New Development Strategy

CommonGrounds Community-Owned Cooperative Building Project in Traverse City, Michigan

by Keith SchneiderMay 14, 2024May 21, 20240

TRAVERSE CITY, MI – As owner of Higher Grounds Trading Company, Chris Treter enjoyed strong demand for his company’s coffee even as he confronted a related challenge brought on by the surging popularity of this Lake Michigan city. New hires couldn’t find affordable places to live. “Traverse City is becoming Myrtle Beach meets Hilton Head,” said Mr. Treter. “A place catering to a population outside the region. Our workforce can’t live here anymore.” Treter’s solution, …

Report From Virginia Marks My 40th Year Writing For The New York Times

by Keith SchneiderFebruary 12, 2022February 12, 20220

TYSONS, VA â€“Corporations moved to exclusive gated suburban campuses after World War Two to escape traffic, crowds, and big city clamor. Now companies are designing city hubbub into new suburban mixed-use headquarters that merge office buildings with shops, restaurants, hotels and parks that are open to the public. One of the prominent examples is in this suburb close to Washington, D.C. where Capital One just added a 1 million square-foot mixed-use building to its 24-acre …

Biden Working Hard To Sideline GOP Mash-Up Of Madness

by Keith SchneiderJune 27, 2021September 12, 20211

BENZONIA – I’ve waited for this one from the Department of Justice. It’s been coming for weeks. Attorney General Merrick Garland sued Georgia on June 25, 2021, asserting that its despicable voter suppression law passed in March is illegal. The law, like others by Republican Legislatures in 13 more states, is designed to make it much harder for people of color to vote. But under the U.S. Voting Rights Act, discriminating against groups of people …

Craft Distilleries Are More Numerous Than Ever. The Pandemic Looks To Have Helped.

by Keith SchneiderJune 22, 2021June 23, 20210

GETHSEMANE, KY. â€“ Conditions last year could hardly have looked worse for craft distilling in Kentucky or any other state. Built on the intimacy of locally-produced spirits, virtually all of the more than 2,000 craft distilleries that operated around the country were imperiled by state health directives that closed tasting rooms. Yet while the virus produced financial pain, it did not lead to many distillery deaths. Federal pandemic-related aid, consumer demand, important changes in state …

Report Cites Progress, Impediments to Universal Access to Clean Water, Safe Sanitation, and Hygiene

by Keith SchneiderJune 20, 2021June 20, 20210

My first months of 2021 were consumed with reporting and writing a three-part Circle of Blue project on global trends in water, sanitation, and hygiene. Our collaborator was the Wilson Center, the D.C. think tank that has been one of of our partners since 2010 in reporting the Global Choke Point chapters in China and India. As I noted in WASH Within Reach, as a Circle of Blue correspondent in Africa, Asia, and Latin America …

Kentucky Coal Fields Display How Hard It Is To Redevelop Rural America

by Keith SchneiderJune 19, 2021June 23, 20210

PAINTSVILLE, KY. â€“ On April 23, 12 weeks after President Joe Biden signed an executive order that promised to help rural regions of the East and Great Plains move past their dependence on fossil energy markets, the administration identified $37.9 billion in existing federal grant and loan accounts to meet the presidentâ€™s job creation and revitalization goals. One of those accounts, administered since 2016 by the Department of the Interior, helped start a high-tech manufacturing …

LeBron James’ I Promise Development Strategy Is Doing Good By Doing Well For Akron Kids

by Keith SchneiderMarch 9, 2021March 11, 20210

AKRON, Ohio â€“ In 2014, when he strode into the University of Akronâ€™s InfoCision stadium accompanied by the cheers of 30,000 people, LeBron James had more on his mind than returning to his hometown to play basketball again in neighboring Cleveland. That August evening Mr. James really wanted to talk about his new mission in Akron. The LeBron James Family Foundation, he said, would focus on strengthening the academic performance of Akronâ€™s underprivileged public school …

2021 Will Be Better; The 2020s Will Be Great

by Keith SchneiderDecember 27, 2020May 2, 20240

There really is not a way to hit on a word, or even an assembly of words, to adequately encompass the tough, dangerous, and ultimately exceptional year that 2020 has been. Next year will be better. And the 2020s promise to be a decade of real progess. During this decade technology and ecology will marry more firmly than ever to produce pathbreaking achievements in sectors that really matterâ€” energy, transportation, agriculture, climate, resources, and manufacturing. …

In Louisville, Covid-19 Slows Portland Neighborhood Recovery

by Keith SchneiderApril 8, 2020June 23, 20211

LOUSVILLE, Ky. — Until the Covid-19 pandemic, Gill Holland spent six years and $35 million constructing new residences and renovating 19thand 20thcentury wood and brick warehouses in Portland, an historic Ohio riverfront neighborhood that is Louisvilleâ€™s oldest and one of its most impoverished. Mr. Hollandâ€™s Portland Investment Initiative has purchased over 60 properties and filled them with businesses and residents new to the racially diverse neighborhood, where roughly 10,000 people live. The project has renovated …

In Montgomery, Bryan Stevenson is Thurgood Marshall’s Heir Apparent For Supreme Court

by Keith SchneiderOctober 9, 2019May 4, 20200

Montgomery, which has occupied one bank of the Alabama River since 1819, never deliberately set out to distinguish itself as the white hot furnace of American racial injustice, or the historic hearth of reconciliation. That’s what Alabama’s capital has become, though. Yesterday the city of 200,000, where slaves were sold and where the Civil Rights movement was born, took another memorable step. It elected Steven Reed, Montgomery County’s first African American probate judge, as its …