This House Costs Just $20,000 — But It’s Nicer Than Yours, Fast Co.Exist
Is it possible to build a house that’s cost-effective to someone living below the poverty line? The answer is yes, according to students at Auburn University’s School of Architecture, who worked on the design and construction dilemma for more than 10 years. Last month, they revealed two tiny houses in a community outside of Atlanta that cost just $14,000 each.
How America Is Putting Itself Back Together Again, The Atlantic
As writer James Fallows says, “As a whole, the country may seem to be going to hell.” But as he’s discovered while visiting various towns across America in his single-engine prop plane, there’s actually a groundswell of renewal and innovation already happening — from impressive economic growth in an impoverished area of Mississippi known as the Golden Triangle, to an investment in the Michigan public education system and a creative movement in more than 10 cities where artistic ventures are being celebrated.
Here’s What Happened When This School Made SATs Optional on Applications, Mic
Along with prom and getting your driver’s license, taking the SAT or ACT is a teenage rite of passage. But that’s no longer the case for some college-bound students. In a bold move, George Washington University made standardized test results optional for undergraduate applicants. The positive outcome: A more diverse candidate pool, including a sharp uptick in applications from African-American, Latino and first-generation college students.
MORE: Meet the Courageous Man Who Has Housed 1,393 Chronically Homeless Individuals in Utah
Tag: the South
The Resurgence of the 1950s Dinner
Nobody wants to think about how an animal goes from roaming in a pasture to meat on a plate, let alone talk about the actual process. But for small-scale farmers (not to mention those that want to know where their food comes from), access to slaughterhouses and how meat is processed is crucial. Local meat isn’t local, after all, if livestock have to be driven miles away, or even to another state, for processing.
In Lynchburg, Va., Seven Hills Food has turned a century-old slaughterhouse into a $3 million, state-of-the-art, humane processing facility for Virginia-grown beef, hogs, lamb and goats. The 40,000-square-feet of brick, concrete and steel is a USDA-inspected facility capable of processing 75 to 100 cows or 300 to 400 hogs each day — filling a gap in the Chesapeake foodshed infrastructure and making local beef and pork more accessible to consumers and growers in the state. Intertwining the age-old art of butchery with modern software, Seven Hills can trace a carcass all the way down to a finished primal cut back to original lot it came from.
Owner and native Virginian Ryan Ford tells NationSwell that the idea behind Seven Hills Food started over a dinner table conversation about the difficultly of sourcing local meat. Turning a cow from a farm into a steak served at a restaurant can be a challenge. While the state’s abundant forage resources and topography is ideal for beef production, livestock farmers still have a hard time getting their product onto local places. That’s because, for food safety reasons, federal and state regulations require that red meat be cut in a USDA-inspected facility — something that Virginia has a real shortage of.
“We’re still trying to solve the same problem that existed for years,” Ford says about the lack of regional processing. “There’s a real bottleneck in that regard.”
Food that’s directly farm-to-table not only supports local farmers and processors, but it also cuts down on transportation and fuel usage, reducing the amount of greenhouse gases released into the environment. A shorter distribution chain also means fresher food since it spends less time in a warehouse or in transit.
But in general, the days of mom-and-pop butcher shops have been replaced by the Big Four — Tyson, Cargill, JBS and National Beef — that slaughter roughly 80 percent of the country’s cattle and can process 300 to 400 beef cows per hour. This consolidation of slaughterhouses meant that local butchering, like many other skilled-labor jobs in the U.S., became a dying trade. As Dr. Jonathan Campbell, associate professor and meat extension specialist at Penn State in University Park, explains, family-owned shops are going out of business because “they don’t have the labor force to keep up with changing demand and specialized markets.” The industry funnels a staggering $894 billion to country’s economy (about 6 percent of the GDP), and there’s even more growth potential in this market as emerging economies, such as China and India, demand more meat.
“The U.S. and other industrialized nations have been charged with the task of feeding the growing global population. And so it’s very difficult to do that with small, niche markets,” says Campbell, who helps advise Pennsylvanian meat companies on processing, food safety and cost-efficiency. Despite this, it is possible for an independent slaughterhouse to stay competitive in the meat market: by carving out specialized demand since they’re not driven by volume.
Seven Hills Food has been officially open for a month and currently has 15 employees. When asked about the challenges of running an independent slaughterhouse, Ford laughs, asking, “Do you have all day?”
“Every day is a challenge,” he says. “We’re starting from scratch. There are very few models to follow.”
Yet Ford remains ambitious about his goal of getting Virginians much closer to their food. “There’s an eighth generation family cattle business in the state of Virginia,” he says, referencing one of his clients. “As a consumer, wouldn’t you like to know that story?”
If you’re someone that cares about where your food comes from, it’s a tale worth hearing.
Forget South Beach. This Urban Park Is Going to Be Miami’s Top Spot to Get Fresh Air
South Florida will soon have its very own version of New York City’s famed High Line. The southern counterpart’s co-creators are calling their idea “The Underline,” a stretch of urban parkland underneath an elevated train’s railway in Miami.
Led by Meg Daly, a businesswoman who first reimagined the transit corridor’s possibilities after a debilitating accident, The Underline will transform a barren swath of land into safer paths for pedestrians and bicyclists — from the Miami River in the north to the city’s South Station. James Corner Field Operations, the same New York City-based firm behind the High Line, is sketching early blueprints and expects to present plans this September.
The genesis for this huge public works project occurred when Daly was out for a bike ride with her adult daughter. The pair collided, and Daly hit the asphalt elbows first and broke both bones. (The pain was “terrible,” she says, “but I’ve been through childbirth, so whatever.”) For all practical purposes, Daly was incapacitated — unable to drive for three months while both arms healed. So she started traveling on the city’s Metrorail, an elevated train.
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“I took it from one stop to another, and on the final stretch, I’d walk under under the train tracks to grab some shade because June and July in Miami are really hot. It was at that moment I realized there’s so much land here, and there’s really not a whole lot being done with it. This should be like the High Line in New York,” she recalls. “That’s really where the idea came from. It was a crazy idea, and I started telling my friends and family. My background’s in marketing, so I’m used to hearing a lot more ‘no’ than ‘yes,’ but they all agreed it should be a park.”
From end to end, the park will stretch 10 linear miles. Under the tracks, the corridor exceeds 110 feet in width in some spots. (Compare that to 30 feet on the High Line.) One side parallels U.S. Route 1; the other faces building facades.
Today, there’s a crude, narrow path that some frequent, but mostly the space looks how you’d expect a rail yard to appear — utility poles, maintenance ladders, fences (and holes to sneak in) and encroachments from adjacent property owners. “There’s really bad signaling, and it doesn’t have lighting at night. Not a lot of people use it,” says Isabel Castilla, senior associate at James Corner Field Operations.
Although it’s underdeveloped, the passage still radiates potential. Its shade provides a refuge from the Florida humidity, and the patterns of light through the rails roughly three stories above create a dazzling chiaroscuro display — an effect that’s accentuated by pedaling on a bike at a constant rhythm.
This fall, James Corner’s team will present initial renderings for pilot projects downtown and near the University of Miami — two locations where people are “clamoring” for open space, Daly says. At one end of the line, construction of high rises in the central business district is encroaching on limited greenery; at the other, college students can feel disconnected from the town across the train tracks and are actively looking for new recreation opportunities. Neighbors abutting the line are planning out their own use for the space, too. South Miami Hospital, for example, is planning to pull back the pavement on a parking lot and introduce a meditation garden for patients.
Like Gotham’s version, the artery will connect disparate neighborhoods. Designers from James Corner Field Operations will unite the entire passage with native flora and tailor each block to residents’ needs. Columns supporting the tracks above, for example, might become a canvas for local artists in West Grove, a bohemian neighborhood, Castilla says.
But for all its specificity, the most important idea is that the line will be available to everyone, regardless of socioeconomics. “Anyone who lives along a transit line will now be able to come here and walk this, then go back home and never need a car,” Daly says.
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Compared to New York’s undertaking, Miami’s project must also fit more practical needs. “We’re the fourth most dangerous place in the country for pedestrians, and [one of] the most dangerous in the state for bicyclists. We don’t have protected infrastructure,” Daly says. The Underline will function as an “off-road safe haven” running parallel to the region’s busiest highway: U.S. Route 1, she adds. The project’s architects believe the new transit infrastructure won’t only protect pedestrians; they hope the newly landscaped paths, in sight of disgruntled motorists in gridlock, will be a “catalyst” for encouraging alternative modes of transit.
“Everyone hits their head and says, ‘Why didn’t I think of this?’” Daly says. “When I was forced to not drive and walk where I wanted to go, I had this new lens… It’s big, it’s shady. There’s an opportunity here. It’s all because I had never walked underneath it before.”
Many grassroots revitalization efforts have started with an ingenious idea like Daly’s, only to languish in the bureaucracy of City Hall. To the visionary, permits, zoning ordinances and public meetings can be a slow and painful death. A “champion” in Miami-Dade County’s Parks, Recreation and Open Spaces department, Maria Nardi, chief of planning, “a bureaucrat who thinks like an entrepreneur,” propelled the idea forward as the “glue that held future trails together,” Daly says.
No small force to be discounted herself, Daly often talks about bringing private sector speed to government. She sets ambitious goals for The Underline’s construction, but knows she’ll meet them. Overtures made to three municipalities and four nonprofits produced an “unusual collaboration”; altogether, they contributed $500,000 to get planning underway. Again, valuing speed, Friends of the Underline’s planning committee chose James Corner as the lead design team. “The way we’re railroading this thing” — pun intended — “we didn’t have the time to have anybody go through a learning curve. [James Corner] brought that expertise.”
There’s still some practical elements for the firm to work out — designing safe passageways at intersections, getting approval from the Federal Transit Authority, finding the money to make everything possible — but Daly seems positive that the entire line will be completed in six years.
“You know what motivates me? That it can be done; it just isn’t being done. The way the public sector moves needs to be challenged. Development is moving much faster than infrastructure to match it,” Daly says. “The people who live here deserve this. And I want to be sure to use this before I’m in a wheelchair.”
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This Second Grader Saved for a Pet Snake, But Decided to Feed the Poor Instead
Eight-year-old Keaton Snell of Winter Haven, Fla., assiduously saved his allowance and birthday money for months, trying to accumulate enough to buy himself a snake. Once he’d saved $114, he approached his mom about getting the pet, but she said he needed to wait until he was 10-years-old.
Keaton wanted to spend the money this year, however, so he decided to buy food for those less fortunate.
He got the idea from his second grade class, which has been talking about ways the kids can help the community and holding a food drive. His teacher, Lori Davis, tells the News Chief, “We’ve been having conversations about the less fortunate, and Keaton is particularly sympathetic about it. He came to me and said, ‘I want to spend $114 on food for the poor,’ and I thought that’s a lot of money, but it was totally his idea and it shows how deep in his heart he feels about this.”
Keaton started by raiding his pantry to give to others. His mom, Shannon Snell, says “I kept telling him he can’t give all of our food away. We need some, too. So it came to the point where he was like, ‘Mom, just take me to the grocery store, and I’ll buy the food.”
Shannon made a deal with her son that she would match his contributions. Keaton ended up donating 72 cans, which will stock the food pantry at The Mission, a Winter Haven, Fla., church organization that feeds the hungry and helps the homeless.
Keaton’s classmates were donating an average of about two cans per person, but when they saw all the cans he brought, it inspired them to give more.
Davis says, “He came into school with two bags overflowing with cans. The other kids saw it, we talked about Keaton using his own money and they all got really excited about it. They started bringing in more cans and we saw the school count rise a lot.”
So far, the school has collected 3,000 cans of food. As for Keaton, he may not yet have a pet snake, but his teacher rewarded him with one week during which he doesn’t have to wear his school uniform. “He went above and beyond,” Davis says.
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How Homegrown Roots Can Save Local Food Economies
When the local economy is threatened, what do you do?
While some may turn to outside forces for help, others turn to the people at the heart of the matter: the community. That’s exactly what residents of Asheville, N.C. did by bringing to fruition a homegrown solution through the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project (ASAP).
With the changes in the tobacco industry and the trend towards larger agricultural farms, North Carolina communities realized that something needed to be done to preserve their farmers, which are constrained in size because of the mountainous landscape. That answer came in the form of a group of volunteers led by Charlie Jackson.
The group began by taking it to the streets, publicizing local farms and products through door-to-door campaigns, newspaper articles and radio announcements. It also printed a Local Food Guide as well as a weekly “Fresh at the Farmer’s Market” report, according to the Sustainable Cities Collective.
In 2002, the nonprofit ASAP was born.
Since then, it has expanded its efforts by starting the “Appalachian Grown” program, which offers certification to local farms, restaurants, distributers and grocers. Acceptance into this elite group entitles members to technical assistance, marketing support, training and a network of other local food providers.
Preserving an economy requires all generations, which is why ASAP is going into schools to educate youths through its “Growing Minds Farm to School” program. Working with schools, ASAP organizes school gardens, local food cooking classes, farm field trips and local food service in the cafeteria, as well as training teachers and dietitians.
The purpose of the program is to make local food a commodity which everyone can enjoy, which is why a large percentage of students receive free or reduced lunch.
For Jackson, though, the movement is about the community, so it leads the project, which has the added benefit minimizing infrastructure issues.
“It’s really important to ASAP that a just food system’s going to include everybody,” Jackson tells Sustainable Cities Collective. “Right now, we’re thinking about this as a movement. Focusing on local is an amazing way to create community dialogue and democracy that we don’t have in our food community right now.”
Through the work of ASAP, the western North Carolina agriculture economy is thriving, and Asheville has become a cultural hub. And for a region that was on the brink of disappearance 15 years ago, it just goes to show what a difference a little home fertilization can make.
MORE: This Startup Uses Urban Relics to Serve Up Local Food
This Radio Host Reaches Out to Female Vets
A few years ago, Air Force veteran Teresa Lambert felt silenced about her experiences in the military, as do many female vets. But now she speaks up by hosting a radio show focused on issues facing female veterans that’s sponsored by Women Veteran Social Justice (WVSJ) and recorded on the campus of the University of North Georgia Gainesville.
Lambert has a lot to talk about on air, such as the fact that female veterans are more likely to become homeless than male veterans are, and women vets face homelessness at a rate four times greater than civilian women. Since many of them are coping with trauma from abuse, female soldiers feel uncomfortable visiting V.A. hospitals and shelters where large groups of men gather, and many of them are mothers who can’t find homeless shelters that accept kids.
Lambert’s job as the northeast Georgia ambassador for WVSJ is to help female veterans with any issues they face. Not long ago, she was struggling, too, having been a victim of domestic abuse during her time in the Air Force. She felt frustrated with the military’s response to her troubles and experienced symptoms of PTSD. “By the time I left, my anxiety level was so high that I would not let anybody touch me,” she tells the Gainesville Times. “I didn’t get any kind of help, and I was such a mess. I continued making bad choices.”
One poor decision many female veterans make is to fail to seek help that’s available to all veterans since that assistance is often geared toward men. “A man walks around and he’s wearing a veteran’s hat and that’s OK,” she says. “But if a women does it, she’s just wanting attention.”
So Lambert and the WVSJ reach out to female veterans — in person and through social media — offering them assistance, resources and camaraderie. Volunteers give fellow female veterans food, housing and help filling out paperwork and applying for benefits.
“(Female veterans) all have at some point the feeling that we can’t be the only one,” Lambert says. “We can’t be the only one going through this, whatever it may be.” And now with the help of WVSJ, more female vets are realizing that they aren’t.
MORE: For Female Veterans Experiencing Employment Woes, This Organization Offers Strong Advice
The Plan to Save Louisiana’s Wetlands
Southeastern Louisiana is vanishing.
Two thousand square miles of wetlands have already been submerged in the Gulf of Mexico, and the state’s shoreline is receding quicker than anywhere else on Earth. A chunk of marshland as big as a football field washes away every hour — meaning that 16 square miles are erased from the map every year. Much depends on the Bayou State’s changing contours not only for the 1.2 million residents of greater New Orleans, threatened by violent storm surges, but for the entire country: half of the nation’s oil refineries, the mainland’s largest commercial fishery and the Western Hemisphere’s largest port all hinge on the region’s viability.
In response, Louisiana is implementing a $50 billion plan to save its coastline over the next half-century. Some call it ambitious; the rest say it’s a “moon shot.” But it’s the state’s only chance to reverse a manmade environmental catastrophe before it’s too late, says a two–part series by ProPublica and The Lens.
“What we had here was a paradise — a natural paradise,” Lloyd Sergine remembers. He’s describing the swamp village of fishermen, trappers and farmers where he grew up, just a couple dozen miles south of the Big Easy. “But when I try to tell the young people about this, they just stare at me like I’m crazy. They just can’t imagine what was here such a short time ago. And now it’s gone. Just gone.” When Sergine looks out onto the fields of his childhood, he sees only saltwater drowning the landscape. Derelict boats and ice chests float in on a high tide that soon washes over concrete foundations and wooden pilings where his neighborhood once thrived. “Everything we had was based on the wetlands,” he says. “When the wetlands started going, we were done for.”
At the heart of Louisiana’s Master Plan for the Coast is the restoration of the Mississippi Rivers’s natural process of depositing sand and mud along the delta, sediment that built up extensive wetlands over several thousand years. The mighty river once picked up 400 million metric tons of sediment before spitting the brown water into an ecosystem that depended on silt to avoid sinking into the ocean.
But after engineers attempted to limit the river’s devastating floods by constructing a network of dams, levees and dikes, annual sediment deposit dropped by 60 percent. Around the same time, in the 1930s, oil drilling and dredging of canals cut into the swamps. Deterioration accelerated as saltwater intrusion choked freshwater plants that had held the ground together and powerful hurricanes battered the vulnerable clumps of land.
Louisiana’s short-term fix is pumping sediment back into the crumbling marshes. Pipelines collect sand and mud from the riverbed and from offshore to add to flooded basins and to create new barrier islands. So far, at a cost of $105 million, two projects have restored 1,600 acres. But those gains are small compared to rapid loss: the same amount is being swept away every two months.
A long-term solution will require mimicking the Mississippi’s historical flow by diverting water in controlled surges. In an unprecedented experiment, the plan suggests building a system of gates that will open when the river runs high, flooding the area and restoring much-needed silt. “The one advantage this delta has over the many others that are in trouble is that we still have a river delivering the material to help get us out of trouble,” Denise Reed, chief scientist at the Water Institute of the Gulf, explains. “As long as that river is bringing the sediments to us, we have a chance.”
There’s still many unanswered questions for the project’s researchers and engineers. “Their solutions must fit within constraints imposed by how much sediment the river can deliver and must anticipate future sea-level rise and land subsidence. Somehow, they must balance the need for restoration with the needs of the shipping, energy and fishing industries,” Bob Marshall, of The Lens, writes.
Replicating North America’s largest drainage system will be no easy task, but the state thinks they can catch up by 2042.
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To Fight PTSD, This Veteran Cross Stitches
With treatments for PTSD ranging from equine therapy and scuba diving to a nudist lifestyle, it’s clear that what works to ease one veteran’s PTSD symptoms might not work for another. Regardless of method, anything that relaxes someone suffering is beneficial.
Veteran David Jurado couldn’t shake the troubled thoughts that serving in Iraq left him with. About his time serving overseas, he tells the Greenville Online, “We definitely saw our fair share of battle. I lost really good friends through IED (improvised explosive device) explosions.”
A few years after Jurado returned home from Iraq to Greenville, S.C., he began to seek help for his PTSD. Companions for Heroes helped him train a service dog from the Greenville Humane Society. “With the resources that Companions for Heroes had to offer, I was able to able to raise my own service dog in about a year’s time,” Jurado says. “The service dog really broke my anti-social shell. I was ready to take on whatever the world had to throw at me.”
While the dog helped, Jurado kept seeking other activities to ease his PTSD — including cross stitching, a craft that his mom taught him when he was eight-years-old. “My wife gave me a pattern, and I jumped right back into it for a reason. It’s something that keeps my mind from wandering into places I don’t want to go or remember,” he says. “Life is pretty simple when all you’ve got to worry about is needle and thread.”
Jurado transitioned from his former career as a police officer to working for Companions for Heroes. He has been so successful with figuring out what techniques help him to manage his PTSD symptoms that the Wounded Warrior Project selected to become a peer mentor for other vets with similar issues.
Now Jurado is always ready to help two other veterans in the Greenville area. “Helping other people with their challenges helps me better handle mine,” he says.
MORE: This 85-Year-Old Knitter Churns Out Hats to Help Homeless Vets
For Kids That Struggle with Reading, Digital Literacy Programs Show Promise
Can an electronic device actually improve literacy skills?
Schools with high percentages of low-income students are seeing promising gains in reading ability and enthusiasm since they’ve introduced tablet reading programs in about 30 schools in Brevard County, Fla.
Mackenzie Ryan of Florida Today writes about Christopher Jamian-Fleck, a student at Emma Jewel Charter Academy, who earned his own tablet computer last year and became an ebookworm with the help of a reading program called MyON.
While home sick, Jamian-Fleck began exploring the program’s library of 20,000 books and learned to read with the help of a program that highlights each word as it is read. (Other features that can assist kids with dyslexia or those that simply need extra help include the ability to increase font size or listen to the book read aloud.) The eight-year-old zoomed ahead from struggling with literacy to reading above grade level.
His grandmother Marcy Fleck says, “He wasn’t a reader before this, and now he’s enjoying it so much. He finds out things he never knew he was interested in. And he can go at his own pace.”
In fact, Christopher wouldn’t be able to check out books from his school without the tablet program because it doesn’t have a library. The charter school couldn’t afford to build one, so it used funding from the United Way to pay for MyON and Kindle e-readers for kids. Many of the families in the school don’t have Internet access or computers, so the e-readers make it possible for them to read e-books.
The program appears to be working even at schools with well-stocked libraries; Ryan writes that one principal noticed check outs of old-fashioned books at the school library increased once the digital program sparked the kids’ interest in reading.
Teresa Wright, who directs Brevard’s Early Childhood and Title I programs is working to secure funding to allow more low-income schools to get the program and the tablets it requires. “We’re hoping that students will have access before the holidays,” she says. “Reading is like a sport, the more you practice the better you get.”
MORE: Can Texting Help Improve Childhood Literacy?
The Coordinated Rescue Team That Saved a Disabled Veteran from Homelessness
You’ve heard the sad stories of veterans falling through the social service cracks and ending up homeless.
This is not that.
Instead, it’s a happy tale about a group in South Carolina that united to patch those cracks in the system and efficiently coordinate resources available to help veterans.
Disabled U.S. Army Veteran Herbert Frink of Beaufort, S.C., hit upon hard times recently. He lost his job and went through an expensive divorce, both of which put him behind on his rent, utility and car payments. Frink gained custody of his two young children, but he knew he might lose them, too, if he lost his housing, so he asked for help at the American Red Cross.
His simple request set off a united effort to keep a roof over his head, made possible by the new Military and Veterans Service Alliance of the Lowcountry (MAVSA). The service, which began this year in the southern state, maintains a database of more than 40 organizations eager to help vets. Representatives from the nonprofits meet once a month to coordinate their efforts.
In Frink’s case, the Red Cross picked up the tab for his overdue electric bills, the Savannah chapter of Wounded Warriors got him up to date on his car payments and One80 Place, a Charleston, S.C.-based nonprofit that aims to prevent homelessness, paid for his rent and even found him a new job with a trucking company. They also found a daycare that would accept Frink’s kids and accommodate his job hours.
“They have done so much for me,” Frink tells the Beaufort Gazette. “The resources started pouring in once I contacted them, and they have not stopped.”
Frink isn’t the only veteran MAVSA has helped. In its first few months of operation, members have also connected a suicidal veteran with psychiatric care and helped others get back on their feet financially. The coalition hopes to expand their scope in the future, updating their website and partnering with law enforcement to initiate special veterans courts.
“As a veteran, it makes me feel so good to know that organizations in my hometown are helping veterans,” Frink says. “I never thought I’d experience it. Now that someone’s helping me, I need to give back. I owe a million thanks to them. They saved me and my children.”
MORE: When It Comes to Helping Homeless Vets, Could Thinking Small be the Answer?