“It is easier to pick up a phone and get a ride to the airport than ask your neighbor,” says Krista Wyatt, executive director and CEO of TimeBanks.Org. Paying for a service is simply less fraught than asking for a favor — no one wants to be a burden, and plenty of people don’t know their neighbors well enough to try.

But many older adults can’t afford to pay out of pocket every time they need a ride, repair, errand, or check-in. In Detroit, nearly 55% of seniors live alone; many live in older homes in need of repairs, face transportation issues, or live with a disability.

The City of Detroit already offers senior housing, roof repair, transportation, and recreation programs, but it’s harder to build a government program around the ordinary, day-to-day needs that come up for seniors: a ride to a doctor’s appointment, a porch step that’s come loose. That help still runs on informal networks, and those only work if someone willing is also available — and if asking doesn’t feel like an imposition.

The Unity in Our Community TimeBank in Southwest Detroit is one of hundreds of time banks across the country helping older residents make those connections.

Founded in 2009, the Unity in Our Community TimeBank has 842 members; in the last year, they’ve engaged in about 1,000 exchanges. Members earn credits by helping others, and they use those credits when they need help themselves. Members help each other with things like rides, yard work, errands, small home repairs, and sewing. No matter what the task is, everyone’s time is valued the same. Since credits carry over, members can help when they’re able and use those credits when they need something.

Where seniors can serve

The Unity in Our Community TimeBank was formed after two time banks in nearby neighborhoods merged. One of the two was housed within an elder-serving organization that wanted another way to meet seniors’ needs outside its existing services.

But coordinator Alice Bagley says older adults quickly became some of the time bank’s most active contributors: They make calls, share knowledge, repair things, offer companionship, and mentor younger neighbors.

Across the country, in Northern California, the Sebastopol Area Time Bank sees a similar dynamic. Coordinator David Gill says the time bank facilitates about 45 exchanges each month, with thousands since our founding about a decade ago.

One of its most active members is Jim, a retired widower in his late 80s who “loves working with his hands,” according to Gill.

“He’s got incredible skills and knowledge, but he didn’t have a mechanism to be able to use them,” Gill says. The time bank gave him one. Since joining, Jim has logged more than 350 hours helping others: “He’s helping an incredible number of people and sharing his personality. And he’s found a home for himself. He’s found purpose.”

For older adults, being able to contribute and remain part of community life can be especially valuable since more people are aging alone and one in three older adults reports feeling lonely or socially isolated. Purpose, connection, and a sense of mattering are all linked with flourishing later in life.

Recognizing that value, the city provided early funding to help incubate the Sebastopol time bank in 2015, and it’s now fiscally sponsored by the Sebastopol Community Cultural Center. The time bank also partners with the Sebastopol Area Senior Center: Volunteers can earn time-bank credits for the hours they serve at the Senior Center and they can use those credits elsewhere in the network.

The partnership gives the time bank a way to reach new members, while “the Senior Center gets to reward volunteers in a way that they’ve never been able to before,” says Gill.

The time banking model

Time banking has been around for more than 40 years in the United States. Civil rights attorney Edgar Cahn began developing what he called “Time Dollars” in the early ‘80s, following the Reagan administration slashing funding for social welfare programs. Cahn later founded the Time Dollar Institute, which eventually became TimeBanks.Org.

Cahn saw time banking as a way to value caregiving and community work that’s often unpaid and underappreciated. He argued that there is a wealth of human talent that the market ignores, and that people need more opportunities to contribute — and to be recognized as contributors.

Communities have since adapted his model in different ways. Some time banks operate as standalone community exchanges. Others are housed inside senior centers, churches, healthcare networks, and nonprofits that use the model to coordinate support among the people they already serve.

Neighborly help doesn’t organize itself

Time banking can’t fill all the gaps in elder care. Members don’t handle medical care, personal care, or other needs that require trained professionals. And even requests that neighbors could manage may not be met if the demand outpaces the available help.

In Southwest Detroit, Bagley says home repairs are consistently in high demand, in part because many of the city’s homes are older and it can be hard to keep up with maintenance and repairs.

Matching requests with the right person can take time, too, Bagley says. A time bank can give people a wider circle of support, but it still may not be as quick or convenient as hiring someone.

A time bank is only effective when it has active members, so that someone is available when a request comes in. Keeping that going requires dedicated work, though: Someone has to recruit participants, connect requests with offers, help new members get started, maintain partnerships, and keep people participating.

Building trust is part of that work. Bagley describes the time bank as “ultimately a trust-based system” and said that “trust has to be earned.”

If someone asks for a ride and the person shows up, they’ll become more comfortable relying on the network. When a new member posts an offer, Bagley encourages other members to take them up on it so the newcomer can get involved and build confidence in the system.

This coordination can be hard for volunteers to sustain on their own.

How can cities and institutions help?

Wyatt, from the national time banks network TimeBanks.Org, says coordinators can “get burned out pretty fast” without enough support.

As in Sebastopol, cities and community organizations can help by funding coordination, connecting time banks with people and organizations they already serve, or providing space, training, and administrative support, she says.

Time banking doesn’t fit the standard categories institutions often use to support programs. Bagley says the Unity in Our Community TimeBank has been able to get some support for specific activities, like a yoga class that could qualify for an active-lifestyle grant or a cooking class that could qualify for a nutrition grant.

But it’s been harder to get funding for the exchange network itself. “It’s not a concept that fits in any boxes,” Bagley says.

While funding and institutional support can give a time bank resources, the exchange still hinges on members actively participating, she notes. Through her work with the Michigan Alliance of TimeBanks, Bagley knew of a time bank in Pontiac that received initial institutional support and funding but had less involvement from community members. When the funding period ended, “there just wasn’t a lot left,” she says.

Part of the funding challenge is that much of what members gain from a time bank is hard to quantify. It’s easy to count things like hours and exchanges. It’s harder to measure whether those exchanges helped someone feel more useful or supported or whether the network helped a community come together.

Not only are these benefits hard to measure, they’re also hard to generate.

Chao Guo, a University of Pennsylvania researcher studying time banking, noted that care and other forms of relationship-based support are private goods that markets often struggle to provide well. Time banking gives people another way to provide this support — and to get something in return.

Guo said time banks can also create public goods by strengthening community ties and a sense of belonging. As more services are delivered remotely or through digital platforms, time banks help keep at least some forms of care rooted in local relationships.

The way time credits function can also keep more of that value local. As Cahn wrote in the book No More Throw-Away People, “Money knows no geographic loyalty.” Money earned for a task can be spent anywhere. When credits can only be exchanged for local activities or help from other members, the value created by members grows within the community.

That gives cities another way to help with the everyday needs that fall outside existing programs. They can’t create a program for every need older adults might have, but they can support the local networks that help residents find and help one another.

Support for this reporting came from the Better Life Lab at New America and from UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, as part of its “Spreading Love Through the Media” initiative, supported by the John Templeton Foundation.

In New York City, the Community Opportunity to Purchase (COPA) bill is being presented for the third time in five years. If passed, COPA would create a pathway for tenants to own the buildings they live in by giving nonprofits the chance to buy distressed buildings before they hit the speculative market. While New Yorkers wait to see what will happen with COPA, some tenants are taking matters into their own hands.

Recently, the Dukler Tenant Union secured a historic housing win that gets them closer to this goal. After years of fighting their slumlords, the Dukler family, the buildings where union members live, were finally sold to a new landlord, Mark Schwartz. He is an affordable housing developer who has promised to honor their rent strike, make the necessary repairs to create livable conditions for the tenants, and eventually, after six years, introduce the tenants to a pathway of turning their buildings into a co-op.

However, this historic win still falls short. Anita Foxe has lived in one of the Dukler buildings for 26 years and joined Housing Organizers for People Empowerment (HOPE), a tenant organizing group, last year to fight for better living conditions. She has spent years organizing her neighbors and helping them understand how the Dukler family, a consistent presence on the list of the worst landlords in New York City, was stealing from them. She has raised her children and now grandchildren in this apartment. Foxe and her neighbors’ ultimate goal is to own their own building, and until she sees that Schwartz has stuck to his word, she says she won’t feel 100%.

According to JohnAugust Bridgeford, lead tenant organizer with HOPE, a project of tenant support organization Urban Homesteading Assistance Board (UHAB), tenants have worked with Brooklyn Legal Services (BLS) to create memoranda of understanding (MOUs), which are part of a legally binding contract between the buyer and the tenants.

While this is a typical document used in real estate transactions that outlines the understanding both parties are making, this MOU is a bit different. It covers an extended relationship between the tenants and Schwartz. For Schwartz, it includes language to ensure he keeps his promise to honor the rent strike and improve the conditions of the buildings, and it provides the tenants with knowledge on how to eventually transfer ownership to themselves.

According to Foxe, the MOU says after a six-year period, Schwartz will bring in someone to discuss pathways to becoming a co-op with the Dukler tenants. However, Foxe says she feels 75% satisfied with this historic win. She and her neighbors still do not own the building.

“COPA would have given the opportunity for a community group from an approved list to come in as the new buyer rather than this open market ‘anyone can just come in and buy these buildings and take over and do whatever they want,” says Bridgeford, who has worked with these tenants since 2024.

From where Bridgeford stands, the policy would have made things a lot easier and given the tenants more avenues to engage with an ownership model that was not led by another developer or landlord. “[It] would actually give community groups and trusted partners that are mission-driven the ability to come in and work with tenants,” he says. “It would be a big change.”

Councilwoman Sandy Nurse recently put the COPA bill forward for the second time during her tenure. As it stands, the bill has 30 council member sponsors, who would vote in its favor. Unlike when the bill was vetoed by former Mayor Eric Adams in December 2025, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has publicly declared his support for COPA. In fact, he included COPA in his official housing plan for the city, which he announced in late May.

“It’s the first time that the agency (HPD) has the directive to work with us to get this passed and really put time and energy towards consideration of what it looks like to stand up a program,” Nurse says.

COPA has had success in San Francisco and has garnered tons of support in New York City from more than 200 community land trusts, tenant associations, affordable housing developers and other groups.

Now, in order to become law, Speaker of the New York City Council Julie Menin must bring the bill to a vote.

The bill’s current status is “laid over in committee.” According to Nurse, after a bill is heard in committee, it must go through the aging process, which takes at least a week. Once aged, a bill can be put for a committee vote, and then the full council will vote. The bill was laid over in committee on September 5, meaning it is well past its aging period.

When asked for comment, Menin’s office responded, “COPA was recently heard in committee and will continue going through the legislative process as the Council reviews the testimony and considers the feedback received.” Given the bill’s overwhelming support, one could ask what is left to consider?

The next stated meeting is October 8, at 1:30 p.m. at City Hall. But as of the publication date, the agenda items have not been published.

Once upon a time, cities in the U.S. built big, beautiful, ornate bathrooms.

City leaders weren’t doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. They believed that clean, well-maintained facilities with white porcelain sinks and flushing toilets could create a better, more well-behaved — read, middle class — public, as historian Bryant Simon describes in his new book, For Customers Only: Public Bathrooms and the Making of American Inequality.

When the dream of a better public failed to materialize — and people predictably took advantage of the privacy in public that public toilets offered — cities escalated surveillance and criminalization or simply shut bathrooms down; one of the most shocking chapters of the book details the targeting and entrapment of men seeking sex with other men. Public bathrooms have never been equal, Simon argues, instead functioning to exclude and stigmatize undesirable populations.

Fast forward to the “rough equality” of today where everyone suffers from a lack of bathroom access. While pay toilets were mostly banned in the U.S. in the 1970s, people routinely pay $5 or more to use the bathroom at coffee shops.

How did we get here? Next City spoke to Simon, a professor of history at Temple University, about the circular logic of dirty bathrooms, bathrooms as a human right, and how cities are investing in bathrooms today.

I was struck by the idea from the bathroom building boom that fancy bathrooms would create a better public and discipline people into being good citizens. But is the opposite true? By failing to maintain bathrooms, by purposefully leaving them dirty, are city leaders thinking, “I am creating bad citizens”?

I don’t know if all the dots are connecting in people’s thinking. It’s hard to know. Segregationists definitely were connecting those dots. They’re deliberately, in the ‘40s and ‘50s, un-maintaining bathrooms to uphold white supremacy — they’re turning Black bodies against themselves.

Later, the idea works with a kind of circular logic: ‘There aren’t many public bathrooms. The people using them tend to be poor. They’re not as clean as we want them to be. Well, we’re not going to give them more money because they’re unclean, and the fact that they’re unclean is proof that they don’t deserve money.” That logic happens all the time.

One of the things that made those public bathrooms in the past feel safer and used by a broad class of people was they had a very loose surveillance. They had attendants.

You don’t have eyes on these places like you had in those early comfort stations and vandalism happens. What does it take an 18-year-old who’s drunk to break something? But it would be prevented if there’s someone there. But that logic is never brought to the surface in debates. It’s like, “These people are running these places down, I’m not gonna add budget money to this.”

And then the places are even more run down. And it’s like, “People get what they deserve,” to the extent — which I think is a crazy thing — of putting prison bathrooms in public bathrooms. The symbolism of that says a lot about how you view the public and the people who rely on public services.

I see a lot of “We can’t afford bathrooms because we can’t afford attendants.”

Let’s take a place like San Diego and the hepatitis A outbreak. What were the costs of vaccinating the city? What would attendants get us? I don’t actually know how to do this math, but it would be interesting to think creatively about how we imagine spending state money, and not just say no because it costs a lot. And I would go one step further: If everything is a cost-benefit analysis, then people don’t matter.

Part of the conversation is around messaging. Are we messaging that access to a bathroom is a basic human right?

Every social movement in the 20th century finds itself at the bathroom door, and they see the fight for their rights, that they’re going to have to win some kind of recognition of their bodies and their state in public. Obviously, current trans debates are about this.

The very first gay manifesto written in 1970, like line two, is about entrapment in bathrooms, “We can’t be free if this doesn’t happen.” It’s gotten lost, but the very first responses to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1963, are “Oh, we’re going to be able to use bathrooms.”

There’s a fundamental understanding that that access is part of equal citizenship.

People who are fighting over the rights of the unhoused almost have no choice. This is so fundamental to the state of being without shelter that there’s no choice but to fight over this.

Now, I would say that the basic right question has never gotten very far. There’s never been a moment that I can think of where the state writ large has accepted the idea of access to public bathrooms as a right.

When talking about cities providing public bathrooms, it seems like you immediately come to “It’s impossible.”

Maybe the coverage that we close our eyes and dream of is impossible, but it’s also dangerous and irresponsible not to try to do better at this point. In our drive to create inequality, we’re used to this rough inequality of now, where we’re all without this basic necessity, and we’ve just thrown it out to the free market, where we once again have paid toilets, but they’re Starbucks and they’re $5. If we have any interest in equality — in the most basic sense — we deserve to try. We need to re-open shuttered bathrooms.

In the case of L.A., Metro is providing bathroom trailers called “Thrones.” How do they fit into the story?

The Thrones are an interesting case. They’re relatively cheap compared to other options. They work. They fit the needs of some people, but I also think they share something with porta potties, and there’s a psychological dimension to this.

They seem almost temporary — almost like a wish that this problem will go away. There’s some issues of access: You need a phone; you can be shut out if you violate the rules. I talked to a toilet activist in New York who confessed, “I’m really glad that they’re putting up Thrones, but I wouldn’t use one.”

When I spoke to Throne, they pushed back on the idea that they’re temporary.

Visually, to me, they look temporary. You don’t plant plants around them.

But I do think Thrones speak to the kind of creativity we need, and also in this moment of diminished state capacity, where the private sector is entering into the equation and offering solutions that used to be government solutions.

There are people in California and New York throwing around the idea of bringing back pay toilets, not at the Starbucks level, but for $1. And what they would argue is that, “Yeah, this isn’t perfect, but we’re not going to get any kind of municipal entity to enter into this unless there’s a revenue stream.”

And the other thing that the revenue stream can guarantee — and this is something we should ask about any toilet solution — is there a plan for maintenance? Un-maintenance is an act of state violence in a sense.

In Skid Row, people were grateful for the bathrooms — five standalone units installed between 2004 and 2010. Then the units were vandalized, and people were having sex and doing drugs in the bathrooms, and then the narrative was the city has no choice but to shut them down overnight.

Think about the commingling challenges that meet in Skid Row. Drug addiction, homelessness, various kinds of trauma, lack of employment, the way poverty haunts people in this country and makes it hard to recover from. And then you build a bathroom and when it doesn’t solve all those problems, you blame it on the bathroom.

People are having sex, but people have no privacy. People are doing drugs. Well, there are drug problems.

San Francisco put a fair amount of money into trying to solve the problem of the lack of public bathrooms and open defecation in the city. And when there wasn’t a dramatic decrease in open defecation, they’re like, ‘Why did we build these bathrooms?’ And this is a really hard, almost impossible task for activists, to say, “Yes, we need a lot of money, we got a problem, but we can’t solve everything.”

There’s this cycle of opening bathrooms and then shutting down the bathrooms, and then we need bathrooms, so we need to open more bathrooms. Where do you think we are in this cycle?

I do think there’s renewed interest in bathroom building. But part of the reason why it’s successful is some of this push — and I think you saw in Skid Row — [is] coming from business forces that realized we had reached a point of no return, and it was affecting their ability to make money and to bring people to those parts of the city. And so I would say it’s largely to contain the bodies of the unhoused.

It seems like Americans are more comfortable with [inequality] than they are with halfway solutions.

I am shocked, appalled and saddened by our tolerance of inequality. I live in a city with really, really stark lines between people who have enough and people who don’t have anything. Philly is not particularly pretty this way. I have a walk to the subway that I find numbing on a daily basis.

We are really willing to accept inequality. And there’s a way that that gets played out in bathrooms, and there are a lot of people who want inequality. Because inequality guarantees them a boundary between themselves and the people they don’t want to be near.

Welcome back to The Weekly Wrap, our Friday roundup of stories that explain the problems oppressing people in cities and elevate the solutions that bring us closer to economic, environmental, and social justice. If you enjoy this newsletter, share it with a friend or colleague and tell them to subscribe.

CDFI Fund Proposal Would Remove Race and Ethnicity as Qualifying Criteria

The Treasury Department has proposed new policies for community development financial institutions (CDFIs) that would eliminate CDFI certification based on serving certain racial and ethnic minorities, The American Banker reports.

The Federal Register specifically proposes that African American, Hispanic, Pacific Islander, Filipino, and Vietnamese populations would no longer be eligible target market types, as well as “Other Targeted Population” types. CDFIs that are already certified and rely on these markets would have a one-year transition period to requalify.

The move is part of the Trump administration’s ongoing effort to stamp out the CDFI Fund’s so-called “woke” ideologies. While “not unexpected given the administration’s executive orders,” the proposal “nonetheless represents a significant change in CDFI certification that harms populations lacking adequate access to loans and equity investments,” the Community Development Bankers Association has responded in a statement.

The Treasury is accepting public comment on the proposal through Nov. 30.

‘Stop the Settlements Act’ Introduced in House

Rep. Joaquin Castro introduced legislation in the House of Representatives on Thursday meant to impose sanctions on entities helping to build Israeli settlements in the West Bank or Gaza.

Sanctions are mandatory under the law, but the legislation includes a carveout that allows the president to avoid any sanctions for “national security” purposes. It also gives wide leeway to the president to determine who receives sanctions, allowing the office to determine who is “responsible for or complicit in or to have directly or indirectly engaged or attempted to engage in” the construction of settlements.

In theory, this could include American real estate agencies that have promoted illegal land sales as well as nonprofits and developers. But it is unlikely that the President would sanction, for instance, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who has promoted plans for settlement construction in Gaza.

‘Ratepayer Protection’ Bill Shut Down in Senate

The U.S. Senate voted down a bill introduced by Republican Sen. Jon Husted that would have required utility regulators to “consider” requiring tech companies operating data centers to pay for the construction of new energy plants rather than offloading costs to other ratepayers.

Only four Democrats voted in favor of the legislation, with Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer calling it an “ineffectual participation trophy” because it does not make ratepayer protection mandatory. The American Prospect notes that many states, including conservative ones, have implemented stronger ratepayer protections than would be provided by the failed bill, including tariffs on data centers.

Trump Administration Slashes Fuel Efficiency Standards for Gas Vehicles

The Department of Transportation has slashed rules for vehicles meant to curb greenhouse gas emissions, The Guardian reports. Gas vehicles account for 28% of the U.S. greenhouse emissions.

The Trump administration claimed that the move would reduce the cost of new cars by $1,300. But some advocates for cleaner energy said the new rules would cost consumers more at the gas tank, as car companies are no longer bound by mileage per gallon requirements in vehicles they manufacture.

“Consumers will pay the price for these reckless rollbacks while Trump’s Big Oil and Big Auto buddies reap the short-term profits,” Dan Becker, who works for the Center for Biological Diversity’s safe climate transport campaign, told The Guardian.

Report: U.S and Israel Attack Civilian Infrastructure in Iran

A report from the National Iranian American Council documented widespread attacks on civilian infrastructure during the U.S. and Israel’s illegal war on Iran. According to the report, attacks from the U.S. and Israel have damaged 12 bridges, more than 210 health centers, 27 airports, and 1,288 schools. Citing United Nations data, the report said that 24 to 26 healthcare workers had been killed, including in a direct strike on an ambulance. More than 3,400 civilians in Iran were reported killed as of June, according to the UN.

MORE NEWS

• MTA says Trump tariffs will add $1B to cost of new trains and buses in NYC. The City Reporter

• California just passed the strongest AI labor laws in the U.S. Blood In The Machine

• How Meta uses AI data centers to avoid billions in federal taxes. The New York Times

• Activists are pushing cities and companies to cancel parking contracts with ICE . The Appeal

• These 100 nursing homes face perilous flood risk. Minnesota shows what can happen. KFF Health News

• Mamdani must redo his pied-à-terre tax rollout, NY judge orders. Gothamist

• NYC delivery workers report staggering rates of injury, mental health issues. The City Reporter

• EPA unlawfully canceled $7B Solar for All program, judge rules. Smart Cities Dive

OPPORTUNITIES & RESOURCES

• Visa Foundation is providing grants to nonprofit Entrepreneurial Support Organizations that provide direct services to small and micro businesses. Apply by Oct. 21.

• Microsoft Community-First Grants are accepting applications for funding support for nonprofits serving King County, Washington, advancing civic life; education and workforce development, housing, human services, and basic needs; and sustainability and transportation. Apply by Oct. 23.

• The America250 Community Futures Challenge is accepting applications from 501(c)(3) nonprofits advancing workforce development, economic mobility, public infrastructure, civic tech, entrepreneurship, community development, and more. Apply by Nov. 30.

This story was produced by MLK50: Justice Through Journalism as part of Next City’s Local Reporting Hub, with funding from the Kresge Foundation.

Ms. Carolyn has had a hole in her ceiling for two years.

During heavy rain, water leaks through the exposed wood and runs down the wall in the front room of her one-level home. The room’s water-soaked floorboards are cracked and splintering. Ms. Carolyn, who asked to be identified only by her first name in this piece to protect her privacy, keeps the worst of the damage hidden under a large box, worried that pests will come up through the gaps in the floor.

A contractor cut the ceiling hole in 2024 while attempting to fix a smaller water leak — but he never came back to repair it. Ms. Carolyn tried to contact her homeowner’s insurance company, which had hired the contractor, but was unsuccessful.

“I tried to call them back, but I couldn’t get nobody to actually answer me,” she says.

Her front room used to be where Ms. Carolyn laid out her best dinnerware, the far wall decorated with a mirror and floral candle sconces. Now, the wall is bare aside from the vertical stains the water leaves when it gets inside. Her decorations sit in piles on the dining table and floor. She rarely goes into the room at all.

As her home ages, other maintenance issues have emerged, including a broken water heater and electrical problems in the kitchen. In the front room, a dark spot that she suspects may be mold has appeared on another wall near an air vent. Because Ms. Carolyn is on oxygen therapy, mold in the home is especially dangerous.

This story was co-published in collaboration with Shelterforce, the only independent, non-academic publication covering the worlds of affordable housing, community development and housing justice.

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act’s champions on both sides of the aisle called the law the largest housing legislation in decades. But will it actually increase the supply of housing in the U.S.?

The law contains an array of technical tweaks and rule changes, and lays out future housing goals, all designed to boost the supply of market-rate and affordable housing. Housing policy analysts who spoke with Shelterforce and Next City agree that the law is large and ambitious and may have some positive impact, but they say the extent to which it will increase the supply of affordable or market-rate housing will depend largely on future financing.

Tram Hoang, senior associate at PolicyLink, expressed skepticism of the law’s ability to spur new housing. “It doesn’t do anything meaningful to directly produce housing, let alone affordable housing,” says Hoang, pointing out that the legislation doesn’t mandate new housing anywhere.

Much of what the legislation promises won’t happen unless Congress funds it, a hollowed-out HUD can effectively implement it, and private developers decide the incentives are worth acting upon, experts say. But everyone who spoke with Shelterforce and Next City acknowledged that many of the new federal law’s changes could remove some friction in the housing development process.

“This bill is really the largest non-low-income housing tax-related housing supply bill we’ve had probably since 2008,” says Mark Kudlowitz, senior policy director for Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), a nonprofit that helps finance affordable housing. LISC worked with the Senate on elements of the bill and has championed its passage.

Reducing environmental review

Some of the biggest changes in the ROAD to Housing Act are designed to speed up federally required environmental review, which has increasingly been cast as a hurdle for housing production.

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), signed by President Richard Nixon in 1970, requires public notice and evaluations of environmental and economic impact by federal agencies before certain development projects, including buildings and transit infrastructure, can be approved. It requires lengthy public engagement, which can add months or years to development timelines.

According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, one-quarter of NEPA reviews that require environmental impact statements take more than five years to complete. The process can exceed that if a NEPA review is caught up in outside litigation. While little data exists tracking NEPA’s cost to housing projects, an estimate from Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office of New York state’s similar State Environmental Quality Review Act found that it adds $82,000 in costs per unit there.

The Trump administration already passed sweeping alterations to NEPA as part of the 2025 reconciliation bill (H.R. 1), allowing corporations to shorten the typical review period if they pay a fee. The ROAD to Housing law creates more openings for developers to skip or shorten NEPA evaluation. Most of these changes are in Section 206 of the law, Unlocking Housing Supply Through Streamlined and Modernized Reviews Act.

The list of housing-related exemptions from NEPA review includes social supports unrelated to new construction, such as rental assistance and certain types of homeowner assistance. Acquisition of public land, rehabilitation of one- to four-unit buildings, and new construction of up to four units will not require an environmental impact statement.

According to Kudlowitz of LISC, these changes to NEPA were necessary to cut costs for developers and allow projects to move forward that would have otherwise been too expensive. “Time is money. It carries interest rate risk,” Kudlowitz says.

Incentivizing local land use and zoning reform

The ROAD to Housing Act also incentivizes localities to make regulatory tweaks to allow for denser housing, but only if Congress funds it at a future date. It does this through an “innovation fund” in which HUD disburses grants to cities or counties that demonstrate “an objective improvement in housing supply growth.”

Eligible local governments and tribes would have to apply for the grant and provide data on their success at producing housing that “has improved the quality and affordability of housing in the jurisdiction of the eligible entity” and implementing initiatives to increase housing supply, including legalizing denser lots that would accommodate duplexes, triplexes, and quadplexes; eliminating parking requirements, and shortening regulatory requirements. If Congress authorizes funding in the future, the grants would run between $10,000 and $250,000. Congress can appropriate $200 million a year until 2031 to fund these grants.

According to Kudlowitz, the fund would represent a step in the right direction toward incentivizing local governments.

“This bill acknowledges [that] while the federal government has a very real role in producing and preserving affordable rental housing and affordable homeownership projects, we also need localities [that] control land use and regulatory barriers to do their part,” Kudlowitz says. But this only happens if the law is funded. “We have to go ask Congress for that,” he says.

Boosting manufactured housing

In another large reform meant to speed up housing production, manufactured homes will no longer have to be mobile. Often erroneously called mobile homes, most manufactured homes are moved only once in their lifespans. Removing the longstanding requirement to include a chassis—the frame containing wheels in a manufactured home—could theoretically speed their production.

According to Shamus Roller, executive director of National Housing Law Project, a legal advocacy nonprofit, the change could allow developers to produce more housing quickly.

“Removing that requirement might allow people to really experiment,” he says.

Under Section 301 of the ROAD to Housing Act—the Housing Supply Expansion Act—HUD must also enact new safety standards for manufactured homes built without a chassis. It also directs HUD to create new energy efficiency standards for these homes, with a one-year timeline for enacting them.

“Our team is working quickly and efficiently to implement this law in a way that delivers on President Trump’s promise to increase affordability for the American people,” a HUD spokesperson told Shelterforce and Next City.

In a July 11 statement, Manufactured Housing Institute CEO Lesli Gooch said that the ROAD to Housing Act “enables high-quality homes to be built efficiently and placed in more localities.” The manufactured homes industry was also exempted from the law’s ban on large institutional investors, despite a proliferation of private equity ownership of manufactured housing lots.

Financing changes for affordable housing

Beyond streamlined review and regulations, the ROAD to Housing Act introduces some financing tweaks that policy experts say could help produce more affordable housing. The law increases the cap on public welfare investments, a federal limit on how much certain banks can invest in affordable housing and other community development projects, a restriction intended to limit banks’ credit risk. That cap increases from 15 percent to 20 percent of a bank’s capital.

H.R. 1 changed the formulas and increased funding for the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program. But the credits themselves must be sold on the private market to raise funds, and private banks faced the same restrictions on how much they could spend on LIHTC.

In theory, the cap increase could lower the burden on local governments to fund affordable housing projects and “investment will be able to be redeployed elsewhere,” says Emily Goldstein of ANHD, a coalition of community groups in New York City. It’s not clear how big of an impact this change may have: While H.R. 1 came with an estimate that 1.22 million more homes would be produced over nine years as a result of the law, no such estimate has been produced for the ROAD to Housing law, Kudlowitz says. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, banks supplied 80 percent of the $28.9 billion in investments into LIHTC credits.

Implementation remains in question

Despite these changes, experts who spoke with Shelterforce and Next City say the law faces an uncertain environment that will hinder its implementation.

HUD’s staff has been hobbled by cuts from the Trump administration’s “deferred resignations” in April 2025, in which the administration spent billions of dollars paying workers to resign, as well as more layoffs during the government shutdown last year. HUD is currently operating with 5,800 employees, according to Federal News Network, compared to 8,800 before the second Trump administration began. “A lot of the most experienced people at the agencies have left, and that creates real challenges for making these programs work,” Roller says. Implementing all the programs in the law might require a new federal administration re-staffing the agency. A HUD spokesperson did not address whether the agency would increase hiring to implement the law’s provisions.

Most of the law’s tweaks allow developers to build more cheaply by saving them time. According to Hoang at PolicyLink, this is less efficient than directly subsidizing developers and requiring affordability.

She says the law mainly addresses “soft” costs of development, while the main restrictions to supply are “hard” costs of financing in the form of loans. “The biggest thing that we can do to build affordable housing is to lower the cost of building,” says Hoang. “[The law] takes a very roundabout way to try to make housing affordable when we could just say here’s money for affordable housing.”

She also says many of the provisions meant to speed up housing production may save developers money, but there is no requirement that those savings translate into lower rents.

“Any cost savings are not designed to go to the end user, which is a tenant or a homeowner,” Hoang says. She calls for deed restrictions for homeowners or rent control for rented units.

Roller agrees, saying all of the ROAD to Housing Act’s reforms are positive moves, but leave the larger problems in the housing system in place.

“I don’t think any of those things or all those things combined are going to shift the basic nature of the way the housing market works,” Roller says.

For a nation in the grip of a housing affordability crisis, the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act — the first major overhaul of housing legislation in more than 30 years — is good news.

But the policy, which aims to accelerate housing production across the country, also sets in motion surging demand for one of the oldest and most consequential building materials on Earth: wood.

Timber is foundational to North American construction; nearly every building we can see contains remnants of forests near and far. Engineered wood technologies have also recently emerged as a lower-carbon alternative to concrete and steel, given that building material manufacturing accounts for 11% of global CO2 emissions. Yet the origin of these wood products and their underlying forestry practices remain poorly monitored, at growing risk to the planet.

As cities grapple with the need to increase housing production and decarbonize the built environment, they must take seriously the ecological impact of these material demands. As governments streamline zoning and building codes to ease constraints on housing supply, our cities must also enact reforms to incentivize building retrofits over demolition, construction material reuse over new material consumption, and sustainable harvest timber certifications to ensure that housing expansion does not result in the decimation of old-growth forests.

The risk to boreal forests

Stretching across Canada, Alaska, northern Europe, and Russia, boreal forests account for roughly 27% of the world’s forests. Trees and soils built up over millennia store enormous amounts of carbon; the Canadian boreal alone contains the equivalent of 26 years of global carbon emissions.

Yet boreal forests face dual existential threats: logging of the old-growth Canadian boreal is increasing at a rate of nearly one and a half football fields each minute, while simultaneously the boreal is warming faster than any other forest ecosystem on Earth, with acute impacts from drought and wildfires.

Most Americans have experienced the impact of this decline in boreal health firsthand. In recent summers, smoke from increasing and more intense boreal wildfires fueled by climate change has blanketed U.S. cities, triggering air-quality alerts, closing schools, and sending vulnerable residents to emergency rooms.

Whether we acknowledge it or not, cities are locked into a reciprocal relationship with these distant forests. Urban growth drives timber harvests and cutting down forests increases net greenhouse gas emissions, which can in turn negatively influence forest health, wildfire risk, and global carbon dynamics.

Rapid Arctic warming has dramatically altered boreal fire frequency, intensity, and seasonality, putting the boreal at risk of switching from a carbon sink to a carbon source. Large, high-severity fires are becoming more frequent, releasing massive amounts of carbon that can far exceed decades of forest carbon sequestration.

While vital to global carbon stability, these changing carbon dynamics in boreal forests are only partially represented in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s projections and individual countries’ national greenhouse gas inventories and nationally-determined contributions, or NDCs. When large-scale logging coincides with intensifying climate stress and wildfires, forests can become ecologically unstable, losing their capacity to recover and raising the risk of permanent ecosystem change.

At the same time, boreal wood is increasingly being used in urban construction as in recent years, nearly half of U.S. lumber imports have come from Canada. With rising concerns about housing affordability and supply constraints, many U.S. cities are seeking to quickly expand housing construction at a time when global demand for wood products is projected to grow 37% by 2050.

This itself is not a problem. When sourced responsibly, wood is one of the lowest-carbon building materials available. Unlike concrete and steel, which release significant amounts of greenhouse gases during production, trees store carbon absorbed from the atmosphere as they grow. When lumber is used efficiently in building construction, this biogenic carbon can remain locked away for decades in the structures around us.

But the calculation of these carbon benefits depends heavily on the underlying forestry practices and the building’s lifespan. When a tree is harvested, its stored carbon is often released far more quickly than the replacement forest can re-sequester it.

Here lies the paradox of urban climate action: While cities urgently need more timber to expand housing supply and decarbonize building construction, rising demand risks accelerating the ecological decline of the very same forests that undergird global carbon stability.

The certification problem

Since the 1990s, many North American timber operations have received certifications from forestry-standard groups, signaling to eco-conscious developers, architects, and investors that their wood products were responsibly produced. The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) cover the majority of commercial forest operations in North America. They differ in governance and stringency: FSC emerged from environmental advocacy as the only multi-stakeholder, third-party certification scheme, while SFI was created as an industry-friendly alternative by timber trade groups.

But SFI policies around clearing primary forests are vague, while the FSC Mix label allows a product to include a majority of wood from non-certified logging operations. With global timber consumption forecast to surge by more than 170% over the next 30 years, the consequences of these certification systems are increasingly important.

Recent reporting shows that roughly a third of certified Canadian timber harvest occurs in old-growth (or ‘primary’) forests, ecosystems that have captured carbon over centuries and play an essential role in stabilizing the global climate. Timber — especially timber marketed as sustainably certified — should never be harvested from old-growth forests.

These complex ecosystems have sequestered carbon over hundreds of years and should be maintained to maximize ecological and carbon benefits. The harvesting of old-growth forest timber, particularly through clear-cutting, wipes out wood and soil carbon sequestration, fundamentally alters ecological diversity, and increases vulnerability to fire, pests, and drought.

Is mass timber the solution?

A growing body of research underlines the high potential of bio-based materials like “mass timber” to store carbon, as they can replace carbon-intensive, mineral-based structural materials like concrete, steel, and aluminum. These engineered wood composites provide strength and durability far beyond what traditional lumber can, while significantly reducing embodied emissions.

Due to its lower carbon nature and aesthetic appeal, mass timber construction is rapidly expanding in European and North American construction markets. With manufacturing building materials account for 11% of global energy emissions, these evolving technologies hold promise for reducing the embodied carbon of urban development. That said, the forestry practices and ecological impacts behind these mass timber products are poorly researched.

How cities and policymakers can respond

While geographically distant from the boreal forest, cities can send a powerful market signal that housing solutions should not outsource environmental damage to the North. This can happen through two broad paths: by reducing overall timber demand through comprehensive building adaptive reuse strategies, and by encouraging the use of independently certified, sustainably harvested timber that avoids old-growth forests.

A first step would be for state and municipal policymakers to support clear, accessible information on building life-cycle carbon assessments to help determine the feasibility of building retrofits and material reuse, and just as importantly, to demystify a timber certification landscape that is complex and, at times, misleading.

These educational efforts should be paired with the following:

• Procurement requirements that favor wood products certified with FSC’s “100%” label that prohibit harvesting from old-growth forests

• Incentives for whole building life-cycle assessments that account for carbon capture and release over time and help resolve whether building renovation or new construction is most efficient

• Tax benefits plus expedited zoning and permitting timelines for building reuse when feasible over demolition and new construction

• An independent database of wood products that report environmental impact metrics

In the United States, existing environmental building standards like the LEED rating system could be adjusted to ensure incentives align with genuinely responsibly sourced timber. For example, the latest version of LEED doesn’t distinguish between FSC certifications, so projects can get a “responsibly sourced” credit if they use products certified with the looser FSC-Mix label. Overall, we need more nuance when it comes to defining “sustainable forestry” within the architecture, engineering, and construction sector and in the regulatory bodies that set building standards.

These reforms should fit within a broader push for circularity. Cities can reduce their consumption of new timber products by reforming zoning and building code requirements to encourage building adaptive reuse and deconstruction, establishing material recovery and recycling systems, and providing information and technical assistance for values-driven practitioners.

These can occur in tandem with loosening restrictions on mass timber buildings to lower the embodied carbon of urban construction, paired with appropriate forestry certification requirements. Local land use reforms and density allowances offer complementary ways of enabling housing production without sacrificing boreal health.

More broadly, the boreal forest remains a blind spot in climate policy and accounting. We don’t have enough scientific data on the carbon fluxes in boreal forests and the carbon life-cycle impacts of mass timber. Scientists emphasize that adaptive forest management — forest management approaches that aim to reconcile biodiversity and climate goals with forestry demands — is essential to maintaining forest resilience. Implementing a robust data-driven monitoring framework in high-risk boreal forests in the U.S. and Canada, plus integrating ecosystem-based forest management, can help.

Recent research has highlighted the mismatch between the sustainable values of many private forest owners and the policy incentives they face, suggesting a significant opportunity to engage motivated landowners in adaptive forest management. Regional governing bodies can respond to this opportunity by pairing expanded financial incentives with technical assistance, detailed information on local climate change impacts, and capacity-building support.

While cities occupy less than 3% of the Earth’s land surface, they are home to 45% of the world’s 8.2 billion people, and the impacts of their material demands and carbon emissions are global. To meet global climate goals, we must drastically reduce the building sector’s carbon impact in the coming decades. Construction technologies are becoming greener, but the challenge ahead is accounting for the ecosystem impacts embedded in the products that make urban life possible.

Boreal forests sit at the center of this challenge: removed from urban life, essential to global climate stability, and increasingly shaped by distant demand. Our cities must adopt a broader field of vision.

Sponsored content from KABOOM!. Sponsored content policy

Four in 10 students report persistent sadness or hopelessness, and a new KABOOM! report says remedies start with simply listening to young people.

In the first of a two-part sponsored series with KABOOM!, we delve into the “State of Our Kids,” a new report on the youth mental health crisis built with a youth editorial board that pushed back on adult assumptions and centered lived experience alongside statistics. 

Lysa Ratliff, CEO of KABOOM!, and Amy Meuers, CEO of the National Youth Leadership Council, say most conversations about youth mental health happen without kids in the room. Or, adults tokenize young people: “A lot of times, as adults, we'll invite young people to share their opinion, and then we turn away from them,” says Meuers.  

In its approach to the report, KABOOM! drew upon its 30-year history of treating youth as designers and experts during its efforts to close the gap in playspace equity.

“When you're 5 years old, you know how to build a playground more than a 50-year-old, right?” says Ratliff. “When you're 15 years old, you know what's going on with young people who are overscheduled or trying to get into college or dealing with things in their community more than a 35-year-old.”

Ratliff describes a generation growing up with a tablet by age 2, offered more distracting technologies than opportunities to play.

“It became really important to us at KABOOM! to expand the conversation beyond playground design and playspace design,” says Ratliff, explaining what led to the new report. “We started tuning into statistics that made us really worried and concerned about the wellness and mental health of our young.”

Read the full report at kaboom.org/sook. Listen to the sponsored episode below or subscribe to the Next City podcast on Apple, Spotify, or Goodpods.

It was a standing-room only audience at the final runway show of this year’s Indigenous New York Fashion Week. The crowd squeezed in right up to the door of this year’s venue: the brand new home of the American Indian Community House.

It was exactly what executive director Patricia Tarrant (Mandan and Hidatsa) had in mind when she signed a seven-year lease on the space. Founded by Native American volunteers in 1969, American Indian Community House (AICH) has bounced around about a dozen locations over the decades.

With around 9,600 square feet in the heart of the Garment District, AICH’s new, sixth-floor space is a big upgrade from its previous location in a cramped 1,700-square-foot, 20th-floor Madison Avenue office. It’s also custom built-out for the organization’s multiple needs — including hosting high-profile events. AICH moved into the new space on March 1.

“With this space we have so many more opportunities and I think we can be more economically sovereign by renting out our space to other organizations,” Tarrant says. “You can rent out a space anywhere but here you could also give back to Indigenous folks and that’s what we frame it as.”

Wherever it’s been located, AICH has always been a space where multiple Native communities have come together to support each other — be it through basic health care or mental health services, a food pantry, job training, connections to housing, or celebrating and creating art and culture.

This year, it’s meant hosting 30 Indigenous designers and 120 Indigenous models, as well as all Indigenous-led hair, makeup and production teams — representing more than a hundred tribal nations or Indigenous communities, from as far as Fiji and Australia — for the second annual Indigenous New York Fashion Week.

It was a full circle moment for Liana Shewey (Mvskoke) and Korina Emmerich (Puyallup), co-founders and co-owners of Relative Arts NYC, the East Village studio and community space that produces the event. The duo first met at an AICH event back in 2018; the nonprofit has moved twice since then.

“I was definitely in awe of the amount of space they have now to do different events, performances or gallery shows,” Emmerich says. “Coming from where we met in this little janky-ass place on Eldridge Street, to see where it is now is so exciting.”

Events like these are a big component of the long-term vision to get AICH to a place where it can finally secure a permanent home. Ten percent of Indigenous New York Fashion Week ticket sales this year went to AICH.

“It just feels like taking a space that is so deserved and needed,” Shewey says. “Of course the longest-running urban Indigenous-run space would be continually displaced for their entire existence. This is perfect for fashion week. This is perfect for AICH. This is perfect for growing what they’re doing.”

AICH’s journey

AICH’s new home reflects its glory days as both a service provider and Indigenous cultural hub.

For decades, AICH received significant federal funding through the Indian Health Service for its health programs and the Department of Labor for its job training programs. It launched an HIV/AIDS project in 1990, and hosted a conference on HIV among two spirit Native Americans in 1991.

Over those same decades, AICH also operated performance spaces and art galleries that hosted exhibitions of nearly every well-known Native American artist as well as many that are still under the radar. Back in 1975, it hosted the first show by Spiderwoman Theater, North America’s first Native feminist theater troupe and the longest-running Native American women’s theater company.

“Arts are very important to Native Americans,” says Frances Grumbly (Akwesasne Mohawk), who has been a part of AICH since inception, and currently serves as board treasurer. “We’ve always been creating, one way or another, whether it be basket weaving, painting, moccasin making. It’s part of our soul to create.”

From 1989 to 2005, AICH operated a theater on the eighth floor at 404 Lafayette Street, with an art gallery and gift shop downstairs. The theater was known as “The Circle,” with the nonprofit’s office spaces arranged around a circular space used for serving meals or holding classes during the day and re-arranged into a performance space in the evening. AICH was forced out from that space at the end of 2005 to make way for a luxury condo redevelopment that never actually came to fruition. The building is now part of NYU’s campus, filled with offices and a fitness center.

AICH moved its 40 or so staffers down to a space in the Financial District, at the very southern tip of Manhattan. For a few more years, it kept up its health and workforce programs, youth programs, its gallery, and a performance space.

Things started taking a turn in 2012. First, AICH was forced to move again due to a rent hike. Then, that same year, it lost a long-running Department of Labor grant worth $1 million a year — about a third of AICH’s revenue at the time.

More devastating news came in 2017, when the nonprofit lost its long-running Indian Health Service grant. AICH reported zero revenue on its 990 tax filings for 2017. The organization lost its own space and moved into an office shared with another nonprofit on the fourth floor at 39 Eldridge Street in Chinatown — but at least it still had space for smaller events. Volunteers and donations from board and staff held the organization together by a thread over the next couple of years.

AICH started rethinking its model to be less reliant on federal funding. In 2019, a group of non-Native New Yorkers came to AICH’s leadership with an interest in supporting Native communities — not out of a sense of charity, but as a form of reparations.

“It was a group of settlers that had intergenerational wealth,” Tarrant says. “They approached us to say that they would give the money to Indigenous folks and then Indigenous folks could say what they wanted to do with that money.”

That group partnered with AICH to launch the Manna-hatta Fund in October 2019. The fund encouraged non-Native New Yorkers to donate at least $24 a month — alluding to the apocryphal story that Dutch colonists led by Peter Minuit bought the island now called Manhattan from its Indigenous inhabitants for $24 worth of trinkets.

AICH decided what to do with the money, which it mostly re-granted to other Native-led organizations, like the American Indian Law Alliance. By the time it closed in October 2025, the fund had raised a total of $2.5 million. AICH has since been transitioning Manna-hatta Fund donors into supporting AICH itself.

As the organization’s finances started improving through individual donors and support from foundations, AICH renewed its efforts to find a permanent home.

Finding a home – and a new focus

When Tarrant returned to AICH in 2021 as executive director (she had worked there from 2006 to 2018) the organization was starting to shop around for a space.

Logistically, they needed a space in Midtown Manhattan — close to all the city’s subway lines plus regional transit hubs. “Our community’s not in one specific area of New York City, we’re spread out,” Tarrant explains.

New York City is home to the country’s largest urban Native population, more than 180,000 individuals, and it’s a growing share of the city’s population. But aside from Brooklyn’s former Little Caughnawaga, an enclave of Mohawk ironworkers and their families that existed from the 1920s to the 1970s, New York’s urban Native population has never really clustered in one particular neighborhood.

Tarrant toured about a dozen different Midtown locations. Some were storefronts, which had the benefit of being more visible and accessible. But that access would come with worry over securing the space after-hours. Plus, many Midtown storefronts lacked space for the art exhibitions, sewing classes, film screenings, and other events that AICH wanted to host going forward.

The more spaces Tarrant saw, the more she became convinced that AICH wasn’t quite positioned yet to acquire a permanent home. It needed more time to rebuild.

“It started as purchasing a building,” Tarrant says. “But at the time we had only two staff members, and we didn’t think we could have the capacity for that. We started looking into more renting spaces and building up the capacity for our staff to have that goal of, in the end, acquiring a space.”

Tarrant had grown up around the organization in its glory days. Her late mother, Victoria Yellow-Wolf Tarrant, worked in AICH’s Health and Wellness Department during those years at The Circle; Tarrant’s older sister managed AICH’s gift shop.

She knew it would never be exactly the same as it had been then. The Indian Health Services funding for New York City was now with the New York Indian Council, and newer groups like Urban Indigenous Collective were now providing some of the mental services that AICH previously provided.

“We were realizing … that AICH doesn’t have to be this ‘end all, be all’ organization that it used to be,” Tarrant says. “We thought the culture aspect and the youth programming wasn’t already being fostered in other organizations. We want to shift towards that more.”

So their team started focusing on spaces that would fit their vision of AICH as a Native cultural and community hub with a focus on youth programming. “We used to be a drop-in center,” Tarrant says. “Having a place to be in community has always been a part of AICH’s history and that’s something I want to maintain and bring back.”

On the sixth floor of a 105-year-old building on West 39th Street, just around the corner from the Port Authority Bus Terminal, Tarrant found what she needed. It was the entire floor, and it was mostly open space.

The landlord offered to cover buildout costs. Taking inspiration from The Circle, Tarrant worked with AICH’s development director — a trained landscape architect — to create a floor plan to build offices around the outside of the space, leaving the middle open and flexible like it was back at 404 Lafayette.

The floor plan included extra office spaces that AICH itself doesn’t need right now, but is offering to sublet to other Native-serving organizations or allied groups. It’s another piece of the long-term vision: If AICH is to ever acquire a permanent home, it will most likely be renting out office space in that building to other organizations. Now it could also learn how to operate in that potential market, just as it’s learning the business of event rentals and co-programming with others.

“It’s about collaborating,” Tarrant says. “We’re still learning and we’re still trying to build up our consistent base of programming, but I think we’re in a good place right now where we can fill in those broader gaps. It’s been needed in the Indigenous community – somewhere you can fit more than 20 people in a space.”

New possibilities

As it happened, AICH’s new location in the Garment District was particularly fitting for a fashion show.

“There’s so many different smaller businesses in the Garment District that you can make connections with,” says Emmerich, co-founder of Indigenous New York Fashion Week. “I’m up there all the time, just shopping at the notion stores. Anything I need, I can just run up to the Garment District and get it.”

Everything about Indigenous New York Fashion Week was planned to maximize opportunities for new connections. Twenty-two designers were first-timers to this year’s event, as were many of the models.

It was the first ever runway show for Jona Guisbert, co-founder, designer and creative director at Quispe Azul. His brand works with Quechua communities in Ecuador’s Andes Mountains who hand-weave garments using traditional pedal looms.

Guisbert grew up in Queens with an Ecuadorean mother and a Bolivian father. He first began to connect with his Indigenous roots when he moved to the Pacific Northwest about a decade ago. After he returned to New York, a friend who had modeled for Indigenous New York Fashion Week last year encouraged him to apply to show a collection this year.

“It was a really meaningful way for us to be able to share all the work that we’ve been doing over the last couple years,” Guisbert says. “In my mind, this is something that happens maybe at year 10, so it definitely was unexpected. The way this opportunity for us even came about was just through rebuilding my Andean community here in New York.”

Most other New York Fashion Week runway shows work on a pay-to-play model, with designers typically paying show producers anywhere from $10,000 to $50,000 to participate. At Indigenous New York Fashion Week, designers pay nothing to participate.

Sponsors and ticket sales cover production costs, which Shewey and Emmerich estimate to be around $327,000 this year. They were able to pay models and hair and makeup teams more than last year, closer to industry standards.

“We’re creating an economy of Indigenous creatives,” Shewey says. “That first meeting at AICH was just a taste of what was possible. From there, it was organizing and meeting more and more people who were driven with the same passion and vision for liberation. Coming together and realizing that we’re all just trying to get free.

“And here we are now. We have our own little chunk of the East Village. We get to create on our own terms and put on big events on our own terms and gather on our own terms.”

Voters in Providence, Rhode Island, are set to become the first in the nation to decide on a binding initiative to divest their tax dollars from countries or companies complicit in genocide, war crimes, occupation, or apartheid.

The groundbreaking measure will be on the ballot in November thanks to a years-long organizing effort launched in response to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

“We are seeing that across almost all demographics, divestment is popular, and there is broad support for human rights and Palestine solidarity,” says Jackie Goldman, who became the Democratic nominee to represent Providence City Council Ward 5 following a primary win this month. Goldman was previously a member-leader with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP).

Justin Marlowe, director of the University of Chicago’s Center for Municipal Finance, says that the effort reflects growing popular interest in how tax dollars are collected and used.

Read more: A Small Bay Area City Has Divested From War Criminals. Here’s How.

“There’s been a realization of just how much money is at stake and just how opaque the decision-making can be sometimes,” he tells Next City. “That has caused a lot of people on all the different sides of this debate to really bear down and study these processes and learn where the points of influence are, and as they’ve done that, you’ve seen some litigation, some policy changes, some pressure campaigns.”

A campaign born from Break the Bonds

JVP Rhode Island started the Providence divestment campaign in 2024 as part of a nationwide JVP initiative called Break the Bonds, which seeds and supports local efforts to demand divestment from Israel Bonds. More than $1.6 billion in Israel Bonds are held by state governments, municipal governments, and public pension funds nationwide, with at least $1 billion held by Palm Beach County in Florida and about $360 million held in New York state and local retirement funds. The Development Corporation of Israel sells those bonds to raise foreign funds for the Israeli treasury.

When Providence organizers launched their efforts, the city held no Israel Bonds, so the goal was to prohibit future investment. In 2024, an initial attempt to pass an ordinance barring future investments in the bonds of governments maintaining a military occupation or accused of committing war crimes or human rights violations sputtered out after Mayor Brett Smiley promised to veto it.

Read more: Is Your City or State Investing in Israeli Bonds or Fossil Fuels? Here’s How to Find Out.

A new coalition called Providence for Palestine is now leading the effort to pass a wider-reaching ballot initiative, which would mandate that the city “refrain, to the best of its ability, from investing in ‘complicit entities’ or ‘sovereign debt’ of foreign countries conducting ethnic cleansing, apartheid, illegal military occupation, or genocide.” The new coalition includes members of JVP Rhode Island, Democratic Socialists of America, local labor unions, and Reclaim RI, a housing justice and progressive organizing group.

“The leadership of our campaign since Break the Bonds and in this campaign as well is disproportionately Jewish and very much rooted in our Jewish values and wanting to build a faith and Jewish culture that centers solidarity, and justice, and repair,” says Zack Kligler, a JVP Rhode Island and Providence for Palestine organizer.

He says campaign volunteers collected more than 10,000 signatures in support of the measure.

Goldman was among those who helped collect signatures, often juggling multiple clipboards to gather names for their campaign, fellow progressives running in other districts, and the ballot measure. “My ask was just ‘Hey, we’re collecting these signatures to be able to get Providence to divest from countries and companies complicit in genocide, apartheid, and human rights violations,’” Goldman says. “And people were like ‘Oh yeah, pass me that clipboard!’”

The Providence Board of Canvassers confirmed at the end of July that it had verified the signatures of more than 5% of the city’s registered voters — the threshold needed to get on the November ballot.

Learning from Pittsburgh and Somerville

Organizers in Providence drew inspiration from earlier divestment efforts in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Somerville, Massachusetts. The Not On Our Dime campaign in Pittsburgh tried in 2024 and 2025 to get a divestment referendum on the city’s ballot, but pro-Israel groups opposed it and succeeded in pushing the issue off the ballot through legal challenges. Meanwhile, voters in Somerville passed a divestment ballot question last November. But under local law, it had to be non-binding.

“Somerville and Pittsburgh have been pioneering this pretty new tactic for the BDS [Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions] movement, and we’re very excited to take that to the next level,” Kligler says.

Read more: How Somerville Organized To Pass a Ballot Question To Divest From Israel

Organizers also drew strength from their city’s own progressive record. In 2006, Providence became the first U.S. city to divest from companies conducting business in Sudan after the genocide perpetrated in Darfur through an action of the city council. In November 2023, the Providence City Council became one of the nation’s first legislative bodies to pass a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

This November’s ballot initiative in Providence will be the nation’s first binding citizen initiative on the question of divestment, according to Benjamin Case, project lead on the Ballot Initiatives Project at Arizona State University’s Center for Work and Democracy. He says it’s a new step for a progressive movement that has increasingly turned to ballot initiatives to drive change over the last two decades as frustration with the Democratic Party has grown.

Divestment is a particularly fitting issue for a citizen’s initiative, Case says, because “number one, it’s something that is highly popular with voters; and number two, it’s something that, for one reason or another, is not popular with representatives.”

Opposition may be weakening

As in Pittsburgh, the initiative in Providence is facing threats of legal action from Zionist groups who do not want to see the city’s funds divested from companies with ties to Israel.

The Jewish Alliance of Rhode Island wrote to Providence officials ahead of the signature certification process in July suggesting that the initiative could be invalid. Providence Mayor Brett Smiley has also urged voters to oppose the initiative claiming it would violate state law and be unenforceable if passed.

However, recent events in Providence have left advocates optimistic that the initiative has a good chance of passing, and any legal challenges would have to come afterward.

Smiley was among those defeated in September’s primaries in the same progressive wave that saw Goldman win their primary in Ward 5. The new Democratic candidate for Providence mayor, David Morales, is a democratic socialist who has spoken in support of the divestment campaign. Progressives are now expected to hold a majority if not a supermajority on Providence City Council after the general election.

Kligler says many of the organizers whose efforts helped usher in the new slate of progressives are now turning more of their attention to the ballot measure. “We’re continuing to build the movement, and do get out the vote stuff, and hopefully turn a lot of the energy that’s been focused towards these progressive candidates towards this ballot measure now,” he says.

Goldman says they hope this year’s elections, including the historic ballot initiative, will mark the start of a new era for Providence.

“There’s a real energy and thirst for a government that puts people first,” they tell Next City. “There’s only so much power that we all have, but we can choose where our money goes and how we build up the financial health of the city, and we don’t need to do that through the financing of genocide [and] endless wars.”

Welcome back to The Weekly Wrap, our Friday roundup of stories that explain the problems oppressing people in cities and elevate the solutions that bring us closer to economic, environmental, and social justice. If you enjoy this newsletter, share it with a friend or colleague and tell them to subscribe.

Quick scheduling note: The Weekly Wrap is off next Friday. Next City’s team will be in Chicago hosting Vanguard, our annual conference for rising urban changemakers. We’ll be back in your inbox in October!

San Francisco May Give Housing Its Own City Department

San Francisco Supervisor Myrna Melgar is pushing to create a new standalone city housing department, Mission Local reports, which could potentially be called the Department of Housing Development and Preservation.

Currently, the city’s housing programs are scattered across multiple offices with limited coordination. The new department would pull housing functions out of the mayor’s office and consolidate them into a single agency with broader authority over affordable and market-rate housing production and preservation.

Melgar is also drafting separate legislation to launch a city program supporting limited-equity housing cooperatives. It’s a relatively rare ownership model in San Francisco despite roughly 1,600 existing co-op units, most built decades ago with now-defunct federal subsidies.

A third proposal would require city agencies to coordinate street repaving with planned bike lane installations. “To solve our housing crisis, we need more of everything,” Melgar says.

Supreme Court Preserves Mail-In Voting

The Supreme Court left in place a legal challenge to the Trump administration’s new rules on mail voting, SCOTUS Blog reports.

The rules would have required the Department of Homeland Security to provide a list of U.S. citizens to all states and authorize the attorney general to prosecute elected officials for alleged voter fraud in their districts. After 23 states sued, implementation of the order was paused, which led to a legal back and forth that ended with the Supreme Court.

Governing reports that local election officials are relieved that the new rules won’t be implemented. Mail-in voting is more popular with Democrats than Republicans, who are expected to lose seats during the midterms.

Seattle Social Housing Pauses Lowest-Income Applicants

According to the Seattle Times, the city’s new Social Housing Development Authority has temporarily paused applications for its most low-income applicants.

The authority purchased the Elara apartments and intended to transform it into a mixed-income development subsidized by a tax on corporate earnings that voters approved through multiple ballot measures. The pause on low-income applicants comes as the housing developer said it was still securing contracts for social services, including job referrals and behavioral health.

Trump EPA Weakens Carbon Power Plant Rule

Grist reports that Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency has repealed a Biden-era rule that required coal plants to either end operations by the 2030’s or use carbon sequestration technology to pull carbon from the atmosphere. The agency has also repealed all federal regulations on carbon emissions in the country’s energy sector.

Obama- and Biden- era restrictions were not in place for long enough before their repeal to significantly reduce carbon emissions, but coal production has still slowed largely because of the fracking boom, according to Grist. In recent years, the growth of hyperscale data centers has breathed some new life into the coal industry, as energy-guzzling infrastructure requires fast and cheap sources of fuel to power it.

States Are Fighting Prediction Markets

The federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission has sued nine states for attempting to regulate their own online prediction markets, Governing reports.

The CFTC has argued that prediction markets are not gambling, which states have authority to regulate, but financial derivatives, which the federal government regulates. Kalshi and other companies have argued that the service is not gambling because customers are betting against other customers rather than the “house.”

MORE NEWS

• Tenant right to purchase bill closer than ever in Boston. Commonwealth Beacon

• Deconstruction is a key frontier for climate action in Seattle. The Urbanist

• The death of Vancouver’s Villages Plan, and its lessons. Sightline Institute

• NYC deploys robotoilets. The public bathrooms have a strict 10-minute time limit. Gothamist

• As extreme weather worsens, Black and Hispanic Homeowners are paying more for insurance. Inside Climate News

• Upcoming overhaul of the Chicago region’s transit system shows the power of organizing around public service. Truthout

• New York City’s first light-rail project could take 5 years to build. Smart Cities Dive

• Santa Ana bans city employees from moonlighting for ICE. LAist

• This group is building benches at bus stops that don’t have one. Will the city let them stay? Chicago Sun-Times

• Airbnb launches $250 million housing accelerator to jump-start stalled projects. Housing Wire

OPPORTUNITIES & RESOURCES

• DEADLINE TODAY: The CommonSpirit Health Improvement Grant Program is funding initiatives addressing community health, health equity, mental health, crisis support, and well-being in Colorado, Kansas, and Utah. Apply by Sept. 18.

• The Park Foundation is accepting funding proposals for work related to democracy, civic participation, and media. Apply by Sept. 22.

• Impact Fund is accepting grant applications for impact litigation advancing economic, environmental, and social justice. Submit a letter of interest by Sept. 29.

• The America250 Community Futures Challenge is accepting applications from 501(c)(3) nonprofits advancing workforce development, economic mobility, public infrastructure, civic tech, entrepreneurship, community development, and more. Apply by Nov. 30.

This story was originally published by Barn Raiser, your independent source for rural and small town news. We’re featuring it as part of In the Shadow of the Server, a Next City series on the fight over urban technology infrastructure — who builds it, who benefits, and how local leaders can push back.

Today’s data center proponents argue such projects bring needed jobs and a boost to local economies. Rural America has heard confident pitches like these before. Nearly 40 years ago, concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, arrived one barn at a time with bold promises of jobs and a county tax base.

By the time neighbors organized, right-to-farm laws and state preemption had severed the ground from under them. All the while, manure lagoons leached into the groundwater and fouled the air, shortening the life expectancy of the farmworkers and downwind neighbors.

Organizing still won real things, to be sure, from North Carolina’s CAFO moratorium in 1997 to Chris Jones’s clean-water campaign for agriculture secretary in Iowa today. When it comes to CAFOs, the lessons came late, but in the age of artificial intelligence, those same lessons can give rural communities a leg up.

While CAFOs crept into rural America, data centers are arriving as a land rush. This speed is both terrifying and an advantage. Texas alone has some 248 proposed data center projects, even though 56% of Texans tell pollsters they do not want one nearby, which means that, unlike the CAFO era, rural communities are asking questions before the statutes are locked in. And rural people need their voices to be heard. According to Pew Research Center, of the more than 1,500 data centers proposed or under development, 67% are in rural communities.

The ultimate question will be: Do rural residents have the power to say no?

The answer is playing out across the country. In November 2025, 800 people filled a board meeting to oppose a billion-dollar Meta-linked project in Howell Township, Michigan, and the developer withdrew. In February, the city council of San Marcos, Texas, rejected a $1.5 billion campus after nearly nine hours of public comment, then became the first Texas city to ban data centers through its zoning code. Fort Worth, Texas, is drafting data center zoning rules of its own.

Nationally, the poorest census tracts resist data center projects at five times the rate of the richest. Projects that meet resistance are cancelled at several times the rate of those that do not. One tracker counts tens of billions of dollars in blocked or delayed projects.

Opposition to data center projects is one of the few issues that many Americans agree on. A June Reuters/Ipsos poll found that only 14% of respondents would support a data center being built in their community. On July 18, organizers held 142 protests across 42 states in the first nationwide protest against data centers and artificial intelligence.

Data center hyperscalers are copying the CAFO playbook as best they can. West Virginia has stripped its counties and towns of the power to regulate data centers; similarly, the state’s right-to-farm law prohibits local governments from bringing civil or criminal action against an agricultural operation as long as it meets state and federal laws, permits, and regulations. When Hill County, Texas, passed the state’s first county moratorium in May, a developer sued for $100 million and the county rescinded within a week, because Texas counties can zone against neither a data center nor a feedlot. Hood County pulled its own moratorium after state Sen. Paul Bettencourt (R-7) asked whether counties even hold that power; the same senator calls the San Marcos ban illegal.

Right-wing organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), behind the pro-CAFO model legislation of right-to-farm laws since the 1990s, likewise appear intent on denying local control in the data center buildout. At its annual meeting in July, ALEC considered a model legislative framework that would undercut local bans and moratoriums and give data centers the “clear authority to secure power… subject only to objective safety and interconnection standards,” as the Center for Media and Democracy reported. The meeting featured speakers from Google and Nvidia, along with a Meta sponsorship.

The outburst of anti-data center sentiment ahead of the midterms has forced political leaders to reckon with the issue of local control. This is where data centers and CAFOs diverge. In June, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who once hailed Texas as “the epicenter of AI development,” called for a ban on AI data centers in rural neighborhoods and a cut to their billion-dollar-a-year tax exemption after facing rare bipartisan pressure. Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law to preserve local control over data centers. Michigan’s candidates for governor are split over the server halls sprouting between Lansing and Detroit. Illinois recently reversed course on its data center policy, reeling in the subsidies it had rolled out in 2019. And in July, New York became the first state in the nation to enact a one-year moratorium.

So, who hasn’t been able to say no? We pulled the locations of CAFOs and data centers in North Carolina and Texas, where the data is easily available, and—yes—got Claude to plot it for us against demographic and county boundaries.

In North Carolina the answer is pretty clear. The state’s 2,482 permitted animal operations cluster in the Black Belt coastal plain where the epidemiologist Steve Wing found hog lagoons a generation ago. Weighted by the number of permits each county holds, those counties are 46% people of color, against 34% across North Carolina’s hundred counties as a whole. Duplin County alone holds over 500 permits and 2.2 million allowable hogs in a county where almost half the population of 49,000 are people of color.

Data centers are the inverse of CAFOs. The state’s data centers sit in counties whiter than the state average, in the Piedmont towns that lost their historic furniture and textile businesses as well as in wealthy Wake and Mecklenburg counties (respectively home to large cities Raleigh and Charlotte). Two of the state’s suspended projects are in adjacent Edgecombe County and Pitt County, where residents informed their resistance based on their history fighting CAFOs.

In 1995, residents of predominantly Black Kingsboro, in Edgecombe County, successfully blocked a major meatpacker from building a 300-acre slaughterhouse in their backyard through efforts to rezone land. When a $19 billion, 400-acre data center came knocking three decades later, residents opposed it en masse. The developer Energy Storage Solutions withdrew its proposal in July and by August, Edgecombe County enacted a two-year moratorium.

In Texas the pattern is a little more complex. Rural Texas tends to be whiter than a state average balanced by majority-Hispanic cities. Yet the feedlot Panhandle is majority-Hispanic meatpacking country, with counties like Deaf Smith and Castro where the workforce lives beside the feedyards it staffs. The rural counties now hosting data centers likewise run less white than rural Texas as a whole.

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Other outlier cases in the U.S.: The world’s densest data center cluster is outside Washington, DC, in Loudoun County, Virginia, among the wealthiest counties in America, while xAI’s Colossus runs beside Boxtown, a majority-Black neighborhood in Memphis.

The patterning and the possibilities for asking questions about data centers are very different. CAFOs were put next to the disempowered by history. In most of the counties with proposed data centers, there’s no local billionaire hyperscaler whose family has been on the land for generations to champion the project, with the historical ability to make people of color, in particular, suffer the consequences in the ways that CAFOs had.

In contrast, data centers are being aimed by site selectors in a hurry, looking for cheap land and water, cheap power and thin resistance. But they don’t have their local defenders and hands on the levers of power in the ways that CAFOs do.

At this intersection of race and class is the oldest American proxy for who can, and who can’t, say no.

Here are the questions that constituents should ask their local governments about new data center projects:

This story was published by The 74, a nonprofit news site covering education. Sign up for free newsletters from The 74 to get more like this in your inbox.

With her long, wavy hair pulled back in a ponytail, the young mom sat alone outside courtroom 6 at the Tulsa County Family Center for Juvenile Justice, checking her phone and anxiously waiting for a court official to call her name for an eviction hearing.

“I’ve never been through this,” Courtney said in early May. Her two kids, ages 5 and 6, were staying with her mother out of town while she tried to catch up on rent or find another place to live. It was the best for the children, she said, but “they want to be with me.”

Between losing one job and starting another, she feared she’d still come up short of the $1,004 she owed.

She didn’t have much time.

In Oklahoma, the eviction process moves faster than the ability of most renters to respond. State law gives tenants five days to pay their debt or move out. A tenant has to appear in court just three days after a summons arrives.

Tulsa has one of the worst eviction rates in the country — the 11th highest as of a decade ago. Since then, the rate has grown from 8% to roughly 13%. Last school year, landlords filed evictions affecting more than 600 children in the state’s largest district, the Tulsa Public Schools.

Her kids’ schools, Courtney said, didn’t ask why she withdrew them with a month left in the school year.

That’s hardly surprising, experts say.

“[Parents are] looking for, ‘How do I find a place where my kids are going to sleep?’ ” said Eric Hallett, a staff attorney at Legal Aid Services of Oklahoma. “They’re not thinking ‘What can a lawyer do for me?’ or even ‘What can Tulsa Public Schools do for me?’ ”

But in a state with one of the fastest eviction timelines in the nation, that’s something the district is trying to change. Since 2020, leaders have worked with ImpactTulsa, a nonprofit, to prevent disruption in kids’ education and quickly direct parents under threat of eviction to resources like legal aid and rental assistance. When a student’s address appears in an eviction filing, the parent receives an email from the district offering help.

“There is a culture of defeat, if the eviction seems like a done deal. Why would I reach out for help?”

The alert is a promising example of schools being “first responders” in a housing emergency, said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a national advocacy organization focused on students experiencing homelessness. Tulsa’s system has caught the attention of organizations doing similar work from Dallas to Dayton, Ohio. But the resources available to families fall far short of the demand, and the threat of eviction itself can be so traumatic that parents are often too overwhelmed to respond.

“There is a culture of defeat,” said Ana Barros, the director of collaboration and partnerships for ImpactTulsa. If the eviction seems like a “done deal, why would I reach out for help?”

Roughly 3 million kids nationally are caught up in evictions each year, with households headed by single Black mothers especially vulnerable. Housing instability lands the heaviest on families with young children. New data from a Stanford University survey shows that nearly 30% of parents with children under 6 were worried about being evicted in the next month and 8% had already received an eviction notice. A federal program provides homeless students with educational and transportation services. But families who are evicted don’t immediately qualify for the same support, and the damage to students’ learning is clear.

“The gaps in children’s education are huge,” said Emily Turner, an attorney who is part of ImpactTulsa’s eviction prevention team. Missing days and weeks of school because of an eviction raises concerns about kids’ safety, she said, and the more they miss, the harder it is to come back. “They feel behind or they feel scared or they feel like this isn’t my space anymore.”

In the Oklahoma City schools, 65% of students whose families received an eviction notice were chronically absent, almost as many as those who were actually evicted, according to Shelterwell, part of Mental Health Association Oklahoma. On state assessments, students with an eviction notice or judgment had 25% lower proficiency rates in math compared to their peers. In reading, the academic impact was more than twice as much — 56% lower.

“We have slipped to the bottom in education rankings,” said state Rep. Amanda Clinton, a Democrat who sponsored a bill this year to give tenants facing eviction access to free mediation before a judge heard their case. The bill passed the House, but died in the Senate. She agrees with Republicans that the state should focus on turning around its dismal performance in reading. “But we cannot be serious about improving student outcomes unless we get serious about keeping kids in the classroom to start with.”

At Kerr Elementary, on the east side of Tulsa, Principal Jennifer Thomas sees the academic impact of evictions every morning. Students with unstable housing are frequently absent, and when they do come to school, they often arrive at least an hour late and hungry.

“We have students who have been at four different schools within a month,” she said. As with Courtney’s kids, Thomas said it’s not unusual for grandparents to provide backup, but that adds to the learning disruption. “Grandma doesn’t know where the school is, or Grandma’s not used to having to get the kids up at 7:30.”

Lawmakers took up the issue last year and worked to pass a bipartisan bill that would have given tenants a few more days to show up in court — a rare development in such a deep red state. But Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, vetoed it. With a background in real estate, including rental homes in Florida, he argued that the extension would be too “burdensome” for landlords. This year, a similar bill died in committee.

“This is a very, very landlord-friendly state,” said Delia Kimbrel, the director of research and policy at ImpactTulsa. “The scales are really stacked up against the family.”

‘Human realities’

Corporate landlords are the most likely to evict, research shows. Those include Vesta Realty, which owned Barcelona Apartments, the Spanish-style complex at a busy intersection in southeast Tulsa that filed the case against Courtney.

Hannah Remick, a former administrative assistant for the company, who herself was evicted from one of its 40 complexes, estimates that Vesta filed about 25 evictions a week. Whether tenants have kids doesn’t make landlords any less likely to force them out, she said.

“They would just say ‘units.’ They wouldn’t think about who is living in that unit,” she said. The process, she said, is “very separated from the human realities of what’s going on there.”

When ImpactTulsa identified management companies evicting families with school-aged kids, some of the affected properties had maintenance issues and code violations that had gone unaddressed for months. In 2024, one mom of a kindergartner told reporters she was evicted after complaining to the media about a lack of hot water and cockroaches in her apartment.

Poor living conditions for renters are not unique to Tulsa. A recent nationwide survey showed that 13% of renters moved in the past two years because their home needed repairs. Five percent said they were either evicted or trying to avoid eviction.

Remick described Barcelona as “one of the worst,” with workers instructed to layer coats of Kilz primer over walls with mold. Courtney told The 74 she had six work orders pending, including one for a leaky water heater, when she was evicted. Because an eviction can prevent a tenant from getting another lease and affect future employment, she asked The 74 not to use her last name.

The company’s financial condition was likely one reason for the backlog of repairs. Vesta’s owner, Marc Kulick, is facing multiple lawsuits. In February, Fannie Mae, the mortgage lender, initiated foreclosure proceedings against the company, and in July, as a result of litigation, a different company, YSA Investments, took ownership of multiple Vesta properties, including Barcelona. Vesta was also among the Tulsa landlords that fell months behind on city water bills.

“We all got letters on our doors saying they were going to charge for water,” Courtney said, even though that cost is supposed to be part of the rent.

According to a city official, the company caught up with water bills, and Vesta issued a statement saying that because of a pending “ownership dispute,” all questions about conditions, staffing or maintenance at Barcelona should go to the current operator.

YSA spokesman Parker Detweiler said his company is “doing everything humanly possible within the law to get living conditions where they should be.”

Sherri Daley, executive director of the Tulsa Apartment Association, said while it’s important to address the “underlying causes of housing instability,” landlords have to worry about their bottom line.

“Property owners and managers typically focus on the lease obligations, payment history, and compliance with the rental agreement rather than whether a household includes school-aged children,” she said. One of the arguments against extending the eviction timeline was that it would hurt small, independent landlords. “Even one missed payment can create a ripple effect, leading to deferred maintenance and other financial pressures for the owner.”

Tenants falling behind on rent can sometimes avoid an eviction if they communicate with their landlords, said Amy Coldren, who launched Shelterwell in Oklahoma City in 2023. As part of its eviction prevention work, the organization provides nonprofits and schools with a free, tenant education program called LiveSteady. It covers topics like how to understand a lease and manage a budget.

Coldren said one of the first women she met after starting Shelterwell was facing eviction because her children, who had previously been in foster care, were considered unauthorized occupants.

“I’m a former foster parent, so I know the work that she did to get her children back,” she said. “A simple solution would have been for her to have a conversation with her landlord and put her kids on the lease.”

‘A sensitive manner’

ImpactTulsa’s work began with a disturbing realization.

Property owners most likely to evict are also concentrated in the same neighborhoods as schools with the highest chronic absenteeism. That’s what the organization found when it began scraping the eviction court docket six years ago for addresses that match those of district students.

Between 2020 and 2023, Kimbrel identified eviction filings affecting roughly 4,400 Tulsa students. The disruption wasn’t brief. A year after a district family’s eviction showed up on their radar, nearly three-fourths of those students were still chronically absent.

“That just slapped everybody in the face,” she said.

But even the most sophisticated of district data systems can’t stop families from being displaced. The district’s homeless education staff last school year emailed all 621 families identified through the alert system, said BreAnna Shine, director of student engagement. Less than 100 ultimately received support through the district. Most didn’t respond. They might have landed somewhere else, ignored the message or resolved the issue with their landlord.

The other half of the system is a resource hub in one of the district’s most heavily impacted clusters of schools, East Central. The schools on that side of town draw from apartments like Eastgate, which filed eviction notices during that 2020-23 period affecting 47 students at Cooper Elementary and 26 students at East Central High School, Kimbrel’s analysis showed.

The hub at East Central Middle is two offices near the front entrance where Angeles Gonzalez, a family “navigator” with Tulsa Responds, and Turner, an attorney for the YWCA, meet privately with parents to triage their immediate needs — items like rental assistance, a free hotspot or food stamps. But district staff initially wrestled with whether they even wanted to know which families had been evicted.

“It’s a sensitive matter,” said Stephanie Andrews, executive director of student and family support services. It’s uncomfortable to contact a parent who might not want anyone to know they’ve hit such a low point. “It’s not been without some bumps.”

The district can guide a family to a nonprofit offering short-term rental assistance or temporary housing, but that often means they end up on a waiting list for services. Restore Hope, a nonprofit, spends about $100,000 a month in rental assistance, but those funds only cover about 30% of the eviction cases, said Josh Geppelt, executive director. Plus, to qualify, applicants have to show they have “means to maintain the rent after we do the assist.”

Living in limbo during that application process, while also bouncing from one living situation to the next, is draining, said Aspen Allen, a mother of three.

“You’re waiting for them to call you, and if nobody answers, they move to the next person,” she said.

She leaned on the district last fall for clothes and backpacks for her kids in between leaving a rental home with plumbing problems, spending time in a former hotel run by a local church and moving into Parkview Terrace on the west side of town, a public housing development known for gun violence. It’s the same complex where she’s currently waiting for a subsidized apartment.

“I haven’t been able to have my own spot for my kids to be happy, go to school, go on vacation and just have a good life,” said Allen, who works as a DoorDasher and was waiting to hear back about a part-time FedEx position. “I’m trying to keep them in school, not missing any days, which is very difficult at times.”

‘They grab what they can’

Inspired by Tulsa’s example, nonprofit leaders in other cities nonetheless face the same obstacles in trying to serve families with scarce resources.

“There is no system,” said Aqua Porter, executive director of the Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative in New York. “There are just things that people have to navigate through, and they are not connected.”

Most of those other nonprofits have something Oklahoma does not — a longer timeline between eviction notices and court appearances. In New York, for example, nonprofits have roughly 30 days from an eviction filing to help families find legal aid, point them toward sources of financial support and encourage them to attend their first court appearance.

Because Oklahoma’s system is designed to get renters with delinquent payments out as soon as possible, it’s often too late to prevent eviction. Those with nowhere to go may stay in the apartment after they’re evicted until they’re forced out by the sheriff’s department, said Melissa Vowell, a homeless education program specialist for the Tulsa Public Schools.

They usually have about an hour to collect belongings.

“If it’s a sheriff’s eviction, they grab what they can in the time a sheriff will allow,” she said.

Their next stop might be Vowell’s office, which connects to a storeroom packed with school uniforms, socks and underwear, and personal hygiene products.

She also maintains a detailed spreadsheet filled with organizations offering food, transportation and housing. One nonprofit on the list is Family Promise of Tulsa, tucked into a serene, wooded area west of downtown. Out of a small white cottage, Executive Director Tina Massey runs an eviction diversion program that provides one-time payments of up to $1,000 for those who have fallen behind on rent. Massey estimates that the program reached close to 90 district families last school year. For those who lose their housing, a shelter on the same property offers fully furnished apartments for up to three months.

Brooklyn Cloud found Family Promise on Facebook last year while living in a Mazda SUV with two daughters, one in preschool and another in second grade. After an eviction from Harmony Glen, a 74-unit complex owned by a Texas-based company, they spent six months sleeping under the lights in Walmart and QuikTrip parking lots.

“I didn’t even know a 7-year-old could get depressed,” Cloud said. “Her grades started to slip, lack of appetite. She wanted to sleep all the time.”

“I didn’t even know a 7-year-old could get depressed. Her grades started to slip, lack of appetite. She wanted to sleep all the time.”

While staying in one of the apartments, Cloud and her husband paid off the eviction and saved for a new home. Their oldest now “has her own space.”

“She’s more bubbly and her personality is back,” she said. “She’s not so down-in-the-dumps and snappy.”

‘Legal first aid’

Most parents in a crisis like Cloud’s don’t even show up to court.

“They can’t get time off work or child care,” said Hallett, the legal aid attorney.

That was clear the day Courtney’s case appeared on the docket. Of the 89 eviction filings before Judge Tammy Bruce, who hears about 13,000 eviction cases a year, less than half of the tenants showed up.

If they do appear, they’re unlikely to have legal representation. In nearly every case, Judge Bruce told them they could either meet with their landlord’s representative or see if they qualified for legal aid. Court documents show Courtney represented herself, while a Vesta employee appeared for the company.

Courtney was evicted two weeks later. Attempts to reach her by phone and text since then were unsuccessful.

Last year, Hallett began asking tenants if they have children in the Tulsa schools. It’s his contribution to the district’s effort to identify more families.

On the district side, about 40 teachers at East Central Middle learned how to offer “legal first aid,” like helping parents construct timelines of the events that led up to eviction. Missed or partial payments, maintenance issues reported, and messages to landlords and property managers are important to document because when apartments change ownership, new managers don’t always honor previous attempts to pay.

Barros, with ImpactTulsa, expected some resistance from staff to the training. She’s a former social studies teacher at East Central Middle.

“Teachers are like ‘Whoa, that’s not my job. You’re adding something else to my plate,’ ” she said. But schools play a unique role in eviction prevention, she said. “Kids are legally required to be here. So let’s take advantage of that.”

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In the spring of 2020, the year in which banks across the country committed to closing the racial wealth gap and businesses near and far launched DEI programs, the Hope Policy Institute published data on the asset gap plaguing community development financial institutions, or CDFIs.

“Even though CDFIs are by their mission intended to decrease inequities in low-income communities, disparities persist in the amount of funding and resources allocated to support their work,” the organization wrote in Closing the CDFI Asset Gap. “Minority-led CDFIs are underrepresented in the field as a whole, and they are underfunded compared to their white counterparts.”

Looking at 2017 data gathered by the U.S. Treasury’s CDFI Fund, the report highlighted that minority-led CDFIs held just 12% of all CDFI assets while white-led CDFIs housed 75%. But this is not just a funding problem. The disparity determines who holds decision-making power in communities — sometimes those with that power come from outside of communities. It also shapes how communities build and own assets in their neighborhoods, and whether projects shift resources and governance toward community self‑determination.

For Amber Banks, president and CEO of the African American Alliance of CDFI CEOs, that six-to-one difference made the problem facing Black CDFIs clear. “Black CDFIs tend to face a lot of the same challenges that the communities that they serve face in terms of access to capital,” she says. This impacts the CDFIs’ ability to build and leverage networks, raise money, grow their funds, and ultimately serve the communities they set out to support.

“The Alliance was created to solve these issues in the form of an intermediary,” Banks explains. The network helps Black-led CDFIs build their power and serve their communities on their own terms. One of the ways it does that is by creating a sense of community among members where they are able to discuss challenges and solutions, and sometimes collaborate on projects.

Stemming from a 2018 conversation among 23 Black CDFI CEOs, the Alliance officially incorporated as a nonprofit in May 2020. Since then, the Alliance has brought well over 100 members into its fold and secured more than $50 million in funding to fuel the efforts of its members like The Housing Fund in Nashville, Tennessee, and the Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago.

With a focus on creating and maintaining affordable homes for moderate- and low-income folks and families, The Housing Fund’s work has evolved from serving as a revolving loan fund when it launched in 1996 to now offering a suite of programs that fall under three big umbrellas: home buying, home improvement, and development.

“Thirty years later, in the City of Nashville, there’s still an affordable housing crisis. We are still working on it one unit at a time, still doing development loans, still doing down payment assistance loans. And we’ve expanded to the entire state of Tennessee,” explains Angela Belcher, the Fund’s executive vice president and chief operating officer. “We find ways to fill gaps in the marketplace.”

This gap-filling includes a shared equity homeownership program with zero-interest loans that, upon the sale of a home in the program, leads to the reinvestment of a portion of the sale profit back into the fund and, thus, onto the next owner to preserve affordability. The Fund also manages a community land trust on behalf of Metro Nashville and runs a housing resiliency fund. The resiliency fund offers grant-based property tax relief to homeowners facing unaffordable bills after a 34% property tax hike went into effect that fateful month of March 2020. Thanks to a 2020 investment from Amazon, for five years the grants paid the difference between old and new tax bills for homeowners who would have otherwise struggled to pay the full amount.

The Housing Fund’s anti-displacement work has both been inspired by, and has also inspired, other Alliance members. This is the crux of what the Alliance does. “It’s the opportunity to talk with other CEOs around the country who are trying to tackle some of the very same challenges we are and trying to find innovative solutions. It’s really about partnerships in the way that we’re sharing information,” Bechler explains.

The Fund’s CEO, Marshall Crawford, was one of the Alliance’s founding members and continues to be deeply involved with the organization. While serving as an Alliance board member, Crawford oversaw the creation of the Alliance’s Housing Initiative Roadmap that’s designed to help BIPOC organizations pursue and achieve housing justice in their communities.

The Alliance, The Fund, and the Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago (NHS) are all part of an ecosystem of organizations that are working to prevent displacement in their communities. Through that process, they’re ensuring people, families, and communities feel like they belong.

Both The Fund and NHS participated in the Alliance’s inaugural cohort of its Housing Justice Champions Accelerator, which offers training and one-on-one coaching to help participants deepen their policy advocacy capacity and ability to lead housing justice work on local level.

At the start of the program, each participating organization was asked to identify policy barriers they face. Those barriers would then serve as the focus of their work in the accelerator over the next two months.

NHS focused on property tax delinquency. Anthony Simpkins, president and CEO of Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago, says that participating in the program helped the organization “refine our messaging and segment it among elected officials, potential government and philanthropic partners, and collaborative partners like other community-based organizations. It helped us understand how to communicate with each of those segments that we had to either convince or collaborate with.”

An organization that has prevented some 10,000 foreclosures through HUD-certified housing counseling, convenes a 30-member housing policy task force, and whose property tax payment plan — the messaging of which was worked on in the accelerator — helps tax-delinquent homeowners make monthly payments in collaboration with county officials and housing advocates, NHS is a proud member of the Alliance.

“We’re just very impressed with the work that the Alliance does, how it supports its member organizations, and how it really advocates for building the capacity of the organizations and the leaders that are a part of their network,” Simpkins says. “We’re just really proud to be a member.”

This story was produced by Fresnoland as part of Next City’s Local Reporting Hub, with funding from the Kresge Foundation.

Out of California’s eight largest cities, Fresno is the only one that doesn’t have a department or office focused on arts and cultural affairs.

Local arts advocate Amy Kitchener has been reminding people of that fact for months.

And now that the Fresno Arts Council is out of the picture when it comes to administering the city’s multimillion-dollar annual arts grant program funded by Measure P, Kitchener and others say it’s high time for that to change.

“The idea is that there’s personnel — senior personnel — at the city level who have a really deep understanding of the arts and cultural ecology of Fresno,” said Kitchener, who leads the Alliance for California Traditional Arts. “That’s the missing piece here.”

Though it looks different from city to city, introducing something like this in Fresno would transition the city from working with arts professionals outside of city government to administer arts and culture programs to actually hiring those arts professionals to oversee that work from inside City Hall.

The benefit of this model, versus outsourcing to an external agency like a local arts council, comes down to access, said California for the Arts Board President Jonathon Glus.

He’s worked across both models and sees advantages to both.

“When you are outside of City Hall, you have more flexibility — especially in a state like California, where there’s a lot of restrictions on municipal governance,” he said. “You can respond to needs in the community relatively quickly, and if that outside organization is functioning well, then leadership can very easily have a seat at the table with other civic leaders.

“What you don’t have,” Glus added, “that you do have inside City Hall, is access to the many departments and the many, many, many fundings streams and mechanisms inside City Hall that can be leveraged to support the arts.”

But can something that sounds good on paper actually make a difference? Or rebuild trust after the Fresno Arts Council’s $1.82 million embezzlement scandal shattered an already strained relationship between the local arts community and the bureaucratic systems determining who among them gets taxpayer funding?

Others are open to the idea, but still have their reservations about City Hall’s own track record when it comes to transparency.

For LAByrinth Art Collective co-founder Alicia Rodriguez, it’s not the concept of a dedicated department focused on arts and culture that gives her pause. It’s the fact that it would run through the city.

The most recent blow to trust among Rodriguez and other members of a coalition demanding greater transparency around arts funding came at a city council meeting in June.

At that meeting, councilmembers voted 6-1 to place a $350,000 cap on grant awards for larger-budget arts organizations in the next cycle of Measure P grants.

That decision defied a recommendation from the city’s Parks, Recreation and Arts Commission to instead place that cap at $150,000 — which advocates for the city’s most under-resourced arts organizations said would’ve helped set aside more of the pot for them to expand access to arts and culture. The city’s larger-budget arts and culture organizations, on the other hand, pushed for the higher cap, saying that funding can help stabilize their operations.

“The city is hard to trust,” Rodriguez said. “It’s because specifically their actions don’t match their words. We’ve seen, time and again, power outweighing public desire. You’ll have roomfuls of dissent or support for an action or a motion or an issue, and the city council will do whatever they like.

“It sounds great. Theoretically and conceptually, yeah,” Rodriguez added regarding the Cultural Affairs Department idea. “We’re one of the only cities that doesn’t have one of these, and (if) other cities that do have these are seeing tangible results in their arts and culture landscapes, then that would be encouraging. Now, can Fresno do that? Only if the people are in charge of that process — not tokenized or used. In charge of,” she emphasized.

There’s also no cookie-cutter version of this kind of structure within a city — it looks different anywhere you go, appearing under different names with varying staff sizes and placement within a city’s org chart.

But with Fresno City Hall holding the reins for the foreseeable future, and with decades left of the 30-year tax revenue funding the grants, there’s a long runway to shape what the future of arts administration in Fresno could look like.

Most large cities in California have dedicated city staff on cultural affairs

Excluding Fresno, the state’s seven other largest cities by population — Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, San Francisco, Sacramento, Long Beach and Oakland — all have a city office, division or department focused on administering arts and cultural affairs.

But they come in all different shapes and sizes. Los Angeles’ Department of Cultural Affairs has almost 100 people on the payroll in the proposed budget for 2026-2027. Oakland has a much smaller team within the city’s Economic & Workforce Development Department that’s hovered around five people in recent years.

Some cities, like Oakland, similarly house their arts staff within economic development departments, like San Jose. In Sacramento, their Office of Arts and Culture is a division of their Department of Convention and Cultural Services. In Long Beach, the Cultural Affairs Manager is located in the Department of Library, Arts, and Culture.

But the bottom line, says Roberto Bedoya — Oakland’s former Cultural Affairs Manager — is that you have folks at City Hall who know their local arts and culture landscape inside and out and understand how to support it with city resources.

“If you don’t have that expertise in City Hall,” he said, “it’s a deficiency that will come back to haunt you.”

It’s also not just the managers or directors of these programs themselves advocating to maintain arts and culture experts in-house.

In 2025, Oakland’s arts community successfully fought to resurrect the Cultural Affairs Manager position after the city council had previously moved to axe it during an intense round of budget cuts.

Community members who protested Oakland’s cuts to the Office of Cultural Affairs emphasized the importance of the external funding that Bedoya helped attract to the city in his role prior to his retirement, especially since the city was allocating less than 1% of its total budget to the department and its public art programs. In Los Angeles, the local arts community also organized a petition to protest cuts to the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, fearing impacts to programming at art centers around the city.

Bedoya was stunned to hear that a city like Fresno — with such a bounty of arts and culture — didn’t already have a department like this at City Hall.

Bedoya was also skeptical about the decision for this grant cycle to task the city’s PARCS Department (i.e. Parks, After School, Recreation and Community Services) with helping manage the grants in the immediate.

“To respect the cultural community you’re meant to serve, I think it needs an individual that understands the diversity of that cultural community that you’re supporting,” he said, “whether it’s large-budget institutions or neighborhood arts centers, individual artists, community members who are deeply invested in the cultural community, cultural expression.

“Maybe there’s somebody in Parks and (Rec) that has that already,” he added, “but their expertise is probably related to athletics and maintenance … rather than the cultural voice of the city. You need somebody that knows that.”

Glus also emphasized the importance of having arts professionals run arts grantmaking — the same way a city would hire folks with expertise in the economy to run an economic development department.

“It’s not simply processing contracts or grants,” he said. “It’s about the long-term sustainability of a field. You have to have people who understand the health and vitality and the needs of the sector. If you’re managing public funds and you don’t have staff that understand that, then you’re not managing your public funds well.”

In Long Beach, the Cultural Affairs Officer position is a lot newer — going on seven months, to be exact.

Griselda Suarez was tapped to become the city’s inaugural Cultural Affairs Officer in February 2026. Before that, she led Long Beach’s Arts Council for a decade. She’s also a poet and writer.

The road to creating her position in the Department of Library, Arts, and Culture took a few years, Suarez said. A key part of that was a feasibility study Long Beach’s city council contracted with a consulting firm to conduct in December 2024.

“I participated as a community member when the study was happening and was in the room with many of our cultural leaders, who were like: ‘We’ve been doing this work. … How are we going to continue, and what are you going to change?’” Suarez said. “And so the concerns were there.”

But following robust engagement with both community members and city leaders, the study established a “clear path towards better coordination of arts and culture initiatives,” said Cathy De Leon, who directs the Department of Library, Arts, and Culture, in a statement.

“The study helped to inform budget development and organizational change, for example the addition of a Cultural Affairs Division to Library Services,” De Leon added, “and investments in staffing were able to be supported through the city’s FY 26 budget.”

The hope is that over the years, the Cultural Affairs Officer can shape policy to ensure “longevity, equity, and growth for arts and culture in LB,” De Leon said.

What could this look like in Fresno?

Kitchener has high hopes for what a department, division or office like this in Fresno could help deliver.

There’s the Cultural Arts Plan that the city is required to update every five years under the Measure P ordinance with an update due by 2028. But it’s not just Measure P-related tasks she’s hopeful a hypothetical department would help facilitate.

“There’s an understanding that arts and culture isn’t just kind of a nice-to-have luxury, but it can actually be a driver of social change. It can be a driver of economic development,” she said. “I think that’s where the really exciting opportunities are for Fresno.

“Another big area that a lot of the Cultural Affairs Departments work in,” she added, “is downtown revitalization.”

Glus said there’s a growing trend among city arts and culture departments to “focus on the larger creative economy” and “the small business of the arts” in terms of the services offered.

Nikiko Masumoto, a Fowler-based artist and farmer who racked up hours of canvassing in support of Measure P before it passed in 2018, said she also sees great potential for what city administration of the arts grants can accomplish.

But if the city were to go for something like a new department, a lot of it would come down to getting the right person there — or, ideally, persons, plural, she said. She’d also like to see that personnel hail from the multiple departments that arts and culture intersect with, from transportation to parks and recreation.

“I tend to believe that some of the struggles in democracy are … we actually need more people involved,” she said, “not less people.”

There’s already been some debate at PRAC meetings this year over how important it is to require an arts and culture background for the people working on this.

Masumoto said in her arts career, she’s come to believe that those credentials alone shouldn’t be seen as a guarantee someone will be a good champion for the local arts community.

“There’s plenty of people who have deep expertise in arts,” she said, “that wield the expertise to shut people out.”

Rodriguez of LAByrinth Art Collective said she’d also have concerns about conflict of interest when it comes to hiring the right person for this job. She’d want to see protocols that are “vigorous,” “transparent” and “able to be acted on by the people if something comes up.”

“If you serve on a board, or if you sponsor someone that is going to compromise your ability to be objective,” she said, “then you can’t do that.”

But she also believes, just like there’s an abundance of remarkable artists in Fresno, there’s a wealth of good candidates to lead work like this for the city.

“There are plenty of people in Fresno that are arts and culture-aware,” she said, “and immersed in community, and not compromised. We have enough folks to find. We don’t have to hand these positions to people that are just going to feed the power machine.”

Could this happen at Fresno City Hall?

At this point, it’s unclear how much of an appetite there is for a new department, division or office among the powers that be. Fresnoland reached out to the three sitting councilmembers who aren’t running for office elsewhere or on the verge of terming out this year — Council Vice President Tyler Maxwell and Councilmembers Nick Richardson and Brandon Vang.

Only Vang’s office responded, but didn’t commit one way or the other.

“I’m supportive of exploring ways to strengthen the administration of Measure P grants and learning from how other cities manage their arts programs,” Vang said in a statement. “At the same time, any future model must remain consistent with the requirements established by Measure P.

“While other cities structure their arts programs differently, the City of Fresno operates under the framework established by Measure P, which combines funding for both parks and arts programs and places oversight with the Parks, Recreation and Arts Commission (PRAC),” Vang’s statement continues. “Any discussion about long-term administration should begin with that framework in mind.”

A spokesperson for Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer’s office also didn’t respond to a request for comment on the idea.

It can take several years to build out structures like this, Glus said.

But he cautioned against starting up anything new without the means to follow through in terms of funding and resources.

“The worst you can do,” he said, “is put a funding program inside a city government structure and then not have the resources to have professional staff etc. to make it efficient, accessible, transparent.”

It came down to the wire for hundreds of federally-certified community development financial institutions across the country.

The Department of the Treasury was supposed to have awarded nearly $300 million in financial assistance to CDFIs around this time last year, but the Trump administration continually delayed their distribution. Finally, just this morning, the Treasury Department announced that the awards are going out and recipients will be notified by Sept. 30.

If those awards don’t actually go out by the end of this September, the authority to spend those dollars will expire, meaning they’ll be lost for good. That’s why Inclusive Action for the City, a Los Angeles-based CDFI, joined by CAMEO Network, a national network of business service providers, filed a lawsuit in federal court last month seeking action “to prevent the irreversible expiration of $289 million dollars in congressionally-appropriated funds.”

Even with this morning’s announcement, the lawsuit still matters. Unless and until awards totaling all of the $289 million are announced and the awardees notified by the Treasury Department, it’s still some possible that funds could be lost after Sept. 30 without court action to extend the deadline. The court filings offer a behind-the-scenes glimpse at exactly how CDFIs leverage these public dollars, using them to attract private sector funds to scale up their work. Hundreds of CDFIs across the country use the same basic model to finance affordable housing, small businesses, economic revitalization projects, community facilities, and more.

But that model depends heavily on the Community Reinvestment Act, the landmark anti-redlining law passed in 1977. The Trump administration recently proposed reforms to the rules used to enforce the Community Reinvestment Act. Advocates are sounding alarms that the proposed changes may also have drastic consequences for that basic CDFI model, and for community development more broadly.

CDFIs are one of the most cost-effective tools available to federal policymakers, with every $1 in support from the CDFI Fund leveraging $5 to $10 in additional private funding, according to the nonpartisan Urban Institute. With the Community Reinvestment Act reforms looming, the basic CDFI model remains under threat.

The first hearing in the lawsuit is set for Sept. 24. Public comments on the proposed changes to Community Reinvestment Act regulations are due by Oct. 13.

Money attracts money

The CDFI Fund is the arm of the Treasury Department that certifies CDFIs. To obtain certification, institutions must provide evidence showing they have a primary mission of community development and provide at least 60% of their loans or other financial services to low- and moderate-income communities or households.

Banks, credit unions, venture capital funds, and loan funds can all obtain CDFI certification, making them eligible to apply for financial assistance from the CDFI Fund — including the $289 million that the agency was supposed to award last year. There are currently around 1,300 federally-certified CDFIs across the country, located in all 50 states as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

From Fiscal Years 2010 to 2024, financial assistance from the CDFI Fund has allowed recipients to originate nearly $300 billion in total loans and investments in distressed and underserved communities; provide more than $55.8 billion in financing to more than 1.34 million businesses; and supported the development of more than 557,000 units of affordable housing, according to the Treasury Department.

Inclusive Action for the City, which filed the recent lawsuit, was one of hundreds of CDFIs that applied for financial assistance from the CDFI Fund last year. In 2024, 578 CDFIs received $434 million in awards from the CDFI Fund’s various dedicated financial assistance programs.

Founded in 2009, Inclusive Action for the City obtained CDFI certification as a loan fund in 2020. According to its court filings, it makes small business loans that “allow neighborhood restaurants to buy kitchen equipment; street vendors to obtain the permits they need to enter the formal economy; and local businesses to keep paying employees through unexpected closures caused by natural disasters, construction, and other interruptions,” including the 2025 Eaton fire that destroyed a huge swath of Altadena in LA County.

Since obtaining CDFI certification, Inclusive Action for the City has received seven awards from the CDFI Fund, totaling $1.75 million — most recently a $478,000 award in 2024.

But Inclusive Action for the City doesn’t simply turn around and lend all those dollars to its clients. CDFI Fund awards are unusual in that award recipients can and usually do hold at least some of those dollars in their coffers as collateral to go out and borrow even more funds from a range of private sector sources — including banks, foundations, wealth managers and other investors, all of whom expect loan funds to set aside a certain amount of cash as a cushion against potential loan losses.

For every $1 a CDFI-certified loan fund sets aside as a cash cushion, it can borrow $5 or more from private sources, which the loan fund then turns around and lends to its clients.

That’s how CDFI Fund awards “have both stabilized Inclusive Action’s operations and allowed Inclusive Action to attract additional investors, including major financial institutions, philanthropy, and private lenders,” writes Doug Smith, vice president for policy and legal strategy at Inclusive Action for the City, in a declaration filed as part of the lawsuit.

With funding from those additional investors, Inclusive Action for the City has made $5 million in total loans so far, including $900,000 in loans to 50 small businesses in 2025. According to the nonprofit’s court filings, financial assistance from the CDFI Fund allows Inclusive Action for the City to grow its loan portfolio by a rate of 10% a year while keeping its interest rates affordable to its borrowers.

“The CDFI Fund exists to inject public capital into underserved markets precisely because doing so will attract private capital,” Smith writes in his declaration. “Without that public capital, CDFI viability overall will contract—and ultimately, underserved entrepreneurs will be forced to resort to predatory sources of funding that are not designed to support their growth.”

Even prior to the Trump Administration’s return to the White House, CDFIs have increasingly advocated to expand public sources for this kind of funding. In recent years, Michigan, California, and Virginia have joined New York as states that have some kind of CDFI Fund-like financial assistance program for CDFIs. At the local level, Cook County made a round of financial assistance grants to five community lenders in 2025.

As managing director of the social investments practice at the Kresge Foundation, which has invested in CDFIs for many years, Aaron Seybert sees a growing sense of urgency around these efforts.

“Maybe it’s time to think about a different model that’s more inverted, where it is a state-driven system that is much more local and much more locally responsive and that states and local units of government are in the game and we have a much more diversified set of public funding structures,” Seybert says.

Motives in question

The future reliability of much of the private capital that CDFIs use is now also in question.

Passed in 1977, the Community Reinvestment Act, or CRA, requires banks to meet the credit needs of the communities where they do business, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods. It empowers federal banking regulators to periodically evaluate each bank’s performance in meeting those needs, and to take those evaluations into account when considering applications from banks to open or close branches, or applications for bank mergers.

CRA evaluations focus largely on home mortgages, small business loans, and small farm loans. But starting in 1995, investing in CDFIs became a way banks could meet some of their CRA obligations. Investments from CRA-motivated banks have since become a huge source of funding for CDFIs.

The Opportunity Finance Network (OFN) has nearly 500 member CDFIs across the country. OFN member CDFIs borrowed $6.2 billion from CRA-motivated banks in Fiscal Year 2024, representing 46% of members’ borrowed funds. Back in 1995, that percentage was just 15%.

CDFI investments from CRA-motivated banks are also starting to get more interesting. The partnership between LA Más and Self-Help Ventures Fund to fight back against real estate speculation-fueled displacement in northeast LA, as one example, is made possible by low-cost, long-term investments in Self-Help from banks with CRA obligations.

But in August, the Trump administration unveiled a much-anticipated proposal to overhaul how federal banking regulators evaluate banks for meeting their CRA obligations. While the picture still isn’t 100% clear, community development leaders are concerned that the changes would water down CRA obligations and lead to banks reducing their investments in CDFIs — and maybe some banks phasing out of CDFI investments entirely.

“Weakening the CRA and defunding the CDFI Fund is going to lead to considerably less reinvestment in the communities that need it most, in the communities who’ve been most harmed by generations of disinvestment and redlining and harmful policies,” Smith tells Next City. “It’s an enormous step backwards and really concerning.”

Under current CRA regulations, banks get grouped into three levels based on asset size. Small banks, currently those up to $412 million in assets, are only evaluated for whether they are sufficiently reaching low- and moderate-income communities and households within their home mortgage lending, small business lending or small farm lending.

At the next level up, currently for banks between $412 million and $1.65 billion, CRA evaluations add a community development section that analyzes activities like loans to finance publicly-subsidized affordable housing projects or economic revitalization projects. Investments in CDFIs can get banks credit on this section of their CRA examination.

At the third level, banks with at least $1.65 billion in assets, the community development analysis becomes even more sophisticated, looking specifically at activities like participating in federal programs such as Low-Income Housing Tax Credits or New Markets Tax Credits. Investments in CDFIs are worth even more at this level of CRA examination.

“We rely on investments from banks of all sizes to help us reach the communities that are historically excluded from mainstream capital,” Smith says. “And we’re able to combine those investments historically with CDFI Fund investments and philanthropy to be able to support small businesses that otherwise can’t go to a big bank to get that loan.”

The proposed new CRA rules lift the thresholds for all three levels. Small banks would top out at $1 billion in assets; intermediate banks would be those from $1 billion to $10 billion in assets; and large banks above $10 billion in assets. By shifting which banks fall into each category, roughly 814 banks would no longer be evaluated for community development activity, and another 417 banks would face reduced community development scrutiny after dropping down from the large level to the intermediate level, according to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

“The share of all banks with community development responsibilities would fall from roughly half to less than one-third,” the coalition says in its analysis. “This risks losing over half a billion per year in community development loans and investments.”

Some states would be hit harder than others. According to the coalition’s analysis, the proposed rule would eliminate community development portions of CRA evaluation for 50 out of 107 banks in Minnesota;46 out of 106 banks in Wisconsin; 46 out of 109 in Iowa; 34 out of 84 in Indiana; 30 out of 62 in Louisiana; 21 out of 51 in Mississippi,; and 46 out of 103 in Georgia.

It may be even worse. Analyzing certain changes in the proposed CRA regulations that would apply to the country’s largest banks, as much as 85% of all community development loans, investments, and grants nationwide could be at risk, according to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

That’s if the proposed CRA regulations ever go into effect, which isn’t 100% guaranteed. And even if the administration does manage to push through these new rules, the next administration could easily throw them out before they’re ever implemented — which is what happened the last time under the first Trump administration.

This story has been updated to reflect that Inclusive Action for the City’s lawsuit with CAMEO Network is still ongoing, as the CDFI Fund has not yet notified all awardees or disbursed all $289 million.

Sponsored content from City Parks Alliance. Sponsored content policy

This is the first in a four-part series exploring how the Outdoor Recreation Legacy Partnership (ORLP) program helps cities transform their communities.

City Parks Spark Local Economic Vitality

At a time of economic uncertainty, city leaders face the persistent challenge of generating local economic growth while improving the quality of life for all residents.

Public parks can provide the answer.

National data and real-world outcomes increasingly demonstrate that park investments yield significant, measurable economic benefits for cities. According to the National Recreation and Park Association, in one year alone, local parks supported more than 1.1 million jobs and generated $201 billion in economic activity.

Quality-of-life amenities like parks attract the businesses and talent that help cities grow and retain diverse local workforces. Residential properties located near parks and trails can see up to a 10% increase in their property value, which in turn boosts local property tax revenue for municipal budgets.

At the same time, park investment can reduce infrastructure costs. For example, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, investing in parks and green infrastructure to manage stormwater is 15-80% less costly than investing in grey infrastructure, such as pipes and tunnels.

For cities across the country, federal grants through the Outdoor Recreation Legacy Partnership (ORLP) program are an important part of a blended funding approach that weaves together public, private, and philanthropic resources to multiply the impact of every dollar invested.

The Outdoor Recreation Legacy Partnership Program

Established by Congress in 2014 and permanently codified through the bipartisan EXPLORE Act in 2025, the ORLP is a nationally competitive matching grant program managed by the National Park Service (NPS) and funded through the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF). It is the only federal program focused exclusively on creating new parks or renovating existing public recreational spaces in urban and tribal park-deprived communities.

Since its inception, the ORLP program has invested over $470 million in recreation projects nationwide, supporting more than 150 projects, and leveraging over $500 million in matching local, state, and private funds.

Quantifying Economic Impact

To calculate the return on investment for ORLP grants, the NPS relies on a standard economic model that tracks how federal dollars and their matching funds multiply through the economy. The math breaks down into three layers: direct construction activity, supply chain purchases, and everyday household spending by workers as they spend their paychecks. By keeping tabs on these shifts, the NPS can measure the real-world impact of the program, including short-and long-term job creation, local wages, overall economic output, and direct boosts to U.S. GDP.

Right now, total ORLP investments support the equivalent of 12,000 full-time jobs for one year and $844 million in labor income. Across the U.S. economy, ORLP projects have generated $2.8 billion in economic output and contributed $1.37 million to GDP.

ORLP as an Economic Catalyst in Small to Mid-Sized Cities

Transforming a neglected piece of land or repairing broken infrastructure is a significant investment, especially for small and mid-sized cities. City leaders are leveraging federal ORLP grants to help get redevelopment projects off the ground and catalyze additional local investment in jobs, tourism, and neighborhood revitalization.

Here is how small- to mid-sized cities across the country use ORLP funding to turn parks into local economic engines:

Anchorage, Alaska: Growing the Workforce and Local Food Economies

Anchorage utilized a $750,000 ORLP grant to transform an abandoned lot into Chanshtnu Muldoon Park, enabling local partners to leverage an additional $1.2 million in municipal bonds and private funds. The construction of the park’s trail networks was completed through the local Youth Employment in Parks program, providing local teenagers with paid trade skills and job training. The park also features a 45-plot community garden and food forest producing up to 10,000 pounds of food, supporting the local micro-economy.

Dubuque, Iowa: Spurring Local Investment and Neighborhood Revitalization

Federal funding can completely change the game for parks in smaller communities. A prime example is Dubuque, Iowa, which combined two ORLP grants — one for $508,000 and another for $1.98 million — to breathe new life into Comiskey Park by adding high-demand features such as a splash pad, new basketball courts, an event field, and advanced playground equipment. The City even factored in green stormwater infrastructure using native plants and a bioswale. The financial ripple effect was massive. The project supported over 63 jobs, deliberately keeping taxpayer money local by hiring subcontractors from around the area. All told, it injected more than $7.1 million into the broader economy and successfully drew in nearly $4 million in matching funds from government and corporate partners. Plus, because the park sits just blocks from a developing business district and connects directly to the Bee Branch Greenway linear park, it already serves as a major anchor, driving up nearby housing demand and business growth.

As Dubuque Mayor Brad Cavanagh said:

“This investment is often a major catalyst that gets neighborhoods pushing forward and gaining momentum. It’s a testament to how investment spurs investment going forward.”

Green Bay, Wisconsin: Unlocking Brownfield Redevelopment

Parks are uniquely suited for unlocking the redevelopment potential of abandoned or industrial spaces. In Green Bay, Wisconsin, an ORLP-supported shipyard redevelopment project is converting a former brownfield into a destination waterfront park. The project helps transform underutilized industrial land into valuable public space by featuring an event lawn, an urban beach, a dog park, and a playground designed to attract visitors. By turning an industrial eyesore into a vibrant public amenity, the project makes the surrounding land much more attractive for private investment and further redevelopment.

Raleigh, North Carolina: Boosting Municipal Revenue

In 2018, Raleigh used a $747,600 ORLP grant to revamp John Chavis Memorial Park, adding a central plaza, a community center, and new spots for families to spend time together. That federal funding did more than just fix up the park, the upgrades triggered a nearly 400% spike in annual park revenue compared to what it brought in before the makeover.

Rock Hill, South Carolina: Attracting Regional Tourism

For some cities, parks are built with economic objectives engineered directly into their design. Rock Hill, South Carolina, intentionally deployed its ORLP funding to achieve its economic objective of attracting regional tourism. The city utilized its award to support the development of a regional multi-sport complex at Southside Regional Park. Designed to provide equitable access to recreation, the complex was engineered to help grow regional economic development by hosting athletic tournaments. These regional sports complexes generate predictable local tax revenue by driving multi-day hotel stays, restaurant dining, retail sales, and fuel purchases.

The ORLP ROI

When local budgets get tight, forward-thinking mayors and city planners know that funding local parks is a proven solution for driving economic growth in practical, measurable ways. For leaders committed to building thriving cities, investing in green spaces is a smart policy, and ORLP grants offer a blueprint for making their vision a reality.

To learn more about ORLP grants and access resources to help your city apply, visit the City Parks Alliance’s resource page.

Before the streets of Nepal’s Bramhakhel fill with traffic, 40-year-old Pratima Poudel walks to a centuries-old stone spout carrying empty plastic bottles to collect water. The walk has become part of the Nepali language instructor’s daily routine.

The spout she visits each morning is part of the Kathmandu Valley’s traditional water system, composed of interconnected stone spouts known locally as dhunge dhara or alternately as hiti. The network once supplied water to communities across the valley; today, it provides an alternative source for residents facing unreliable access to piped water.

“We don’t like tap water,” she tells Next City as she fills her bottles directly from the spout. From time to time, residents treat the spout’s water with chlorine. “This water is cleaner. Some neighbors have begun boiling the water before drinking, but I am not worried.”

In a country where only a quarter of the population has access to clean drinking water, Poudel is one of a growing number of Kathmandu residents choosing the spout over the tap. Nearly 70% of the city’s drinking water samples contain E. coli and faecal coliform, bacteria that indicate contamination by human or animal waste, according to the latest government analysis. Residents say the valley’s rivers have become open sewers and the pipes carry the same contamination into their homes.

Climate change and rapid urbanization are colliding in the Southeast Asian country, where increased monsoon intensity and frequent floods are overwhelming the capital’s water systems. Amid this failure of modern infrastructure, residents are reviving dhunge dharas in and around Kathmandu — in one case, even rebuilding an ancient fountain from the ground up after it was lost in the 2015 earthquake.

A 1,400-year-old network

The oldest functioning spout — Manga Hiti in Patan, a city of ancient palaces and courtyards less than four miles south of central Kathmandu — has provided water since 570 AD.

These fountains rely on underground aquifers that channel water naturally through gravitational force, supported by networks of ponds and canals that store and regulate supply during dry seasons while preventing flooding during monsoons.

Beneath each stone spout lies a complex water system. A stone spout is essentially “the outlet of a spring connected to groundwater,” as climate change and springshed expert Ujjwal Upadhyay describes it.

“The stone structure is built by people, but the water flowing through it comes from a natural underground system,” he explains.

Rainwater enters the ground through a defined recharge area, accumulates in underground aquifers and eventually emerges at the surface as a spring. Traditionally, communities identified these natural water pathways and built spouts at points where water could flow to the surface.

“Even those who get tap water come to Bhinya Hiti for drinking water,” says heritage conservationist Rabindra Puri, referring to a spout in Bhaktapur municipality, about eight miles from Kathmandu. It’s believed to date back around 1,400 years.

“The spouts served a social purpose as well as providing water,” he explains. “They were designed as community spaces where residents could meet, exchange news, and socialize while collecting water, much like people gathering at tea shops today.”

Short supply, uncertain quality

The public utility company Kathmandu Upatyaka Khanepani Limited is responsible for the management of the Kathmandu Valley’s water supply and sanitation system. Its 2024-2025 annual report says the capital’s water demand is about 136 million gallons (514 million liters) per day, while the company’s average supply is only 61.4 million (232.4 million liters) daily with seasonal variation.

The gap between supply and demand has pushed people to alternatives like groundwater extraction, private tankers, jars, and bottled water. But in places where functioning stone spouts are available, people continue to use dhunge dharas.

For 18-year-old Mohin Thapa, Brahmakhel Dhunge Dhara has made collecting drinking water easier.

“When my parents are busy with work, I collect the water myself,” the university student says. “Rather than going every day, I fill four or five bottles at a time, which lasts a couple of days.”

His family uses tap water for bathing, cleaning, gardening and washing, while relying on water from the stone spout for drinking.

“I prefer drinking water from the dhunge dhara,” he tells Next City. “Ever since I was a child, that has been my primary water source, and I love its natural taste and freshness.”

Sher Bahadur Pun, chief of the Tropical and Infectious Disease Hospital’s Clinical Research Unit, says the hospital receives around half a dozen patients presenting with symptoms of waterborne diseases, including fever and diarrhea, every day. Patients do not typically identify stone-spout water as the source of their illness, he says, but he still encourages caution.

“That does not make untreated stone-spout water automatically safe,” Pun says. “Boiling or purifying would be better.”

A 2022 review of research on Kathmandu Valley’s stone spouts reported that previous testing had detected total coliforms, E. coli and nitrates in some spout-water samples, with water quality varying by season. The review noted that many stone spouts rely on shallow groundwater, making them vulnerable to contamination.

A system under pressure

A survey by the Kathmandu Valley Water Supply Management Board in 2019 counted 573 spouts in the valley with a combined discharge of 2.4 million liters a day.

Of those spouts, many were in disrepair and 94 had been lost entirely. Just 224 were still functioning. In 2022, the valley’s water fountains were placed on the the World Monuments Fund’s watchlist for heritage sites urgently at risk.

Like the city’s modern water infrastructure, the ancient water network has also been increasingly under pressure due to extreme weather and development. Kathmandu receives around 57 inches (1,450 millimetres) of rainfall a year, but more often, that rain is falling in shorter, more intense periods, Upadhyay says.

“Heavy rainfall over a short duration is more likely to run off rather than infiltrate and recharge groundwater,” Upadhyay points out.

Houses, roads, agriculture and other changes in land use can interfere with the areas where water needs to infiltrate, he explains: “A spout can be cleaned, repaired or restored on the surface, but if its underground conduits are broken, its recharge area is blocked, or its water source has been disrupted, the flow can disappear.”

Sushil Shrestha, a stone-spout expert, conservationist and chairperson of the Historic Stone Spouts and Ponds Conservation Association, says that this has happened at stone spouts across the valley.

He points to Sundhara, or the Golden Spout, in Kathmandu, where surrounding buildings and infrastructure have disrupted the underground system and contributed to the spout drying up. But he says the spout could still be revived by reconnecting it to viable water sources.

Bringing spouts back to life

Residents are now more aware of the importance of this heritage, Shrestha says.

The nearly 600- to 700-year-old Alko Hiti in Patan, Lalitpur — which alone produces more than 200,000 gallons (about 800,000 liters) of water a day, he says — was restored after its water was polluted from a leak from a local bone mill factory in 2000. A surge in water-borne diseases triggered a local conservation movement, which culminated in the community-led revival and renovation of Alko Hiti in 2003.

In Thamel, the historic Ga Hiti spout supplied thousands of residents until April 2015, when a neighbouring hotel collapsed in a massive earthquake that devastated the region, and the spout was destroyed. Reconstruction cost more than $30,000 (Rs4.6 million), with Kathmandu Metropolitan City covering 80% and residents raising the rest. The Ga Hiti Youth Club and local volunteers finished the work in about six months, and the spout was flowing again by early 2017.

According to Shrestha, there is a massive gap between water demand and supply, and functioning dhunge dhara are “actively helping to minimize that gap.”

“They are priceless ancient heritage and very old living historic monuments – beyond easing daily shortages,” he tells Next City. “If Kathmandu Valley loses them or they stop flowing, the water crisis will deepen further, and we will lose a very important part of our history.”

This article was produced in collaboration with Egab.

Welcome back to The Weekly Wrap, our Friday roundup of stories that explain the problems oppressing people in cities and elevate the solutions that bring us closer to economic, environmental, and social justice. If you enjoy this newsletter, share it with a friend or colleague and tell them to subscribe.

25 Years Since 9/11 Attacks Shook America

Today marks twenty-five years since the 9/11 attacks in New York City and Pennsylvania, which killed 2,977 people. The attacks spurred the U.S.-led “war on terror,” which has killed more than 900,000 people through direct violence and more than 3.6 million people indirectly, and birthed a sprawling private-public surveillance infrastructure — including a multibillion dollar industry – that is still rapidly expanding.

Cancers and illnesses related to dust and smoke from the towers’ collapse have since killed more than three times as many people as the 9/11 attacks themselves, according to U.S. health officials. On Sept. 8, the Mamdani administration released 170,000 pages of city records showing air quality in lower Manhattan following the attacks was worse than previously known — and that city officials repeatedly misled residents about the toxic air quality. “People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said.

Texas Cities Fend Off Proposal To Disband Their Utility Companies

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is pushing to dismantle the state’s municipally-owned electric utilities, arguing that introducing private competition will lower electricity bills for residents.

But city officials, utility operators, and independent experts say the proposal would likely do the opposite, The Texas Tribune reports. Austin and San Antonio’s city-owned utilities operate as nonprofits, returning hundreds of millions in excess revenue to fund city services like libraries, parks, and first responders. Without that revenue, city budget deficits would deepen. Plus, the process of deregulation would cost “over a billion dollars that would be paid by customers,” Austin’s mayor says.

Meanwhile, a study of federal data found that public utility customers pay 14% less on average than customers of other utility types. Houston, the state’s largest city without a municipally-owned utility, operates in a fully deregulated market and still experiences some of the highest electricity rates on the Texas grid.

Cities Are Swapping Flock Cameras for Axon Cameras

As backlash grows to Flock Safety’s now-ubiquitous automated license plate readers and its searchable national database, cities are increasingly deploying automated license plate readers from other brands, including Axon, as 404 Media first reported in August.

Newsweek mapped out where cities are deploying Axon’s readers, including Knoxville, Syracuse, Denver, Durango, and Antioch. Axon already develops body cameras and tasers and has existing relationships with law enforcement agencies around the country; on its website, Axon advertises license plate readers that can be placed on street lights as well as “vehicles, trailers or trees.”

The ACLU has warned against cities swapping one license plate reader with another brand, saying that the privacy concerns remain the same.

Judge Rules Americans Don’t Have Constitutional Right to Clean Water

A Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals judge ruled that Americans don’t have a constitutional right to clean drinking water, Mother Jones reports.

A 2022 lawsuit alleged that the city of Jackson, Mississippi violated the constitution’s due process clause by failing to provide accurate information about contamination and failing to provide clean water.

A Trump-appointed judge claimed there would be no historical basis for those rights. Clean drinking water is a protected right in at least nine other states, in some cases protected by state constitutions, as in New York.

New Solar Is Mostly In Trump Country

Grist reports that the nation’s solar buildout is mostly taking place in states that voted for Trump in the last election. This is happening as Republican policies are making it more challenging to build solar — including the phase-out of Biden-era tax credits and the introduction of layers of review to wind and solar projects on federal land.

According to a report released by the Solar Energy Industries Association, solar has made up 70% of new electric generating capacity this year, whereas gas made up only 8% of new capacity. But gas is phasing out more slowly than anticipated thanks to a nationwide buildout of data centers, many of which rely on new gas because it’s faster to build out.

MORE NEWS

• U.S. bond yields spike after Bessent increases buybacks. Semafor

• Smithsonian’s secretary to resign as Trump tries to rule the institution. The New York Times

• Japan halves speed limits on all narrow city streets. The Guardian

• Austin edits development rules to encourage affordable housing near transit. Austin Current

• Sand Branch, Texas, has no clean drinking water. She’s trying to fill the gap. The 19th

• Cops won’t fight federal election interference, so citizens will have to. Mother Jones

• London mayor to have his texts and emails searched following Palantir lawsuit. The Guardian

• Homeless services contracts to get a ‘reset’ in San Francisco. Smart Cities Dive

• Developers eye Native nations, tribal communities for new data center projects. Nebraska Examiner

• Train crashes destroyed their towns. Will yours be next? In These Times

OPPORTUNITIES & RESOURCES

• Stanley 1913 is accepting applications for its Creators Fund, which supports bold and innovative leaders of nonprofits anywhere in the world (with budgets between $200K and $2M to be eligible) working to strengthen their communities. Apply by Sept. 13.

• The Park Foundation is accepting funding proposals for work related to democracy, civic participation, and media. Apply by Sept. 22.

• Impact Fund is accepting grant applications for impact litigation advancing economic, environmental, and social justice. Submit a letter of interest by Sept. 29.

When city leaders debate sanctuary policy, they usually ask what employees should do when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) calls, arrives at a jail, or requests access to a public facility. But by the time a request reaches City Hall, the most important decision may already have been made: Did the city create and keep the record ICE wants?

That question has become urgent as federal immigration-enforcement capacity rapidly expands. The Government Accountability Office reported that ICE’s average daily detained population grew 71% between January 2025 and April 2026. At the same time, information collected for one public purpose is increasingly being repurposed for another. Last year, the Department of Health and Human Services gave ICE access to personal data covering 79 million Medicaid enrollees, reportedly including home addresses and ethnicity.

Sanctuary is not only a policing policy, it’s an information architecture. And while cities can’t control federal databases, they can control many of their own data collection and retention practices.

Sanctuary begins before ICE Asks

A city can prohibit employees from voluntarily assisting civil immigration enforcement and still maintain systems that make residents easy to locate.

A parks department may keep household rosters and copies of identity documents; a library system may preserve borrowing histories and stale addresses; automated license-plate readers may store months of vehicle movements; public benefit files may contain more immigration documentation than the governing program requires; and language access programs may preserve identifiable lists of residents’ languages or national origins for years, when aggregate data would suffice.

Every retained record creates another route by which ICE may seek information: a subpoena, public-records request, interagency portal, contractor’s database, employee acting outside policy or security breach. A “do not share” rule is valuable, but a system in which unnecessary information no longer exists is much stronger.

Federal statutes often invoked in sanctuary-city disputes — 8 U.S.C. Section 1373 and 8 U.S.C. Section 1644 — address government restrictions on communicating information about citizenship or immigration status. They do not require a city to ask residents about status, copy their immigration documents, or indefinitely retain every address, household roster, license plate read, or language field it happens to collect.

State records laws, grant rules, and litigation holds may require preservation of particular records. The answer is disciplined records management: collect less at the outset, distinguish legally required records from convenience copies, establish lawful deletion schedules in advance, and suspend deletion when a valid hold applies.

Several cities have already implemented parts of this approach.

The interagency rules for New York City’s municipal ID program, IDNYC, requires identity and residency documents to be returned and not retained after verification. Oakland’s surveillance ordinance requires public review and enforceable use policies before city departments deploy surveillance technology. And in March, Seattle’s City Council reaffirmed that city employees should not require immigration-status disclosure to access city programs. It also directed departments to review whether personal information is truly necessary, where it is shared, and how contractor policies should change.

What a data retention sanctuary requires

Every city should conduct a department-by-department data inventory. This assessment shouldn’t just identify which databases exist, but which fields are collected, why each field is necessary, who can access it, which vendors receive it, how long each copy survives and whether information flows into regional or federal systems. The review should include police, jails, libraries, recreation programs, housing offices, public-health departments, 311 systems, utilities, and city contractors.

Cities should apply a necessity test before collection. Immigration status should not be requested unless a law or specific program makes it indispensable. Proof of identity or residence should be verified without retaining a copy whenever feasible. Household composition should not be collected when a simple count will do. A preferred language may be needed to deliver service; nationality usually is not.

Deletion should be automatic. Each system should have the shortest lawful retention period tied to its actual purpose. Non-hit license plate data should disappear quickly. Expired recreation accounts and obsolete contact details should be purged. Library reading history should be off by default or controlled by the patron. Temporary eligibility documents should be deleted once verification and any legally-required audit period end.

Cities must write these duties into procurement contracts. A city’s privacy promise is meaningless if its software vendor can retain, sell, combine, or repurpose resident data. Contracts should prohibit secondary use and sale; limit subcontractors; require access logs, deletion certificates, and prompt notice of government demands; and require the vendor to delete all copies when the city’s retention period expires. City councils should treat data terms as seriously as price and performance.

Cities can still preserve aggregate data to measure equity. Aggregated, de-identified information can show whether language access, libraries, health programs, or recreation services are reaching low-income and immigrant neighborhoods. The goal isn’t to make the government blind. It’s to prevent service delivery data from becoming a map of vulnerable households.

Compliance needs an owner. A chief privacy officer, inspector general, privacy commission, or designated city attorney should review new systems, publish annual retention audits, and investigate violations. Residents should be able to see what information a program collects before they enroll, how long it will be kept and how to request correction or deletion when the law permits.

Cities cannot guarantee that ICE will never enter their neighborhoods or obtain information from federal and commercial sources. They can ensure that a library card, swimming lesson, language request, or municipal benefit does not become a permanent investigative lead.