The Future of Making A Neighborhood
A new phase for the newsletter.
Hello, readers!
We are writing today with an update about the future of our beloved publication. In March 2022, we launched this humble little newsletter as a way to sustain and expand on the storytelling and information sharing we brought to East Hollywood with our panel series on the past, present, and future of the neighborhood in 2021. Since then, we’ve published a variety of stories reflecting on the state of the neighborhood, its people, and the policies and politics that shape it. We also brought in many new writers, most of whom were young writers and photographers previously unpublished elsewhere and we were proud to be able to pay them for their work while giving them access to a whole new audience.
We are now, after three years of trying to navigate the best publication schedule and structure for this newsletter, and after changes to our respective personal circumstances, shifting to a new phase of life for Making A Neighborhood. Moving forward, we will not have a formal publication schedule, and we will publish stories as we are able to produce them. We are committed to maintaining high quality work, but our full time jobs leave little room for us to do this work on a regular basis.
No future stories will be paywalled, and our archive will be unpaywalled as well. We have long tried to balance the belief that writers and artists should be paid for their work with the belief that these kinds of stories belong to the community and should be free to access. And while we’ve determined that all our work will be free to access from here on out, we also ask that those of you who can continue to support financially continue to do so, because we do hope to be able to keep paying new, young and emerging writers for their perspective on their neighborhood.
In the short term future, you’ll see an essay from Ali Rachel Pearl about alternatives to speculative real estate in Altadena as the town recovers from the Eaton Fire, as well as other dispatches from Altadena’s rich and diverse community. We will also continue covering East Hollywood, and we are committed to bringing you perspectives from other neighborhoods.
Thank you for supporting us on this journey, for helping us uplift these stories, for all your kind words of encouragement, for your financial support, and for valuing the small work, the local work, and the heart of our team.
All our love,
Samanta, JT, & Ali