the strain of babysitting pupils

Sunday, September 13, 2015 by Wade Kwon

Fights stopped: Around 5.
Phones confiscated: 13.
Lessons taught: 0.

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The Future of Birmingham: TBD

Saturday, September 12, 2015 by Contributor

Photo: Rob Briscoe (CC)

Cub Scouts hold the flag during the National Anthem at Regions Field. The ballpark’s opening in 2013 brought the Barons back to Birmingham and changed the city’s landscape.

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Get the full version of this essay in our free ebook.
Details at the end.

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By Carrie Rollwagen

Birmingham is a city that’s both hopeful and humble. As a transplant to this place, I’ve been impressed by the ability of Birminghamians to remain hopeful for change. Lately, that has been rewarded with some amazing projects growing out of that optimism.

Community and civic involvement

Our city’s nasty history with civil rights includes so much tragedy that we should do our best to honor the sacrifices of those Birminghamians. We do this by taking an active interest in our civil rights and government.

Many problems that still plague our city — the sad state of Birmingham schools, our Jefferson County bankruptcy and the abysmal condition of our virtually nonexistent public transportation system — could be solved if more of us took an active role in our political system. The story of Alabama politics is a story so laced with corruption that it’s hard to imagine anything different, but lately Birmingham has changed in ways that give us hope.

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Read an excerpt from Carrie Rollwagen’s
book, “The Localist.”

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Birmingham, especially downtown, looks so different than even what the most optimistic supporters imagined years ago. I lived in a loft at the Phoenix Building on Second Avenue North about a decade ago. I couldn’t buy groceries nearby, I couldn’t find a coffee shop that stayed open regular hours, and I certainly couldn’t watch a baseball game.

Now, Regions Field has brought the Barons back to the city, and I regularly go to Railroad Park to read or have a picnic. Community development projects downtown have buoyed business (I now have my choice of great coffee shops: Urban Standard, Octane and Revelator), and they’re attracting new stores to the area (Publix will finally bring a full grocery store to downtown residents in 2016).

Businesses like these are important to the growth of our city, but community projects like parks and stadiums create infrastructure that brings people together (and attracts more business to the area, too).

A hidden benefit to this civic activity is better health. Like all American cities, and especially all Southern ones, Birmingham has a weight problem. Too many of us carry so much weight that affects our health, not to mention our image of ourselves. Being overweight can make us sluggish and unwilling to try new things in our city.

We can help ourselves by nurturing the small businesses and community projects that get us up and moving. Iron Tribe is a huge CrossFit organization that began in Birmingham. Zyp, the new bike share program from REV Birmingham, will give us opportunities to get from place to place more easily in the city center. And we have dozens of small local gyms in almost any discipline to keep us continually active, along with free fitness classes at Railroad Park.

So many individuals work hard to do good in our city, but we aren’t always great at rallying behind them. Our future will be stronger if we create a culture of volunteering and prioritize helping those in need. More organizations need to make it easy to jump in.

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Social Media for Small Business and Personal Branding: Carrie Rollwagen will hold her daylong popup workshop on Sept. 19 at Innovation Depot downtown. Participants will learn blog management, keyword optimization techniques, techniques on communicating through social media and more.

Beginners will get a good start on their personal accounts and learn how to leverage business accounts; freelancers and artists will learn to brand themselves better with social media.

Tickets are $100, which includes lunch. For more information and to register, visit the event page.

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Carrie Rollwagen is author of “The Localist” and co-owner of Church Street Coffee and Books in Mountain Brook.

Website | Facebook | Twitter @crollwagen | LinkedIn | Instagram

• • •

The full version of this essay and many more are available in the free ebook, “The Future of Birmingham.”

All you need to do is fill out this simple form. We’ll email you a link to download the book. (And, at no extra charge, we’ll add you to the mailing list for the free Y’all Connect newsletter.)

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Read more essays in our special 10th anniversary series, The Future of Birmingham.

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smiles for meters

Saturday, September 12, 2015 by Wade Kwon

Is happiness a
constant? A pool that slowly
drains? A deep, deep font?

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The Future of Birmingham: Modest incremental improvement

Friday, September 11, 2015 by Contributor

Photo: Shannon (CC)

The band moe. performs at Avondale Brewing’s outdoor stage.
The transformation in Avondale could spread to other
Birmingham neighborhoods.

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Details at the end.

•

By Karl Seitz

The future of Birmingham is not likely to be as bright as it could be. A lack of strong local leadership and obstacles beyond local control limit the improvements that can be achieved.

Oh, some promising signs have appeared, primarily from nontraditional sources of leadership that will make some difference. But the political, business and institutional segments of public life from which municipal leadership typically comes are not doing much leading these days. And looming in the background is the obstacle Birmingham has faced throughout its history, a state government that is more dysfunctional than usual even as it retains its traditional antipathy to urban areas.

So, with all these obstacles, does Birmingham have any hope for a better future? Yes. Perhaps not as much as one would like, but more than we could expect depending on traditional sources of leadership.

Although they could be separated into distinct threads, the combination of the local craft beer industry, high-quality restaurants and the local music-entertainment business has already transformed Avondale and is well on the way to changing other parts of the city. Add the developers who are transforming — not always benevolently — the areas near these dining-entertainment venues, and significant parts of Birmingham will be very different places in 10 years.

Another change, this one in attitudes, that has been going on for more years than most of us realize and is likely to continue is LGBT acceptance. It is no coincidence that Jefferson County probate judges were ready to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples the day it became legal. In marked contrast to the handful of probate judges in Alabama who are refusing to issue any marriage licenses to avoid issuing a same-sex license, Judges Alan King and Sherri Friday had prepared for the change they rightly expected was coming. They had even worked with the state Health Department to change the license application forms to remove gender references.

While one hopes they would have done the same regardless of public opinion, it is likely they knew that a majority of county residents at least tacitly accept equal treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals. After all, bars in this city have openly catered to gay customers for at least 50 years. More recently, UAB has been a leader in treating AIDS, which primarily affected members of the gay community early on. And Jefferson County does have an openly gay state legislator in Patricia Todd.

Acceptance and equal treatment of LGBT individuals is not universal in Birmingham, but the trend is clear here as it is across the country. Acceptance will only grow in the years ahead.

Public education might produce positive changes in the next few years. New superintendents always stir hope. However, the cynic in me says such predictions are risky. Better to wait and see.

One would like to be more optimistic about the brightness of Birmingham’s future. But from my perspective, modest improvements appear to be the best we can do. The strong, broad-based community leadership that is necessary for a better result doesn’t currently exist.

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Karl Seitz arrived in Birmingham in 1964 to attend Birmingham-Southern College after serving 3 years in the Navy. While still a student, he began what would turn out to be a 38-year career at the Birmingham Post-Herald. For more than 30 of those years Seitz served as editorial page editor. Since retiring with the 2005 closing of the newspaper, he has been editor of a quarterly newsletter for the USS Caliente Association, a group of men who served on that Navy ship from 1943 to 1973. He has also written for genealogical publications.

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• • •

The full version of this essay and many more are available in the free ebook, “The Future of Birmingham.”

All you need to do is fill out this simple form. We’ll email you a link to download the book. (And, at no extra charge, we’ll add you to the mailing list for the free Y’all Connect newsletter.)