Apartment Choice

Along the busy Peachtree Industrial Boulevard in Dunwoody is a sprawling collection of two- story apartment buildings . The units are worn but relatively kept up. Dozens of children play soccer or run in the parking lots. And numerous vans with ladders atop their roofs indicate a working class clientele . The buildings and their occupants might be largely unremarkable, but the Dunwoody Glen and Lacota apartment complexes and their 2,000-plus mostly Hispanic residents are now the focus of a controversy that has divided this newly incorporated suburban enclave and led to a federal lawsuit . In 2011, Dunwoody officials pushed a bond referendum that would raise money to demolish two aging apartment complexes and build a sprawling — and badly needed — park. Then- Mayor Ken Wright extolled the effort in a press release just before the vote but added that while the city “regrets the need to displace residents (in) 785 apartment units” it would work to relocate those citizens, including...

On Aug. 9, 2007, Lansing police discovered the beaten body of 46-year-old Debra Renfors in her apartment in the 1000 block of North Washington Street . Renfors was the third woman to be bludgeoned to death in the city in two weeks, and a grim reality was beginning to set in. Det. Sgt. Joey Dionise confronted Captain Ray Hall , giving voice to a fear that had been bubbling for days. “Captain,” Dionise said, ”We have a serial killer. Years later, Hall still remembers the “sinking feeling” that accompanied that moment. Ten years ago this month, Lansing was in the grip of a killer who preyed on single women, using whatever was convenient to murder them, and, in some instances, sexually assaulting them. Before police caught him, he had killed five women in just over four weeks. A sixth woman would survive. Matthew Emmanuel Macon , then 27, was eventually convicted of two of the murders, and the assault of the surviving victim. When detectives got Macon in an interview room, it would take ...

get elephant's newsletter We gardeners often talk about what plants we would like to grow. Rarely we ask, “What can the garden grow in us?” I began my journey of learning to grow food as a broke post college graduate at the onset of the Great Recession. At the time, I viewed the garden purely as an object to help me save money by growing my own food. Little did I know the garden would grow in me. It is kind of a miracle to plant a seed under dirt. First, you see nothing. And if you are like me, you experience a sense of worry, until one lucky morning, you go outside and see that a baby plant has emerged. Just as the seed has transformed into a plant, there is also an inner transformation that happens through gardening. First, there was not much edible food growing in my garden. My carrot seeds never sprouted, my leafy greens were feeding more aphids and slugs than me, and my blueberry plant caught a disease. Needless to say, I did not save money. But the idea of gardening was s...

A Jacksonville police officer shot a man multiple times Sunday morning after, Sheriff’s Office officials said, he took the officer’s Taser during a struggle and pointed it at the officer. The shooting followed a foot chase that began when police responded to a 911 call reporting a domestic dispute, heard a woman screaming and discovered a woman being strangled by a man on top of her inside an apartment at the Cleveland Arms apartment complex about 8:45 a.m. Devanta DeJuan Jones , 22, was shot at least four times by Officer Cliff Sames of the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office. The shooting happened after Sames and another officer tried unsuccessfully to stun the man, later identified as Jones, three times with their Tasers during the pursuit in which Jones kicked in the door, then ran through a neighboring apartment occupied by a mother and three children. Jones also tried but failed to force his way inside two other apartments during the foot chase, said Director Tom Hackney of the S...

Some say the East Village is dead, Manhattan has been murdered, and New York City has lost its soul. Some say that if you stand in the right place and squint hard enough, it can almost seem like the old city is still alive. Jeremiah Moss likes to think of the city as a crime scene, which he is investigating for clues, searching for the cause of death. In his new book, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul , Moss sets out to chronicle what, exactly, has gone wrong with New York, where greed, hypergentrification, and government policies have conspired to kill off the unique character of dozens of neighborhoods. “I want it to be a body of evidence—this happened, this happened, this happened. When you lay it all out like that, it’s undeniable,” says Moss during a recent walk around the East Village. “It is not a natural change. It’s very deliberate, it’s very planned. It’s from policies, and the policies have values behind them, and the values are very clear. They favor the ...