Homewood Nation

On Monday, June 24th the Black Political Empowerment Project convened a Homewood community discussion about how to deal with vacant or abandoned properties. The discussion was held at the neighborhood branch of Carnegie Library. Homewood Renaissance Association CEO Rev. Eugene Blackwell, Operation Better Block Executive Director Jerome Jackson, Rosedale Block Cluster Executive Director Diane Swann, and Community Empowerment Association CEO Rashad Byrdsong, were among the 50 community and non...

Four people attended last night's meeting of Block Watch Plus, the monthly gathering for Homewood residents to share information, strategize, and raise concerns about issues that require a response from beyond the community.

The simple agenda sparked enough discussion to fill the allotted meeting time of 6 - 7:30 pm. There were four items:

A membership campaign. I reiterated my desire to make BWP unavoidable - i.e., the resident group that p...

Today I checked the Allegheny County Elections Division's website to see if the official numbers (as opposed to unofficial ones) for the May 21st primary had been posted. They have.

I wanted to figure out one thing - how many of Homewood's registered voters actually voted. To do this, I compared a map of the City's wards and voting districts with

Councilman Bill Peduto is the presumptive next mayor of the City of Pittsburgh after having secured the nomination of the Democratic Party for that post, in a City where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 2-to-1.

Now the question is how Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods, such as Homewood-Brushton, should position themselves given the way that Peduto says he intends to govern.

It feels like Deja Vu: the Black Political Empowerment Project (B-PEP) is calling for a moratorium on the demolition of housing in low-income neighborhoods and Bill Peduto, the likely next mayor of the City of Pittsburgh, wants the city to have more arrows in its quiver, for urban development, than simply demolishing abandoned properties. Actually this ques...

This is Homewood Nation's first editorial in support of a political candidate. I was reluctant to write it, because my background as a reporter trained me not to express support for political candidates. But I'm editor and publisher now, and endorsing candidates is a big part of what editors and publishers do.

I was also reluctant because I'm not politically astute, and not even politically inclined. Indeed, I am working through issues with the very word "politics" - which i...

Mayoral candidates (l-r) Bill Peduto, Jack Wagner and Jake Wheatley at Tuesday evening's forum hosted by WESA FM. Photo: Halden Kirsch, WESA FM

Your choice between candidates for mayor of the City of Pittsburgh is in large part a philosophical one. Tuesday night WESA 90.5 FM hosted a public forum for City of Pittsburgh mayoral candidates Bill Peduto, Jack W...

Late last night, I watched the video of Charles Ramsey, the man who rescued three women from their imprisonment in his next-door neighbor's house.

I had deliberately refrained from viewing it for a couple of reasons - 1) Homewood and Pittsburgh by themselves generally produce more news than I can handle; 2) I was waiting for The Virality Cycle (tm) to play itself out.

The Virality Cycle (tm) works like this:

1 - The event.

The community forum on gun violence convened by State Rep. Ed Gainey brought a full house to the auditorium of the Homewood Carnegie Library last night:

Speakers included Wilkinsburg Police Chief Ophelia "Cookie" Coleman, who had an entire career on the Pittsburgh force before going to Wilkinsburg; Zone 5 Commander Timothy O'Connor and Rob Conroy, Western Pennsylvan...

Dozens of volunteers in orange vests are working throughout Homewood this morning, in the Homewood-Squirrel Hill Redd-Up. The event happens on the third Saturday of April every year.

Here, some of Bethany Baptist Church's 30 or so volunteers tame a wild lot in the 7700 block of Tioga Street:

Across the street, a second crew gathered this mound of debris and trash in...