Free Republic

A series of gunshots fired late at night in East Atlanta recently prompted my neighbor to post on our local Facebook group, asking what we can do as a community to make it less dangerous to live and work in the area. You may be asking yourself the same question. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, cities across the country have seen an increase in gun violence and homicides. Around the country, crime seems to be rising, and that sense of danger influences our daily choices – from where we walk our dogs to how we vote. As a...

SAN DIEGO — Across the nation some cities are ripping up aging highways to make room for open spaces that connect — rather than divide — neighborhoods. In San Diego some advocates are looking to the sky for a similar solution to reunite neighborhoods that were split by interstate highways. San Diego Commons, a nonprofit group led by local architects and urban planners, is proposing that the city build bridge decks, often called freeway lids, above Interstate 5 to reconnect several central San Diego neighborhoods that years ago were shorn apart when the interstates were built. The nonprofit is proposing...

Baltimore has its Highway to Nowhere, a road that gobbled up communities before the project was abandoned. Wilmington, Del., had neighborhoods wiped out by Interstate 95. Thousands of Detroit residents lost their homes — and surviving communities were scarred — by the construction of Interstate 375. The Overtown neighborhood in Miami, a majority-Black community, was “flattened,” also by I-95, forcing 10,000 people to leave their homes. In Nashville, bulldozers demolished 620 houses, 27 apartment buildings and six Black churches to make way for the I-40 expressway. All across the nation, American communities bear the scars of the headlong rush to...

(CNN) — Njeri Camara, 61, can’t visit the Shreveport, Louisiana home where she was born. Like many Black homes and neighborhoods across the country in the 1960s, it was bulldozed to clear space for highways. Camara says her parents moved when she was a baby to another Shreveport neighborhood, Allendale, where she still lives. But now her current home is at risk of being bulldozed so that a second highway, Interstate 49, can connect directly through the city. The Shreveport leaders who want to trade Camara’s home for a highway are embracing a Dwight Eisenhower-era belief in the almighty good...

Rampant arson and looting continued in Kenosha, Wisconsin for a second night, as rioters focused their destruction on small businesses in residential neighborhoods. Just after 11 PM local time, rioters set fire to a warehouse at the end of a street that was next to a row of houses. Footage showed the fire and the videographer warning residents to call the fire department given the delayed response times.

The coronavirus is bringing about a strange revival of neighborhood life, which has been atrophying for a half-century. We should pay attention. Something unexpected has happened to neighborhoods across the country in the wake of coronavirus lockdowns and business closures: they’re coming to life.With schools and restaurants closed, and a huge swath of the workforce stuck at home either working remotely or not working at all, usually quiet and empty neighborhoods are suddenly bustling. Patterns of life and work that have become entrenched in American society over the past half-decade—kids in school and both parents away at jobs during...

When I was growing up in Chicago’s northern suburbs, one of our local heroes was the late, great W. Clement Stone, founder of Combined Insurance. I recall being an awestruck college volunteer with the Young Republicans, manning the registration table at a Republican state convention, when Clem Stone came up to chat with us. His story was the stuff of legend: starting from nothing during the Great Depression, selling insurance door-to-door, and from that humble beginning, he became the multimillionaire founder of one of the great Illinois corporations. From time to time, we hear of others who also got their...

If former President Barack Obama wants the Obama Presidential Center to define his legacy, he’s going to have to let life go full circle. That means climbing off his presidential high horse and returning to his roots as a community organizer. Once Obama announced his library would be in Chicago, it was as if the former president had suddenly turned into a greedy real estate developer. And unfortunately, the manner in which the project was unveiled wasn’t inclusive. Jeanette Taylor, the education director for the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, Taylor said she asked the former president why he wouldn’t sign...

The Illinois Tollway invited about 20 Hinsdale property owners to meetings Thursday, but at least 50 people showed up, including state Sen. Chris Nybo. The Elmhurst Republican asked tollway officials why they are not reconstructing Interstate 290/Interstate 88 interchange first, and then reassess whether the proposed widening farther south with two lanes in each direction is still needed to relieve congestion. "The tollway has not clearly explained why they need to expand this stretch to six lanes, instead of five, in each direction. That additional lane in each direction is a big deal for Hinsdale and Western Springs," Nybo said...

What to do with the rundown, dangerous and divisive Evangeline Thruway is a critical open question facing state transportation officials planning an elevated interstate connection through the heart of Lafayette. The Department of Transportation and Development is considering two options: keep the basic structure in place as a frontage road, or reinvent a portion of the roadway as a pedestrian-friendly “Grand Boulevard.” The thruway cordoned neighborhoods to the east when it was built in 1963, and the boulevard idea aims to reconnect those neighborhoods to downtown commerce. State officials and their consultants said a decision will come within a year....

With brutal MS-13 crimes sweeping Long Island and officials calling the scourge a public safety crisis, Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels, revealed a new plan he's developed, showing authorities how to "rein in MS-13." After the gruesome discovery of four bodies in Central Islip on Long Island — the four young men are believed to have been victims of the deadly MS-13 street gang — the spotlight is on Suffolk County as lawmakers, educators and a horrified public try to shine a light on MS-13 and seek answers on how to stem the tide of escalating violence. Sliwa,...

TAMPA — Hillsborough County leaders voted Tuesday to move forward with a plan to add 90 miles of toll lanes to Tampa Bay's interstates despite continued opposition from the people whose neighborhoods would be impacted the most by the project. The Hillsborough County Metropolitan Planning Organization — a 16-person board which approves transportation projects — listened to more than 3½- hours of public comment on its Transportation Improvement Program, which lists the county's priorities for the next five years. The TIP includes dozens of projects, from road maintenance to bike paths. But the evening's debate centered around only one project:...

A telephone survey seeking opinions about the expansion of I-70 through east Denver is generating irate protests from some respondents, who say the survey seems designed to elicit positive responses about the purported benefits of the $1.8 billion project."It was one of the most one-sided push polls I ever listened to," Larry Patchett, a production technician for public television, wrote in a complaint to CDOT. "The entire thing was just a series of opportunities to validate your suppositions and PR spin on the I-70 Ditch project." The project, which would replace a crumbling six-lane viaduct with a below-grade, partially covered...

Concerned that the City is an inhomogeneous hodgepodge with pockets of great wealth in some neighborhoods and squalor in others, newly appointed Housing Preservation and Development Commissar Vicki Been announced a plan to move 80,000 to 120,000 poorer families into middle class neighborhoods. “This way instead of having blight and filth in every direction they might look poorer families will be within easy walking distance of a better kept neighborhood,” Been boasted. “The crimes that plague poorer sections of our City would be more evenly dispersed throughout the whole City. Victims will come from a more broadly representative subset of...

Even the most dangerous cities in America can have relatively safe neighborhoods, as there is more variation in crime within most cities than between cities. But using exclusive data developed by NeighborhoodScout, and based on FBI data from all 17,000 local law enforcement agencies in America, we here report those specific neighborhoods in America that have the highest predicted rates of violent crime per 1,000 neighborhood residents of all. Violent crimes include murder, forcible rape, armed robbery, and aggravated assault. These neighborhoods are the epicenters of violence in America, where social issues are likely to ignite into violence and spread....

As the number of street crimes committed in Baltimore City escalates, so does the level of fear. This has caused communities to look beyond the police for protection. In Baltimore City there are four special tax districts where residents pay more to make their neighborhoods safer. Charles Village is one of them and has the lowest surtax of the four. It was formed in the mid-1990s as a way for the community to provide supplemental security and sanitation services to what the city was already providing. The surtax charged to homeowners has never been altered. Baltimore’s Little Italy community is...

Barack Obama’s latest plan to reshape America will involve punishing white communities for their lack of inclusion. Already the Obama Administration has doled out “damages” to 25,000 Americans in the last three years in housing reparation payments. It’s like Pigford on steroids. FOX NEWS VIDEO America Live reported:Shaun Donovan, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, in a July 16 speech to the NAACP about a new regulation and database aimed at adding “protected classes” into predominantly white neighborhoods. The federal government is getting serious about pushing racial and ethnic diversity into America’s neighborhoods–and is using big data and big money...

Bill Ayers, former domestic terrorist-turned university professor, reemerged earlier this month to explain how the Left’s access to schools and neighborhoods will help them shape the future of America. Speaking at a New York University “Change the Stakes” meeting on Dec. 4, he said the Left must utilize the existing “movements on the ground.” In the video, obtained by EAGnews.org, Ayers also first blasts conservatives for portraying President Barack Obama as a “secret Muslim” and a “secret sociopath,” running around with “terrorists and Arabs.” He lamented the fact that many liberals felt like Obama was “winking” at them while he...

Roll back the clock to 1980 and Greater Houston looks quite a bit different.Some of the tall buildings, meandering toll roads and shiny professional sports venues aren't there, of course, but of more significance is the absence of many places that Houstonians now call home. As the metro area's population doubled over the past three decades, extensive developments and master-planned communities popped up or expanded to serve those with the means to buy spanking new homes on the suburban fringe. As for those of little means - many of them immigrants, legal and otherwise - they increasingly crowded into older,...

Traffic injuries are four to six times higher in low-income areas of Montreal, compared with wealthy neighborhoods. Researchers find that better road designs could reduce those disparities Approximately 40,000 people will die on U.S. roads this year, and thousands more will be injured. A disproportionate number of those traffic injuries will befall people from lower-income communities. According to new research, pedestrians in the poorest neighborhoods of Montreal were six times more likely to suffer traffic injuries than pedestrians in the wealthiest neighborhoods. Bicyclists and motorists in poorer neighborhoods were also at greater risk; they were four times more likely to...