Placemakers Slate Podcasts

Imagine a place where you can stroll down the sidewalk, wave to your
neighbors on their porch, then pick up your dry cleaning or have lunch at the café.
That’s the kind of walkable, compact, mixed-use community envisioned by the
founders of New Urbanism—including Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. But some people say
there’s a reason one of Plater-Zyberk’s developments played a starring role in a
memorable Hollywood film about overly constructed reality.

Seattle’s Yesler Terrace was the first racially integrated housing project in the U.S. Today, it remains a multicultural nexus for the city. The Seattle Housing Authority and its partners at JPMorgan Chase have been hard at work rebuilding and rejuvenating this historic community’s infrastructure and investing in its economic sustainability. Join Brian Babylon as he explores how the city has tackled such an enormous revitalization project. 

George Leonidas Leslie was perhaps the most sensational—and successful!—criminal in American history. An architect by training, he planned and pulled off a series of record-breaking bank robberies throughout the late 1800s and arguably ushered in the modern heist. On this episode of Placemakers, producer Mike Vuolo explores the unholy relationship between burglary and the built environment.

Long before the Black Lives Matter movement swept the U.S., Dallas’ police
chief tried to diffuse the anger and mistrust between minority communities and
police. His reforms made an impact. The number of people killed in confrontations
with police fell, just as crime fell. But Dallas was still torn apart by racial hate last
summer, leaving five officers dead and the city in shock. It fell on the police chief to
bring people back together in the aftermath.

How does a small group of people change politics? The Free State Project
wants libertarians to concentrate themselves in New Hampshire and promote
libertarian causes. Thousands have already moved, and thousands more are on the
way. But not everyone is happy to see them coming.

How do you solve a problem like the suburbs? For one man in Arizona, it
means creating an agricultural utopia, replete with picket fences and a community
garden. He was inspired by one of our era's  most scathing critics of suburban
sprawl: James Howard Kunstler. We'll hear from both about what happens when
you try to remedy what Kunstler calls “the greatest misallocation of resources in the
history of the world.”