Ferguson, five years later: The killing of Michael Brown sparked protests against police brutality, but the city faces new, insidious problems

it strikes me that in spite of all of the massive problems here that are going to probably take forever to satisfactorily be addressed because of the complicated politics that are involved and the fact that corporate solutions to the problems in question will most likely fuck the community further (to say nothing of the fact that many of those problems feed into other problems that then feed back into the original problems), there are still people who see opportunity for the community:

As Jovan leaves the center and heads back along West Florissant Avenue to the Canfield Green Apartments to babysit his sister’s son, he still sees a sea of parking lots and vacant land in every direction. Ever the optimist, he doesn’t see the decline — he sees opportunity.

“They’ve got all this empty land. It’s a chance to rebuild the community,” he says. “They could build more housing, build more parks. What I would love to see is a flower maze; plant a lot of flowers over the years, and let it grow into a maze.”

He laughs, realizing this sounds a bit fanciful and adds that better jobs — especially for young people — is what will ultimately take the crime rate down. But that’s not all: he feels that something bigger, something intangible that is hard to describe in a planning document, is necessary to unite the locals.

that's something people really need to tap into more, honestly. communities can't solve everything, but it generally doesn't hurt to actually have an organized and unified community to advocate for things like this instead of a bunch of balkanized interests trying to keep corporations and the government from coming in and either making the situation worse or directing their attention to things which don't actively improve communities.

incidentally colorlines has a short, kinda-related piece out today about how the racial disparity in being stopped has grown in ferguson since 2013, even as the total amount of stops by police has gone down because of new state laws and the changes to the system described in this article.