The Valley Is Growing and Not Everyone Is Growing With It | Andrik Gonzalez | TEDxBrownsville

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For almost twenty years, Ester has raised a family of ten in two beds inside a self-built home in a Rio Grande Valley colonia, with no paved road to it and, until recently, no secure legal claim to the land underneath her. She’s one of nearly 200,000 people living across the Valley’s 1,200 colonias, part of a pattern repeated in roughly 2,400 similar settlements along the entire U.S. border. Andrik Gonzalez argues that colonias didn’t happen by accident. They grew out of a regulatory gap between what developers were allowed to sell and what local government was required to provide, a gap that decades of housing funding have barely touched. Drawing on income, employment, and education data from across the Valley, he makes the case that neglect became infrastructure, built one policy decision at a time, and asks what it will take for the region’s coming growth to finally include the people already here. This talk includes a personal story and regional data on poverty, housing, and publ

Tags: Activism, Architecture, English, Immigration, Social Sciences, TEDxTalks, [TEDxEID:66803]