Today marks a big occasion for the LJ Urban blog. This post you are reading is our 600th bringing a total of 1627 comments. I know that may not mean a lot to you but to us who started this thing not knowing where it would take us and why we were even doing this its a huge deal. The first post was on October 3rd 2006 and was done by Jason Presley. Jason was an incredible writer and spent months leading up to the launch of the blog deciding what our message would be. Once we did launch Jason tirelessly tweaked and retweaked the design with EMRL ultimately landing on the site you see today. He liked to call it a “playground” every component of the site is interchangeable and always in motion.

Anyway, I know its sappy to hear someone write about looking back and how far they have come. But I am darn proud of what the site here has become and can not wait to see what the next 600 posts bring.

And since we are getting all sentimental here are a few of my favorite posts out of the last 600.

- The 800 Pound Gorilla
- Optimism
- The Myth of Quantity over Quality
- Alice in wonderland

There are lots more good ones I am sure but that is all I can seem to dig up that is resonating with me right now…

Levi Benkert

I remember last year Jason and I were talking about how once the Good project opened we would try and find a blogger who we could ask to live in the project for the first month so they could post every day about what life in Good was like.

Never could I have imagined that a year later Jason would no longer be with us and so many things would be different. Some good (like me moving in here with my family) and some truly tragic (like Jason passing away). Yesterday I was thinking about all the amazing ideas Jason used to have and how much he would have loved to be here today watching this neighborhood unfold before our eyes. It is deeply sad that he was not able to see this all pan out so well. He would have been proud.

I am going to in Jason’s honor start to be that blogger, I mean I live here already and there is no reason why it can’t be me right? So when you start seeing more posts about our new house and all the cool things about Good you can thank Jason for the idea.

And to kick things off here is the latest from EMRL, (the super cool guys who are behind all the design and creativity you see here) its a map of all the neat things we found in the neighborhood.

But before you see it you have to watch this video to get yourself in the right mood…

OK…. Are you feeling in the mood? Well then, without any further ado I present to you the neighborhood.

Levi

I spent the afternoon sipping Jamba juice with my kids sitting on some grass in a parking space…. Yeah you read right sitting in a parking space. Today was Park(ing) day and the Sacramento team did a great job this year putting together an awesome park.

This is the kind of stuff I am talking about when I say that I want us all to build true, earthy, raw, community in the heart of the city. It’s good people getting together and doing something out of the ordinary just to get people thinking about better ways of doing things.

Watch what KCRA News had to say.

Also head over to Jessie’s Blog for some pictures of today’s park.

Being at the park reminded me of Jason and all that he did to contribute to making the world a better place. The park was named Presley Park in honor of Jason. It’s still very sad not having him around.

Levi

Just a quick reminder that tomorrow is Park(ing) day. The whole thing makes me miss Jason a lot, he did an incredible job last year putting it together and making sure it was an authentic gesture towards a better world and not just another gimmicky sales pitch. I hope we are able to do it justice this time around.

Here is the post I stole from Walkable.org since Eric is a better writer than I am, and I wanted to make sure nothing was lost in translation. I look forward to seeing you there!

Across the world this Friday, there will be several hundred fewer car parking spaces and just a little more park space. Concerned people from around the globe will be converting car spaces into mini-parks—many with sod, benches, games, etc.

Here in Sacramento, we will be creating several spaces across the grid. I’ve created a webpage that has all the information you need to know about our local efforts. Visit it here. On the page, you will find park locations, contact information, information for Facebook, photos from last year’s event, event flyers, and more. The park I’m involved in organizing will be located at J & 20th Streets in Midtown. The park will be named Presley Park in memory of Jason Presley who was incredibly instrumental in bringing together last year’s amazing park.

For those of you in other cities, I encourage you to check the PARKing Day Headquarters website to see if there’s a park in your community. I had so much fun last year that I’ve decided to spend the whole day in the park this year. It’s one of my favorite days of the year! That game of chess pictured above was not staged, by the way. Two strangers just sat down and decided to play!

I guess I was a day early on the Park(ing) day post.

Erick Fredericks from Neighborhoods.org sent me this email today..

Park(ing) Day Kickoff

Do you feel that too much of our urban land is dedicated to automobile uses? Do you think we need more park space in Sacramento? Want to help reverse these trends for a day and have fun doing it? Come join us at the kickoff meeting for Sacramento PARK(ing) Day 2008 next Monday!

Conceived by REBAR, a San Francisco-based art collective, PARK(ing) Day is a one-day, global event where artists, activists, and citizens collaborate to temporarily transform parking spots into “PARK(ing)” spaces: temporary public parks. For more information, visit http://www.parkingday.org/

This year, PARK(ing) Day is on Friday, September 19–meaning we have less than 2 months to plan for our park(s). Please join us at the kickoff meeting on Monday, August 11th at 6:30pm at 1215 22nd Street in Midtown Sacramento.

Last year, we created two very successful parks with hundreds of visitors and bunch of media coverage. We also had an amazing group of people that helped organize the parks. Two of the lead organizers have left Sacramento to attend school in another city. And one of our organizers, Jason Presley, passed away earlier this year. Jason was such an inspiration to everyone he came across, and he deeply cared about an eco-friendly urban environment (or eco-urban as he called it).

In memory and honor of Jason, we plan to call our parks “Presley Parks.” We know that if Jason was here this year, he would be able to pull together everyone and create an amazing park. Since he won’t be with us, we desperately need your help. Even if you’re not able to make this first meeting, please let me know if you are interested in participating. You can also join our Google Group for planning and meeting updates: http://groups.google.com/group/sacparkingday

You can view some of the photos from one of last year’s Sacramento parks: http://www.flickr.com/photos/neighborhoods/sets/72157603024716370/

Please pass this along to anyone that you think will be interested in participating.

Thanks,
Eric

Eric Fredericks
Founder, neighborhoods.org
(916) 669-0676 (m)
eric@neighborhoods.org

Just thinking about Park(ing) Day makes me sad that Jason is not going to be here with us this time around. But that same emotion is driving me to go after it and make a really good park in Jason’s honor.

I realized when thinking about this that I am not even sure who all came together and made it happen last hear with Jason. He was so good at things like that, that I hardly heard about how it all came to be.

If you want to get together and make it happen again this year send me an email and let me know. It’s on September 19th and I think we should start planning for it soon.

Levi

The question of why you do what you do seems to be bouncing around the nether regions of my head lately, I have to be honest that when things get challenging I ask the question more often than when life rolls out the red carpet.   

So I have decided that today, for as much my benefit as yours, I am going to try and put into words why I get up in the morning and do what I do. It’s the list of things that make me want to push harder into life and make a difference in the world.

The center of everything in my life
Is it just me or do we all seem to have this thing about work and our careers that we think it’s the be all end all? I have to say that for me the real meat of who I am and what I do in life is after I get home from work when I walk in the door, kiss my wife and hug my three beautiful children. That is where the real, raw, core of who I am rests.

I like making cities better and dreaming of new ways to build places for people to live but I would give it all up in a second if it came before my family. My wife is awesome and my kids are some very cool little people that I love to be with.

The other thing I have found in life that is worth fighting for is adoption. Ruth, our youngest, is 17 months old and the sweetest little thing I have ever met. We adopted her last year and its one of the more rewarding things we have done in life.

We learned in the process that there are so many kids that need homes and never get adopted. The foster care system is no place for kids to spend their formative years and the shortage of willing families is a tragedy. If any of you ever want to know anything about adoption, call me and I will drop everything to talk with you and help you figure out how to adopt. I can assure you there is nothing better I could be doing with my time. [Read more →]

Many of you attended the movie night we put on last year, I know that there were even quite a few that were turned away because we ran out of space. Well we are thinking its about time to do another one and hopefully we can get everyone in this time.

We are going to ask that everyone bring a small donation at the door for our friends over at ECOS. They are a great organization that does great things for Sacramento and we think that a movie would be a great way to celebrate them and get some good folks together while we are at it.

The last movie was all Jason’s idea so its a bit sad to be doing one without him around to enjoy it but I think he would have wanted us to continue in his honor.

The Details

Where: Its going to be in the new Green Sacramento Space at 20th and H (which is our office also)

When: Friday July 25th at 7pm

What: We are going to be showing the movie The Corporation and possibly a few other short films as well. Just a bunch of fun stuff to get you thinking about your community and what you can do to make it a better place.

Here is a trailer for The Corporation…

Hope you can make it!

Levi

The Just Plain Frustrating

I decided to write this post a few weeks ago and its been haunting me every since. I always have wanted to be more open and real here on the Blog and its some of the things I am going to write about here that have made me think its worth being real whenever you can.

Change is a good thing. I have always been a person who was OK changing things and re-arranging stuff in my life. Jessie (my super cool wife) and I have moved 9 times in the 8 years we have been married. And it’s normally for no other reason than that we got antsy and thought moving again would be fun (it’s not, by the way). But I have been learning a different kind of change lately, a change that I did not choose, but one that has ripped into every part of who I am. And although it would never be worth the cost of getting here, I have come to understand that there has been a lot of good to come out of it.

Let me start in February.

On the 27th I was heading to a meeting in Roseville when my Dad called to let me know that my older brother had passed away. I felt like a train had run me over. Everything in me seemed to stop working all at once. I turned around and started to head home but I really don’t remember anything about the trip back. My brother was 32 and it came as a total surprise to not have him around any more. The next 2 weeks were a blur of emotions. I am the youngest of 4 and my parents and two older sisters were coming apart, reeling from the shock. And as you can imagine I was too.

Now I am not writing this to go into great detail about the aftershock and what that was like but instead to talk about the frustration of a premature loss and what we can learn from life in times like this.

Jonah (my brother) was a crazy, passionate person who was fearless in every way. And I never thought that he would not be around. He was 5 years older than me and I always looked up to him and thought he was Superman.

I wish it ended there.

On the 25th of March I got another call telling me that now Jason had died. Another complete shock. Jason was only 36 and I had never though he would not make it. I knew he had a liver disorder but I always understood it to be a small issue and not fatal.

Jason was one of my best friends he was creative to an extreme I have never seen in anyone else. He never saw the world as a box, but instead as a bunch of ideas waiting to be unearthed.

I was not even through processing losing my brother yet when Jason died, and I was really unprepared to start the process all over again. In the middle of all this, LJ Urban was going through all the changes I talked about in Part 2 of this series. Thankfully we had started to get some of the issues under control at that point, but I knew that a few of them were still not yet stabilized and it all seemed to come together in this incredible peak of craziness. But you know what? You would think it would all be a horrible disaster, like the world came crashing down on you and you would not want to get back up. But my wife and I found ourselves seeing things in a different way, processing it all in a very clear, very deep way. We were able to see all this for what it was really worth and start to approach life with a new found understanding.

I heard someone say a few days ago that they used to think that people sucked and life was awesome but later found out that life sucks and people are awesome.

That is how I feel; I understand now why it matters what we do. I get that people are the reason for all of this and that we need to love each other and be honest with each other. I understand that it’s not about what we can accomplish but instead about who we can help and what “bad” we can make “good”. I now am more passionate than ever about making cities better places to live, but instead of doing it for the recognition and achievement, I now want to do it so that the people who live in them have a better quality of life.

Before Jason died he and I talked a lot about the Good Project and why we named it that. He always used to say that it was the first project out there that could actually be called that. He would talk about dreaming big and how he wanted to inspire people to do just that. He also wanted to start to get people to understand why living small was better. He hated that America uses 15 times the energy of most other countries and that our footprint was so large that we could never live our lifestyle without importing and exploiting other countries.

All the things that Jason used to say mean so much more to me now. I finally understand why doing good is not just for me but so that I can leave behind a legend and a path for others to follow. I want to see us stir up a movement of people who are not only inspired by doing good but intolerant of people and corporations who chose not to.

Losing people is hard and just plain frustrating. Hard like I never understood before in my life but when you step back and take a look at the big picture, you start to see that things really can be better here on Earth and that we really can make a difference.

I had breakfast with my dad today and he and I were talking about Chicago and how its such an awesome city. He mentioned that it all started with a fire. That fire was by no means a good thing but it was in rebuilding from that fire that a vision for a truly great city was born. It was the passion that came from people who suffered a terrible loss that inspired them to build a truly great city. We don’t choose the fires in our lives but we get to choose how we are going to react to them. I choose to dig in and dream big.

Levi

I have had an overwhelming amount of email from people wanting to help out Jason’s family.

He left behind two beautiful little girls and a wife who are now trying to figure out how to go on without him. Jason did not have a life insurance policy, so it’s going to be a struggle for them financially – on top of the emotional frustration of not having him around anymore. Some of those emails I did not even respond to (sorry if that was you). Anyway, I want to offer a way for everyone to help out his family. LJ Urban is going to be doing everything we can in this time for them, but we know that the more people who step up the easier this time will be for them.

I have set up a fund at American River Bank. If you want to help them out, you can mail money to this address.

Jason Presley Memorial Fund
C/O Cathy Carter
520 Capitol Mall, Suite 100
Sacramento, CA 95814
(916) 441-5150

Cathy will be making a list of everyone who donated (for his family to know who helped out). If you want to make your donation anonymous, just indicate that in your envelope.

Thank you so much. I know that every little bit will help them, even $20 will go towards buying groceries and make things that much easier on them.

Levi