In Urban Magic – Vibrant Black and Brown Communities Are Possible, offers a powerful argument for confronting the endemic and longstanding obstacles to economic growth and development of Black and Brown neighborhoods in Los Angeles—and anywhere else in America where there is motivation to bring about sustainable change in partnership with communities. The book is especially relevant in the wake of the 2020 racial reckoning and protests for widespread systemic change.
The book contains the strategies needed to transform Black and Brown communities into modern places to live, work, and visit. It stresses the need to be relentless, consistent, and work together continuously to nurture our youth and help our communities to become self-sustaining and to afford the quality of life that each person needs to be successful. This means including children and young adults in the process as well so they will be empowered and inspired to seek careers they may not have thought possible.
Using the author’s home-base community in South Los Angeles, he provides details about how urban America can move forward over the next several decades to reverse the syndrome of chronic underdevelopment in predominantly Black and Brown communities. Anderson is determined to make the predominately Black-inhabited communities he has lived in most of his life into healthy, wealthy, and desirable places to live, work, and visit.
Urban Magic provides the nation’s Black and Brown thought leaders, economic and finance-oriented public policy makers, business leaders, progressive (and some conservative) university-based political allies, architects, planners, and students with a virtual operating manual for effecting big change communities of color.