Brightline West Project

As a passionate advocate for modern transportation, I am beyond excited about the latest development in American rail: the Brightline West project, which is officially one step closer to reality with the recent signing of a $3 billion grant agreement by the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA)! This project isn’t just another rail line; it’s a historic leap forward for high-speed rail in the U.S. and a beacon of progress for public transportation enthusiasts like myself.

On September 26, 2024, this monumental agreement was finalized, marking the beginning of what many of us have dreamed about for decades—true high-speed rail connecting Las Vegas to Southern California! With trains capable of reaching speeds over 200 miles per hour, we’re talking about radically transforming how we travel between these two bustling regions.

To have a project of this magnitude come to life thanks to a strong public-private partnership is inspiring. Just look at the numbers: over 35,000 jobs are expected to be created, including 10,000 union construction jobs. This is a huge win, not only for those in the industry but also for local economies and communities, and it sets a precedent for future infrastructure efforts across the country.

Michael Reininger, the CEO of Brightline, really hit the nail on the head with his assertion that this project will “jumpstart the high-speed rail industry in America.” It’s long overdue, and finally, we are moving forward. The Brightline West project won’t just connect cities; it will embody a bold, eco-friendly approach to our transportation challenges—reducing CO2 emissions by over 400,000 tons annually and removing three million cars off the roads that currently choke the I-15.

Imagine this: a seamless, comfortable two-hour journey from Las Vegas to Rancho Cucamonga, complete with onboard amenities like food and Wi-Fi. For someone who routinely endures the endless traffic jams on the freeway, the thought of relaxing in a sleek train while taking in the stunning California desert views excites me beyond measure! No more cramped airplane seats or endless hours stuck in a car; we’ll be able to travel in style and comfort.

And it warms my heart to see the emphasis on sustainability and environmental responsibility. The fact that Brightline West will utilize zero-emission, fully electric trains positions it as the premiere green transportation choice in America. It’s initiatives like these that give me hope for our future and showcase how modern rail can lead the way in combating climate change.

Heavy construction is slated to kick off in 2025, and early groundwork is already ongoing. Crews are busy drilling geotechnical borings along the I-15, and I can practically feel the anticipation in the air! Soon enough, we’ll see new stations sprouting up, including one right in the heart of Las Vegas—a city known for its bright lights and bustling energy!

As someone who often travels for both leisure and business, I am particularly looking forward to the role this project will play as we approach the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Brightline West will undoubtedly serve as an essential transport option for visitors and residents alike, highlighting what a modern transportation system can achieve.

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In closing, there’s so much to be excited about! The Brightline West project calls forth a vision of the future that is connected, rapid, and environmentally conscious. It represents the culmination of years of advocacy, dreaming, and hard work. I look forward to seeing how this journey unfolds as we ride the rails toward a new era in American transportation.

Here’s to the future of rail in America! 🚄🌟

Until next time, happy rail journeys, everyone!

This post is inspired by the recent developments surrounding the Brightline West project.

https://www.brightlinewest.com

The Bridge is a section of the STM Daily News Blog meant for diversity, offering real news stories about bona fide community efforts to perpetuate a greater good. The purpose of The Bridge is to connect the divides that separate us, fostering understanding and empathy among different groups. By highlighting positive initiatives and inspirational actions, The Bridge aims to create a sense of unity and shared purpose. This section brings to light stories of individuals and organizations working tirelessly to promote inclusivity, equality, and mutual respect. Through these narratives, readers are encouraged to appreciate the richness of diverse perspectives and to participate actively in building stronger, more cohesive communities.

https://stmdailynews.com/category/the-bridge

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Elizabeth Korver-Glenn, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Sarah Mayorga, Brandeis University

Gentrification has become a familiar story in cities across the United States. The story line typically goes this way: Middle- and upper-income people start moving into a lower-income or poor neighborhood. Housing prices rise in response, and longtime residents and businesses are driven out.

As the U.S. population becomes increasingly urban, gentrification can seem inevitable. However, scholars have found that it’s actually pretty rare.

For example, a study by the nonprofit National Community Reinvestment Coalition that examined neighborhood change from 2000 through 2013 found that most low- and moderate-income neighborhoods across the United States did not gentrify during that period. Just seven cities – New York, Los Angeles, Washington, Philadelphia, Baltimore, San Diego and Chicago – accounted for almost half of all neighborhood gentrification nationwide.

Why is gentrification less common than many people fear? In our book, “A Good Reputation: How Residents Fight for an American Barrio,” we argue that conflicts over neighborhood reputation are an important factor.

We examined disputes among residents of Northside, a predominantly Latino neighborhood, or barrio, in Houston, over how their neighborhood was perceived. We found that those who thought outsiders stigmatized the barrio, or who stigmatized it themselves, avoided engaging with the neighborhood, its institutions and its residents. This group supported measures that would facilitate gentrification, such as monitoring local bars to file nuisance complaints.

By contrast, those who perceived the barrio as a welcome, desirable space worked to cultivate the neighborhood’s institutions and connect its people, pushing back against attempts to gentrify the area.

Gentrification isn’t linear or automatic

Common understandings of gentrification and urban development often frame these urban processes as natural, linear and even inevitable for low-income neighborhoods. The argument goes that once you see a new Starbucks, or a light rail station in the case of Northside, gentrification is sure to follow.

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Based on our research, however, we argue that when politicians, developers and even residents themselves attempt to develop or redevelop marginalized urban neighborhoods, they spur neighborhood conflicts that, in turn, can greatly influence the redevelopment process.

Northside is one such neighborhood. Located just north of downtown Houston, it has been majority Latino for more than 60 years. It has also been a high-poverty area, with 23% to 38% of its residents living beneath the federal poverty line over this time period.

About one-third of its residents are foreign-born, many of them originating from Mexico or Central America. But most Latino Northsiders are second-, third- or later-generation Mexican Americans or Latino Americans.

The neighborhood consists mainly of single-family homes on small, densely packed urban lots. Some streets have sidewalks and covered drainage systems, while others have open ditches and lack sidewalks. Although the METRO red line train travels along the barrio’s western border and a few busy thoroughfares crisscross the neighborhood, much of the area has a small-town, quiet, residential feel.

Conflicting approaches

As we describe in our book, we found two widespread and conflicting views of Northside among its residents. Interestingly, these views did not easily map onto individual characteristics, such as racial identity or class. People would sometimes change their viewpoints depending on the conflict in question.

One group wanted to cleanse the barrio of what its members saw as negative features, transform the area and prepare the way for gentrification to occur. The other group was intent on celebrating the barrio as it already was and on preserving its character and supporting its residents.

Residents who wanted to remake Northside often believed that it had too many features that they felt were associated with Black or low-income people, such as public housing, cantinas or bars, and services for people without homes. For example, one woman we spoke with cited neighborhood cantinas and housing shelters as evidence that Northside was dangerous.

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These Northsiders wanted to purge and clean the neighborhood to improve what they perceived as its marred image. They sought to remove facilities, such as a Salvation Army shelter, which they believed attracted undesirable people; called for increased police presence in the neighborhood; and avoided local places such as parks and grocery stores, often driving to other neighborhoods instead.

They also attempted to curate what they viewed as respectable behavior, through steps such as installing video cameras and calling on residents to report neighbors whom they believed were dumping trash or failing to neuter and spay their pets.

In contrast, other residents believed that their neighborhood was a welcoming and desirable place. They were proud of its parks, churches, public schools and Mexican restaurants, and they spoke of pivotal moments in Northside’s past to argue for its desirability in the present. One such event was an uprising at Moody Park in 1978 that spurred reforms in the Houston police department and capital improvements to the park.

These residents hosted parties, exercised at local parks and volunteered with public schools and Catholic parishes. Many regularly participated in neighborhood development and nonprofit meetings, and they objected when other speakers cast Northside as a stigmatized place and its residents as the cause of barrio ills.

They also defended Northside against what they saw as threats to its quality of life. As one example, residents sued the owners of White Oak Music Hall, a 5-acre, three-stage concert venue that opened in 2016 on the western edge of the neighborhood. Plaintiffs argued that loud music was interrupting their children’s sleep and decreasing their property values. They won important concessions in a 2018 settlement, including caps on the number of outdoor concerts, installation of sound-monitoring equipment and limits on the number and duration of concerts on school nights.

A different kind of gentrification story

Ultimately, we found that Northside did not gentrify because the conflict between these disparate views of the neighborhood blocked or slowed large-scale redevelopment. Some residents’ attempts to protect and preserve the barrio interrupted developers’ plans – for example, by using Houston’s Code of Ordinances to block the subdivision of existing lots. Other actions, such as the lawsuit against White Oak Music Hall, checked developers’ influence in the area.

Although residents’ efforts to prevent redevelopment did not constitute a full-blown, organized social movement, people who valued Northside as it was successfully challenged the idea that it was a dangerous and unattractive place that needed to be remade, and they worked to preserve the place they called home.

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Other researchers have examined similar struggles in cities including Boston, Los Angeles and Chicago. We think that paying attention to these conflicts in cities of all sizes can provide a deeper understanding of why gentrification succeeds – or, more commonly, why it fails.

Elizabeth Korver-Glenn, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Sarah Mayorga, Professor of Sociology, Brandeis University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Bridge is a section of the STM Daily News Blog meant for diversity, offering real news stories about bona fide community efforts to perpetuate a greater good. The purpose of The Bridge is to connect the divides that separate us, fostering understanding and empathy among different groups. By highlighting positive initiatives and inspirational actions, The Bridge aims to create a sense of unity and shared purpose. This section brings to light stories of individuals and organizations working tirelessly to promote inclusivity, equality, and mutual respect. Through these narratives, readers are encouraged to appreciate the richness of diverse perspectives and to participate actively in building stronger, more cohesive communities.

https://stmdailynews.com/category/the-bridge

Colette Gaiter, University of Delaware

The three qualities that matter most in real estate also matter the most to graffiti artists: location, location, location.

In Miami and Los Angeles, cities that contain some of the most expensive real estate in the U.S., graffiti artists have recently made sure their voices can be heard and seen, even from the sky.

In what’s known as “graffiti bombing,” artists in both cities swiftly and extensively tagged downtown skyscrapers that had been abandoned. The efforts took place over the course of a few nights in December 2023 and late January 2024, with the results generating a mix of admiration and condemnation.

As someone who has researched the intersection of graffiti and activism, I see these works as major milestones – and not just because the artists’ tags are perhaps more prominent than they’ve ever been, high above street level and visible from blocks away.

They also get to the heart of how money and politics can make individuals feel powerless – and how art can reclaim some of that power.

Two cities, two graffiti bombings

Since late 2019, Los Angeles’ billion-dollar Oceanwide Plaza – a mixed-use residential and retail complex consisting of three towers – has stood unfinished. The Beijing-based developer was unable to pay contractors, and ongoing financing challenges forced the company to put the project on pause. It’s located in one of the priciest parts of the city, right across the street from Crypto.com Arena, where the 2024 Grammy Awards were held.

Hundreds of taggers were involved in the Los Angeles graffiti bombing. It may never be publicly known how the idea was formed and by whom. But it seemed to have been inspired by a similar project that took place in Miami during Art Basel, the city’s annual international art fair.

In November 2023, the city of Miami announced that a permit to demolish One Bayfront Plaza site, an abandoned former VITAS Healthcare building, had been filed.

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Miami is known for its elaborate spray-painted murals. There’s also a rich tradition of graffiti in the city. So Miami was a natural gathering place for graffiti artists during Art Basel in December 2023, and One Bayfront Plaza became the canvas for taggers from around the world.

Over the course of a few days, graffiti artists – some of whom rappelled down the side of the building – tagged the brutalist, concrete structure with colorful bubble letters spelling their graffiti names: “EDBOX,” “SAUTE” and “1UP,” and hundreds more.

The response to the Miami bombing was more awe than outrage, perhaps because the building will soon be torn down. It elicited comparisons to 5Pointz, a collection of former factory buildings in the Queens borough of New York City that was covered with graffiti and became a landmark before being demolished in 2014.

Meaning and motivation

In the early 2000s, when I started researching street graffiti, I learned that there are different names for different graffiti types.

“Tags” are pseudonyms written in marker, sometimes with flourishes. “Fill-ins” or “throw-ups” are quickly painted fat letters or bubble letters, usually outlined. “Pieces” involve more colorful, complicated and stylized spray-painted letters.

The tradition of painting ornate graffiti names made me think of Paul Cézanne, who painted the same bowl of fruit over and over. The carefully chosen names and their letters become the subject that writers use to practice their craft.

But I also wanted to know why people graffitied.

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Many graffiti writers tagged spaces to declare their existence, especially in a place like New York City, where it is easy to feel invisible. Some writers who became well known in the early 1970s, like Taki 183, scrawled their names and street numbers all over the city.

During my research, I spoke with one New York graffiti artist whose work had garnered a lot of attention in the 1980s. He explained that his writing had no concrete political messages.

“But,” he added, “the act of writing graffiti is always political.”

Another graffiti artist I interviewed, “PEN1,” stood with me on a street in lower Manhattan, pointing out one of his many works. It was a fill-in – huge letters near the top of a three- or four-story building, very visible from the street.

“Those people have paid so much money to put their message up there,” he said, pointing to nearby billboards, “and I get to put my name up there for free.”

Through my project, which I ended up titling “Unofficial Communication,” I came to understand that writing graffiti on walls, billboards and subway cars was a way of disrupting ideas of private ownership in public, outdoor spaces.

It involved three different sets of players. There were the taggers, who represented people defying the status quo. There were the public and private owners of the spaces. And there was the municipal government, which regularly cleaned graffiti from outdoor surfaces and tried to arrest taggers.

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In cities across the U.S., then and now, it’s easy to see whose interests are the priority, whose mistakes governments are willing to overlook, and which people they aggressively police and penalize.

Loud and clear

The names painted on the Los Angeles skyscrapers are the faster and easier-to-complete fill-ins, since time is at a premium and the artists risk arrest.

These vertical graffiti bombing projects on failed skyscrapers, deliberately or not, call attention to the millions of dollars that are absorbed by taxpayers when private developers make bad investments.

Because the names painted on the buildings are fill-ins, they’re not especially artistic. But they did, in fact, make a political statement.

A former graffiti artist who goes by “ACTUAL” told The Washington Post that he’d come out of retirement to contribute to the Los Angeles project.

“The money invested in [the buildings] could have done so much for this city,” he added.

Some of the graffiti artists in Los Angeles were arrested, and the Los Angeles City Council is demanding that the owners of Oceanwide Plaza remove the graffiti, described as the work of “criminals” acting “recklessly.”

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Meanwhile, the developers of buildings that have sat, unfinished, for years, in the middle of a housing crisis, have broken no laws.

Some reckless acts, apparently, are more criminal than others.

Colette Gaiter, Professor of Art and Design, University of Delaware

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.