It’s that time of the year. All month, your favorite nonprofits are in fundraising mode. Streetsblog Los Angeles is urging our friends to support the work that we do.

To sweeten the pot we’re giving away four (four!) books. Remember those early made-of-paper kindle predecessors – books! To win a book, donate $25 or more before January 1, 2020, and you’ll be entered in a raffle drawing. Books will delivered to winners by the end of January.

Below are brief introductions to the great books you could win – listed in alphabetic order by author, naturally. They’re all highly-recommended takes on issues that SBLA readers care about. Later this month, we’ll be posting more detailed reviews and excerpts. If you see something you like, give $25 or more to Streetsblog via our handy donations page. All the cool (and smart!) kids are doing it. Now it’s your turn. (Note: if you already donated this month and would like to be entered in the drawing, please email damien[at]streetsblog.org and we’ll happily put your name in.)

Better Buses, Better Cities: How to Plan Run and Win the Fight for Effective Transit
by Steven Higashide – paperback published by Island Press

TransitCenter Director of Research Steven Higashide has written the definitive volume on how to make bus frequent, fast, reliable, welcoming, and respected in its role at the core of transit systems. The highly readable volume features success stories from Houston, Boston, Indianapolis, and many other cities.

Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom
by Sarah A. Seo – hardback published by Harvard University Press
SIGNED by Sarah Seo!

Sarah Seo surveys 20th century American history to tell how the rise of the automobile dovetailed with current prevalent policing practices. Driving has had huge legal and political consequences, eroding the freedoms that it initially promised.

Parking and the City
Edited by Donald Shoup – paperback published by Routledge
Signed by Don Shoup!

Parking’s rock star Don Shoup makes a compelling case for how parking has shaped communities, and how communities can reform parking regulations to achieve numerous goals from affordability to walkability to public health. Shoup’s 500-page follow-up to The High Cost of Free Parking features numerous chapters by Shoup as well as the writings of other contemporary parking experts.

Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership
by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor – hardback published by The University of North Carolina Press

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership fills in an important gap in housing history by detailing what it meant to end redlining in theory but not in actual practice. Taylor argues that, in an effort to quell the turbulence of the late ’60s, politicians enacted policies aimed at facilitating home-buying in the inner cities. Instead of encouraging the accumulation of wealth, however, it encouraged mortgage lenders to exploit Black homebuyers – particularly Black women – and resulted in tens of thousands of foreclosures in Black communities nationwide. This story of the phenomenon Taylor calls “predatory inclusion” and its far-ranging consequences has been longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award.