The Solutions Journalism Network named me “Member of the Month” for February. They’ll be sharing my work from 2017 across social media. Interview coming soon, too. Thanks SJN!

The good people at Solutions Journalism Network invited me to visit San Francisco for a day and give a presentation on my reporting to their Bay Area chapter. They recently awarded me a travel grant to report this feature for Next City, which considers historic preservation as a tactic to prevent displacement in San Antonio.

WeWork SOMA: Room 6A

156 2nd Street

Wednesday, November 15 @ 12:30 PM

Here’s a link to the event page. Hope to see some of you there.

My article for Mongabay on the Basantes family’s fight to turn their property into a bird watching sanctuary was republished in Spanish by Publimetro. Publimetro is a newspaper that’s available across Latin America. The image above was taken from the Cali, Colombia edition.

Thrilled to see this article being cited by:

— The federal Advisory Council on Historic Preservation

— The University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy’s Placelab initiative

— Planetizen

And others. Thanks for reading!

“At issue is the notion that redevelopment is good for the community and it’s a notion of progress,” says historian Antonia Castañeda, a retired professor. “But the idea in San Antonio has been you get rid of old, dilapidated structures that ‘blight’ the community, rather than repurpose or actually redevelop them for reuse.”

Read the rest over at Next City.

The southeastern wedge of Ecuador’s Cotopaxi province is filled with rich agricultural land. It sprawls in small divided plots of greens and ambers across the region’s hills, ravines, and mountainsides.

But the indigenous farmers that call this area home are facing perennial water shortages that are crippling crop diversity. The shortages spurred an investigation due to start this year by the country’s Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Aquaculture and Fisheries and the Secretariat of Water into possible causes.

A clear culprit is nearby tree plantations that cover hundreds of acres throughout the Nagsiche River water basin. Because they’re made up of exotic species like eucalyptus and pine, they wreak havoc on the soil, with each tree sucking about 5-10 gallons (20 to 40 liters) of water out of the ground every day.

This can thwart crop rotations for local farmers like Maria Beatriz Padilla.

“All this land used to give a great harvest,” Padilla said, listing her former crops. “Beans, peas, Andean lupin, lentils, garbanzos, quinoa.”

She’s spent her 50 years on this same small plot in the Cusubamba district of the Salcedo region, where she makes about $300 a month selling her produce. But now, across the plains surrounding her house are patches of eucalyptus trees reaching dozens of feet into the sky.

Read the rest over at Mongabay.

Five years ago, Sergio Basantes and his wife Doris made history when they decided to turn their lush finca just outside of Quito into a hotspot for bird watching. It’s the first bird tourism site of its kind in the Ecuadoran province called Pacto, which rests at the southernmost tip of 65,000 square miles (167,000 square kilometers) of the dense rainforest called the Chocó-Darién region.

It took decades for them to get this far.

Read the rest over at Mongabay.

Hope you enjoy.

An example of the types of articles I’ve been publishing three times a week since August 2016, for my fellowship with Next City.

In South Phoenix, among suburban neighborhoods where liquor stores outnumber grocery stores, there’s a massive, untended plot of dirt as big as two and a half New York City blocks. Until recently, it was a void space between the housing tracts, collecting trash where it runs up against the streets. Residents really didn’t know what to make of it.

“Kids were mostly using it to dirt bike in,” says Quilian Riano, an architect with DSGN AGNC who’s been visiting the site on and off since August 2015. Nic de la Fuente, a Phoenix resident, says some knew it as the stomping grounds for local gangs.

But with nearly $600,000 from art project supporters the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and ArtSpace America, Riano is about to help turn the swath into a centerpiece of the neighborhood. And he’s hoping that the minority communities that make up the majority of South Phoenix will get an economic shot in the arm in the process.

Read the rest over at Next City.