I have started noticing something in my neighborhood. People walk in the morning, after work, with their dogs, with their partners, or by themselves. They leave their house, walk around the neighborhood, pass other people doing exactly the same thing, and eventually arrive at the same place they started. Home.

There is nothing wrong with walking just to walk. Walking is good for our physical and mental health. It can reduce stress, support cardiovascular health, and give us something else that I think we underestimate, regular contact with other people. Even if we do not talk to them, we see them. We recognize the person with the dog, the couple we pass every evening, the family a few houses down. Eventually, the people around us become a little less unknown.

That is what makes me wonder why we keep building neighborhoods where walking is mostly something we do for exercise. Why can that same walk not take someone to a corner store, a pharmacy, a small restaurant, a park, a local business, or a school? We already provide all of those things. We just assume people will get into a car to reach them.

Somewhere along the way, we designed much of that out of our communities. For decades, cities in the United States were increasingly built around the automobile. Roads became wider, destinations became farther apart, and homes became separated from stores and other everyday uses. The car gave us freedom, but we eventually created places where having one was no longer simply freedom. It became a necessity.

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I wonder if we understood what else we were separating when we separated all those uses. We did not only create distance between a house and a store. We created distance between people.

And distance can make fear easier.

It is easier to be afraid of the person you never have to encounter. It is easier to imagine what a different type of housing might bring when you do not know the people who might live there. It is easier to fear a business, a neighbor, a different culture, or simply change when most of your experience with the unknown happens from a distance.

This has become more personal to me because I now live and spend time around people and institutions where I see that kind of fear becoming part of how decisions are made. Fear of change, fear of what may be built next door, fear of who may move nearby, and fear of having difficult conversations. When you spend enough time around that fear, you can start getting used to it. I have even caught myself forgetting what it feels like to live and work in places where the starting question is not simply, “What land use belongs here?” but “How do we improve people’s quality of life?”

That is why I have a hard time with the idea that planning is about land use and not people. It has never really been true. Every line we draw, every use we separate, every housing type we allow or prohibit, every sidewalk we make too narrow, and every destination we place too far away affects how people live and how often they encounter one another. Land does not experience our plans. People do.

Maybe we need to start planning in a way where communities are truly the stakeholders again. I believe our rules can be based on truth, goodness, and beauty, but that requires accepting something that can be difficult for planners, elected officials, and residents alike. We cannot control everything that will happen. Some things will be unpredictable. Some conversations will be uncomfortable. Some changes will surprise us. That does not automatically make them bad.

Maybe there is something beautiful about that uncertainty. Instead of creating rules around the fear of everything that could possibly go wrong, we can create places that make it easier for people to see each other, talk to each other, and learn how to live around people who may not be exactly like them.

If you have never experienced that kind of place, travel may help. Go somewhere where you can walk out the door and become part of the life around you. Avoid the tour package for a few days. Walk, get lost, visit a small store, sit in a plaza, take transit, and pay attention to how people interact when everyday life happens outside their homes and cars. You may come home wondering why something so normal started feeling so radical here.

And maybe some of our fears are not really about other people at all. Maybe they come from change, uncertainty, or knowing that we cannot control what happens next. Learning to live around people and becoming more comfortable with that uncertainty has helped me become a better planner. Maybe it can help you too. And if none of that works, there is always therapy.

Good luck

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I spent years working in Houston, the largest city in the United States without traditional zoning. Houston still regulates development through ordinances, building codes, deed restrictions, and rules controlling how property can be divided. It is not a city without rules, and it has certainly not solved segregation, inequality, or every problem created by development.

Still, my experience there showed me that different cultures, incomes, housing types, and ways of living can exist together without every property being separated into a zoning district. Houston is not perfect, but cities are not supposed to be perfect. They are made by people, and they should be human, able to change, and capable of making room for different people.

That experience changed how I think about zoning. Zoning is the system many cities use to decide what can be built and where. In planning conversations, I often hear that zoning does not regulate the “who.” It only regulates how land can be used. That statement is legally correct, but it does not tell the whole story.

Cities decide where apartments can be built, where a fourplex can be built, and where only one house is allowed on a property. They also decide how large a lot must be, how many homes can be built on it, and how far those homes must be from the street. These decisions affect the amount, type, and price of housing available, which helps determine who gets the opportunity to live there.

Imagine two properties of the same size. On one, the city allows only one large house. On the other, it allows four smaller homes. The city has not directly said who can live on either property, but it has helped determine what kind of housing will be available and how much someone may need to earn to afford it. The regulation describes buildings, but the consequences are felt by people.

We also cannot ignore the history. Zoning and other land use restrictions have been used to keep Black people, brown people, lower-income families, and others out of certain neighborhoods. The language eventually changed, but many of the tools that created separation remained. A rule does not have to name the people being excluded to produce exclusion.

Today, many cities say they need more housing. They support duplexes, fourplexes, garage apartments, smaller homes, and apartments, but only in the “right” places. We need more housing, apparently, but not in neighborhoods where existing residents may complain.

I do not believe that creating more opportunities for lower-income families erases the advantages that more privileged families have accumulated over many years. Allowing a duplex, fourplex, apartment, or smaller home nearby does not take away anyone’s education, professional connections, property ownership, financial security, or access to good schools and services. Giving more people access to opportunity is not the same as taking opportunity away from those who already have it.

Still, that is often how change is presented. If a city allows more people to live in a desirable neighborhood, some residents are told that their neighborhood is threatened or that their way of life is being taken away. But what are we protecting when the main concern is that someone with a different income, culture, language, or way of living might move nearby?

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There is a legitimate argument for regulating development. New housing can affect streets, drainage, water lines, emergency services, and other public infrastructure. Health and safety matter, and cities have a responsibility to address those impacts.

However, we should regulate the actual problem. If drainage is the concern, require the development to manage drainage. If the street cannot safely support additional traffic, study access and transportation. If fire safety is the concern, enforce building and fire codes. If the size or design of a building is the concern, regulate its form and how it relates to neighboring properties. We should not automatically prohibit an entire housing type when the real concern can be addressed directly.

This is also where politics enters the conversation. The people who complain, organize, vote, and attend public meetings often have more influence over what gets built than the people who may need a home there in the future. Future residents do not receive public hearing notices. The family that could have lived in the fourplex that was never approved cannot attend the meeting to defend it.

That is the uncomfortable part of planning we do not discuss enough. We say zoning regulates land, not people. At the same time, concerns about who might live next door often influence the rules we create for that land.

This does not mean cities should have no rules. It means our rules should focus on what actually affects the public, including safety, infrastructure, access, the environment, and how buildings relate to streets and surrounding properties. We should question rules that exist mainly to decide which types of homes, and therefore which people, are considered acceptable in a neighborhood.

Many communities welcome different cultures, incomes, languages, generations, and ways of living. Our rules should give those communities the freedom to grow instead of forcing every neighborhood to follow one narrow idea of how people should live.

Planning cannot be separated from the lives of the people we serve because communities are made of people, not land uses. We cannot keep saying zoning does not see the “who” when its consequences clearly do.

There is something that happens to me every time I travel to a city like Barcelona, Istanbul, Lima, or many other places outside the United States. I walk everywhere, but not because I am trying to exercise. I walk because that is simply how I experience the city. I find coffee around the corner, walk to a restaurant, sit in a plaza, or stop somewhere I had no intention of visiting. Along the way, I see children, older adults, workers, families, and visitors sharing the same streets. Apartments sit above cafés and small stores, and buildings come close enough to the sidewalk that the street feels like a place where life happens rather than simply the space between destinations.

Then I come home to Texas, and the experience changes almost immediately. The streets become wider, buildings move farther apart, and something as simple as getting coffee, buying groceries, or meeting a friend usually requires getting into a car. We build beautiful houses and attractive developments, yet so often the spaces between those buildings give us little reason to walk, stay outside, or interact with one another. I will admit that coming home sometimes makes me sad. It is not because I do not love Texas. This is my home. What makes me sad is knowing, after experiencing another way of living, that we are capable of creating something better here. Some people may respond, “If you like those places so much, why don’t you move there?” But why should I have to? Why should people in the United States have to travel somewhere else to experience the simple pleasure of walking out the front door and becoming part of the life of a community?

We have the resources, knowledge, and talent to build great communities. The problem is not that we do not know how to create them. In many places, the rules we have created make them unnecessarily difficult to build. As planners, we spend an incredible amount of time deciding where apartments can go, where stores can operate, how much parking is required, how far a building must sit from the street, and how many homes can exist on a property. Regulations are necessary, and I am not suggesting that cities should allow anything anywhere. But somewhere along the way, controlling land uses became more important than creating good places.

We became very good at separating things. Homes go here, stores go there, apartments somewhere else, and offices along another corridor. Then we connect everything with wider roads and larger parking lots and wonder why people do not walk. We regulate what happens inside individual properties while sometimes paying too little attention to what happens between them. Yet that space between buildings is where much of city life actually happens. Children walk to school, neighbors stop to talk, and small businesses become part of the neighborhood. These ordinary interactions are easy to overlook, but they are part of what makes a community feel like a community. When our planning system makes them difficult, we should be willing to question whether the rules are producing the places we actually want.

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Recently, CNU Latino hosted a webinar with Dr. Nir Buras of the Classic Planning Institute, and our conversation pushed me to think more deeply about this. We spend a lot of time in planning talking about innovation, new technologies, new policies, and new solutions. But humans have been building cities for thousands of years. People were creating streets, public spaces, and neighborhoods that worked long before we had the planning tools and regulations we use today. Many of those places have also adapted over generations and are still loved today. Listening to Nir made me wonder whether we spend so much time looking for the next planning solution that we sometimes forget how much we already know.

That does not mean recreating the past or copying Barcelona, Istanbul, or Lima somewhere in Texas. Texas should look and feel like Texas. But we should be humble enough to recognize that previous generations understood things about building communities that we may have forgotten. Dr. Buras talks about the “magic of place,” and I like that idea because anyone who has traveled has probably experienced it. There are places where you naturally slow down, look around, walk a little farther, sit for a while, or simply want to stay. It may be the street, the buildings, the shade, the people around you, or a combination of things that is difficult to explain. You just know when a place feels right.

Maybe our planning rules should focus more on the experience we are creating for people. Can a child walk safely through the neighborhood? Can an older adult remain independent without having to drive everywhere? Can people with different incomes and at different stages of life find a place in the same community? Knowing whether a property is classified as residential, commercial, or office tells us very little about what it will actually feel like to live there.

Many of the walkable neighborhoods people love in the United States have become extremely expensive, and that can create the impression that walkability, beautiful architecture, mixed uses, and active public spaces are amenities for wealthy people. I think part of the problem is that we have made these places rare. When only a small number of neighborhoods offer this kind of life, people with the resources to do so compete to live there. The answer should not be to stop creating beautiful neighborhoods. We should make them more common and make sure there are different kinds of homes and opportunities for people with different incomes and at different stages of life. Beauty, dignity, and access to community life should not depend on how much money someone makes. Beautiful houses create value for the people who own them, but beautiful streets create value for everyone.

None of this requires Texas to become Europe or Latin America. I want Texas communities that reflect our climate, history, cultures, architecture, and the people who actually live here. But being able to walk to a store, meet your neighbors outside, or spend an evening with your family in a public space is not European or Latin American. Those are human experiences. We know how to create places where those things can happen because we have done it before. The question is whether we are willing to make it easier to do again.

I love traveling, and I hope I never stop experiencing cities around the world and learning from them. But travel has also made me more demanding about what I believe we can accomplish at home. We do not need to copy someone else’s city. We need to build communities that are ours, places that reflect who we are while giving people the opportunity to walk, meet one another, participate in public life, and feel connected to the place they call home.

I should not have to leave the United States to find that, and neither should anyone else.

On a weeknight, a few hundred people filed into a room to hear how a dying mall would be reborn. The plan was ambitious and, on paper, exciting. An arena for a hockey team, shops wrapped around it, apartments above the shops, restaurants, a walkable district where a sea of parking used to be. The kind of project a city puts on the front page. I went because I live here, and because reading a room like this is my work. I wanted to see how the people who will live around this thing, my neighbors, were being invited into the decision.

The meeting ran the way these meetings almost always run. Two hours on a weekday evening, after the workday, which is to say after the second shift has already started for a lot of people. If you wanted your voice counted, you pulled out your phone and typed your comment into a form. There were no sticky notes on a wall. No tables with paper and pens. No station where someone who does not trust a phone, or does not read English quickly, or simply thinks better with a marker in hand, could leave a mark. The room was full, and it was full of a particular kind of person. Retired, mostly. Living close by. Comfortable speaking up in English in a public room. These are real neighbors with real stakes, and none of what I am about to say is against them. But a room is a design decision, and this room had been designed for them and almost no one else.

So I asked the question the format was already answering on its own. Are you going to take this to other neighborhoods? Are you going to do this in other languages? The answer, cleaned up, was no. The reason given was speed. All of this had come together so quickly that there had not been time to do it any other way. Then a staffer turned the question back on me. Do you know a community that needs this translated into Spanish?

I have thought about that question a great deal since, because of everything it gives away. If you are the city and you do not already know who you need to reach, or where they live, then that is the job you are failing at. Knowing your residents is not a favor a resident performs for you at a microphone. It is the floor of the work, the thing that comes before any plan.

This is a city of nearly three hundred thousand people. According to Census figures, almost a quarter of its residents are Asian, roughly one in six is Hispanic, and many households speak a language other than English at home. The median household income clears a hundred thousand dollars, which tells you this is a prosperous place, and prosperity is exactly what hides the people who are not sharing in it. A few miles from the proposed district are older neighborhoods with working families and a history shaped by segregation and unequal investment. None of that was visible in the room.

A meeting that reaches none of these people is not a neutral meeting that happened to be small. It is a meeting that decided, before it began, whose input would shape a district meant to outlast everyone in the room.

And here is the part that should trouble us more than it does. A short survey and a comment box work fine for some people. For others, participation runs on trust, and trust is not something you collect on a Tuesday. You build it by being present before you need anything, not by arriving with a finished rendering and a two-week window. When a government only shows up in a neighborhood to extract a signature or a comment, the neighborhood learns precisely what it is worth to that government.

The exclusion does not end with the meeting. It can become part of the district itself.

Mixed-income and mixed-use are not amenities you sprinkle on a project to make it look generous. They are the mechanism by which a place produces opportunity instead of concentrating it. When you put homes at different price points on the same blocks as the shops, the offices, and the arena, you make it possible for the people who will actually work in that district to live near the work.

The people selling the tickets, cleaning the arena, cooking in the restaurants, and teaching in the school that eventually follows the rooftops are not an afterthought to the district. They are the district.

A development that only builds housing one kind of person can afford is not a neighborhood. It is a resort with a commute attached, and the commute lands hardest on the exact workers who keep the place running. We already know where that road ends, because we are standing on it. We do not have enough housing people can afford, yet we keep approving projects that add little or none of it, and then we act surprised by the shortage we designed.

When I raised the question of mixed-income housing, the answer came back to feasibility. The numbers, we were told, do not add up. I do not accept that, not as a sentence offered without a single figure behind it. A developer’s return is not the same thing as a city’s return. Cities can measure the difference. A fiscal impact analysis compares what a given pattern of development costs a city to serve against what it returns over its whole life, which means a city does not have to guess which projects pay their own way and which quietly drain the budget. When those costs are actually measured, dense, mixed-use development has been shown to generate far more tax revenue per acre than conventional low-density development, while often costing less to serve. That does not settle the mixed-income question by itself, but it should end the habit of treating the most spread-out development as the safe financial bet, when the opposite is closer to the truth.

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So when someone tells you the mixed-income math does not work, the honest response is to ask them to show the analysis. Not the developer’s projection, which is built to answer a different question, but the city’s own accounting of what it costs and what it returns over the life of the thing. If a city is considering public money or incentives for a private arena, the least it can do is know, in real numbers, what it may be trading away and what the people who live there would get back.

Here is the one hopeful thing about that night. The survey is still open. Nothing has been decided. This is not a vote that lands in a week. Which means the excuse and the opportunity are the same fact. If there was no time to reach the rest of the city before the meeting, there is time now.

A city that wanted to could use this open window to go where it did not go, speak in the languages it did not use, and reach the people it left outside the room. The timeline was never the real constraint. The will was.

But defaults have gravity, and the default is already set. The frame of this project was built in a room most of the city never entered, and frames are hard to move once the renderings are printed and the press release is out. Into a region already struggling with housing costs and long commutes, we are proposing one more district a nurse, a line cook, or a teacher may not be able to afford to live in, and calling it progress because the arena will bring revenue to the city.

And look at who brings that revenue in. The storefronts a district like this fills are the national chains and the large restaurant groups, the tenants who can afford the rents it sets, and the money they take in does not stay. It leaves for a headquarters in another city. The local restaurant and the corner shop, owned by people who live nearby and spend what they earn where they earned it, get priced out of the place built in their own community. A district can bring in revenue and still send almost all of it somewhere else.

Revenue is not the thing I am arguing against. Bring money into the city. But money that flows into a city and never reaches the people who live there is not development. It is extraction with a better facade.

I am not asking anyone to give things away. I am asking us to build so that mixed-income and mixed-use become the vehicle for investing in the people we say we serve, so that a family can stay, and earn, and set something aside for a future that is better than the present.

That is what integration is for. Not a box checked on a site plan. A block where the person who can afford the penthouse and the person who cleans it both go home to the same neighborhood, and where the second person’s children grow up sharing an address with the first person’s opportunity.

We built the shortage we are living in by asking who could profit from a project and almost never who could belong there.

The mall is dead. Something will rise where it stood.

The only question that matters is the one the meeting was built to avoid.

Who are we building for?

If the answer is only the people who could make it to the room, then we already know what we are building, because we have built it before, and we are still paying for it.

On Tuesday morning, before the sun was fully up, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo left his home in Houston’s East End and drove to pick up his crew. His uncle and two other men were riding with him to a construction job north of the city. He was fifty-two years old. His family says he had lived in the United States for about thirty-five years, most of his adult life, and in all that time he had helped build houses for other people to live in. He was a man of routine, his son said. He got up, he gathered his workers, he went to work.

That routine is not his alone. It belongs to thousands of men across Houston who leave before dawn in trucks and vans, tools in the back, a co-worker in the passenger seat. It belongs to a city that has been built and cleaned and cooked for and held together by immigrant labor for generations. It is so ordinary that no one notices until it stops. Lorenzo had kept those hours for thirty-five years. He was not a headline when he woke up. He was a father of three, a husband, a man in the process of obtaining a work permit.

By the time his family found him, he was in a hospital bed with CPR in progress, and soon after that he was gone. According to the Department of Homeland Security, immigration officers were running a targeted enforcement operation in the East End when they tried to stop the van Lorenzo was driving. The agency says he refused to follow commands, rammed a law enforcement vehicle, and tried to run over an officer, and that an agent fired in self-defense. A source with preliminary knowledge of the operation later told reporters that Lorenzo was not the man the agents had set out to find, that Texas authorities had flagged two other people in a white van, and that neither of them was him. His family says he would have complied if he had understood that the unmarked cars following him belonged to law enforcement. The Harris County medical examiner ruled the cause of death a gunshot wound to the torso and the manner of death a homicide, a classification that does not by itself decide criminal intent.

His family says they first learned what happened through video and reports circulating online, the way too many families now learn the worst news of their lives. His uncle and the other workers were reportedly detained. A memorial grew overnight at the corner where he fell, candles and flowers and handwritten notes. Hundreds marched down Canal Street chanting for ICE to leave Houston. Local and federal officials questioned what threat agents believed they faced from a man his family says had no criminal record and had lived here for thirty-five years. Even the president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, promised legal action against the United States over the death of one of her citizens. All of it set in motion because a man drove to work.

There is something underneath this story that most of the coverage will not reach, and it should matter to anyone who works in a city.

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I am a citizen. I have papers. I work in public service, in the kind of job that asks people to trust government enough to show up. And still, when I read about Lorenzo, something in me flinches, because fear does not check your documents before it arrives. Fear travels through language, through skin, through an accent, a last name, a neighborhood, a memory. For a great many immigrant and Latino families, a killing like this is not a distant news event. It is a warning. It tells them what can happen on an ordinary Tuesday, and it changes what they are willing to do.

Here is what that costs, and this is where I speak to the people who do this work alongside me. When fear settles into a community, people stop showing up. They stop calling when the water main breaks. They stop coming to the meeting where the rezoning gets decided. They stop reporting the slumlord, the flooding, the danger on their own street. They decide the safest thing is to be invisible. And when people disappear from the process, government loses the truth of the community. A planner cannot plan for people who have been frightened into silence. The map goes blank exactly where the need is greatest.

The killing is not a planning story. A man shot by an ICE agent on Canal Street is not the same as a zoning code or a highway route, and I will not flatten one into the other. But the fear that follows has a history planners should recognize. American planning has taught communities before that government was not for them, through redlining, through highways driven straight through neighborhoods, through zoning written to keep certain people out. Each wound taught the same lesson, and communities learned it by withdrawing. A killing on the way to work teaches it again, faster, through fear instead of policy. The act is different. The retreat is the same. And a city that refuses to name what that retreat does to trust will keep planning on top of the silence it helped create.

So it matters that people refused to let this pass quietly. Lorenzo’s son said his father deserved to live a quiet life under his own name, not to be reduced to a headline. LULAC and members of Congress demanded to know who authorized the operation and whether anyone tried to de-escalate before firing. The Harris County District Attorney began collecting what information it could reach. None of that undoes the killing. But it means the first version is not being accepted as the final version, and that is not nothing.

What remains is a wall. The shooting sits with the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general, the alleged assault on the officer with the FBI, and the evidence and witness statements all held under federal control. The agents involved had not been issued body cameras, according to a DHS spokesperson, so no official footage of the stop exists at all. The mayor of Houston has said the city has no jurisdiction, that there cannot be two investigations, that the right move is to press federal partners for transparency. He may be right about the limits of jurisdiction. But jurisdiction is not the same as responsibility. A man was killed on a Houston street. His neighbors are afraid on Houston streets. That makes it a Houston matter, whether or not a Houston officer pulled the trigger.

Cities keep telling immigrant communities that public services are for them, that the meeting is open, that their voice counts. Those words mean nothing to a family that just watched a father die on the way to a construction site. If a city wants to be believed, it has to act like it understands the fear it is asking people to set aside. It has to say plainly that a man dying on his way to work is not somebody else’s problem. It is a wound in the community, and a wound that goes unnamed is a wound that gets inflicted again.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo went to work and never came home. His son said the hardest part is knowing his father will never again spend an evening on the porch of the house he worked his whole life to keep. That porch is still there. The city his labor helped build is still there. The empty chair is still there too. The least the city can do is not look away.

The meeting is over and the folding chairs are half put away when a resident walks over to the planner. She has lived on the same block for thirty years, long enough to watch the street outside her door turn from a place where children played into a road where cars move too fast for anyone to cross safely. Her grandchildren cross it twice a day to get to school. She is not asking for much. She wants a crosswalk, or a light, or anything at all that tells a driver a child might be here. She is calm about it because she has asked before. She asks the planner because they kept showing up. They learned the names on her block. They sat in that room enough times that she decided this might finally be someone worth trusting.

For planners who do this work honestly, that trust is the whole job. They go to meetings nobody requires them to attend. They learn a neighborhood the way a person learns a language, slowly and by being present, until people stop saying what they think City Hall wants to hear and start telling the truth. That truth is the most valuable thing a city can hold because it is the one thing no consultant, traffic model, or market study can manufacture. The woman standing beside those folding chairs knows more about that street than any report ever will. When she finally trusts someone enough to say it out loud, she is sharing knowledge that took years to earn and cannot be bought.

So the planner carries it back to the office, the way they are supposed to. They write it up. They present the recommendation. Somewhere along the way comes the familiar response: there is nothing to be done. Not because the request is unreasonable. Everyone who has stood on that corner agrees the street is dangerous. There is nothing to be done because of politics. The council member has other priorities this cycle. The budget is already spoken for. The timing is bad, and somehow the timing is always bad. It comes in the same calm, reasonable tone every time, but underneath it is the same message.

That is just how it works.

Then the planner goes back to the woman and hands her a softer version of no. She nods because she already knew. She never really believed the city would move. She came anyway, hoping this time might be different. Now she has her answer, and it is the same one her block has been receiving for as long as she has lived there.

That is what costs more than an unpainted crosswalk.

The system asked what she needed. She told the truth. Nothing happened. After enough experiences like that, people stop believing the city wants to hear from them. They show up less. Eventually they stop showing up at all. The trust the planner spent years building does not disappear. It changes into something more honest. It becomes the belief that people like her were never really expected to win.

I want to stop the story here and say plainly, to you, what is actually happening when someone tells you it is just politics, because that phrase hides more than it explains.

Politics, in that sentence, almost never means the hard work of building agreement among people who disagree. It usually means discomfort. More specifically, it means the discomfort of the person who would have to spend political capital, give something up, or share a little power so the woman could get her crosswalk. When someone who is comfortable calls something politics, what they are often saying is that the cost of acting would fall on them, and they would rather it keep falling on her.

This debate is not new. Our profession has been wrestling with it for decades. In 1965, Paul Davidoff, the planner who introduced the idea of advocacy planning, argued that there is no such thing as a neutral planner. The planner who claims to stand above the conflict is often protecting the people who already benefit from the way things are. Doing nothing is not objectivity. It is still a choice.

A decade later, Norman Krumholz, Cleveland’s planning director, built his work around a simple idea: a public planner should expand the choices of the people who have the fewest. He was told it was unrealistic. He was told that was not how the system worked. He was told it was politics. He did it anyway, and the work outlasted the people who told him no.

Neither argued that planners should speak for communities. They argued that planners have a responsibility to make sure communities have a fair chance to shape the decisions that affect their lives.

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There is another truth buried inside that phrase, and it is harder to admit. The person telling you a dangerous street is just politics has probably never had to cross it. Comfort is not just a salary or a title. It is the distance between making a decision and living with its consequences. Many of the people sitting in comfortable offices have spent their lives protected from the problems they are being asked to solve, and much of that protection was shaped by zoning. Generation after generation, it decided who would receive investment and who would live with risk, who would have choices and who would be told to wait. Some people in those rooms honestly do not understand what those decisions have meant for families like the one on that block. That is the version I can almost forgive. The version I cannot forgive is the one where they know and decide it is someone else’s problem.

So you have to stop treating that person’s comfort as the limit of what is possible. Not by lying, and not by getting yourself fired in a way that leaves the community worse off than before. You do it by changing what you believe your job really is. You are not there to lower the crosswalk down from the institution because the institution was probably never going to let you do that. You are there to hand people the map. You explain which meeting actually matters. You point them to the council member who can make a difference. You introduce them to neighbors who have won similar fights before. You explain, in plain language, what the code allows and where the real leverage is. You give people the knowledge the institution tends to keep to itself. Then you step back and let them lead.

None of this will appear on your performance review, and that is exactly how you know it matters. The community organizes. The room the person above you assumed would stay empty begins to fill. Politics that once seemed impossible begins to move because the people with power finally have to listen. When the crosswalk is finally painted, your name is nowhere near it, and it should not be. The victory belongs to the neighborhood.

The job is not to speak for the community. The job is to make sure the community can speak for itself.

Maybe one morning, that grandmother walks her grandchildren across a painted crosswalk. Not because the system suddenly found the answer, but because a community learned how to make the system listen.

The phrase sounds like wisdom. It sounds like experience talking. Sometimes it is just fatigue wearing the costume of efficiency. In community outreach it becomes permission to stop thinking. We take an engagement method that worked in one neighborhood, drop it into another, and call it a best practice. We never ask the only question that actually matters. Does this fit the people in front of us?

Here is what bothers me about the wheel itself. A wheel is never just a wheel. It is a wheel for something. The wheel on a race car would tear itself apart under a tractor. A bicycle wheel cannot hold an airplane. The little wheel under your suitcase would be useless on a mountain road. Engineers understand this and feel no shame about it. They redesign the wheel constantly, because the road changed, or the load changed, or the speed changed. They do not call that failure. They call that the job.

Outreach is the same, and we keep forgetting it. I have seen meetings where the flyer was translated, the room was reserved, the agenda was prepared, and still the people most affected were not there. Not because they did not care. Because the process was designed for people who already knew how to participate. The same round of flyers and evening hearings that fills a room in one neighborhood reaches no one in the next, and the difference is almost never effort. It is history. People learned a long time ago whether government shows up to ask or to take, and they remember the last broken promise long after the rest of us forget we made it. Same method, completely different result.

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I did not learn this from a textbook. I came to this country from Peru, and before I ever called myself a planner, I learned what it feels like to be outside the room where decisions are made. I have sat with families who would never walk into a public meeting, not because they had nothing to say, but because no one had earned the right to hear it. Trust is not a deliverable you copy from a past project. It is built in one place, with one group of people, in their language, on their schedule, around their history. You cannot photocopy it.

None of this means best practices are worthless. I am not telling anyone to start from zero every morning. Experience is real, and ignoring it is its own kind of arrogance. But a best practice is a starting point, not a finished product. It is a question, not an answer. It says, here is something that worked somewhere, once, for someone. Now go do the harder part. Find out if it works here. Sometimes the honest answer is no, and good engagement means adjusting instead of forcing the fit.

I understand that reinventing the wheel is just a phrase. Nobody says it to do harm. But I have started to notice how much creativity we give away every time we lean on it. When the answer that worked somewhere else is already sitting on the shelf, we stop looking for the better one. We stop asking what this place, these people, this moment could teach us. The solution that would have fit this place never gets built because the safe answer arrived first. That is not efficiency. That is a missed chance dressed up as good judgment.

So the next time the room relaxes and someone reaches for that phrase, slow it down. Ask what road this wheel was built for. Ask who was in the car. Ask whether the people we are trying to reach have ever driven this stretch of road before. If the answers do not line up, then yes, you reinvent the wheel. Not to waste effort, but because the people you serve deserve a wheel built for their road instead of someone else’s.

The wheel is not sacred. The people are. Build for them.

We fly across oceans to feel it. We get on a plane, land in some old neighborhood in Europe or Latin America, and tell our friends the trip was magical because everything was right there. We rarely ask the obvious question when we get home. Why did I have to leave the country to feel that? Why can I not walk to anything where I live?

I want to put two houses next to each other and ask you to look before I say anything else.

One of these houses is in The Heights, in Houston, Texas. The other is in San Borja, in Lima, Peru. If you have spent any time around city planning in the United States, you already know which one you are supposed to like. The Houston house has the front porch, the iron fence, the small green yard, the shutters, the door that faces the sidewalk and seems to invite you up the steps. There is no garage staring at the street and no driveway cutting across the walk. The Lima house breaks every rule we teach. A blank wall faces the street. Two wide garage doors sit right on the sidewalk. The living space hides behind and above, with a balcony looking down. By the design language we use in American planning meetings, the Houston house is good manners and the Lima house is a mistake.

Now let me tell you which neighborhood I would rather live in if I wanted to walk. It is not the one you were taught to pick.

I am writing this because of a comment I keep hearing in planning rooms, said with full confidence, that a walkable neighborhood is one with front porches, stoops, friendly doors, and buildings that face the street. I understand the instinct. I also think it puts the order of things backwards, and these two houses are the cleanest way I know to show why.

Let me be fair to The Heights, because I am not here to insult it. It is one of Houston’s oldest neighborhoods, founded in 1891 as one of Texas’ earliest planned communities and connected to downtown by streetcar. Tree-lined streets, old bungalows, a real grid. By Houston standards it is genuinely walkable, and it has earned that reputation. Nineteenth Street is a true commercial spine with shops and restaurants and a theater, and the city even passed a Walkable Places ordinance in 2020 to protect that character. Old M-K-T rail buildings now hold restaurants and breweries. People there will tell you they can leave the car at home for a night out, and they are telling the truth.

There is a real reason that house looks the way it does, and I want to say it plainly so no one mistakes my argument. Houston is hot, it is humid, and it floods. The Heights itself was settled on higher ground precisely because it drained better than the city below it. A house lifted off the ground, a deep porch for shade, a roof built to move water off fast, a front door raised above the street, all of that is climate answering a hard sky. It is intelligence about rain and heat, and I would not change a line of it. In Houston, that house is correct.

But look closer at the pattern. The Heights, depending on where you draw the line, holds somewhere between roughly seven thousand and thirteen thousand people per square mile. The median home now sits around six hundred seventy five thousand dollars, and the new construction that looks like the house in that photo runs far higher than that. The fabric is mostly single family, and the walkable life is concentrated on a few corridors. You walk to 19th Street as a destination. From most of the neighborhood, you drive to it first. The breweries and the boutiques and the weekend brunch are wonderful, and they are also not the same thing as a pharmacy, a small grocery, a school, and a park stitched into the residential blocks themselves. For a lot of ordinary daily errands in The Heights, you still get in the car.

Now walk with me through San Borja, in the blocks around Rosa Toro, between Javier Prado and Canadá. First, the weather, because it is half the reason these two houses look nothing alike. Lima has close to the opposite climate, which for a builder is almost no weather at all. The city sits in a coastal desert and barely sees real rain. A house there never had to fight the sky the way a Houston house does, so it can turn a plain wall and a garage to the street without breaking the walkable life around it. Each house answers its own place, and both are right to. Which is exactly why the house is the wrong place to look. Design answers climate, culture, and comfort. Whether you can walk out your front door and reach what you need is answered by everything around the house.

So let me show you what is around it. This is not a poor neighborhood I am romanticizing. San Borja is one of the more comfortable districts in Lima, well off, well kept, the kind of place professionals want to raise children. It holds about a hundred thirty three thousand people in less than four square miles, which works out to close to thirty thousand people per square mile. That is two to four times the density of The Heights, and you would never feel crowded walking it. That density is what pays for everything being close. It is what lets a corner store, a bus line, and a small park three blocks apart all survive.

Here is what within reach means there. Small parks sit inside the residential blocks, not at the edge of the neighborhood but in the middle of it, surrounded by houses, with a few corner stores at the corners. People in San Borja call these parks by name and treat them like living rooms. Parque de la Mujer, Parque Juan Gris, Parque Amistad, Parque Aguas de San Borja, and the big one a little further off, the Parque de la Felicidad. Kids play there after school. Neighbors meet there. On Saturdays some of them turn into small markets where you buy produce off a folding table. Walk a few minutes in any direction from one of those blocks and you cross pharmacies, several of them, open late. Bodegas. Bakeries. Restaurants serving the menu of the day to people who walked over on their lunch break. None of this is hidden on one special street. It is spread through the neighborhood in every direction, because the neighborhood was allowed to mix.

And then, around the outside of all that quiet residential interior, you hit the big avenues. Javier Prado, Aviación, San Luis. That is where the malls are, the bigger commerce, the offices, the bus stops, and the elevated Line 1 of the Lima Metro, which has run over Avenida Aviación since 2011. From the inside out it goes house, then plaza and corner store, then neighborhood errands, then avenue and train. You can live most of your week on foot and reach the rest of the city without owning a car. That is not a vacation. That is a Tuesday.

Let me stop the story here, because this is where most of us in American planning get the lesson backwards, and I want to be precise about it.

New Urbanism is the movement that grew up in the 1980s and 1990s as a reaction against sprawl and against the single-use zoning that pulled houses, shops, jobs, and schools apart and forced a car between them. The Congress for the New Urbanism wrote a charter around a handful of real ideas. Walkability. Mixed use, meaning homes and shops and work in the same place. A mix of housing types and incomes. Connection, meaning streets that link instead of dead end. Density high enough to support all of it. Good public space. The movement is right about all of this. It is most of the reason I do this work.

But somewhere along the way, in meeting after meeting, the movement got flattened into a look. The porch. The setback. The hidden garage. The alley. The picture. And the picture is not wrong. Those design moves do good things. A porch can put eyes on the street, slow a car down, and start a conversation with a neighbor.

So when someone tells me a walkable neighborhood is a neighborhood with porches, I hear a true thing said in the wrong order. Design matters for many reasons, climate and comfort and safety and beauty among them. It does not, by itself, mandate or regulate whether a place is walkable. The porch has become one of the most recognizable faces of New Urbanism. The engine underneath it is mixed use, density, and connection. A door that faces the sidewalk is worth nothing if the sidewalk leads nowhere you need to go. You can see the proof all over Texas right now, in master planned developments that print the Heights look onto raw land at the edge of a highway. The porches are there. The shutters are there. And the nearest gallon of milk is a four lane road and a left turn away. The form is New Urbanist. The life is pure sprawl.

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It is fair to ask why we keep building it this way when we know better. Because this was never only a design debate. Part of it is habit. Part of it is a harder history that we tend to step around, and we should name it instead. The separation of houses from everything else was never only about keeping things tidy. Single family zoning in this country was used, on purpose, to sort people by class and by race, to wall certain families out of certain blocks. When a plan refuses to let a neighborhood mix uses and mix incomes, it is not neutral. It is repeating an old decision about who gets to live close to opportunity and who has to drive to reach it. Any new plan that does not understand that history will build it again with nicer materials.

Here is the turn that matters. What makes the San Borja block walkable is the permission the neighborhood was given to be many things at once, homes and parks and stores and transit woven together at a density that lets a small business survive and a bus line make sense. Take the prettiest house on that block and drop it on an arterial road in a place that forbids the corner store, and you have not exported walkability. You have exported a facade.

We are, slowly, starting to relearn this in the United States. Cities are loosening rules that allowed nothing but single family homes. Houston, of all places, the city with no formal zoning at all, passed ordinances to protect walkable streets and let buildings come to the sidewalk. The instinct is correct. It just has to go deeper than the picture.

So here is what I want planners and builders and neighbors to sit with. The design of a house matters. I am not throwing out the porch, and in Houston I would build it for the rain and the heat alone. But the design means almost nothing for walking if the house can only ever be a house, on a block that can only ever be houses, in a place where every need lives on the far side of a car ride. A neighborhood earns the word walkable when the building can change, when the block can hold a store or a clinic or a small office without anyone panicking, when a child and an older person and a person who cannot afford a car can all still reach what they need on their own two feet.

That is the real test, and it has nothing to do with style. A neighborhood has to be able to adapt, to become other things as people and needs change, instead of sitting frozen as one use forever. And it has to integrate, to let homes and shops and incomes share the same block, because that mixing is not a decoration. It is the thing that turns a pretty street into a place people can actually live.

The Houston house knows how to look like belonging. The Lima house, blank wall and all, knows how to deliver it. Give me the second one every time, and then let us learn to build it here, where I live, so the next generation does not have to buy a plane ticket to remember what it feels like to walk out the front door and simply have what they need.

During his keynote, Raj Chetty, a Harvard economist whose work on mobility has reshaped how researchers think about opportunity in the United States, spoke about research showing that children from lower-income families have better long-term outcomes when they grow up in mixed-income communities. The point was not that they live near wealthier people. It was that they become exposed to different social networks, expectations, and relationships that shape the direction of their lives. He called it economic connectedness. Children growing up in these environments are more likely to attend college, earn higher incomes, and gain access to information and opportunity that does not exist in places where poverty is concentrated.

That argument tends to dominate the conversation. Mixed-income housing is framed as something we do for lower-income families, with the rest of the neighborhood acting as a kind of generous host. But the longer I sat with Chetty’s research, the more I sat with Chetty's research, the more I thought about what tends to get left out of the conversation around it. The benefit moves in both directions. The host changes too.

I lived in an ADU and later a triplex inside wealthier neighborhoods. It was just me. Young, renting, foreign. The neighborhoods themselves were not homogeneous either. There were people from different backgrounds and young families mixed in among the longtime homeowners. I was close to work, close to public transportation, close to college. Driving was an option, not a requirement. On paper, I was exactly the kind of resident some homeowners oppose when they hear multifamily, density, or affordable.

At first there was distance, and you could feel that people were unsure whether I belonged there. Then one day I helped an older neighbor with something. I cannot even remember what it was. Probably carrying something. I am Hispanic but I am not handy, so it was nothing impressive. It was small enough that I forgot about it almost immediately. It was not small to her. A few days later she invited me to dinner with some of her friends.

I brought pisco sour, made by me, the Peruvian way. I am a proud Peruvian and that was not going to change at someone else’s dinner table. The drink became the door. They asked about Lima, about how I ended up in their neighborhood, about my family back home. After that night, their gatherings became part of my life there. I was thirty or forty years younger than most of them. What I learned in those rooms I will not forget.

They were not performing inclusion. They were giving me the quiet confidence that I could be one of them, not a white retiree, not a property owner, just a neighbor.

That sentence is the whole argument. Belonging to a neighborhood did not require looking like the people who had lived there for decades, and it did not require owning the roof over my head. I was renting. I was foreign. I was young. I was still a neighbor. And the people who already lived there got something out of it too. They got a version of me, and of this country, that they would not have met if zoning had kept renters like me out.

This is where most planning conversations miss the point. Mixed-income housing is not charity. It is the only way many people across class and culture ever actually meet each other. Wealthier residents become more empathetic over time, not because anyone lectured them, but because they were forced to confront realities they had never experienced. They begin to understand why some families live in multigenerational homes, why transportation access matters, why a single unexpected expense can break a household.

The truth is that immigrant and working-class families often carry the burden of being the ones who must constantly prove they belong. The small favor, the pisco sour, the willingness to show up at a dinner where you are forty years younger than everyone else in the room. That work falls on the people who already have less. When it works, both sides gain. But we should be honest about who is doing the work of changing minds in this country, and who is simply waiting to be convinced.

The other side of the cost is what happens when this exchange never takes place. Wealthier neighborhoods that never share space with anyone outside their income bracket raise children who become adults unable to read the country they live in. They do not learn to recognize the lives happening just outside their school district, their cul de sac, their HOA. That is a quieter form of poverty, but it shapes how they vote, hire, govern, and build for the rest of their lives. The dinner table I sat at gave those neighbors something too. It gave them a country that was a little more accurate than the one they had been told existed.

So when planners and residents argue about ADUs, triplexes, multifamily, density, compatibility, the conversation tends to stay inside the vocabulary of buildings. Setbacks. Units per acre. Parking ratios. But the real question underneath all of it is whether the people who live in a place will ever have the chance to know each other.

The difference between fear and empathy is often just proximity. A shared sidewalk. A conversation. A neighbor inviting someone different into their home for dinner. We talk about housing as if we are discussing buildings, setbacks, and density. Most of the time, we are really deciding whether people will ever have the chance to know each other at all.

That is where the deception begins. Not at the airport. Not at the border. At the kitchen table.

The men who accept these offers are not naive. They are calculating, the way anyone calculates when the options at home are narrowing. Many are reportedly contacted through social media and messaging apps, promised contracts in dollars and signing bonuses they could never earn at home. What they cannot see is that the offer was constructed, from beginning to end, to look like a chance. The job does not exist. By the time they understand the work is in a war zone, they are already on Russian soil, already without their documents, already being told that signing a military contract is the only way out.

One rescued Peruvian described the pattern in his own words. He was lured to Moscow with a job offer, abducted on arrival, stripped of his papers, and threatened with prison unless he signed. Foreigners like him, he said, are treated as expendable. Some are sent into combat after only weeks of preparation. Some come home wounded. Some do not come home at all.

That man came home. Many have not. As of early May 2026, Peruvian media reported at least thirteen deaths based on the account of the attorney representing affected families. A later EFE report cited by Infobae placed the number at fifteen. Other reports describe dozens of missing Peruvians and estimates ranging from hundreds to more than 600 people affected. The exact numbers keep shifting, and that is part of the scandal. Families are still waiting for someone in authority to say plainly how many people this happened to and what is being done to bring them home.

This is not recruitment. It is trafficking. People are not being recruited into war. They are being delivered into it.

What is happening to Peruvians is not unique to Peru. Reports from international investigators and media describe the same pattern across countries. Fake jobs. Contracts in Russian. Confiscated passports. Promises of money, work, or citizenship. Then the front line. Russia’s foreign recruitment machine depends on people who are desperate enough to believe that a dangerous offer might still be better than staying where they are.

Peru has begun to respond. The Public Prosecutor’s Office is investigating the case as presumed human trafficking. The Ministry of Justice has provided legal aid to families. The Foreign Ministry has demanded information from Russia about Peruvians connected to the war. These are real steps. They are also steps that arrived after families had already filed complaints, after deaths had already been reported, and after the story had already become too visible to ignore.

When a government goes quiet on something like this, that is not neutrality. It is a choice. Families waiting for news about a son or a husband are not waiting for policy clarity. They are waiting to know if someone is alive. Every week that passes without a public accounting is a week those families navigate grief, rumor, and bureaucratic silence at the same time. A government does not need every answer before it speaks. It needs the honesty to say what it knows, what it does not know, and what it is doing to close the gap.

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Russia and Peru share responsibility for this, but they do not share it equally. The Kremlin built the network. Its recruiters target populations they know are economically desperate, because desperation makes people easier to deceive. Calling what follows “voluntary service” requires ignoring how consent actually works. Consent does not exist when the truth is withheld and coercion follows. Peruvians are being used as expendable bodies in a war that has nothing to do with them, and the Russian state designed that outcome.

Peru’s failure is different, but not minor. Warnings reached families after their sons were already missing. Investigations opened after deaths were already reported. A government that reacts only after the damage is visible has already failed the people it was supposed to protect.

I come from a country where people leave because staying feels impossible. I have worked in communities where residents knew something was wrong long before any institution acknowledged it. Neighbors recognized the signs of trafficking before any agency named them. Families carried the weight of it in private long before anyone offered them help. That work taught me a hard lesson about how these systems break down. The information is almost never missing. The fear is not missing. The pattern is not missing. What is missing is anyone in a position of power willing to listen to people who already know.

That is the gap that lets a network like this one keep working. Traffickers do not exploit ignorance. They exploit the distance between what communities know and what institutions act on. The conditions that made these recruitments possible did not begin at an airport gate. They began in the everyday math that makes a constructed job offer feel like a reasonable risk. When the economy at home offers no clear path forward, people accept uncertainty they would otherwise reject. Traffickers understand this. They build their schemes around it.

We should not be asking why individuals took these offers. We should be asking why those offers keep finding the same kinds of people, in the same kinds of neighborhoods, in the same kinds of moments, and why the systems meant to protect them keep arriving after the damage is done.

This is not a failure of information. It is a failure of responsibility.

What that means now is concrete. Peru’s Foreign Ministry owes families a public, regular accounting. How many Peruvians are confirmed in Russia, how many are missing, how many are dead, and what is being done to bring the living home. Consulates need a clear protocol for reaching trapped Peruvians, and the public should know what that protocol is. Migration and labor agencies should be running active warnings inside the communities most at risk, in the same channels where these offers actually circulate, not after a death has been reported but now. And the rest of us, especially Peruvians at home and abroad, should be naming this story out loud, in the places where the next offer is about to land.

People are dying because no one with authority has been willing to treat this as the emergency it already is. The first step is refusing to let silence finish what deception started.

Sources
Infobae Perú, “Se eleva a 13 la cifra de peruanos muertos en la guerra Rusia-Ucrania” (May 1, 2026). Reporting based on statements from attorney Percy Salinas representing affected families. https://www.infobae.com/peru/2026/05/01/se-eleva-a-13-la-cifra-de-peruanos-muertos-en-la-guerra-rusia-ucrania-en-medio-de-denuncias-por-reclutamiento-con-enganos/

Infobae Perú, “Trata de personas en la guerra Rusia-Ucrania: 73 peruanos desaparecidos y 8 fallecidos” (April 29, 2026). https://www.infobae.com/peru/2026/04/29/trata-de-personas-en-la-guerra-rusiaucrania-73-peruanos-desaparecidos-y-8-fallecidos-tras-ser-reclutados-ilegalmente/

Infobae Perú, “Red internacional recluta a peruanos con engaños: prometen bonos de USD 20 mil, confiscan pasaportes y los envían al frente” (April 27, 2026). https://www.infobae.com/peru/2026/04/27/red-internacional-recluta-a-peruanos-con-enganos-para-enviarlos-a-la-guerra-en-rusia-prometen-bonos-de-usd-20-mil-confiscan-pasaportes-y-los-envian-al-frente/

Infobae Perú, “Reclutadores que enviaron peruanos con engaños a la guerra en Rusia amenazan de muerte a sus familias” (April 28, 2026). https://www.infobae.com/peru/2026/04/28/reclutadores-que-enviaron-peruanos-con-enganos-a-la-guerra-en-rusia-amenazan-de-muerte-a-sus-familias-para-silenciar-denuncias/

Infobae Perú, “Familiares de peruanos reclutados por red internacional de trata reciben apoyo legal del Minjusdh” (April 29, 2026). https://www.infobae.com/peru/2026/04/29/guerra-rusia-ucrania-familiares-de-peruanos-reclutados-por-red-internacional-de-trata-reciben-apoyo-legal-del-minjusdh/

Infobae Perú, “El negocio de mandar peruanos a morir en la guerra” (May 2, 2026). https://www.infobae.com/peru/2026/05/02/el-negocio-de-mandar-peruanos-a-morir-en-la-guerra-asi-funciona-la-red-de-reclutamiento-ruso-que-opera-con-impunidad-en-todo-el-mundo/

EFE / Infobae update on rising casualty count to 15 Peruvians, citing the legal defense representing affected families.

El Comercio, “Ministerio Público inicia investigación por trata de personas de peruanos trasladados a Rusia.” https://elcomercio.pe/lima/ministerio-publico-inicia-investigacion-por-trata-de-personas-de-peruanos-trasladados-a-rusia-fiscalia-ultimas-noticia/

El Comercio, “Gobierno exige a Rusia información de peruanos reclutados para la guerra.” https://elcomercio.pe/lima/sucesos/gobierno-exige-a-rusia-informacion-de-peruanos-reclutados-para-la-guerra-cancilleria-noticia/

El Comercio, “Trabajos fraudulentos para peruanos en Rusia: así los captan y terminan en la guerra.” https://elcomercio.pe/lima/sucesos/guerra-trabajos-fraudulentos-para-peruanos-en-rusia-asi-los-captan-y-terminan-en-la-guerra-noticia/

La República, “De falsas ofertas a la guerra: Fiscalía investiga presunta trata de personas” (May 1, 2026). https://larepublica.pe/sociedad/2026/05/01/de-falsas-ofertas-a-la-guerra-fiscalia-investiga-presunta-trata-de-personas-por-caso-de-peruanos-llevados-a-rusia-27885

La República, “Ocho peruanos muertos y 5 heridos tras viajar a Rusia” (April 27, 2026). https://larepublica.pe/sociedad/2026/04/27/ocho-peruanos-muertos-y-5-heridos-tras-viajar-a-rusia-y-ser-enviados-a-guerra-contra-ucrania-1397250

La República, “Peruanos enviados a Rusia habrían sido amenazados de muerte tras denunciar estafa laboral” (April 29, 2026). https://larepublica.pe/sociedad/2026/04/29/peruanos-enviados-a-rusia-habrian-sido-amenazados-de-muerte-tras-denunciar-estafa-laboral-1316716

RPP, “Rusia recluta a extranjeros en condiciones vulnerables para combatir en guerra con Ucrania.” https://rpp.pe/mundo/actualidad/rusia-recluta-combatientes-extranjeros-guerra-ucrania-trata-personas-informe-noticia-1686373

RPP, “¿Qué puede hacer nuestro país para repatriar a los peruanos llevados a Rusia con engaños?” https://rpp.pe/politica/judiciales/que-puede-hacer-nuestro-pais-para-repatriar-a-los-peruanos-llevados-a-rusia-con-enganos-para-combatir-a-ucrania-noticia-1686135

RPP, “Fiscalía inicia investigaciones preliminares por presunta trata de personas.” https://rpp.pe/lima/judiciales/fiscalia-inicia-investigaciones-preliminares-por-presunta-trata-de-personas-en-caso-de-peruanos-trasladados-a-rusia-noticia-1686616

Radio Nacional, “Embajada de Rusia y Cancillería se pronuncian sobre peruanos reclutados para guerra en Ucrania.” https://www.radionacional.gob.pe/noticias/nacional/embajada-de-rusia-y-cancilleria-se-pronuncian-sobre-peruanos-reclutados-para-guerra-en-ucrania

BioBioChile, “18 peruanos que viajaron engañados a Rusia serán repatriados” (May 3, 2026). https://www.biobiochile.cl/noticias/internacional/america-latina/2026/05/03/18-peruanos-que-viajaron-enganados-a-rusia-seran-repatriados-iban-a-servir-en-la-guerra-con-ucrania.shtml

ABC Color, “Regresan a Perú 18 nacionales reclutados en Rusia para combatir en la guerra de Ucrania” (May 2, 2026). https://www.abc.com.py/internacionales/2026/05/02/regresan-a-peru-18-nacionales-reclutados-en-rusia-para-combatir-en-la-guerra-de-ucrania/

I remember the first time I realized something was wrong with how Americans build their cities. It was not in a classroom or a planning document. It was the silence. The streets where I first lived in the United States were wide and quiet in a way that felt less like peace and more like absence. Nobody was outside. Stores were miles away, behind parking lots the size of city blocks. There was no corner to linger on, no sidewalk that led anywhere worth going. I had grown up walking to everything, to the bodega, to school, to the panadería where the smell of fresh bread reached you half a block before you arrived. I had grown up in a place where neighbors were witnesses to your life and you were a witness to theirs. I did not have a word for what I had lost. I just knew I was somewhere that had traded it away.

That place I came from, and the feeling of losing it, is what I think about now when I hear people talk about the 15-minute city as though it were a new idea. It is not. It is a description of how most of the world has always lived, and how much of the United States chose not to. The question worth asking right now is not whether that model is pleasant. It is whether, given what is happening in the world, it is the only model that actually holds up.

I want to return to that word. Fragile. Because what I felt as a disoriented immigrant navigating a car-dependent suburb is the same word Professor Steve Keen used in a recent conversation that I have not been able to stop thinking about. Keen, the rebel economist who predicted the 2008 financial crisis, joined Steven Bartlett on The Diary of a CEO and laid out how much of what we depend on daily moves through a single 21-kilometer passage, the Strait of Hormuz, carrying 20 to 30 percent of the world’s oil, fertilizer, and helium. A prolonged conflict there, he argues, could trigger a global famine and collapse semiconductor production. You can watch the full conversation here. His conclusion is that the only real protection is self-sufficiency. Not as a survivalist fantasy, but as a serious, community-scale strategy for how we organize our lives.

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What Keen is describing at the global level is the same logic I lived before I ever came to this country. A system that depends on things that are far away and outside your control is a system that breaks the moment something interrupts the chain. That is true whether you are talking about oil moving through a 21-kilometer passage in the Middle East or a family that cannot buy groceries without a car. When the things you need are close to you and the people around you are genuinely connected and interdependent, the system has more ways to absorb a disruption. Proximity does not just make life more pleasant. It makes it harder to break.

This is where the conversation about the 15-minute city needs to be more honest. Most of the time it is presented as a lifestyle preference, a way to walk more, drive less, and enjoy more pleasant streets. All of that matters, but it is too comfortable a framing for the moment we are in. When food, services, work, and daily needs are close to where people live, communities become less dependent on systems that are far away and outside their control. Proximity creates options. It creates the ability to keep functioning when something outside the neighborhood starts to fail. That is not a design preference. It is a form of collective protection.

The deeper problem in America, and this is the part that I think will hurt the most, is not infrastructure. It is culture. The United States was built, ideologically, on the premise that self-reliance is a virtue and that dependence on others is a weakness. That belief shaped zoning codes, subdivision design, and transportation investment in ways that physically enforce separation. We built an entire environment around the idea that the ideal American life is one lived at maximum distance from other people, and for a long time, when supply chains were stable and the global system was running smoothly, that model worked well enough that most people never questioned it.

That same belief operates at the personal level in ways that make community building harder than it needs to be. Asking for help is still treated in this culture as something close to failure. People are afraid of looking incapable, even when they are simply trying to learn something they have never been taught. The reality is that most things feel simple only after you understand them, not before, and a society where people are hard on each other because they are even harder on themselves is a society that struggles to build the trust and interdependence that resilient communities actually require. The individualist model has no answer for what happens when the system it depends on breaks down. It was never designed to.

Immigrant communities have always known this. When you arrive somewhere new without capital, without established connections and without fluency in the language around you, you do not survive through individualism. You survive through networks. You share tools, skills, childcare, information and meals. You build proximity, social density, economic density and cultural density, because your daily reality requires it. This is not a cultural preference or a romantic way of living. It is a survival strategy that has been working for generations, and it is one that American planning has consistently undervalued, zoned against, and in many cases actively displaced. What we should have been doing, for decades, is learning from it.

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The policy conversation has to follow from this honestly. Building more resilient communities means allowing mixed uses so people can live and work closer together. It means supporting small and local businesses that serve neighborhoods directly rather than drawing people away from them. It means designing streets that people can actually move through on foot, not just pass through in cars. It means reforming zoning rules that enforce separation and make proximity illegal in much of this country. None of this is without resistance. It is politically difficult because it challenges rules and expectations that have been in place for generations. It is culturally difficult because it asks people to accept that relying on others is not weakness but wisdom. That is a hard argument to make in a country that has built its identity around the opposite idea, but avoiding it does not make the underlying fragility go away.

Waiting for politicians to lead this is not a strategy. Most elected officials are not afraid of the wrong idea. They are afraid of the next election, and that fear keeps them in follower mode when the moment is asking for something different. So the question shifts to what the rest of us can do without their permission. It starts with who we support. Small developers who are trying to build walkable, mixed-use, human-scale projects in our cities need customers, advocates, and communities that show up for them. They are working against zoning codes, financing systems, and cultural expectations that were all designed for a different model. Supporting them is not charity. It is an investment in the environment your children will inherit. It also starts with the conversations we are not having enough, particularly with younger people. A generation that grew up with the internet has access to something no previous generation had: the ability to see, in real time, how the rest of the world lives. They can watch footage of a street in Medellín, a market in Lisbon, a neighborhood in Tokyo, and understand immediately that the car-dependent suburb is not the only option and not even a good one. If you have children, younger siblings, nieces or nephews, people you love who will be living with the consequences of the decisions being made right now, talk to them about this. Ask them how they want to live. Not what job they want or what car they want to drive, but how close they want to be to their neighbors, how they want to move through their city, what kind of street they want to grow old on. They already know the answer. Most of them just have not been told they are allowed to ask for it.

The utopia people imagine for the future of cities is something many of us already lived. We left it, or it was taken from us, or we arrived in a country that had traded it away for the convenience of cheap gas and wide roads. But we carry the memory of it in our bodies, in the way we still look for the corner store, still wave at neighbors, still feel vaguely uncomfortable when a street has no one on it. That memory is not sentiment. It is a design brief. It is evidence that another way of organizing human life is possible, because we have seen it work.

The question is whether this country is willing to learn that lesson on its own, or only after the systems it depends on stop working.

Abraham Zorrilla is a Senior Planner and Chair of CNU Latino at the Congress for the New Urbanism. He writes about cities, power, and the politics of place at The Human Link.

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Houston is known for not having zoning. That is not an accident. It is a decision made over time by its residents, one that reflects a belief that people should have a direct role in shaping their neighborhoods and how the city grows.

That idea shows up in how Houston operates. It is a place where culture is not something you describe but something you experience. Different languages, traditions, and ways of life exist side by side. It is not perfect, but it is real. And in that reality, people come first.

That is what makes planning in Houston different. It is not just about rules or regulations. It is about understanding how people actually live and trying to respond to that, even when it is complicated. That approach does not always align with the state, and on April 8, 2026, that tension became impossible to ignore.

That day, the Houston City Council voted 12 to 5 to pass an ordinance that changed how the Houston Police Department interacts with federal immigration enforcement. The policy was not extreme. It did not block cooperation or attempt to override federal law. Instead, it clarified that local police should not hold someone longer than necessary based solely on a civil warrant from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, while also requiring transparency from the mayor’s office on how immigration enforcement is carried out locally.

On paper, it reads like a small adjustment. In practice, it touches something much deeper.

Houston is one of the most diverse cities in the country. Entire neighborhoods operate in multiple languages, and families move between cultures every day. For many residents, especially immigrants, the relationship with police is not just about safety. It is about trust, and whether asking for help could create more risk instead of less.

City leaders understood that. If people are afraid to call the police, crimes go unreported. If witnesses stay silent, cases fall apart. Public safety depends on trust, not fear.

But that local logic does not exist in isolation.

Five days later, on April 13, the Governor’s office responded with a direct message: repeal the ordinance by April 20 or lose 110 million dollars in state public safety funding. There was no long negotiation or extended legal debate. Just one week to decide.

The state’s position is rooted in Texas Senate Bill 4, which prohibits cities from limiting cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. From the state’s perspective, Houston crossed that line. From the city’s perspective, it was trying to clarify its role and protect its residents.

At that point, the obvious question is whether the state can actually do this. The answer is more complex than many people assume.

States do have significant authority over cities. Under concepts like Dillon’s Rule, cities operate within the framework set by the state. That allows the state to limit local actions and attach conditions to funding. But that authority is not unlimited.

There are legal boundaries, especially when funding is used as leverage. Under the Spending Clause Doctrine, governments can attach conditions to funding, but those conditions cannot be so extreme that they eliminate any real choice. In NFIB v. Sebelius, the Supreme Court made it clear that financial pressure can cross a line and become coercion.

That is what makes this moment different. A one-week deadline tied to 110 million dollars is not just a policy disagreement. It raises a more fundamental question about whether the city is being given a real choice or being forced into one.

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There is also the question of whether Houston’s ordinance actually violates state law. That is typically something resolved in court, not through an immediate financial ultimatum. So while the state may have the authority to challenge Houston, the way it is doing it sits in a gray area.

This is where the real story begins, because this is not just about immigration policy. It is about power.

Cities like Houston deal with problems at the street level. They see how policies affect real people in real time and respond to what is happening in neighborhoods. States, on the other hand, control the framework. They set the limits and control the money.

That 110 million dollars is not abstract. It funds officers, equipment, and programs that serve the same communities this ordinance was meant to protect.

Houston has faced state pressure before. On housing, on development, and on local policies, the pattern is familiar. The city moves based on what it believes its residents need, and the state responds by setting limits. But this moment feels different because the pressure is immediate and the cost is clear.

And this is where my view becomes more personal.

I am proud of Houston.

Many will say the city is being irresponsible, that it is risking too much, and that it should not challenge the state when that much funding is on the line. I understand that perspective, but I see a city that is willing to listen to its people and act on it, even when it creates conflict.

That is not easy to do. There are cities that would have adjusted immediately, avoided the fight, secured the funding, and moved on. That may be the safer path, but over time, when decisions are driven by fear of losing funding instead of what residents need, something shifts. The connection between people and their local government begins to weaken.

Living in North Texas, I see that dynamic more clearly. Decisions are often shaped by caution and concern about how the state will respond. Over time, that caution becomes the default. Cities become more careful, less willing to take a position, and people feel that distance.

That is why this moment in Houston stands out. Not because I know what the final decision will be. The stakes are real, and the consequences matter. But because, at least right now, the city is choosing to stand with what it believes its residents need.

Twelve council members made that decision, knowing the pressure that would follow.

Because power is supposed to come from the people.

April 20 will force a decision. This moment already shows what it looks like when a city is willing to stand up for its people, even when many will say it is a mistake.

If you’re reading this and thinking this sounds chaotic, you’re right. But here is the part that doesn’t make the international headlines. It was supposed to work exactly this way.

At the same time, even the basics showed cracks. Reports from Peru’s Oficina Nacional de Procesos Electorales (ONPE) pointed to delays and shortages of voting materials in some locations on election day, forcing extensions of voting in parts of Lima and even abroad. For many voters, the problem was not just choosing between 35 names. It was whether the system could even handle that choice. When the ballot becomes this large and fragmented, even administration starts to break down.

This Wasn’t Chaos. It Was Architecture.

The runoff rule, by itself, isn’t the problem. What sits underneath it is.

Under Peru’s Ley de Organizaciones Políticas, reformed multiple times between 2019 and 2025, parties need only a minimal number of registered affiliates to stay active. The catch is that they must compete in elections or risk losing their registration.

The result is what Peruvians call partidos de alquiler. Rental parties. Political vehicles built around one face, one contract, one ambition.

They are easy to create. They run. They peel off a point or two. They survive another cycle.

Thirty-five names appeared on that ballot. Five columns. Special printing. Most of those candidates were never going to win. Some of them knew it.

The left and center fragmented across dozens of lists. Established political machines, with structure and resources, are positioned to advance.

This is not a coincidence. It is the math of a system designed this way.

A weak mandate going into a runoff is not a problem for established political machines. It is the plan.

The Congress that could reform these rules is the same Congress that benefits from them. Since 2016, Peru has seen eight presidents, a level of turnover that reflects how instability has become part of the system.

Presidential instability is not a bug. It is leverage.

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To the Left or the Right, Corruption Looks the Same

Before looking at who may advance to the runoff, we need to dismantle a lie.

The idea that Peru’s problem is one side of the political spectrum.
The idea that one bloc is the problem and the other is the solution.

This is a costume. Ideology is the dress. Corruption is the body underneath.

For example, the Odebrecht scandal did not belong to one party. It reached across the entire system. Regional governors, legislators, and business networks operated regardless of who was in power. Illegal mining networks in regions like Pataz-La Libertad show the same pattern.

Pedro Castillo was a disaster. He attempted a self-coup and deserved to be removed.

But the political forces that removed him are not clean alternatives. They carry their own corruption cases, their own financing issues, and their own interest in keeping the system unstable.

The problem is not ideological. It is structural.

Public office becomes access. Access to contracts, protection, and survival.

What We Know About the Leading Candidates

This is not about rumors or campaign attacks. These are documented facts.

Keiko Fujimori | Fuerza Popular

Keiko Fujimori is running for president for the fourth time. She is the daughter of Alberto Fujimori, who was convicted in 2009 of bribery, illegal wiretapping, and crimes against humanity. That legacy has followed her political career.

Between 2017 and 2026, she faced one of the largest corruption prosecutions in Peru: the “Cocktails Case.” Prosecutors alleged she received approximately $17 million in illegal campaign funds from Odebrecht and other corporate groups. She spent 16 months in pretrial detention. Prosecutors sought a 30-year prison sentence and a long-term ban from public office.

In October 2025, Peru’s Constitutional Court dismissed the case on procedural grounds. The law used by prosecutors did not exist at the time of the alleged conduct.

That matters legally.

But it does not mean the money was not received. It does not mean the relationships did not exist. It means the law came after the behavior.

This case is not isolated. Fuerza Popular has also been linked to broader judicial corruption scandals and additional campaign finance investigations in recent election cycles.

She launched her 2026 campaign days after the dismissal.

Rafael López Aliaga | Renovación Popular

Rafael López Aliaga entered the race as an anti-corruption candidate, shaping his campaign persona around that message.

The irony is not subtle.

In September 2025, a Peruvian court extended a money laundering investigation against López Aliaga and his business group, ACRES, by 24 months, keeping it active into 2027. Prosecutors allege that between 2010 and 2018, a structure was used to move funds through offshore companies in Panama, the United States, and the British Virgin Islands.

The estimated impact to the state exceeds S/ 37 million.

In March 2026, a separate investigation was opened regarding S/ 4 billion in municipal debt accumulated during his time as mayor of Lima.

No conviction has been issued. He denies the allegations.

But the investigations are active.

The man who campaigned as “Porky,” known for his cartoon-style way of speaking, is under investigation for money laundering.

The Machine That Won

The 35-candidate ballot was not a failure.

It worked exactly as designed.

Fragmentation ensured that no candidate would approach a majority. The system now moves toward a runoff where a small share of the vote determines who advances.

The institutions that could change this system benefit from it. Party registration rules remain weak. Oversight remains limited. Congress continues to operate with significant power over the executive branch.

Instability is not a side effect.

It is the product.

And Yet. We Still Have to Hope.

This runoff will not offer a clean option.

But the people are still there.

The millions who voted across those dozens of lists are still there. People who want a government that builds, delivers, and works.

If Keiko Fujimori wins, there will be no one left to block her. Her party has spent years restricting other presidents from governing effectively. Now the responsibility is entirely hers. If something good happens, it will be because the same forces that once slowed things down are no longer doing so. And she will take credit for it.

What the international community needs to understand is simple.

Peru’s problem is not left versus right. It is the capture of institutions.

It is the same networks, across parties, operating inside a system that protects them.

Until that changes, the outcome will not.

The 35-candidate ballot was not democracy.

It was democracy’s ghost.

Sources:

• Election delays and extended voting coverage:
  NPR (AP): https://www.npr.org/2026/04/13/g-s1-117208/peru-election-results-delayed
  Al Jazeera: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/12/peru-votes-for-ninth-president-in-less-than-decade

• Peru Constitutional Court dismissal of the “Cocktails Case” (Keiko Fujimori):
  Americas Quarterly: https://www.americasquarterly.org/article/peru-meet-the-candidates-2026/
  Mercopress: https://en.mercopress.com/2026/01/14/peru-case-dropped-against-keiko-fujimori-heralds-new-presidential-bid

• Investigation into Rafael López Aliaga (Panama Papers / money laundering case):
  Infobae: https://www.infobae.com/peru/2025/10/21/rafael-lopez-aliaga-en-problemas-por-caso-panama-papers-pj-amplia-a-24-meses-investigacion-preparatoria-contra-lider-de-renovacion-popular/

• Investigation into municipal debt under López Aliaga (Lima):
  Infobae: https://www.infobae.com/peru/2026/03/21/fiscalia-anticorrupcion-dispone-investigar-a-rafael-lopez-aliaga-por-endeudamiento-de-s-4-mil-millones-en-mml/

• Official election authorities:
  Oficina Nacional de Procesos Electorales (ONPE):

  https://www.onpe.gob.pe

• Jurado Nacional de Elecciones (JNE):

  https://www.jne.gob.pe

Living there changed how I experienced the city. I walked more. I started recognizing people. I built routines without even thinking about it. The places I visited became familiar, and the people working there became part of my daily life. That is something we often ignore when we talk about housing. It is not just about shelter. It is about access, stability, and connection.

Today, accessory dwelling units have become controversial in many cities. One of the most common concerns is that they will be used primarily as short term rentals. But the data does not fully support that fear. Research from Urban Institute and reports from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development show that most ADUs are used for long term housing, either rented to tenants or occupied by family members. In cities like Los Angeles and Portland, they have quietly expanded housing supply without large scale redevelopment. What I saw in Houston reflects that reality. These units were not just investment tools. They were part of how people made living in the city possible.

Now I live in North Texas, and my fiancée and I recently started looking to buy a home. We both have stable careers, good credit, and access to financing. On paper, we should be exactly the type of buyers the market is built for. But our experience has been far more difficult than expected.

We walked into homes priced well above what they were worth, many in poor condition, with sellers acting like buyers had no other option. As if they were doing us a favor. At the same time, the neighborhoods that offered the kind of life we were looking for, walkability, proximity, and daily interaction, were out of reach.

We had to make a choice. Live close to work and be disconnected from everything else, or live in a more walkable, active area and accept a longer commute. We chose the second.

At some point, it stopped feeling like an exciting step forward and started feeling like a negotiation with a system that was not built for us. We would leave showings frustrated, trying to make sense of prices, conditions, and tradeoffs that did not add up. It was not just about finding a house. It was about trying to find a way to live the life we had worked toward.

That experience forced me to ask a bigger question. Why is it so hard to find something that should be normal?

This is where the housing conversation often falls short. We tend to focus on design, density, and aesthetics, but we rarely talk about how housing shapes daily life. Growing up in Peru and later living in Houston, I experienced neighborhoods where daily interactions were part of the environment. You knew the people at local businesses. You built trust over time. You felt part of something larger than your own home.

That is what mixed use actually creates. Not just walkability, but connection.

In the United States, our housing policies have largely been shaped by a strong culture of individualism. That mindset shows up in zoning, in subdivision design, and in how we define success in planning. We have normalized separation. Separation of uses, separation of income levels, and in many cases, separation of people.

We also need to be more precise about what we mean when we say there is a housing shortage. In many cases, the issue is not just the number of units. It is the lack of entry points.

We keep building large homes, on large lots, at high prices, and then act surprised when people cannot afford them. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median size of new single family homes has remained historically high even as affordability has declined. At the same time, zoning in many cities limits the development of duplexes, triplexes, and other forms of missing middle housing.

If we only allow one type of housing, we are planning for one type of person.

We also need to be honest about zoning.

It has not always been a neutral tool. In many cases, it was used to separate people and limit access to opportunity through rules on use, lot size, and housing type. That history is documented, and its effects are still with us.

And yet, we continue to treat zoning as the solution.

When we restrict entire areas to one type of housing, we are not just regulating land. We are shaping who gets to live there.

Removing zoning does not mean removing standards. It means regulating differently. Instead of rigid rules applied across large areas, we can focus on parcel level standards that guide form, scale, and how buildings relate to people.

If we keep using the same framework that helped create exclusion, we should not expect different results.

We regulate land in bulk, but people experience it one parcel at a time.

The answer is not complicated, but it does require us to change how we think about housing.

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We need to build smaller. Smaller homes. Duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes. Even eightplexes in the right places. We need accessory dwelling units by right. We need flexibility in areas with access to jobs and transportation. We need neighborhoods where someone can start small and stay over time.

There is also a cultural reality we are ignoring. According to the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals, Hispanic households added approximately 441,000 net new homeowners in 2025, bringing the total to over 10 million. Without Latino homebuyers, the United States would have experienced a net loss in homeownership.

Latinos are not a small part of this market. They are holding it up.

For many Latino families, housing has never been just about the individual household. I grew up in a culture where family and community are part of daily life. Where you rely on people around you, not just by choice but because it is how you move forward. That reality still exists for many households today, but our housing system is not designed to support it.

This is where the work of Fernando Pagés Ruiz becomes important. He is an Argentinian American affordable housing developer, author of Building an Affordable House, and a co founder of CNU Latino. He has consistently pushed the idea that affordability is not only about subsidy, but about how we design housing in the first place. Smaller lots, simpler construction, and flexible housing types can reduce costs before financing or programs even enter the picture. That approach shifts the conversation from how we fund affordability to how we build it into the system.

We are in a moment where housing policy is gaining national attention, and there is real momentum for reform. But increasing supply alone will not solve the problem if the types of housing being built remain limited. Building more of the same, in the same patterns, for the same segment of the population will not create a more inclusive system.

A different future is possible.

A neighborhood where a young professional can afford to live near work. Where a family can grow without being pushed out. Where different incomes share the same block. Where small housing is not seen as less, but as a starting point.

That is what it looks like when policy adapts to people.

That is what it looks like when housing begins to heal.

There are moments in a relationship that seem small on the surface but stay with you longer than expected. A comment, a reaction, or a misunderstanding that doesn’t quite make sense can leave you wondering why something so simple turned into something bigger. Over time, I’ve started to realize that these moments are not always about what was said, but about where it’s coming from.

I have seen many of my friends build relationships with people from their own culture, and for them, things often feel more intuitive. There is a shared understanding of expectations, boundaries, and behaviors that does not always need to be explained. For me, that has never felt as simple. I have always been someone who loves dancing, especially Cuban salsa, and as a result, I naturally have many female friends. In my experience, several friends from Latin America have told me they would struggle to be with someone who has that dynamic. That reality forced me to reflect on what kind of relationship I could truly build, and it may be one of the main reasons I started dating outside of my culture or region. Not because something is wrong with my culture, but because I needed a different kind of understanding.

I’m from Peru, and Maja is from Croatia, with a strong connection to Serbian culture. We met in the United States, which means our relationship does not fully belong to one culture. Instead, it exists somewhere in between all of them. That “in-between” space can be enriching, but it can also be confusing. It forces you to constantly interpret, adjust, and sometimes question things you always assumed were normal.

Living in Houston played a much bigger role in this than I initially realized. I have been here for 25 years, and Maja for over a decade, and that kind of exposure changes how you see people. You start to understand that what we often call “culture” is not as fixed as we think. Latino culture or Balkan culture do not exist as single, uniform things. There are patterns and similarities, but at the end of the day, they are more about geography than identity. What really shapes you is who you connect with and how open you are to those experiences. Houston forces that openness if you allow it. You meet people from everywhere, and if you truly engage, your perspective expands. I think that is a big part of why Maja and I connected. She is from Croatia, raised in a Christian Orthodox background, but she loves dancing salsa. I am from Peru, I grew up with Cuban salsa, became Buddhist, and I am open to almost any food or experience. On paper, we come from very different places, but in reality, we have built something that does not fit into simple cultural labels.

And even with that openness, we still have moments where those differences show up in ways we don’t expect.

One of the biggest realizations for me has been understanding that what feels obvious to me is not necessarily obvious to her. There have been moments where I reacted to something assuming it did not need explanation, because it felt natural based on how I was raised. But for her, that same situation could carry a completely different meaning. The reverse is also true. What feels intuitive to her can feel unfamiliar or even uncomfortable to me. These moments are not about one person being right and the other wrong. They are about two people bringing different definitions of “normal” into the same space.

Language adds another layer that people often underestimate. We both communicate in English, but it is not the first language for either of us, and that creates subtle gaps in how things are said and how they are received. Sometimes the issue is not the intention behind the words, but the way they are interpreted. I remember being around Maja’s circle and hearing conversations that, to me, sounded intense. Voices would rise, the tone felt strong, and at first I genuinely thought people were arguing. Then, a moment later, everyone would be laughing. Maja had to explain to me that this is just how they communicate. It is direct, expressive, and full of energy, but not necessarily negative. On the other side, she pointed something out about me that I had never really noticed. She told me that the way I speak can come across as flirtatious. For me, that is simply how I am friendly and open, especially coming from a background where warmth and connection are expressed more openly. But she helped me understand that, depending on the context and the person, it can be interpreted differently. Neither way is right or wrong, but both require awareness. It takes patience not just to speak, but to interpret each other correctly, and to recognize that what feels natural to one person can mean something completely different to someone else.

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What has made the biggest difference for us is not a single conversation or a breakthrough moment, but a gradual shift in awareness. Over time, we began to understand that the problem was never love, but understanding. That realization changes how you approach everything. You stop taking things as personal attacks and start seeing them as differences in perspective shaped by experience. Instead of reacting immediately, you begin to pause, ask more questions, and give each other space to explain what you mean. It does not solve everything, but it changes the direction of the conversation.

One thing that helped us reach that point was therapy. It gave us a space to step outside of the moment and see what was really driving our reactions. Maja grew up in a region marked by conflict and witnessed the impact of multiple wars connected to her religious and cultural background. That history is not something you leave behind easily, and it shapes how you process situations, emotions, and even trust. Through therapy, I began to understand not only my own experiences and patterns, but also hers. It helped us see that we are not reacting to each other as much as we are reacting from within ourselves. The tension is not always about what is happening in front of us, but about what we carry with us.

That awareness also made us more conscious of how our environment affects the relationship. Being in spaces that are not fully ours can add another layer of pressure that people outside the relationship do not always see. Sometimes there is an assumption that both of us should automatically feel comfortable in any setting, even when language or cultural context creates a barrier. For example, being in a room where everyone is speaking a language one of us does not understand can feel isolating, even if no one intends it that way. I may not always mind it, but that does not mean Maja feels the same, especially when she is trying to connect with my family or be part of those moments. The same applies in reverse.

Family, without realizing it, can sometimes reinforce the differences that already exist in a cross-cultural relationship. Not out of bad intentions, but out of habit. People default to what feels natural to them, whether that is language, humor, or the way they interact. But for someone coming from a different background, those small things can create distance. It requires effort from both sides, not just from the couple, to create spaces where both people feel included and understood.

All of this has shown me that being in a cross-cultural relationship is not just about learning each other, but also about navigating the spaces around you. It is about recognizing that understanding does not happen automatically, and that sometimes it requires more intention, more patience, and more effort than people expect.

I am still learning this with Maja every day, and I am far from getting it right all the time. But I see it now in a way I did not before. And that awareness alone has already started to change the way we understand each other.

What has been your biggest challenge in a cross-cultural relationship?

A Statewide Pattern

In Houston, the Houston Independent School District, the largest district in Texas, voted unanimously on February 26, 2026 to close or consolidate 12 schools. Eight campuses will permanently close and four will be merged or co located with nearby schools beginning in fall 2026. Most of the affected campuses are elementary and middle schools, many located on the east side of the city. District officials estimate the closures will save between 14.6 million and 20 million dollars each year.

Houston is not alone. Aldine ISD has already closed 11 schools. Fort Bend ISD may close seven more. Spring ISD is closing two campuses. Austin ISD has approved closing between 10 and 13 schools. Fort Worth ISD plans to close 18 campuses over several years. Districts near San Antonio, Corpus Christi, Dallas, and North Texas are facing similar decisions.

The Texas Education Agency reports that statewide enrollment grew slightly in the 2024 to 2025 school year to about 5.54 million students. But projections show a decline beginning in 2026 to 2027, with roughly 24,000 fewer students expected. Urban districts are absorbing the impact first. Houston alone lost more than 7,900 students during the 2025 to 2026 school year.

For city planners and community leaders, these numbers raise a question that goes beyond education budgets.

What happens to a city when its schools begin to disappear

Schools Are More Than Buildings

For me, this is not abstract. My dad and my sister are elementary school teachers, and my mom, who I miss every day, worked as a substitute teacher. All of them worked in the Gulfton area of Houston.

Gulfton is one of the most dense and diverse neighborhoods in the city. Within just a few square miles, more than a dozen schools serve families from all over the world. That concentration reflects the number of children, the diversity of cultures, and the constant movement of families in and out of the area.

In places like Gulfton, schools shape how a neighborhood works. They influence where families choose to live, affect housing demand and transportation patterns, and support nearby small businesses. Parks, libraries, and community spaces often grow around them. Parents meet each other there. Voting happens there.

In many neighborhoods, the school is the most important public building because of what it makes possible around it.

Urban planner Andrés Duany, one of the founders of the Congress for the New Urbanism, has long argued that neighborhood schools are essential to healthy communities.

“When children can walk to school, neighborhoods come alive.”

The opposite is also true.

When a school closes, the daily rhythm it created begins to disappear. Parents no longer walk their children to class. Fewer people are on the sidewalks. The small interactions that made the neighborhood feel alive start to fade.

A closed campus can mean fewer families choosing to stay. It can mean longer commutes for students who are reassigned miles away. It can mean less activity on streets that once had a reason to be active.

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Why Schools Are Closing

The closures happening across Texas are not caused by a single factor. Several trends are happening at the same time.

Fewer children are being born today than in previous decades. That shift is now moving through the school system year by year.

Families are also relocating, often to suburbs or more affordable areas. At the same time, education choices have expanded. Charter schools, private schools, homeschooling, and new voucher programs are drawing students away from traditional public schools.

In 2025, Texas approved Education Freedom Accounts. Beginning in the 2026 to 2027 school year, families can receive up to 10,474 dollars per student to pursue alternative education options, with higher amounts for students with disabilities.

Because school funding is largely based on enrollment, fewer students mean less revenue. At the same time, districts still have to maintain buildings, staff campuses, and run systems designed for more students.

Many campuses are also aging. Some are half empty but still expensive to maintain.

From a financial perspective, consolidation becomes difficult to avoid.

A New Factor: Fear

In Houston, another factor has entered the equation.

Fear.

HISD lost nearly 4,000 immigrant students during the 2025 to 2026 school year, a 22 percent decline. Overall enrollment dropped by about 8,000 students.

Many families are keeping children home due to concerns about immigration enforcement. Increased ICE activity in Harris County has created a climate of uncertainty.

Students have spoken publicly about this shift. During walkouts in Houston earlier this year, one HISD student said:

“We fear coming to school. We can’t go buy groceries. We don’t feel free.”

Even children who are U.S. born are affected when their families fear interacting with public institutions.

The impact goes beyond attendance. Families stop participating. They do not stay after school. They do not gather outside the gates. They do not use nearby parks the same way.

For districts that depend on enrollment, the impact is immediate. HISD could lose around 51 million dollars in funding. Under enrolled campuses become harder to sustain, and those numbers feed directly into closure decisions.

Fear becomes enrollment. And enrollment shapes the city.

What Comes Next

When a school closes, cities face a practical question. What happens to the building.

Some campuses are converted into community centers, housing, or other uses. Others sit empty for years.

But the harder question is not about the building. It is about the life that formed around it.

In the afternoon, parents gather outside school gates waiting for their children. Conversations begin while the school day winds down. Vendors set up along the sidewalks selling snacks to families walking home. Parks near schools fill with children playing after class while parents continue talking nearby.

Even traffic changes. It slows down. Drivers become more aware. The street starts to respond to people.

These are not small details. They are part of how a neighborhood works.

Schools teach children how to read and write. But the act of walking to school, seeing neighbors, crossing streets, and playing in nearby parks teaches something else.

They learn how to be part of a neighborhood.

In many ways, pedestrian life becomes part of the learning experience.

The closures happening across Texas are driven by real pressures. Most decisions can be justified on their own.

But cities should be asking a different question.

What kind of neighborhoods are we creating when we decide which schools to close

And for communities that already feel uncertain about their place in the city, what does it mean when the most important public space around them goes dark.

Missiles. Airstrikes. Political statements. Videos circulating online.

Every day there is something new.

I am not writing this as breaking news. I am writing this because it seems like many people do not fully understand what happened, and if they do, it is not something many people are talking about in its full weight.

But it should be.

One of those stories comes from the city of Minab in southern Iran.

The Strike

On February 28, 2026, during the first hours of the U.S. and Israeli air campaign against Iran, a girls’ elementary school in Minab was struck by missiles. The school was called Shajareh Tayyebeh — meaning “The Good Tree.”

At least 168 people were killed, with some Iranian official estimates reaching as high as 180. Most of them were girls between seven and twelve years old who were in class when the explosions happened.

It is the deadliest civilian incident of the conflict so far.

But the death toll alone does not capture what happened.

Witnesses say the school was struck three separate times. After the first explosion, the school’s principal gathered a group of surviving students and moved them to an interior prayer room, then called parents to come pick up their children. Before most parents could arrive, the school was struck again. That second blast killed most of those who had taken shelter. A third strike followed. One father told investigators he received a phone call from the school after the first explosion, his daughter had survived. He rushed to reach her. She was killed in the second strike before he got there.

That detail, a father racing to a school that was hit again while he was on his way, should stop us.

A War That Escalated Quickly

The strike happened on the first day of a dramatic escalation in the region.

On February 28, the United States and Israel launched coordinated attacks on Iranian military targets. The strikes were aimed at missile facilities, military bases, and infrastructure connected to Iran’s military and nuclear programs.

Iran responded with missile and drone attacks against Israeli positions and American military assets in the region.

Since then, the conflict has entered a dangerous cycle of retaliation. More than 1,300 Iranian civilians have been killed in the broader campaign, according to the Iranian Red Crescent Society.

The tragedy in Minab happened during those first hours.

What the Evidence Shows

The first reports came from Iranian authorities, who blamed the United States and Israel. At first, information was difficult to verify. That is common during war.

But over the following days, a clearer picture emerged from multiple independent investigations.

Satellite imagery confirmed the school was intact at 10:23 a.m. local time. It was struck around 10:45 a.m., at the same time as nearby attacks on the IRGC naval facility next door. Video geolocated by CNN and NPR, filmed from a nearby construction site, shows a munition that two independent weapons experts from the Center for Arms Control and Non Proliferation and the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies identified as consistent with an American BGM/UGM-109 Tomahawk Land Attack Missile. The United States is the only party to this conflict known to operate Tomahawk missiles.

Multiple buildings at the adjacent naval base were also struck in what munitions experts described as a coordinated precision attack, not misfired Iranian air defense missiles. Seven buildings in total were hit across the complex.

On March 11, 2026, The Intercept reported that a U.S. military internal investigation had reached a preliminary conclusion: the United States conducted the strike. Two U.S. officials familiar with the inquiry confirmed this to the outlet. CNN and Reuters reporting from the same period pointed in the same direction, citing officials familiar with the investigation.

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The Targeting Error

Investigations now point to a specific and preventable cause.

U.S. Central Command created targeting coordinates for the strike using outdated intelligence provided by the Defense Intelligence Agency. Satellite imagery from 2013 showed the school building located within the same walled compound as the IRGC naval base. But by September 2016, a fence had been erected separating the school from the base entirely. A separate street entrance was built for the school. By August 2017, satellite imagery clearly showed a soccer pitch in the school’s courtyard.

To anyone who had looked at recent imagery, it was clearly a school. It had been a clearly defined civilian institution for more than ten years.

But the targeting coordinates were never updated.

“It seems that the United States Central Command did not keep its target list up to date,” retired Marine Corps Colonel Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Al Jazeera.

Munitions expert N.R. Jenzen-Jones of Armament Research Services told CNN the most likely explanation was a targeting failure: somewhere in the process, intelligence was not updated, or the wrong target was carried forward into the strike package.

The Official Response

So far, there has been no formal acknowledgment from the United States that its forces struck the school.

President Trump, speaking aboard Air Force One on the day of the strike, publicly suggested that Iran had bombed its own school. When pressed later on why no one in his own administration was publicly supporting that claim, he replied: “Because I just don’t know enough about it.” His assertions were described by The New York Times as contradicted by the physical evidence: a single errant missile, the paper noted, would not have caused such precise and targeted damage to several buildings across the compound.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, when asked about the strike at a press conference, said: “We’re certainly investigating. But the only side that targets civilians is Iran.” Days earlier, at a separate briefing, Hegseth had declared: “No stupid rules of engagement.”

The Pentagon has stated it does not intentionally target civilians and that the incident remains under investigation. Israel has said it was not aware of any IDF activity in the area.

Human Rights Watch, which verified 14 videos and photographs and reviewed decades of satellite imagery of the site, called on the United States and Israel to investigate the attack as a possible war crime.

Meanwhile, funerals in Iran showed rows of small coffins carried through streets. Satellite imagery of the Minab cemetery captured on March 4 showed more than 100 freshly dug graves.

Why This Moment Matters

War always produces tragedies. History is full of them.

But moments like this matter because they remind us of something easy to forget when conflicts are discussed in terms of strategy, missiles, and geopolitics.

Behind every coordinate on a targeting list are ordinary people living their lives.

The girls in that classroom were not soldiers. They were children who went to school that morning. Their school had been separated from a military base for ten years. There was a soccer pitch in the courtyard. There were pink flowers and green leaves painted on the walls.

The intelligence that sent a missile into that building was a decade out of date.

And the school was struck three times.

If there is a question at the center of this story, for governments, for institutions, for the rest of us, it is this: when a military operation kills more than 160 children, even by a documented targeting failure, what does accountability look like? What does responsibility require?

Those are not easy questions. But they are the ones this moment demands.

Sources

• The Washington Post — Reporting on the U.S. investigation and AI-assisted targeting lists.

• Reuters — Officials involved in the preliminary U.S. investigation indicating the strike was likely carried out by U.S. forces.

• Associated Press (AP) — Weapons analysis and missile fragment identification.

• CNN — Multiple investigative reports: satellite imagery analysis, geolocated video, munitions expert assessments, and preliminary U.S. investigation findings (March 6, 9, and 11, 2026).

• NPR — Satellite imagery showing multiple buildings struck; video analysis confirming Tomahawk-consistent munition (March 8, 2026).

• TIME Magazine — Expert weapons identification; reporting on the school’s history and the children who attended (March 11, 2026).

• The Intercept — U.S. military preliminary investigation findings confirming U.S. responsibility; outdated DIA coordinates (March 11, 2026).

• Al Jazeera Digital Investigations Unit — School separation history; compound analysis; witness testimony; expert commentary on targeting failure.

• Human Rights Watch — Verification of 14 videos and photographs; satellite imagery of cemetery; call to investigate as a war crime (March 7, 2026).

• BBC Verify / BBC Persian — Investigative findings concluding U.S. likely responsible; reports on second strike on clinic.

• Middle East Eye — Witness testimony from Red Crescent medics and a victim’s parent describing the double-tap sequence.

• Bellingcat — Cruise missile identification as a Tomahawk.

• Open-source satellite imagery from Planet Labs and commercial providers reviewed by multiple international news organizations.

Investigations into the incident are ongoing.

Across the country, in industries ranging from real estate to marketing to urban planning, this shift is becoming impossible to ignore. Latino demographics are not simply another statistic in a census report. They are actively shaping how communities grow, how markets evolve, and how cities prepare for the future.

The webinar presented fresh data, but it also reminded us that numbers alone never tell the full story. Culture, history, and family dynamics matter just as much when we think about how communities develop.

History and Culture: Deep Roots and Real Diversity

Latinos are often described as a “growing” population, but the truth is that our presence in the United States goes back centuries. Spanish settlements existed across the Southwest long before many modern immigration debates began. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 turned millions of Mexicans into residents of the United States overnight. Later migration waves, including the Mexican Revolution, the Bracero Program, and immigration reforms in the 1960s, expanded Latino communities across the country.

Today Latinos represent roughly 18 to 19 percent of the U.S. population. That means nearly one in five Americans. In several states that number is even higher, and the influence continues to grow in cities large and small.

But the word Latino hides enormous diversity. Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, and Central and South American backgrounds all exist within this umbrella. Some families arrived recently. Others have been here for generations. Some people identify strongly as Hispanic or Latino. Others simply identify as American.

Despite these differences, certain cultural patterns remain influential. Multi generational living is common. Sometimes it begins as an economic necessity. Over time it becomes a family legacy. Decisions about housing, careers, and investments are often shaped by a strong sense of family responsibility and pride.

Panelists such as Dr. Tony Pay and Patricia Boral emphasized that family is not simply a cultural value. It is often the center of economic and social decision making.

Marketing and Engagement: One Size Does Not Fit All

One of the clearest messages from the webinar was that treating Latinos as a single market segment is a mistake.

Patricia Boral explained that successful engagement requires understanding differences within Latino communities. Country of origin matters. Generation matters. Income levels matter. Cultural identity matters.

The most effective communication connects with emotional drivers such as family legacy, pride in homeownership, and the desire to build generational wealth. Generic marketing campaigns that treat Latinos as one homogeneous group often miss the mark.

For industries like housing, development, and urban planning, this lesson is critical. Communities are not abstract demographic categories. They are families making decisions about their future.

As someone who works closely with communities, I see these dynamics constantly. Data can tell us where populations are growing, but understanding culture tells us why people make the decisions they do.

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Economic Power: The Numbers Speak Clearly

The economic data presented by Jamie Smurski of the Hispanic Wealth Project was striking.

There are now 21 million Hispanic households in the United States. More than one million net new households were formed recently, representing 92.6 percent of total household growth in the country.

Homeownership trends tell an even more powerful story. In the past year alone Hispanic households added 441,000 new homeowners. That represents 139.6 percent of total homeownership growth in the United States. The number exceeds 100 percent because homeownership declined in other groups during the same period.

Latino wealth has also grown rapidly. Between 2013 and 2022 Hispanic wealth tripled, making it the fastest growing wealth segment in the country. During that same period the wealth gap between Hispanic households and non Hispanic white households narrowed significantly.

Homeownership plays a major role in that shift. Latino homeowners hold roughly 26 times the median wealth of renters. Latino business owners hold about eight times the wealth of renters.

Purchasing power now exceeds three trillion dollars annually.

These numbers confirm something many planners and community leaders already observe in real communities. Latinos consistently view real estate as a pathway to stability, generational wealth, and long term legacy.

The Real Takeaway

The message from this webinar is not simply about demographics. It is about leadership and preparation.

Communities, businesses, and cities that ignore these trends are not just overlooking a cultural shift. They are overlooking one of the most powerful economic and demographic transformations taking place in the United States.

Latinos are already shaping housing markets, entrepreneurship, and community development. The question is not whether this influence will grow. The question is whether institutions are prepared to understand it.

If you want to watch the full webinar, it is available here:

CNU Latino will continue sharing research, conversations, and opportunities that explore how Latino communities are shaping the built environment and the future of American cities.

The future is already here.

The real question is whether our institutions, our businesses, and our cities are ready to recognize it.

People gather to watch the Super Bowl for the game, the commercials, the spectacle. It’s entertainment. It’s distraction. It’s noise. But this time, when the music started and the images of Puerto Rico filled the screen, something shifted in me. The street stands. The familiar storefronts. The kids asleep on plastic chairs while their parents danced like the night would never end. I’ve been to Puerto Rico twice. I’ve danced salsa in the wild nights of Old San Juan. I’ve felt that energy before. And yet, as I watched, I felt something deeper. Something that took me back to my abuela’s house. To the crowded parties. To my mom, who is no longer here. To the rhythm that raised me even if it wasn’t Puerto Rico that shaped my childhood.

I wanted to cry.

And then it hit me.

For years, I thought I had it figured out.

Through my work building trust across cultures, organizing communities, and navigating spaces where identity matters more than policy, I learned to recognize patterns. I knew which groups blended easily, which ones needed space, which ones showed up and which ones stayed away. I learned that Latino is not one thing. In fact, there are at least three different types of Latinos.

There are Latinos in the United States whose identity as Latino was shaped here. A culture born in the U.S., mixing heritage and survival. This identity does not exist in the same way anywhere else in the world. It is bilingual, bicultural, sometimes defensive, sometimes proud, always navigating.

Then there are Latinos who are Latino because they were born in Latin America. In Peru, Mexico, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Venezuela. In our countries, we do not walk around introducing ourselves as Latino. We say, I am Peruvian. I am Puerto Rican. I am Venezuelan. Our pride is national before it is continental. We are Latino geographically because we come from Latin America, but culturally our identity is rooted in our specific homeland. And in Latin America, we grow up seeing America as one continent. North, Central, and South. One landmass with many nations. The idea that America belongs to only one country is foreign to us.

And then there is a broader meaning of Latino that most people do not talk about. The linguistic and historical one. Countries whose languages come from Latin roots. Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian. Even parts of Europe and Africa share Latin linguistic heritage. Napoleon himself once referred to certain European regions as Latin Europe. In that sense, Latino is about language, not geography. It is about the cultural descendants of Latin languages, not just Latin America.

For years, I separated these groups strategically. As a community planner, I learned that if I organized a meeting labeled around one culture, others would not show up. If it felt too Mexican, Colombians stayed home. If it felt too Caribbean, South Americans felt unseen. So I hosted separate meetings. Separate outreach. Separate strategies. And it worked.

But watching Bad Bunny’s halftime show, I realized something. Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, the Puerto Rican artist known worldwide simply as Bad Bunny, did not separate us. What he did on the biggest cultural stage in the world was bring us together in connection, not division. He did not say, This part is for Puerto Ricans only. He showed a street scene that felt like so many of ours. The food stands. The music. The dancing. The kids sleeping while adults celebrated life. It was not just Puerto Rico. It was memory. It was childhood. It was diaspora. It was belonging. And in that moment, millions of us saw ourselves, even if we were not Puerto Rican. Some critics even said the show sparked controversy in politics and culture, proving how deeply it reached beyond just spectacle.

I had been grouping us by difference.

He grouped us by familiarity.

By shared images. Shared rhythms. Shared emotions.

And that is when I understood what I had missed.

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Yes, there are different types of Latinos. Yes, identity is complex. Yes, strategy matters. But maybe the deeper strategy is not separation. Maybe it is finding the symbols we all recognize. The things we grew up with. The smells, the sounds, the scenes that transcend nationality.

As planners, leaders, and organizers, we often focus on representation by category. But what if we focused on representation by experience.

The halftime show carried more than spectacle. It carried a message. It said we matter. Our language matters. Spanish belongs on that stage. And so do other languages. Portuguese. French. Creole. Indigenous tongues. Hawaiian.

What happened in Hawaii should not repeat itself as it did in Puerto Rico and as it may happen in Venezuela. Cultures should not be celebrated in one moment and diminished in another. They should not be embraced for entertainment and ignored when dignity is at stake. If representation is real, then it must be consistent. It must protect history, language, and identity before they are reduced, erased, or romanticized.

It was a moment of love. But it also carried anger. Anger at invisibility. Anger at exclusion. Anger at being told our culture is secondary.

And yet it ended in hope.

Hope that the stage is big enough.

Hope that identity does not have to divide.

Hope that instead of asking who belongs, we ask what connects us.

I still believe understanding the different types of Latinos matters. But maybe the next step is learning how to unite them through shared humanity instead of separating them through cultural precision.

If Bad Bunny could do it in twelve minutes on the world’s biggest stage, maybe I can try it in a community meeting.

Maybe we all can.

Because at the end of the night, after the music fades and the screen goes dark, what stays with us is not politics. It is the image of a child asleep on a chair while the adults dance. It is the memory of our mothers. Our grandmothers. Our parties. Our languages.

And the reminder that we were always connected. We just needed someone to show it to us.

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After my mother passed, death stopped feeling distant or abstract. It became present. Not loud or dramatic, but woven into ordinary moments. It showed up while walking, while reading, while sitting quietly with thoughts that no longer had anywhere to go. I never felt death so alive as I do now.

Grief has a way of rearranging what you pay attention to. It softens the edges of certainty and sharpens curiosity. You start noticing things you used to dismiss. You ask questions you once thought were naïve. You don’t need answers. You just need something to hold onto.

Around that time, I came across a book called Signs: The Secret Language of the Universe by Laura Lynne Jackson. I wasn’t searching for it. I was actually looking for books for my fiancée, and it was suddenly there, right in front of me. The timing felt uncomfortable, almost confrontational. I read what it was about. Life after death. Communication. Signs from those who are gone.

Part of me resisted immediately. Another part of me felt exposed.
I bought it anyway.

Laura Lynne Jackson is a psychic medium who writes about working with people who have lost someone they love. She doesn’t promise certainty or proof. What she offers is something quieter. She suggests asking for signs, not to force meaning, but to remain open. To notice. To allow grief to speak in a language that logic doesn’t always recognize.

Sometimes, she writes, signs are already there. We just don’t see them.

I’ve practiced Nichiren Buddhism since 2016. It helped me when we first learned about my mother’s illness. It helped me stay grounded when fear threatened to take over. It helped me find stability when life felt uncertain. Faith, for me, has never been about answers. It has been about staying present, about giving pain somewhere to land instead of letting it consume me. I don’t experience different spiritual practices as contradictions. I experience them as different ways of staying connected when words fall short.

So when my fiancée asked me to go with her to church, I said yes. She is Serbian Christian Orthodox. My mother was Catholic. The familiarity mattered more than theology. I wanted to be somewhere that felt close to her, even if I didn’t understand the words being spoken.

In Orthodox churches, people light long candles and place them in sand. Some candles are for the living. Some are for the dead. There is a room specifically for this ritual. For me, the candle wasn’t about doctrine. It was about giving my grief something physical to do. A small act that said, you mattered, and you are still remembered.

My fiancée bought a candle for me. She told me it was for my mom.

I lit it. I placed it gently in the sand. I started praying. I was already crying then, the quiet kind that comes before you realize how much you’re holding. Remembering the book, I did something that felt vulnerable and slightly foolish. I asked my mother for a sign.

I didn’t know what kind of sign. I didn’t ask for anything specific. I just asked for something. Anything.

The mass was in Serbian. I don’t understand enough to follow a sermon. I’ve been to many Orthodox services before, so the unfamiliarity didn’t bother me. I usually listen to the rhythm of the language and let my thoughts settle.

About forty minutes later, the priest began his sermon. It was long, as they usually are. I understood almost nothing.

Then I heard my name.

Abraham.

He said it again.

Abraham.

The sermon was about the prophet Abraham. Of course it was. That makes complete sense. There was nothing unusual about that.

And yet, the only thing I understood in the entire sermon was my name. Repeated. Clearly. Over and over.

I started crying again. This time without restraint. Not the kind of crying that collapses you, but the kind that cracks something open. I felt happiness and sadness at the same time.

Was that the sign I asked for?
Was my mother answering me?
Was it coincidence?
Was grief simply reaching for meaning where none existed?

I still don’t know.

But I took it.

I didn’t analyze it. I didn’t argue with it. I didn’t try to make it logical. I accepted it.

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For the first time since my mother passed, something shifted. The pain didn’t disappear, but it softened. It stopped feeling like something I had to fight and became something I could carry.

Maybe my mother is somewhere else, watching over us.
Maybe she lives inside my memory and my nervous system.
Maybe this was all in my imagination.

And maybe none of that matters.

What matters is that in that moment, I felt heard.

Since then, my grief hasn’t gone away. It has changed. Depression no longer consumes my days. Sadness comes and goes like a visitor I recognize now. I don’t avoid it. I let it enter. I let it speak. I let it leave when it’s ready.

I’m still reading the book. Slowly. Carefully. Sometimes I have to put it down. It carries too many stories of loss. Parents. Children. Families. Pain accumulates quickly when you are already fragile.

I don’t know what signs really are. I don’t know what comes after death. I don’t know if believing in any of this is wise or naïve.

What I do know is this.

Find the one thing that brings you peace.
Not escape. Not denial. Peace.

It might be faith.
It might be ritual.
It might be silence.
It might be memory.
It might be a sign you choose to accept without permission.

Whatever it is, let it help you live without harming yourself.

Grief doesn’t disappear. It changes. It becomes part of your body, your language, your way of moving through the world.

So I’ll leave you with this.

What helps you live with the people you’ve lost
What do you return to when the pain feels too heavy

You don’t have to explain it.
You don’t have to justify it.
You just have to let it help you breathe.

If this piece stayed with you, this is the kind of writing I share here.

I write about grief, faith, leadership, and the moments that change us quietly, often without answers. If you’d like to keep exploring these reflections and be part of this space, you’re welcome to subscribe.

No pressure. Just an open invitation to stay connected.

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