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How Motor City Came Back From the Brink…and Left Most Detroiters Behind [Mother Jones]
The city’s future is being determined by politicians, business leaders, and philanthropists while native Detroiters — more than 80 percent of whom are black — often can only watch from afar.

Cleveland Braces For Media Spotlight During 2016 Republican National Convention [The Plain Dealer]
Cleveland will have a unique opportunity to reintroduce itself to the world, thanks to the 15,000 media members expected to travel here the week of the four-day event in July 2016.  But what happens to that plan if, rather than write about Cleveland’s recovering downtown or hip restaurant scene, reporters instead focus on poverty in the city’s neighborhoods, or ongoing issues involving community-police relations?

Reinvention In The Rust Belt [The Economist]
Gary has an international airport, three railway lines and direct links to four of the nation’s busiest interstate highways. It sits on the shore of one of the world’s biggest lakes and just 24 miles south-east of downtown Chicago. It lost time and wasted federal funds, under a previous mayor, by building a baseball stadium and hosting Donald Trump’s Miss America beauty pageant. But as a transport hub, so close to America’s third-biggest city, it may have a chance to remake itself rather than just manage its decline.

Tackling The Region’s Racial Divide [The Buffalo News]
Many metro areas have continued to sort themselves into black, white and Latino neighborhoods – and Buffalo has done that more than most. In a handful of census tracts stretching from downtown to Cheektowaga roughly along the Kensington Expressway, more than 85 percent of the population was black. In most of the rest of Erie and Niagara counties, the population was more than 85 percent white.

How One Woman in Chicago is Combating Gun Violence [NBC News]
She named her program Kids Off the Block: A nonprofit organization dedicated to providing alternatives to gangs, drugs, violence and the juvenile justice system. More than 2,000 children have participated, she said. “If you can tire them out for the day so all they think about is getting to bath, eating and going to bed, you’ve scored,” she said. “You can’t let them wander out here or get involved with the negative influences that are out here.”