In Kalamazoo, street calming has helped to decrease accidents by 23 percent. Residents and business owners along West Main, a major artery to downtown, are also requesting changes to slow the hazardous flow of traffic.
Houses for teachers, health care workers, assembly line workers, public safety officers — workforce residents — are going up in Portage this spring. Here's the plan for Stanwood Crossings.
Correspondent Mark Wedel recently visited El Concilio's new building to learn how much more work the organization can do for the community in the new location. But the sense that the coming years are going to be years of crisis kept intruding on the visit that included a serious discussion of what could be coming under a second Trump administration for the community El Concilio serves.
It's getting harder to operate a shelter for the unhoused as their numbers increase. Representatives of two of Kalamazoo's most recognizable shelters tell Housing Matters what might work to bring those numbers down.
Kalamazoo Together for the Unhoused raised enough money for around 91 people to get 2,600 pounds of laundry done. It's part of their mission to bring dignity to those who find themselves without permanent lodgings.
Not everyone can live off the grid in a home made of straw. Larissa Touloupas and her husband Ondrej Pekarovic are seeking to do just that. She says, "I think you can do it with minimum inputs if you're creative and if you're willing to be uncomfortable."
What do an "unhinged" taco-buying customer, a spoken word duo, and dancers from Move with Joy have in common? They all recently came together to raise awareness and funds for down payment assistance for Edison neighborhood homebuyers.
Republicans and Democrats agree that expensive campaigns, disinformation, and 'dark money' are all threats to fair elections. Citizens Rising, a nonpartisan Kalamazoo group, hosted a recent forum on protecting democracy.
"Some days it doesn't feel real." That's the reaction David Harris has when he surveys the house that he now calls his own after years of being unhoused.
"There is a type of performance that, maybe you're not going to buy the record, but you feel lucky to be seeing people doing art that you've never seen before. It's like seeing a strange animal in the wild. Fascinating, amazing, but don't pet that thing, it might bite."
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