This is our newsletter, Hard Reset. Sign up here. Donate to BigIfTrue.org here.

In local news

• “Rather than waiting for someone to speak up for us, we had to do it ourselves,” Mar’Tayshia James, president of the Echo Heights Environmental Coalition, told the Fort Worth Report. The coalition opposes the city of Fort Worth’s long-standing development plans for the Echo Heights neighborhood, home to at least 186 industrial facilities that residents have attributed to an increase in cancer and other illnesses.
• Ten months ago, the Department of Housing and Urban Development gave New York City housing agencies about 7,800 emergency housing vouchers meant to house people experiencing homelessness. City Limits reports that only about 5% have been used to rent an apartment.
• An Oklahoma incentive program offered workers $1,200 for returning to the labor force last year. Only about 8,000 of the 50,000 applications received were approved, the Tulsa World reported.
• The Salt Lake Tribune and APM Reports detailed how difficult it can be to shut down a teen treatment facility in Utah—even after allegations of sexual misconduct.

Why journalism needs poetry

When was the last time you read a poem? How did you find it? How did it find you?

I love poetry, but I basically stopped reading it altogether years ago. Instead, I turned what used to be moments of peaceful leisure into an obligation to productivity. I pored through non-fiction books that could help my reporting, guides for starting a business or nonprofit and the occasional novel that friends tucked into my hands after conversations where I unwittingly outed myself as someone who simply couldn’t get my job (and the news) off my mind.

The last time I read a poem was today, and I read it because of journalism.

Nonprofit news site Arizona Luminaria recently published a poem by Phoenix writer Rashaad Thomas. I read it very slowly, the way I drive, the short lines of text dashing by like stripes between lanes.

Called “Phoenix Don’t Love Them,” his poem is about a lot in a few blistering words. “The city calls it urban revitalization. The community calls it gentrification. I call it colonization,” Thomas wrote in a preface to the poem.

He described a historically Black and brown community that photographers and artists like Thomas are working to preserve and document as it morphs into something else entirely.

I read the poem a second time. I read it backwards (actually a really fun way to read poems). I read it.

That’s sort of my point. I would never have read this piece if it hadn’t been published on a news site, of all places.

Historically, poems have appeared in newspapers and magazines, but there’s generally a firewall between hard news and the arts. News is supposed to be objective and serious and solid, right? It comes in two colors: Black and white. It’s not supposed to make you feel things or project the squishy, borderless, in-the-gray thoughts that fill our lives and the most effective art.

Journalism is supposed to be those things. And that connects to something Thomas mentioned in his preface. In an interview back in 1989, rapper Ice Cube said, “We call ourselves underground street reporters. We just tell it how we see it, nothing more, nothing less.”

“In other words,” Thomas writes, “poetry is journalism. Poets are underground street reporters.”

The First Amendment guarantees anyone the right to make journalism, but the industry sets countless explicit or implicit rules about what journalism is, how it works and who can do it. There are gatekeepers, and there are people outside the gate.

Poetry reflects who we are, our humanity. I’m grateful that Thomas and Arizona Luminaria reminded me of that and made me wonder: Shouldn’t journalism do that, too?

New from BigIfTrue.org

For renters with disabilities, finding a home that is truly accessible is a huge challenge. Even if they find a home that checks all their boxes, it may be out of their price range or push them out of neighborhoods where they have deep roots.

Some background from our latest story:

• More than a fifth of households with a disabled resident had trouble navigating or using their homes in 2019, according to a recent report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.
• Lower-income, older, Black and Hispanic residents with disabilities were more likely to live in homes that didn’t meet their needs.
• Unless they live in federally-subsidized housing, renters usually are responsible for paying for changes to make their homes more accessible.

Read more here. And please consider supporting our journalism with a tax-deductible donation. Our reporting wouldn’t exist without help from our readers.

Thank you for reading Hard Reset. You can reach me here at bryant@bigiftrue.org and 405-990-0988.
 
– Mollie Bryant
Founder and editor, BigIfTrue.org