June 2: Wawa v. Sheetz | The Plight of African-American Graveyards | LA To Get New Bus System

The Inquirer’s Aubrey Whelan attended the first day that Project HOME accepted applications for its 88 new affordable apartments on 2415 North Broad Street. Although the process didn’t begin until yesterday, a line started forming on Wednesday afternoon and by dawn on Thursday 500 people were already queued up. The non-profit expected thousands of applications by the end of the day and thousands more in the days to come.

In Next City, Josh Cohen reports that Los Angeles will soon be overhauling its massive bus system, which has been seeing ridership decline as rail ridership increases. First there will be a two-to-three year study in conjunction with a separate effort to increase connectivity with 16 other transit agencies in the metro area. Based on those findings, the Los Angeles Metro’s bus routes and service levels will be totally reconfigured. The nation’s second largest city is joining Seattle, Houston, Austin, and Columbus, Ohio in restructuring old bus networks to address new realties and increase bus ridership. When will SEPTA do the same?

Pennsylvania’s two high-end convenience store brands, Sheetz and Wawa, face off in Eleanor Klibanoff’s latest for Keystone Crossroads. (We bet you didn’t know they both started as family-owned dairies before making the transition to their current business models in the mid-20th century.) Today Sheetz employs 10,000 Pennsylvanians, while Wawa has 11,000 in-state workers.

Anna Orso profiles the Kingsessing Recreation Center as part of Billy Penn’s new series on the neighborhood hubs that will bre at the center of the Kenney administration’s Rebuild initiative.

Zach Mortice explores the plight of African-American cemeteries across the nation, which are facing issues of abandonment, blight, and disinvestment. The epic story, published in In Places Journal, begins in Greenwood Cemetery outside St. Louis and then broadens to focus on the larger story and its historic implications. 

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