CityLab Daily: Stitching Together a Town to Escape Poverty

Keep up with the most pressing, interesting, and important city stories of the day. Sign up for the CityLab Daily newsletter here.

***

What We’re Following

Patch it up: On a dirt road in Boykin, Alabama, there’s a repurposed two-room schoolhouse where you can find the Gee’s Bend Quilters Collective. The group has inherited a rich community tradition: Women have been making quilts in the area since the 1920s, gaining prominence especially during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Their quilts reside in permanent museum collections from coast to coast, and are widely acknowledged as masterpieces of American art.

Despite that global fame, if you want to visit Gee’s Bend, you’ll have plan your visit well. The collective sits 40 miles from the nearest hotel, supermarket, or conventional restaurant, so it doesn’t get much foot traffic. In fact, Boykin isn’t even considered a town, and it’s deeply impoverished. But the community wants to change that by incorporating as a municipality. It’s a move that could get the 300 or so people of Boykin new access to resources, and offer a political agency that they’ve never had before. Today on CityLab: Could incorporating as a town save Gee’s Bend, Alabama?

—Andrew Small

More on CityLab

What We’re Reading

Startups in New York and D.C. prepare for a talent tug of war with Amazon (Morning Consult)

How HUD’s inspection system fails tenants nationwide (ProPublica)

Would a city save money if it paid for lawyers to stop evictions? (Governing)

Hotel and city representatives are meeting in New York to discuss their Airbnb problem (BuzzFeed News)

The big city paradox: They’re getting richer, but they’re losing electoral clout (Washington Post)

Tell your friends about the CityLab Daily! Forward this newsletter to someone who loves cities and encourage them to subscribe. Send your own comments, feedback, and tips to hello@citylab.com.