The Coffee Shop on MLK Boulevard

When Tina Rodriguez opened a small coffee shop on a neglected stretch of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Stockton, California, her friends thought she was making a terrible business decision. The block had three boarded-up storefronts, a shuttered laundromat, and decades of disinvestment. "Nobody's coming there," her brother told her. But Tina had grown up on that street. She knew the people who still lived in those apartments, still walked those sidewalks, still waited at that bus stop every morning in the dark.…