By Elliott Brack, special to Charleston Currents | How about a little something different today?
Let me introduce you to a 6.53 minute video with some of the most soothing music I have ever heard. The work comes from the late jazz virtuoso Oscar Peterson, and it is a composition of his own, which he entitled, “Ode To Freedom.”
Special to Charleston Currents | West Ashley resident and avid photographer Cynthia Bledsoe and her husband Michael Kaynard last month returned from a 4,500-mile automobile trip to Colorado and New Mexico.
By Jason Sakran, special to Charleston Currents | If I didn’t know better, it would appear Charleston is suffering from so many problems and shortcomings that some believe our best days are behind us.
Sakran
Based on the tone and tenor of some elected officials, candidates, and citizens — issues like flooding, affordable housing, crime, and over-development have become so powerful in themselves, they seem to drown out any discussion about hope, optimism and defining what our vision for Charleston 2050 is?
By Frank Knapp, special to Charleston Currents | Like the rest of the nation, South Carolina’s economy seems to be humming along.
But there are warning signs and growing concern that we are heading to a recession.
The Labor Department released its monthly jobs report last week. It showed that 130,000 new jobs were created in August. However, around 25,000 were temporary census workers hired by the federal government. That puts the August total for new private-sector jobs at about 100,000.
For his part President Trump is furious at the “fake news” for pointing out that the Labor Department numbers were well below economist expectations.
Maybe August is just a “quirky month.” That is how Larry Kudlow, President Trump’s National Economic Council Director, described it.
A review by Reba Hull Campbell, special to Charleston Currents | Rarely does a book appeal to all my “reading” senses – well written, important message, compelling story and human connections. “Grace Will Lead Us Home” about the shootings at Emanuel A.M.E. Church was one of them.
Back in June, I listened to an interview on the SC Lede podcast on SC Public Radio with the author of the book, Jennifer Berry Hawes. She’s a reporter for The Post and Courier who witnessed first-hand many of the details surrounding this tragedy.
After hearing Hawes’ podcast, I knew I had to read the book. And I knew I had to buy it and not just borrow it from the library or listen on Audible. I had a feeling it would be one of those books I’d want to mark up and re-read.
Once I got started on the book, I just couldn’t stop. …
Via Digit Matheny, contributing editor | This Is Us. Jane the Virgin. Black-ish. What do they have in common? They are all family television programs that have members of multiple generations living under one roof. But the reality of multi-generational living is more than sitcom fodder.
According to the 2019 Home Buyer and Seller Generational Trends report by the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR), multi-generational housing continues to be a growing trend among homebuyers. This trend is driven largely by Gen Xers, who are the second-largest band of homebuyers today at 24%. Of that cohort, one in six purchased a multi-gen home, half of whom cited accommodating adult children as their reason for doing so.
When it comes to millennial buyers, 9 percent purchased a multi-generational property they could share with aging parents, per the report.
By Charlie Smith, special to Charleston Currents | I moved home to Charleston 23 years ago after two years at Clemson working on a master’s degree in planning and 12 years of living in Miami. Soon after returning, I walked into Dudley’s on King Street and ran into an old acquaintance who had lived up the street from me in graduate school. He asked what I intended to do for a living.
I told him that I intended to establish South Carolina’s first openly gay-owned and -operated real estate brokerage, marketing primarily to the LGBTQ community. His immediate response was “You’ll never make a dime in this town!” I never forgot those words. I immediately set out to prove him wrong.
Real estate was a tight-knit business community back then. It was not all that welcoming to people who had no intention of working under an established broker, but rather who planned to start an office from scratch. It was also 1996 and the internet was in its infancy as a real estate tool.
By Mike Robertson, College of Charleston | There’s hot, and then there’s Charleston hot – the kind of heavy, suffocating hot that has residents wondering why they live here and visitors knowing why they don’t. Yep, Charleston knows hot. It also knows what it’s like when you add a nice thick layer of humidity to that hot. In the South, we call it summer. And, while most of us have adapted to the summer heat, even Southerners are susceptible to the dangerous and even life-threatening effects that extreme heat can have on our bodies.
By Christe McCoy-Lawrence, exclusive to Statehouse Report | The League of Women Voters of South Carolina is, of course, distressed that the state has chosen to pay more money to get less of a voting system than what it could have obtained and than what the citizens of South Carolina deserve.
We had hoped for a new voting system that was primarily hand-marked paper ballots scanned at the precinct. We know that such a system could have been acquired for about half the cost of the planned new system.
By David Burt, special to Charleston Currents | When Wando Mount Pleasant Library celebrates its ribbon cutting on June 10, it will mark a new era in our libraries and the ways in which we interact with them.
The area’s original branch library was built in the 1970s, when a library was primarily dedicated to books: storing, organizing and sharing them. Card catalogues and date stamps may loom large in our memories; however, evolving technologies have brought new opportunities and a new paradigm of the library experience.
The new 40,000-square-foot facility on the corner of Carolina Park Boulevard and Park Avenue brings the library into the modern era with connectivity driving the design. The design aligns active spaces with the roadways to activate the facades, showcasing the library’s lively programming to the community. The form is a direct response to the site’s linear shape and the adjacent wetland to the northeast.
We Can Do Better, South Carolina! (2019) by editor and publisher Andy Brack offers incisive commentaries on the American South, politics, the common good and interesting South Carolina leaders. Available exclusively for Kindle for $7.99. A paperback version will be ready soon. Learn more.
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