From candidate Jenn Truman:

Provide grants to small businesses to open along transit corridors, creating walkable, mixed use neighborhoods, and make small changes in the city’s zoning codes to make opening a small business easier.

“We have a lot of plans around transit corridors but… it is critical we build affordable housing near transit. …That density makes our transit successful and makes our small businesses successful because it provides the kind of place where we need mixed use.”

Article by Leigh Tauss, Indy Week

The top five candidates for District D answered questions about affordable housing, police reform, and the future of the city Sunday during a virtual candidates forum.

Jenn Truman, an apprentice at Matthew Konar Architect, believed her background in design would give her insight into managing the city. She said the city must work with the private sector on "making it easier to build missing middle gap housing."

The News & Observer’s Anna Johnson reports:

After years of debate, Raleigh leaders finally voted to allow backyard cottages throughout the city. Or so they thought. Though the City Council voted 5-to-2 to allow backyard cottages through a special, overlay-district process Tuesday night.

About a dozen people spoke against the overlay district but all said they wanted backyard cottages. Few will be built under Raleigh’s list of rules, they said.

Neighbors, council members and the public shouldn’t have to know why a grandmother wants to live with her family or why a family wants to have an in-home nanny, Jenn Peeler Truman said during the public hearing.

”It is a political popularity contest in the making,” Truman said.

The News & Observer’s Camila Molina reports:

Amazon has initiated a Hunger Games of sorts among major tech cities in North America that want to be the site for the company’s second headquarters, dubbed Amazon HQ2. The company announced the competitive search for the best city on Thursday via Twitter. It is looking for several must-haves for the project, which will cost $5 billion and create as many as 50,000 jobs over the next two decades.

Both Raleigh and Charlotte could be competitive picks with their population count and skilled tech professionals, according to a data analysis by The Upshot. Others also put Raleigh high in those competitive picks.

Raleigh, however, didn’t stand up to the mass transit systems of Portland, Ore.; Denver; Washington, D.C.; and Boston.

“Raleigh played strong until mass transit. Let’s get on that some more.” Jenn Truman tweeted.