawaii, writes Debra Andres Arellano, who recounts the workers’ saga in a moving personal essay. The piece includes reflections from some who joined the picket line, including Virgil Seatriz Jr., a bell clerk at the Sheraton who describes how the strike brought workers closer together.

“Before, we would just show up to work, swipe in, swipe out, either nod or say hello to other departments. Now, we almost know each other by name, no matter which department you worked at,” Virgil explained. “There’s a sense of ‘ohana now where you consider your coworkers your brothers and sisters.” He added, “Before the strike, I think we would just let things go with the flow and voice our opinions individually than as a whole. As a whole we can now voice what’s right or wrong, not individually.”

6. “Waiting for an emergency” (Will Brendza, December 13, 2008, Boulder Weekly)

In Boulder, Colorado, emergency medical responders have, under a newly implemented model, been relegated to their ambulances for 10-hour shifts, often without the possibility of a lunch break or any sort of downtime outside the vehicle. That’s because American Medical Response, the medical transportation company that provides emergency services in Boulder and elsewhere, not long ago decided to eliminate EMS stations in favor of a system known as “street corning posting,” in which ambulances are parked throughout the city ready for action at all times. The system apparently increases efficiency despite that it may be draining and unhealthy for responders.

It is becoming more and more common across the state of Colorado, according to Will Brendza’s piece in Boulder Weekly.

It’s simply more effective to keep EMS locked and loaded, prepped and positioned to respond, than to trifle with the cost of EMS stations and the challenges they present. Street corner posting is becoming the industry standard in Colorado, and whether or not it is popular among ambulance crews seems to be irrelevant.

7. “Overlooked mayoral hopefuls share bold visions for Chicago” (Maya Dukmasova, December 13, 2018, Chicago Reader)

Chicago Reader staff writer Maya Dukmasova spoke with some of the lesser-known candidates who may or may not be on the ballot in Chicago’s mayoral election early this year. They include a brazen pastor named Catherine Brown D’Tycoon; 87-year-old Conrien Hykes Clark, who wants to take on the city’s drug problem; and a police officer named Roger L. Washington. Even if they don’t make it that far, it is still refreshing to hear from them — and, as Dukmasova writes, it will “say little about the viability of their ideas or the seriousness of their commitment to the city.”

As we met with and interviewed the Chicagoans who dream most vividly of taking up the city’s highest office, it became clear that, if nothing else, most of them are acutely aware of the problems faced by ordinary people here. They may not have the campaign funds, party backing, or name-recognition needed to win this election, but they also don’t stink of the bullshit that tends to envelop the “viable” candidates who calculate statements to sound as inoffensive as possible while withholding most actionable opinions and commitments.

8. “As Long Beach Luxury Development Booms, the Poor Get Left Behind” (Joshua Frank, December 13, 2018, OC Weekly)

In Long Beach, California, a surge in luxury development has led to increased rents so onerous that many residents are forced to leave their homes. It is a story that has become all too common in metropolitan areas throughout the country. In his cover story for OC Weekly, Joshua Frank walked through Long Beach and interviewed a number of residents about the city’s housing crisis.

Off East Fourth Street and Redondo Avenue, Jeremy Rodriguez was served a 60-day notice to vacate in early November, when his one-year lease was up. Despite always paying his rent on time and never having been in trouble with his landlord, he was provided no reason for the eviction and offered no option to stay. Rodriguez, who manages a craft-beer tasting room in Long Beach, is now forced to find a new place for his child, girlfriend and small dog in the middle of the hectic holiday season.

***

Matthew Kassel is a freelance writer whose work has been published by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Columbia Journalism Review.