121. The Faith Episode: How We Build Meaning in Everything From Neighborhood Architecture to High School Musical Nights

I'M THE VILLAIN

Wes Willison lives on a block with 100 houses on it. That is a very long block by most urban planning standards and he starts off telling us a bit about what that kind of built environment affords you: safety, because you have a lot more eyes on all the people going up and down the street but also, because his block is nestled in an otherwise high-crime part of Port Richmond, which is a neighborhood in Philadelphia, he and his neighbors get to avoid the attention of big developers who might want to come in and "flip" the neighborhood.

Wes originally went to seminary but is now pivoting to become a realtor, a role in which he hopes to apply a lot of the belief systems he has spent his whole life honing and shaping. We started this episode intending to have a conversation about the importance of place and ownership of land and the inequities ingrained in that, but what we ended up talking about was everything.

For example, Wes tells us the incredible story of how in San Francisco's Chinatown, the Chinese immigrants would pay white builders to add "Chinese-looking" facades to otherwise normal houses to fend off the government and developers looking to buy out or claim land in Chinatown through eminent domain and how the immigrant community organized themselves to leave the city en masse if the government did not choose to respect their land rights, which worked surprisingly well.

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