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On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown was fatally shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, a northwestern suburb of St. Louis. Brown\u2019s death, and the protests that followed, helped catalyze the Black Lives Matter movement and drew global attention to police brutality and racial inequality in the United States.\xa0\nFive years later, what has changed in Ferguson? That\u2019s the topic of a moving recent article from The Verge by award-winning St. Louis journalist Ben Westhoff \u2014 and the topic of today\u2019s episode of the Strong Towns Podcast. Strong Towns president Charles Marohn was interviewed by Westhoff for his article. Now, Marohn turns the tables and asks Westhoff about his reporting, how Ferguson has changed since Brown\u2019s death, and how it hasn\u2019t. While some reforms have been made in the police department, for example, other structural problems have stayed the same or gotten even worse.\nOne such problem is that Ferguson is not a place designed for the people who live there. But Westhoff says that too few people are making the connection between the built environment and tax laws, on the one hand, and issues of racism and poverty on the other. Westhoff also busts the myths that residents of Ferguson \u2014 and other struggling suburbs around the country \u2014 lack the entrepreneurial spirit and pride-of-place they need to make lasting change.\xa0\n\n\n\n\nBy coincidence, today is also the release day for Westhoff\u2019s new book, Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic (Atlantic Monthly Press). Fentanyl is now killing more people on an annual basis than any other drug. Westhoff talks about how his reporting for this book led him to infiltrate synthetic drug operators in China and to a \u201cshooting gallery\u201d in St. Louis where people go to shoot up heroin and fentanyl.\nCheck out this week\u2019s Strong Towns Podcast for a powerful conversation with award-winning investigative journalist Ben Westhoff.