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.

EPA Proposal Would Let Data Centers Skip Public Comment

A proposal from the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency could make it significantly harder for residents to learn about — or weigh in on — plans to build AI data centers in their communities, the Associated Press reports.

The EPA plan would eliminate a federal requirement that states notify the public and accept comment before issuing air pollution permits for data centers and other industrial facilities, leaving it to individual states to decide whether to seek public input at all.

Critics say the move is especially dangerous in Southern and Midwestern states that currently rely on the federal floor as their only meaningful public notice requirement. “Data centers and other industrial sources should not be able to get their air pollution permits in secret,” said Keri Powell of the Southern Environmental Law Center.

The proposal comes amid a bipartisan, urban-rural backlash against data center proliferation that has reshaped local politics across the country. Data centers have emerged as a flashpoint in state legislative races and local elections in Virginia, Georgia, Texas, and beyond. The EPA is expected to finalize the rule next year.

Trump Administration Destroying Fair Housing Enforcement

The 1968 Fair Housing Act bans discrimination in housing accommodations based on protected categories, including race, disability, gender, and religion. But enforcement of the law is almost entirely outsourced by the government to third-party nonprofits that carry out investigations of potential violations.

These fair housing organizations have been hobbled by delays in funding applications since the beginning of the second Trump administration, but as The American Prospect reports, HUD’s latest Notice of Funding Opportunity effectively bans any nonprofit that received funds in the last two years from receiving funds this year. The crude bureaucratic maneuver would essentially end fair housing enforcement altogether and gut one of the country’s most important protections against discrimination.

Heat Wave Deaths Vastly Exceed CDC Count

A two-year joint investigation into heat-related deaths by NPR and Boston University found that an estimated 9,000 people die every year due to heat in the U.S, far higher than the 1,700 to 2,000 recorded each year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Many heat deaths are not marked down as such because they take the form of heart attacks and other killers, according to the report. While large cities including Houston and Los Angeles are still significantly undercounting heat deaths, the report notes that a few localities have managed to improve their protocols for identifying and tracking heat-related deaths.

Arizona’s Maricopa County, for example, “trains ‘death investigators’ to look for signs of heat stress, such as asking about the state of the deceased’s air conditioning system, their ability to pay electric bills to run ACs, their use of medications that increase heat sensitivity, and more,” NPR explains.

Glacial Melting Drives Deadly Flash Floods in Nepal and Tibet

A massive glacier in the border between Nepal and Tibet has melted, causing an extraordinary collapse of rock and ice on Aug. 26. The landslide triggered devastating flash flooding that has killed at least 1,000 people with 4,000 people remaining missing, according to Nature.

More than 160 glaciers in Nepal have completely melted, losing more than a quarter of the country’s glacial area since 1970, according to Grist and WIRED, making deadly collapses more likely. Despite satellite images showing the glacier descending days before the collapse, experts tell Nature that such incidents are hard to predict in part because these mountainous areas are “remote, difficult to access and generally lack continuous monitoring.”

Grist points to a recent study in Science that finds that 40% of the world’s glacial ice could vanish if the world does not keep warming to under 1.5 degrees Celsius.

America’s Natural Gas Buildout Is Out of Control

According to a report released by Global Energy Monitor, new gas power projects connected to data centers doubled in the first 6 months of 2026.

About 189 gigawatts of new gas-powered plants were announced or in different phases of construction, more than double the amount of new starts this time in 2025, much of it to power data centers. Two thirds of these projects were in Texas, which was followed by Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia for new projects.

Data centers account for an estimated 16.9 gigawatts of gas power in projects currently under construction. The buildout has been complicated by local data center bans and a limited supply of gas turbines, not to mention the precarious finances of the AI industry.

MORE NEWS

• Social housing program gets city task force sign-off in Portland, Maine. Smart Cities Dive

• New law requires New York hairdressers to learn how to do all hair types, including Black hair. ABC7

• Florida bans highway license-plate readers as backlash over surveillance spreads. Reuters

• Bangkok is trying a new way to get people off the streets. Bloomberg

• This secretive West Texas housing agency is building an apartment empire. Houston Chronicle

• For affordable housing fund, Cleveland embraces private partnerships. Smart Cities Dive

• New York is relying on office conversions to address its housing crisis. New York Times

• Trump administration moves to relax fuel efficiency standards for commercial trucks. The Hill

• American drivers think speeding is okay because everyone else is doing it. Jalopnik

• Police departments across the U.S. are buying Israeli surveillance tech. Responsible Statecraft

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.

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

Officials struggled for years to curb high-speed crashes along a residential corridor cutting through Albuquerque, New Mexico, but simply punishing the lead-footed drivers didn’t seem to work.

What ultimately did was rewarding the law-abiding ones with fewer red lights.

The solution, which the city credits for a dramatic drop in crashes and injuries along one busy stretch of road, is a relatively novel version of a longstanding traffic safety concept commonly known as “rest in red,” in which traffic signals default to red until a vehicle approaches. But Albuquerque and Portland, Oregon, took it a step further by adding speed sensors that grant a much earlier green light to drivers traveling at or below the posted limit.

“We’re finding that the technology itself is kind of its best advertisement,” Jennifer Turner, Albuquerque’s director of municipal development, said of the strategy the city deployed on Lead and Coal avenues, parallel one-way streets. “If you come to Albuquerque right now and you’re driving that corridor, you will learn pretty quickly that if you are speeding, you stop.”

Isaac Romero, who lives along the corridor, said he has noticed a big difference. Before rest in red, he would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of drivers racing to beat the traffic lights or one another. He saw cars that had crashed and flipped, including one that ended up in his neighbor’s yard.

“We had one accident where it’s even shaken the whole house because some guy slammed into a tree,” Romero said. “It’s a lot of change because now you don’t get as many people flying through there.”

Portland credits its ‘virtual speed bumps’

Portland recently rolled out the concept during the late-night hours on Southeast Powell Boulevard, a busy state highway with a long history of crashes, including fatal ones.

Peter Koonce, who manages signals and street lighting for the city, calls the new approach a “virtual speed bump” and said the early results are promising. At the first intersection tested, rest in red was able to lower the average speed from 39 mph (63 kph) to 30 mph (48 kph), which is the speed limit, he said.

Oregon State University researchers helped Portland choose its vehicle detection system for monitoring speeds, and now they’re assessing its performance. David Hurwitz, a professor of transportation engineering who leads the study, said it’s too early to draw sweeping conclusions.

“This choice that we are making to try to increase speed compliance seems like it’s working really well — seems like it has potential,” said Hurwitz, who stressed that further research is needed to ensure those gains aren’t offset by more drivers running red lights or other negative consequences.

Cities try to change driver behavior but avoid other problems

Potential negative consequences are also a primary concern of Jay Beeber, chief government affairs and policy officer for the National Motorists Association, a drivers advocacy group. Although he acknowledges that rest in red could be effective in certain places at specific times, he questions whether driver behavior can really change without a broad education campaign and believes there are simpler, less-intrusive solutions.

“I think it’s wishful thinking that drivers are aware enough and pay attention enough to really learn to change their speeds based on whether the light is gonna be red or not,” Beeber said. “I think people are going to end up at the light and just be frustrated. I don’t think they’re gonna know why.”

Many U.S. cities, including Albuquerque and Portland, have long used speed cameras to successfully prevent speeding. In fact, Albuquerque set up three near where it also deploys the rest in red approach, which has made that approach even stronger, according to officials.

LA briefly tried rest in red, but most cities haven’t

A few other cities including Boulder, Colorado, and Long Beach, California, implemented smaller targeted efforts to use the threat of more red lights to force speeders to slow down.

Rebecca Sanders, a national safety practice leader at the transportation consulting firm Fehr & Peers, led a 2019 report at Arizona State University and Toole Design looking at various strategies used across the country to manage speed. Of the cities surveyed, only Los Angeles was trying rest in red at the time, and it briefly experimented with using feedback signs to trigger a red light when a driver traveling too fast was detected.

Sanders said the concept seems to work best on roads built for high-capacity traffic during the day but much less congested — and therefore more conducive to speeding — at night.

A 2023 study on five rural and urban roads in North Carolina found a 43% reduction in total crashes after rest in red was implemented around the clock, said Aaron Moody, spokesperson for the North Carolina Department of Transportation. Unlike the systems being used in Albuquerque and Portland, this and other versions of the rest in red approach didn’t use speed sensors to turn lights green for law-abiding drivers, but instead kept lights red by default until vehicles approached, slowing them.

Despite their apparent effectiveness at deterring speeding, cities have been slow to embrace rest in red.

Romero said he’s visited enough neighborhoods through his home security business to know that the approach could work in many other places in Albuquerque and beyond. But it’ll take all drivers buying in, as the presence of just one speeder can trigger a red light.

“If everybody cruises to 30 calmly, I can promise you, you can get every single green light all the way down,” Romero said. “But the moment that one person is there, it changes that whole route for everybody.”

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.

Seven years after New York state made it illegal for landlords to reject housing vouchers, the state attorney general’s office has been steadily cracking down on violators despite multiple legal challenges that threaten the law’s existence.

A 2023 lower court decision found aspects of the 2019 law unconstitutional, but the case has been back and forth in appeals for more than three years. “It’s created this uncertainty,” says Eric Dunn, director of litigation at the National Housing Law Project (NHLP). Most recently, a March 2026 decision by the New York State Supreme Court’s Appellate Division, Third Department upheld the lower court’s decision, surprising some housing attorneys.

Attorneys tell Next City/Shelterforce that the decision has emboldened landlords, not just in New York but across the country, to mount a constitutional defense when source-of-income violations are brought against them.

In 2022, Attorney General Letitia James sought civil penalties against Ithaca Renting Company, which owns hundreds of units in Tompkins County, accusing it of violating the state’s 2019 law. The company sued, arguing that its property rights under the Fourth Amendment are violated when it is forced to accept housing vouchers.

No federal law bans landlords from rejecting tenants based on their use of Section 8 vouchers. Also called Housing Choice Vouchers, tenant-based Section 8 allows low-income tenants to pay no more than 30% of their income toward rent, with the federal government paying the difference to the landlord. New York’s source of income protections don’t just cover Section 8, but the CityFHEPS voucher, social security payments and other government subsidies.

Yet landlords often refuse to accept vouchers. A report by the Community Service Society and Unlock NYC found more than 2,000 crowdsourced reports of landlords refusing to rent to tenants because of their housing vouchers in New York City.

Twenty-four states and 150 counties or municipalities have source-of-income discrimination laws on the books, according to Heather Abraham, an associate professor of law at the University at Buffalo School of Law and the director of its Civil Rights and Housing Clinic. According to Abraham, 60% of voucher holders live in areas covered by source-of-income protections.

In 2019, New York state amended its human rights law to prohibit source-of-income discrimination, including refusing to rent to someone because they use a housing voucher.

The June 2023 Cortland County Supreme Court decision in People v Commons West, issued by Judge Mark E. Masler, found the law unconstitutional because the Section 8 program requires a government inspection of the relevant housing unit. Every landlord participating in the program must sign a Housing Assistance Payment contract with a public housing agency, which authorizes consent to future searches of their property. Judge Masler said that mandating this inspection violates “a property owner’s Fourth Amendment Rights by giving [them] no choice but to consent to these inspections.”

According to Dunn of NHLP, the court’s interpretation of the law misrepresents how Section 8 inspections actually work. The inspections are arranged with landlords, whose consent and coordination are required for inspectors to enter the building. He knows of no examples in which state agencies have relied on police to break down a door and force an inspection. While landlords are compelled to allow inspectors in, this should be a “reasonable” search under the law, he argues.

“If the landlord doesn’t cooperate with that, then the inspection just never takes place,” Dunn says. “They can’t send in a SWAT team to do an inspection over the landlord’s objection.” He says the only reason why a landlord would object to an inspection is that they don’t want to comply.

“A lot of landlords just hate source-of-income laws,” Dunn says.

New York State Homes and Community Renewal changed its policies in response to the 2023 decision, providing an administrative process for landlords to object to a search. Attorney General Letitia James’s office also appealed to the same judge, but Masler rejected the appeal in December 2024. These decisions banned enforcement of the law, but only in Tompkins County, where both decisions were issued, and only for Section 8 vouchers, according to Heather Abraham.

James’s office then appealed the decision to the state Supreme Court’s Appellate Division, Third Department, which covers a large swath of upstate New York. But in March, the court rejected that appeal, saying the law was unconstitutional. The court acknowledged that the state was in a housing crisis, and that “expanding voucher acceptance is essential to achieving the remedial purpose of the federal program upon which hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers rely.” However, the court privileged landlords’ right not to hypothetically have someone evaluate their apartment for suitability over those concerns, arguing that this was an unreasonable search and seizure.

James’s office released a statement saying it was reviewing the decision, without clarifying whether the state would appeal. It eventually filed another appeal on April 1.

In the weeks after the decision and before the attorney general’s appeal, the state was unable to enforce source-of-income discrimination laws for Section 8 holders, although it is not clear legally if those limitations covered only the court’s jurisdiction or the entire state.

The ruling applied only to those federal vouchers, not to local or state vouchers — like CityFHEPS — that don’t have the same inspection requirements, according to Abraham of the University at Buffalo School of Law. It’s also unclear whether any of the court decisions would extend to all of New York state, she says, because the reach of lower and intermediate court decisions in New York state is ambiguous under the law. (Despite the name, the New York State Supreme Court’s appellate division is an intermediate appellate court, and the Third Department that issued the ruling covers only part of the state.) The decision was stayed after being appealed to the New York State Court of Appeals in April, meaning the 2019 law can still be enforced.

When asked by Next City/Shelterforce for a list of lawsuits and investigations related to the 2019 source of income law, the attorney general’s office sent a list of linked press releases. They included only one lawsuit: the 2022 case that led to the Commons West decision the following year. The AG’s office linked to six settlements it reached with landlords since 2022, all of which it said were initiated by investigations.

How New York can set precedent

Despite the limited direct impact of the rulings, the People v Commons West decision has had ripple effects across New York state and the country.

The University at Buffalo has counted 12 cases nationwide since the 2023 decision in which landlords have argued that a source-of-income law violates their Fourth Amendment rights. They include cases in Lincoln, Nebraska, and in Illinois, where a landlord company is arguing that both Chicago’s and Illinois’s source-of-income laws are unconstitutional. In a Lawrence, Kansas, case, a landlord group’s appeals were rejected in May 2025, two years after the city passed its source-of-income protections.

Kansas City, Missouri, passed a source-of-income law in January 2024, but a Fourth Amendment challenge led to a preliminary injunction blocking the law the following month. The law’s death knell was a May 2025 law that prevented any locality in the state from enforcing source-of-income protections.

Abraham says some New York landlords were under the impression that the 2019 source-of-income law had been shot down statewide.

“What I think is most important, factually, about what happened [after the March 2026 decision] is that a lot of landlords and property owners all told each other ‘We won, we got an appellate court to say this is our right,’” Abraham says.

The National Apartment Association, one of the city’s largest landlord lobbies, issued a public statement about the decision in March. The headline only says that the law remains unconstitutional in an appellate ruling, though the text clarifies that “housing providers in New York City are still subject to the city’s source-of-income antidiscrimination law,” and that the state attorney general could still appeal the decision.

Abraham says the decision may also be having a chilling effect on legislators across the country, who now worry that any newly passed source-of-income law will be immediately challenged.

“I imagine there are a lot of legislators who just want to wait rather than spend a lot of their political capital or time trying to move something forward that could be invalidated later,” she says.

Housing Rights Initiative, a nonprofit that has collaborated with the state attorney general’s office to bring source-of-income lawsuits, says it filed hundreds of such lawsuits prior to the New York Supreme Court’s March ruling. The organization says it is cautiously optimistic that the ruling will be narrowed or reversed.

But Abraham stresses that housing attorneys in several states are fighting these landlord cases to establish a strong precedent for source-of-income protections. James, for example, has reached settlements in five source-of-income cases since the decision, according to her office. These include a legal agreement reached in October 2023 over an investigation that began in 2021; a February 2024 agreement with a New Rochelle landlord who agreed to pay $40,000 to the state and accept Section 8 tenants; and an August 2024 agreement in which a landlord of mostly rent-stabilized units in Harlem and Brooklyn agreed to pay $400,000 to potential renters who were denied housing because of their voucher status and to rent at least 65 units to tenants with housing vouchers.

Abraham notes the appointment of Amanda Meyer as special counsel for fair housing within the Office of the New York Attorney General. This is a newly created role, wrote Madilyn Somers, deputy press secretary, in an email. A job description says the special counsel leads the attorney general’s housing discrimination lawsuits, along with drafting public recommendations and comments.

“I think she’s very interested in doing everything the state can to enforce existing fair housing laws and strengthen them,” Abraham says.

In the meantime, anyone who believes they have faced source-of-income discrimination in New York state can file a complaint with the state attorney general’s office.

This article was originally published by The Conversation.

As summer temperatures soar across the United States and Europe, cities are being forced to confront the difficult reality that they’re getting dangerously hot.

Record-breaking heat waves strain power grids, send people to cooling shelters and can make the top floors of some apartment buildings unlivable.

One way to help cool buildings is to install green roofs – living rooftops covered by plants that can transform heat-absorbing rooftops into cooling solutions.

Green roofs have long been promoted as a method to help cities stay cool. Often cities offer developers incentives to install them. But just building a green roof isn’t enough.

My research with colleagues shows that what happens after a green roof is built is as important as the decision to install a green roof in the first place. We found that many green roofs fall into neglect and don’t survive beyond a few years, likely due to the cost of maintenance. When buildings’ operational budgets are cut, landscape elements – including green roofs – are often altered or maintenance is scaled back to save money.

What is a green roof?

Unlike a traditional roof made of asphalt, metal or tiles, a green roof is made up of layers, including insulation, water proofing and drainage, that allow plants to grow atop the building.

Depending on their design, these roofs can support everything from low-growing sedums to shrubs and trees. Rockefeller Center’s rooftop terrace gardens in New York City were designed in the 1930s to hold trees, grass, shrubs and seating areas to double as parklike respites far above the traffic. The roof of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco is fully covered by 2.5 acres of wildflowers, succulents and other native coastal flowers.

These roofs are more than just decorative landscaping.

Plants absorb sunlight that would otherwise heat up the building below. They also cool the surrounding air through a process called evapotranspiration, in which they release water vapor. Additionally, they can reduce the amount of energy needed for heating and cooling buildings by acting as insulation. Green roofs also capture rainfall and prevent it from reaching storm drains, reducing flood risks and improving water quality in the community.

Because of these benefits, organizations like the European Commission and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have promoted green roofs in recent years as a way to reduce urban heat islands, make cities more resilient to extreme weather and improve biodiversity by supporting birds, butterflies and other insects.

Some cities even help pay for them by offering incentives, such as tax credits, stormwater fee reductions or sped-up permitting to encourage developers to install green roofs. Philadelphia, for example, offers businesses a tax credit that can cover up to 50% of green roof construction costs.

These programs recognize the public benefits that green roofs can give, but they tend to focus on getting the roofs built rather than on keeping them functioning long term.

Without maintenance, all the work and money invested by builders and the communities can quickly be lost.

What happens to green roofs in the long term?

Most green roof conversations focus on their design: How deep should the soil be? What plants should be used? How much can they cool a building? Less attention is given to what happens to the roof five, 10, or 20 years down the road.

To better understand the long-term fate of green roofs, we studied 46 green roofs across the southeastern United States. Rather than asking how well a newly installed roof performed, we asked whether it was still functioning and being kept up years after construction. The results surprised us.

Nearly half of the roofs were no longer functioning as intended. Nine had been abandoned, with vegetation loss and no maintenance. Twelve roofs had been removed completely.

Even more interesting was what predicted a green roof’s success, or lack of it.

It didn’t matter whether the green roof had received LEED certification, formally recognizing it as sustainable design, or whether it was owned by a private corporation or a nonprofit. What mattered was whether building ownership had changed.

Every time buildings changed hands, green roofs either ended up abandoned or removed altogether, possibly due to a loss of knowledge about the roof. There is also the issue of cost; people who buy buildings with green roofs may have different budgets or priorities and do not necessarily want to spend the time or money to pay for them.

Larger-scale implication

Green infrastructure requires ongoing monitoring and care.

Plants need to be watered, fertilized and sometimes replaced. Irrigation systems need repairs. Invasive species need to be managed. Drainage layers need inspecting to prevent disastrous leaks that damage the building below. Maintenance on green roofs can cost anywhere from a few cents to over $3 a square foot per year and can be time-consuming depending on whether a roof needs to be weeded and watered by hand.

Without that care, many of the benefits used to justify the original investment can disappear.

Imagine planting thousands of street trees, then never watering them again. That would be a poor investment. Yet people often assume green roofs will continue working indefinitely after installation without stopping to consider the work involved in keeping them alive.

Our research suggests that this assumption deserves a closer look.

Looking toward the future

Research consistently shows that green infrastructure plays an important role in helping cities adapt to a warming climate.

It can reduce urban temperatures, improve stormwater management, create habitat and make neighborhoods more comfortable.

But for green roofs to keep delivering environmental benefits decades after installation, communities may need to think beyond incentives for construction.

Long-term maintenance plans, clear ownership responsibilities and funding for stewardship may prove as important as the installation. Climate adaptation isn’t just about building new infrastructure, but also about making sure that infrastructure can continue to thrive years into the future.

On maps of food access in Charlottesville, the stretch of Carlton Avenue east of the railroad tracks isn’t classified as a food desert. But on a weekday morning, the only open doors belong to a vape shop, a laundromat, and a gas station selling shelf‑stable snacks. The nearest full‑service grocery store is two bus transfers away.

In this acclaimed culinary town at the edge of Virginia’s wine country, lines form at outdoor cafes, vineyard food trucks — and food pantries, where the wait begins before dawn.

In a region ringed by small farms, dozens of grocery stores, and a nationally known restaurant district, food banks are reporting historic demand, driven by steep cuts to federal nutrition programs like SNAP. And the lines are expected to grow even longer as new eligibility rules push more households off the rolls.

“It’s not going to happen all at once,” says Jane Colony Mills, executive director of Loaves & Fishes, the region’s largest food pantry. But even now, she says, “40% of the 12,000 people we are giving food to each month are coming to us two times a month.”

One in seven residents and one in five immigrants face food insecurity. For the city’s Black residents, the numbers are far more stark: roughly one in three, a rate that has remained persistently high for decades, according to the latest Charlottesville City Community Wellbeing Profile.

This wasn’t the future residents envisioned in 2018, when the city endorsed a groundbreaking initiative focused on urban agriculture, healthy school meals, food insecurity, and neighborhood grocery access.

Charlottesville’s Food Equity Initiative, first passed by city council in October 2018 and formally adopted into the city’s Comprehensive Plan in 2021, was celebrated by its founders as one of the nation’s first comprehensive municipal food equity policies. It received national recognition when the EPA, USDA, and Northern Border Regional Commission chose the city for the federal Local Foods, Local Places program.

The initiative’s tenets were forged by the grassroots nonprofit Cultivate Charlottesville and its coalition, the Food Justice Network, with input from hundreds of community members. Nine city departments signed an internal administrative agreement to support the initiative and incorporate its goals into planning. While this wasn’t a formal council action, the move signaled a shift away from treating hunger solely as a charity issue handled by food banks.

Why municipal might matters

Research backs up the hybrid approach Charlottesville was leaning into. A 2023 peer‑reviewed study from the University of the District of Columbia found that government‑affiliated food policy bodies score far higher on effectiveness, resource mobilization, and equity than nonprofit or grassroots models. Bringing food to more tables and grocery stores to more neighborhoods takes both community vision and government might.

Charlottesville has one of the more developed food equity ecosystems for a small Southern city, but it lacks municipal staff or an office responsible for food equity implementation. And the city has no formally designated urban farm parcels, leaving every existing farm site vulnerable to redevelopment.

In contrast, other small cities with strong hybrid programs have city‑run food systems. Burlington, Vermont, employs a Food Systems Policy Manager who handles food systems planning, land access, urban agriculture policy and climate‑food integration, backed by permanent municipal funding. In Ithaca, New York, county planners integrate food systems into land‑use and sustainability planning, while Cornell Cooperative Extension runs food access, agriculture, and nutrition programs with stable public funding.

According to Feeding America’s Map the Meal Gap 2026, which provides county‑level food insecurity estimates, Charlottesville has higher food insecurity among Black residents than both those cities.

It also has higher rates than Seattle, a large city with one of the country’s strongest food equity systems. Seattle tracks and monitors its progress closely, even though its work is spread across multiple agencies rather than housed in a single food systems office.

“The City of Seattle plays an active coordinating role across the entire food system,” explains Bridget Igoe, food policy and programs advisor for the city. Working with hundreds of partners and community input, the city sets policy direction, invests public dollars, and ensures accountability, she says. “That structure reflects our belief that municipal leadership and community expertise are essential.”

Because Charlottesville is an independent city and legally a county, it’s one of the smallest jurisdictions in the country that publishes race‑specific food‑insecurity data — yet it shows racial food insecurity at the scale of a large city.

The most recent public assessment of Charlottesville’s food system — the 2022 Food Equity Initiative update — notes that efforts remain distributed across departments and community partners, and that the city lacks a unified food‑access strategy.

Ryan Thayer, co-executive director of Cultivate Charlottesville, says the organization used to be under contract with the city under the direction of city council to advance and track the food equity initiative. When the contract ended in 2024, the city did not renew it. Now they apply under an annual open grant program. “There does not seem to be a coordinated effort around addressing food inequities within the city’s system. I know that the upcoming climate action report does prioritize local food systems and food equity, but is not clear how that will be operationalized.”

For Charlottesville to prosper, everyone must have access to healthy, affordable, and culturally relevant foods, Thayer tells Next City. “Especially now, with national threats to our food safety, climate impacts, and global supply chain risks, it is critical we invest in local food resiliency.”

How the system was designed

On August 12, 2017, there were no summer crowds lined up at the downtown mall’s storied restaurants. Doors were closed in anticipation of violence as hundreds of torch-wielding white supremacists descended on the town to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

The city known as the home of Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia has a long history of racial tensions that include university expansion into Black neighborhoods. That backdrop had already sparked a robust food equity movement.

The three nonprofits that later merged in 2020 to form Cultivate Charlottesville — City Schoolyard Garden, the Urban Agriculture Collective, and the Food Justice Network — were already running school gardens, neighborhood farm stands, and youth food education programs. Other nonprofits, such as Loaves & Fishes and Local Food Hub, handled emergency food distribution and regional fresh‑food access. The work was entirely community‑led, small, and fragmented, with no formal connection to municipal planning.

The Unite the Right rally in 2017 left one woman dead and dozens injured. In its aftermath, the loose network of food groups began organizing in earnest, moving beyond previous patchy efforts at food access maps and other resources.

In the years after the rally, the groups began formalizing a food equity framework built around work they were already doing. New challenges emerged. Community gardens they had helped create were threatened by redevelopment, and although the gardens were doing equity work, nothing in city policy recognized or protected them.

A new municipal food equity initiative, they hoped, could help defend this valuable neighborhood resource.

In October 2018, pressured by the fallout from the rally, the city council approved $65,000 to expand food equity work, the starting point for the Food Equity Initiative. Soon after, the city launched an Office of Equity & Inclusion which focused on internal city operations, such as diversifying hiring, but also managed external programs like the Downtown Job Center.

The office had no authority over things that could help implement the food equity initiative: Protecting urban farming spaces, regulating neighborhood zoning, and funding school lunches all fall under the separate domains of Parks & Recreation, the Office of Economic Development, and city schools, for example. Indeed, despite the nonprofits’ efforts to shield it, 90% of the city’s urban farmland was lost to redevelopment.

Civil rights attorney Jeff Fogel has long argued that Charlottesville lacks a unified city approach to equity, treating issues like policing and housing as separate. He says he has been unable to find anything about the actions of the Office of Equity.

“Frankly, I’m not aware of what the Office of Equity accomplished, if anything,” Fogel tells Next City.

In 2020, the city council asked the group for a list of the policies they believed the city should adopt. The resulting policy platform the group created became the basis for the city’s formal adoption of the initiative.

But advocates won a major victory when the city agreed to embed 31 of their policy recommendations into the 2021 Comprehensive Plan. For the first time, city planners were required to consider neighborhood food access, urban agriculture, school food infrastructure and the siting of grocery stores in land use decisions — though outside the planning process, the initiative had no binding force.

The sweeping win seemed to signal that Charlottesville was ready to treat food access as part of public planning. The city embedded food equity priorities into its December 2023 zoning rewrite, created an urban agriculture map to help identify food production sites in land use decisions, and formalized its partnership with the Food Equity Initiative.

Today, though, key pieces of the plan remain unrealized.

Charlottesville provides approximately $155,000 to fund the nonprofit’s work in multi-year cycles, yet the city has not created a permanent meal tax fund that would support projects like community-owned grocery stores and transportation improvements, despite Cultivate’s requests.

The city has no staff dedicated to food policy and no one mapping grocery gaps. When new housing is approved, there’s no food systems planner to require grocery space, community gardens, or transit links to fresh food. And while Virginia law requires zoning decisions to be generally consistent with the comprehensive plan, the plan itself is only advisory.

Even as Charlottesville overhauls its zoning code, the initiative’s central goal of securing permanent, city-supported land for community food production remains unfulfilled. Meanwhile, grocery gaps aren’t being filled. Reid’s Market, a neighborhood fixture, has closed. And in July, a grocery store planned for Fifeville — a private development project that received a small city grant and was expected to fill a gap in a well known food desert — was effectively cancelled when the operator withdrew.

“It seems like there is a lot of support for urban agriculture, but local policy has not been created as an investment to ensure the work is sustained,” says Thayer. “I would say the most protected program is the gardening program with Parks and Recreation.” Across the parks system and within site specific plans as well, urban agriculture and gardening has been named as a priority, he says, though the funding has not yet been raised for what would be a multi year process.

“Other programs like ours and the International Rescue Committee’s New Roots have had challenges to retain and secure long-term land agreements for our programing.”

The city has not responded to requests for comment.

The unraveling

In 2021, Charlottesville’s Human Rights Commission warned the Council about a “shocking number” of departures among Black staff across city government and described its equity structures as “insufficient without significant investment.”

The Office of Equity & Inclusion, created in 2019, still had only one staff member. Two years later, the city renamed it the Office of Social Equity, broadening its focus from internal oversight to a department that runs programs and provides services.

Last year, another important partner in food justice work, the University of Virginia — facing federal pressure from the Trump administration – dissolved its equity center and transitioned it into the Center for Community Partnerships.

The change rippled beyond the university, since much of the office’s work involved partnerships with nonprofits like Cultivate. News reports note uncertainty among local partners.

UVA still produces demographic data, but it no longer provides the neighborhood‑level race and income food access mapping that local groups once relied on; UVA once provided fine-grained maps of parcels suitable for urban agriculture, a core focus for Cultivate Charlottesville’s work.

When it comes to tracking food access, the USDA Food Access Research Atlas is still commonly used. “However, the data is from 2019,” says Rebecca Coleman, research librarian for architecture at the University of Virginia. “I am not aware of any local organizations that are maintaining similar data but regionally specific.” She points to Feeding America’s Map the Meal Gap and Reinvestment Fund’s Limited Supermarket Access data for regional food access data. But both tools work at the county level.

The switch was followed by the city apparently renaming its own equity office the Office of Prosperity. Its fresh focus: economic mobility, wealth-building, and social determinants of health, or “equity by another name,” as officials said in an internal memo. The office handles “broad socioeconomic barriers,” but does not manage local food policy.

The recent hiring of a Chief of Prosperity officer puts a single city leader in charge of coordinating its equity‑related work, overseeing the Human Rights Office, the Police Civilian Oversight Board, the city’s disability access office, and the Home to Hope reentry program.

Thayer, with Cultivate, says the group hasn’t been in contact with the city about the new position and its relationship to food equity. “We would welcome to be a part of these conversations with the Prosperity Officer on how to actualize greater food equity in Charlottesville.”

For Colony Mills and other food charity workers in Charlottesville, it’s been a perfect storm: the university stepping back from equity infrastructure and the city switching to a focus on “prosperity,” just as safety net programs are slashed and inflation bites.

As economic forces threaten to overwhelm food equity programs, Colony Mills of Loaves & Fishes says the city has a clear opportunity to address food access through its focus on socioeconomic barriers to prosperity: “The cost of living in our community, a shortage of affordable housing, and an inefficient public transportation system also are barriers that can prevent people from working and accessing enough food.”

Helen Leung opened escrow just a few days into the new year. She had six months to raise $8.3 million, and while she had some ideas, she didn’t know yet where she would find all of it.

Over the previous 18 months, Leung had raised more than $5 million, successfully closing escrow for three acquisitions on behalf of LA Más, the northeast Los Angeles nonprofit where she’s executive director. Based in the largely Latino and Asian neighborhood known as Frogtown, LA Más wasn’t even in the housing market until about two years ago.

But Leung feels pressure to move even faster. Since growing up in Frogtown, she’s witnessed how rental properties here and all over Los Angeles have become prime targets for speculative investors whose business models depend on raising rents every year by the maximum amount allowed by law. Many have used loopholes to flip rent-stabilized buildings into market-rate rentals or condos.

LA Más aims instead to take properties off the speculative market for good, minimizing the amount that rents go up every year, and giving tenants a final say in key decisions about their buildings.

This acquisition would test Leung’s limits so far. It wasn’t for just one property. It was for two, neighboring, rent-stabilized, low-rise apartment buildings, both built in the ‘60s on Drew Street in Glassell Park. With a total of 31 units, this acquisition would more than double the housing portfolio at LA Más.

But LA Más has to compete with the speculators. That means accepting the market price — as well as the tight timelines — and figuring out where to get the money after opening escrow. In this case, the price tag was just over $6 million for the two Drew Street apartment complexes. The rest of the $8.3 million raised would cover badly needed rehab and maintenance.

It took a little longer than expected, but LA Más successfully closed escrow on the Drew Street acquisition in mid-August. The capital stack included a joint-venture co-investment from a larger nonprofit, local philanthropic dollars, individual community investors, and public dollars from a brand new county agency. It’s the first time LA Más is tapping into public funding and community investors.

“We came up with something very complicated but not that complicated,” Leung says. “Private sector landlords and investors do this stuff all the time. We’re taking those skill sets and using them for our community, which is not conventional in traditional housing work.”

A change of mission

Just days before closing escrow in August, children had taken over the LA Más office. The nonprofit shares office space with arts organization Clockshop on a pair of former industrial lots in Frogtown, one of which Clockshop has converted into a courtyard and bamboo garden.

The children and their families came by for Somos NELA, LA Más’s twice-monthly night market featuring food, vintage clothing, and jewelry from a selection of northeast Los Angeles vendors. There were newcomers, too, some just attracted by the sound of music and the smell of bacon-wrapped hot dogs and Oaxacan tlayuda while strolling along the nearby LA River Greenway.

The night market started around two years ago as part of LA Más’s pivot from a broader design-focused nonprofit to a community-based organization. Leung joined the organization in 2013, and had been serving as co-executive director along with co-founder Elizabeth Timme (a Next City Vanguard), until COVID-19 changed everything.

As a design nonprofit, LA Más had been helping working-class homeowners build accessory dwelling units and small business owners modernize their storefronts.

The pandemic cut those efforts short. Amid the shutdown, LA Más started using its office as an organizing base and staging ground for mutual aid around the neighborhood and across northeast Los Angeles.

There was no going back, and the organization recognized that its mission had changed. The design nonprofit’s board members stepped down after electing a new board emphasizing northeast Los Angeles community members. A year of community engagement identified housing as a top priority for the organization going forward: Something had to be done about speculative investors increasingly coming into northeast Los Angeles and flipping rent-stabilized apartments and other long-affordable homes into market-rate housing.

It’s a big investment of time and energy for any under-staffed, cash-strapped, community-based nonprofit to make the jump into the housing market. And LA Más wasn’t going to wait for the public sector or a friendly nonprofit to sell it some land or buildings at a deep discount. It was jumping straight into acquiring properties on the open market before they fell into the hands of less community-minded owners.

“It’s not scary because I think about all the investors and property owners who have been doing housing with a lot less heart or different goals,” Leung says. “It’s a little daunting but there’s enough values-aligned people and funding sources out there.”

Leung had prior experience working in local land use and planning, but LA Más worked to recruit additional board members with experience in housing and community land trusts.

Every time LA Más opened escrow, the organization put itself in a crunch to raise the money in time to close. The nonprofit may have to take out loans where it makes sense. But other common tools for affordable housing, like tax credits, would be way too slow for this.

Penciling out the first acquisition

In 2023, a longtime northeast Los Angeles community member passed away, leaving a five-unit rent-stabilized property on Arvia Street in Cypress Park to her six children. One of the late owner’s grandsons, an artist named Andrés Cortes, had been living there for 15 years as a renter and had become known locally for the mural he’d been expanding for a decade in the abutting alley.

On a cultural walking tour led by Clockshop, which stopped by to see the mural, Cortes connected with an LA Más board member and learned that LA Más was looking to make its first acquisition.

At a listed price of $1.5 million, the family was fielding interest from investors and developers who openly planned to push out existing tenants and flip the property into something much more lucrative. That didn’t sit well with the family, who continued to hold out — giving LA Más a chance.

But even after an appraisal brought the price down to $1.2 million for LA Más, the maximum legal rent-stabilized monthly cashflow from the property wasn’t enough to cover the monthly payments for what the nonprofit would need to borrow to cover $1.6 million in total costs, including rehab work that the property needed.

“We commit to raising more upfront for initial capital investments and maintenance so we’re not slumlords and can make long-deferred improvements for residents,” Leung says.

In discussions with the residents at the Arvia Street property, LA Más floated an idea to add a new market-rate accessory dwelling unit (ADU), replacing a shed that was in use as an artist studio on the property. Residents accepted that as part of the plan, but there still wasn’t enough cash flow for a conventional debt-financed acquisition and rehab to “pencil out,” as it’s known in real estate development lingo.

The solution emerged from conversations with Self-Help, an unusual hybrid financial institution based in North Carolina. Self-Help includes the state-chartered Self-Help Credit Union, which operates in a few East Coast states; Self-Help Federal Credit Union, which works in California and a handful of other states; and Self-Help Ventures Fund, a nonprofit investment fund with a nationwide scope. All three entities are also federally-certified community development financial institutions, or CDFIs.

Read more: The World’s Biggest Flannel Mill Sat Vacant for Decades. A CDFI Gave It New Life.

Pre-pandemic, LA Más had worked with Self-Help Federal Credit Union on its ADU program. The nonprofit worked with homeowners to design and find contractors to build ADUs that would be rented to Section 8 federal housing voucher holders. Self-Help Federal Credit Union would provide the financing for individual homeowners to make it happen.

This time, it was the nonprofit investment fund that came into play.

“Credit unions are highly regulated and you can only use deposits for certain things,” says Tim Quinn, senior project manager at Self-Help Ventures Fund. “[Self-Help’s founders] started the Ventures Fund in order to do things that don’t fit in the traditional credit union bucket, like different types of investments, different types of loans.”

Rather than making a loan, Self-Help Ventures Fund made a joint-venture co-ownership deal with LA Más. If Leung could come up with 20-25% of the $1.6 million needed, Self-Help Ventures Fund would chip in the remaining 75-80%, and the two organizations would split property ownership shares accordingly.

As a co-developer instead of just a lender, Self-Help Ventures Fund would be much more hands-on, but it could deploy more patient, more flexible funding it had specifically earmarked for doing real estate development. CDFIs are almost exclusively lenders, but Self-Help is unusual in that it also has decades of experience developing real estate in its home state, know-how it could share directly as a joint-venture partner to an emerging developer like LA Más.

“There was more of a comfort level with trying something new and different that we’d never done before with a partner that we did have a relationship with, but this being a much more intense version of that relationship,” Quinn says.

LA Más and Self-Help jointly opened escrow for the Arvia Street property on July 30, 2024. For the first time, Leung was on the hook to cover LA Más’s end of the deal — without knowing exactly where the money would come from.

“We just opened escrow and then we asked lots of people,” Leung says. “Every single time we open escrow, there’s a bunch of nos. Some say they don’t invest in projects, some need us to be more proven, or they say the timeline doesn’t work for now but come back to us later. And every time I close escrow, I collect more people who say no and I come back to them the next time.”

The Local Initiatives Support Corporation, another large national community development lender, chipped in with a $40,000 grant to LA Más for the Arvia Street acquisition. Two weeks before closing, a $250,000 grant came in from LA4LA, a public-private fund for affordable housing created through a collaboration with the California Community Foundation and the office of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. LA Más and Self-Help closed escrow to acquire the Arvia Street property that fall.

Making non-traditional acquisitions routine

At the beginning of 2025, LA Más established a community governance committee made up of working-class northeast Los Angeles residents who meet every other month — more often than the nonprofit’s quarterly board meetings — to discuss potential acquisitions and other strategic decisions around the nonprofit’s housing portfolio. Some of the committee members are also vendors at the Somos NELA night markets.

The goal for LA Más is to acquire buildings that are still home to working-class residents, loosely defined as households earning up to 50% of area median income. Acquiring buildings that had already been flipped was not an option.

While LA Más has to accept the market price for properties, the combined acquisition and rehab costs still had to be low enough to justify a purchase while maintaining existing rent levels. It’s a balance that the community governance committee helps Leung to figure out. Sellers also have to give LA Más time to fundraise after opening escrow. There’s always risk with any acquisition, but the committee helps decide if the potential impact is worth it based on their collective vision.

LA Más also looks for opportunities to be creative financially — like the addition of the market-rate accessory dwelling unit at the Arvia Street property, which now rents out at $2,800 a month as a two-bedroom, two-bath unit.

The LA Más community governance committee went right to work. After the Arvia Street acquisition was featured in The Los Angeles Times, a group of tenants on Hancock Street in the Lincoln Heights section of northeast Los Angeles read the story and they reached out to LA Más. They had a five unit building that was for sale and in need of rehab.

After evaluating the opportunity with the community governance committee, LA Más jointly opened escrow with Self-Help Ventures Fund to acquire and rehab the Hancock Street property on March 10, 2025. Self-Help put in $910,000 as a 75% owner of the building, and Leung was on the clock to raise the rest for a total of $1.2 million.

For the nonprofit’s end of the deal, Leung got $200,000 from the WHH Foundation, a local family foundation, in the form of a program-related investment — a below-market rate loan that qualifies as part of the 5% of a foundation’s endowment that the IRS mandates foundations to spend every year.

As much as Self-Help can bring to the table as a joint-venture partner and as much as LA Más can raise in the form of grants, Leung wants to spread those resources to as many acquisitions as possible. That means always checking to see whether the rents at the property can support any debt at all, while also looking for below-market rate debt, including in the form of program-related investments from foundations.

Although program-related investments have been around since 1968, relatively few foundations have yet to take up the practice — but they are growing in numbers. In this case, it was the first ever program-related investment for both the WHH Foundation and LA Más.

“We had a prior grantee relationship with WHH Foundation for eight years,” Leung says. “They had started exploring program-related investments on their own and we ended up as the guinea pig.”

Another $40,000 grant came in from the Local Initiatives Support Corporation. LA Más and Self-Help successfully closed escrow for Hancock Street in the spring of 2025.

Over the summer, a member of the LA Más community governance committee flagged another potential acquisition. On Chapman Street in Glassell Park, the 40 residents of a 12-unit apartment building had spent more than a year resisting voluntary buyout offers to vacate their units from potential buyers of their building.

Also known as “cash for keys,” such offers are one of the tactics used to flip a rent-stabilized building into market-rate units. The building’s corporate landlord had entered escrow with a buyer who wanted to secure cash-for-keys commitments from current residents before closing on the purchase.

After convincing the corporate landlord to exit escrow with the other buyer, Leung opened escrow for the Chapman Street building on Sept. 16, 2025.

For a $2.1 million acquisition and rehab, Self-Help Ventures Fund came in with $1.7 million as an 80% joint-owner with LA Más. For her end of the deal, Leung got another $300,000 program-related investment from the WHH Foundation. LA Más and Self-Help closed escrow for Chapman Street two months later.

It’s starting to feel like a routine, Leung says. Identify a potential acquisition. Get a joint-venture partner on board. Open escrow. Find the rest of the money. Close. Rinse and repeat.

“We’ve definitely had conversations with other CDFIs who are interested in doing real estate development,” Quinn says. “I would say the Self-Help model of doing things is not easily replicable because it’s come about in a unique way over many years.”

Managing with residents

Passed in 1977, the Community Reinvestment Act is a landmark federal anti-redlining law that requires banks to meet the credit needs of low- and moderate-income communities. One of the ways banks can meet those obligations is by investing in CDFIs like Self-Help Ventures Fund.

Enabled by its scale and decades of experience doing mission-driven real estate development, Self-Help Ventures Fund has raised patient, long-term capital from banks on terms that make these joint-venture deals pencil out. But it still has to get those dollars back to its investors, along with a modest return. That means Self-Help has to carefully scrutinize the ability of its local partners like LA Más to manage its joint-venture investments.

After acquiring a property, LA Más meets with tenants to start figuring out how they want their buildings to run. All of a building’s tenants might want to serve on a building’s resident committee, especially in smaller buildings — or maybe they would prefer a smaller group taking on that responsibility. They might want to meet every month, or maybe as little as once a year.

“Our work I would say is part of the social housing movement in LA,” Leung says. “We’re not a purist in terms of residents needing to become owners, which would make it so much harder to finance. We’re upfront about not spending our energy doing that because what our residents are asking for is stability and affordability.”

LA Más maintains flexibility in how each building’s tenants want to govern themselves, but it makes sure residents of each property have a say over major decisions like adding market-rate units or ADUs, which can help their properties achieve financial sustainability while preserving affordability for existing, often long-tenured residents. For Self-Help, resident involvement in governance this way supports a project’s financial stability.

“The governance aspect of it supports our investment, rather than being something that others might look at as a hindrance to operating the property,” Quinn says. “Now you have tenants who are actively engaged in the property, they feel ownership, they feel pride in their community, they feel connected to the others around them. And to LA Más, I think that mitigates some issues that you may run into with tenants down the road.”

Working closely with residents has already proven crucial for navigating complicated situations, like when a second-floor tenant at the Chapman Street property moved out just after LA Más closed escrow in November. That tenant happened to be paying the highest rent in the building at the time.

After renovating the vacated unit, LA Más offered it first to existing building residents. A first-floor tenant took up the offer, while also requesting a $300 rent reduction so she could reduce her workload cleaning houses as a senior. Meanwhile, a great-grandmother on the second floor of the walkup building was also in need of a wheelchair-accessible unit. After the first-floor tenant moved into the newly-renovated unit at the reduced rent, LA Más converted her former unit to a wheelchair-accessible apartment for the great-grandmother.

LA Más then renovated the great grandmother’s former second floor unit and the nonprofit listed it at market-rate for $1,800 a month. That’s nearly twice the average rent for the rest of the building, but it allowed the rent reduction that the original first-floor tenant had needed.

“The people who moved into the market rate unit know the story behind why they’re the people with the market-rate unit,” Leung says. “In most luxury apartment buildings, there’s often just a handful of units that are affordable and you’re living amongst a sea of market rate units, but now this is the reverse.”

Finding new money: Public dollars and community investments

Quinn anticipates Self-Help will stick around as a joint-venture partner for now. But not forever.

“I don’t think the vision is for Self-Help and LA Más to own every property together for all time,” Quinn says. “I think they’re going to be able to do this many times over after we’re no longer purchasing all these properties together. And I wouldn’t say we would only ever work with [LA Más]. There are other organizations we’d love to work with as well [in this way].”

Self-Help’s balance sheet and track record helped LA Más to access its first public dollars.

Not long after closing on the Chapman Street acquisition, the same corporate landlord approached LA Más with another opportunity. Around the block, on Drew Street, the corporation owned two more neighboring buildings with a total of 31 units. It was thinking of putting them on the market, but was impressed with LA Más’s ability to close successfully on the earlier deal at the market price, and wanted to gauge the nonprofit’s interest in taking these two properties off its hands.

LA Más was interested, but this time Leung negotiated for six months to close — anticipating that LA Más would be going after its first public dollars.

The LA County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency (LACAHSA) was created in 2022 with the passage of legislation championed by a regional coalition of housing, labor, and environmental justice advocates as well as homeless service providers. Funded by a countywide half-cent sales tax, LACAHSA has the power to provide long-term, flexible, relatively low-interest loans and grants for both new construction and preservation of existing affordable housing.

As Leung expected, LACAHSA’s first application window for developers opened shortly after the new year. The new agency received 127 applicants, requesting a total of $1.5 billion – far more than the $200 million available. In April, the agency announced its first 10 winners. LA Más was one of them — and the first to focus on preservation, not new construction.

“LACAHSA wouldn’t have underwritten LA Más alone,” Leung says. “We would not have qualified under their criteria. We needed a development partner saying ‘we believe in you and we’re going to go to bat for you,’ and that’s what Self-Help did.”

LACAHSA awarded a combined $7 million for the LA Más joint-venture with Self-Help to acquire the Drew Street buildings. Most of it, $5 million, came in the form of a below-market rate loan with a conventional monthly repayment schedule. Another million came in a subordinated loan, meaning it has more flexible and patient repayment terms. The last million came as a grant that required the joint-venture to raise another million in matching funds.

Self-Help chipped in just $500,000 this time for a 50% ownership share of Drew Street. For her end of the deal, Leung got creative.

LA Más raised its first ever direct loans from individual community investors. At a minimum investment of $25,000, community investors loaned LA Más a total of $200,000, all at one-percent interest over a five-year term. The community investments are unsecured loans directly to the nonprofit, so they’re not tied to the buildings as collateral. LA4LA also chipped in again, this time with a $250,000 program-related investment. Donations covered the rest.

Quinn believes it’s important that LA Más isn’t set on any one particular way of doing things. How much ownership LA Más shares with a joint venture partner, the sources of capital it taps into for any given acquisition, even the exact way in which LA Más involves residents in making decisions about their buildings — it’s all up for discussion with each opportunity to acquire a building. “They’re fixed on the outcome of preserving units for residents and helping people stay rooted in the community,” Quinn says.

LA Más is now turning to community investors to help it take more buildings off the speculative market and protect what’s left of working-class residents in northeast LA. After raising $13 million to acquire 54 units over the past two years, LA Más has set a goal of raising $25 million to acquire another 90 or more units over the next two years.

Leung doesn’t anticipate all $25 million will come from community investors. The more that can come in the form of donations or grants, the better. But Leung sees no reason to limit her fundraising to grants, program-related investments, or public dollars.

“So much wealth is in the hands of people who don’t have great intentions doing housing real estate,” Leung says. “If we have good intentions and we’re smart and creative, we can figure it out.”

I stepped into the maze of stalls at Marché Sandaga in Dakar, where vendors holding vibrant indigo, crimson, and gold wax prints called out and urged me to enter their stalls. Within minutes, I wasn’t just browsing, I was in conversation. Which print? How many meters? What style?

Thirty minutes later, with three fabrics folded under my arm, I was ushered around the corner to a tailor. Measurements were taken quickly. I showed him pictures of the styles I wanted, and three days later, two dresses and a jacket were delivered.

It was a simple exchange, but one I’ve experienced in different forms across cities in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia: urban systems where production, commerce, and human connection are still visible and intertwined.

I’ve visited more than 200 cities across six continents for my upcoming travel memoir, Where I’m From: A Poetic Journey Across Five Continents (affiliate link), as well as my travel series exploring Black cities across the diaspora. I’ve come to recognize that many of these places in the Global South are modeling local systems that make cities feel alive, accessible, and connected. Three lessons stand out for urbanists and planners in American cities.

Cities thrive when production is local and visible.

In Dakar, the process of buying clothes is not separated into distant supply chains. The market, the maker, and the buyer exist within the same ecosystem.

Fabric is sold by vendors who know their inventory by touch. Tailors operate in small shops, often just steps away, turning cloth into custom garments within days. Sandals, jewelry, and household goods follow a similar pattern, produced and circulated locally. This is not just about convenience, but access.

You don’t need large capital to participate. You can start with a skill and a small space. The barriers to entry are low, and the economy is distributed across hundreds of small entrepreneurs. I wanted some of Senegal’s iconic locally-made sandals. I found a vendor on TikTok; I messaged him; he offered to bring my sandals by the next day.

In many Western cities, that kind of visible local economy has largely disappeared. Manufacturing has been pushed out of urban cores, replaced by retail tied to global supply chains and fast fashion. Goods arrive finished, anonymous, disconnected from the people who made them.

What’s lost is not just local industry, but the everyday relationships that come with it. Without the conversations, the negotiation, the sense that the city itself is a place of making, shopping loses its humanity and becomes about consumption.

Infrastructure should support access and inclusion, not just movement.

The city of Medellín is often cited for its MetroCable system, which houses gondolas that rise above the valley, connecting hillside neighborhoods to the city. But what struck me were the outdoor escalators in Comuna 13, built into the steep terrain to make daily movement possible for residents who once had to climb long, difficult paths on foot. These projects aren’t just transportation investments, but investments in access.

For decades, many of these neighborhoods were physically and socially isolated, cut off from jobs, education, and services. By investing in infrastructure that specifically connects these communities, the city redefined mobility as something more than traffic flow. It became a tool for inclusion.

In contrast, infrastructure in many Western cities is still designed primarily around cars and separated by highways and four lane roads that are impossible to cross. The focus is how quickly cars move, traffic flows, and commute times into central business districts.

But Medellín’s gondolas and outdoor escalators offer a model in which infrastructure is designed around the people who have been historically left out, and in which connection is measured in opportunities gained, not just in minutes saved.

The best cities don’t clock out. They tap in.

In Bangkok, the city doesn’t shut down. Markets light up the night. Vendors set up grills along sidewalks, cooking skewers, noodles, and seafood. Flower markets operate through the early morning hours with orchids and marigolds stacked high. The city moves in layers, not tied to “office hours.” This constant rhythm creates opportunity, activity and connection. A vendor who works during the day can operate at night. A worker finishing a late shift can still find food, community, and activity at the end of a shift. Streets remain alive, serving a variety of people at different hours,

In the morning, I was at the market picking through green papaya to make papaya salad for lunch. By evening I was eating pork, chicken, and noodles from moo kata, a Thai barbecue-hotpot combo grill, with friends. Even later, I tried fried crickets from a mobile street vendor. Then, I ended the night with a foot massage outside in the dark, with a row of 10 people lined up alongside me.

In many U.S. cities, by contrast, downtowns often empty out after business hours. Office buildings close at 5 p.m. and the supporting businesses follow suit. Public spaces go dark, sometimes less safe, worlds away from the energy of the day.

Across cities as different as Dakar, Medellín, and Bangkok, the same pattern emerges. The most vibrant urban environments are the ones where people can participate easily in the economy, move freely through the city, and engage in public life throughout the day. Local entrepreneurship, inclusive infrastructure, and participatory public spaces that are alive beyond the workday create foundational urban systems that foster engagement, access, and equity.

U.S. cities often look to large-scale development to bolster their rankings. But some of the most effective models already exist in the everyday life of cities across the Global South, where the connections between economy, infrastructure, and public life remain visible.

This article was originally published through a partnership that includes WYPR, NPR, and KFF Health News.

In March in a McDonald’s parking lot off a busy street, mental health clinician Michala Williams met a 38-year-old woman in a car.

“So, you called the police for help?” Williams asked the woman, who was sobbing uncontrollably and said she sometimes thinks about harming herself.

She told Williams she has children ranging from age 2 to 22, she was dealing with health issues, and that her fiancé had recently been jailed. She felt so overwhelmed she couldn’t eat.

The woman, who asked not to be named so that she could freely discuss her mental health, explained she’d tried to get help the previous month by driving to the hospital but got pulled over on the way because her car registration had expired.

“I don’t care if I get pulled over,” she said. “But I was saying, ‘I don’t know what to do. I just want to go to the hospital.’”

The officer arrested her for acting erratically, so instead of going to the hospital she went to jail.

“I had to sit inside of a cold cell. I couldn’t use the bathroom or anything,” the woman said.

On the day she met Williams, she’d decided to call 911. The dispatcher recognized the woman didn’t need a police response but instead needed one of Baltimore’s mobile crisis teams, which send a clinician and a peer counselor to meet people in mental health distress.

By the end of an hourlong conversation, Williams set the woman up with referrals to a psychiatrist, a therapist, legal help, and a case manager to determine if her child with autism was eligible for government services.

“She’s been through a lot of trauma, and no one is going to deny that,” Williams said. “But I now have to take all of that and decide, ‘OK, here’s steps 1, 2, and 3,’ because we got to find a little bit of sliver of something to give her some hope that there’s help out here.”

For years, the mobile crisis teams, which are overseen by Behavioral Health System Baltimore, a nonprofit that acts as the city’s mental health department, have diverted calls from police to mental health professionals. However, the units have a limited scope, focused on people in mental health crises.

Now Baltimore is tapping into some of the roughly $400 million it has received from opioid-related legal settlements to build out a broader service to operate around the clock and respond to other kinds of crises when police aren’t needed.

Baltimore logged 1.68 million calls to 911 in 2024, but tens of thousands of them didn’t require traditional emergency services, like police, firefighters, or EMTs, according to Tahir Duckett, an expert in community safety at Georgetown Law.

Instead, the calls were about, for example, a homeless person who fell asleep in a store, a person who seemed confused in a public park, and someone who was yelling at passersby on the street.

Such calls “don’t require a badge, a gun, and handcuffs to resolve,” Duckett said.

Often those people end up in jail instead of getting the help they need, he said. A study recently found that when a non-law enforcement team responded to 911 calls in Durham, North Carolina, it resulted in fewer arrests than when police responded — especially for callers who were Black, men, or ages 25-39. Police responses can also lead to trauma for that person or a less satisfactory outcome than another community service response would produce, Duckett said. The idea behind the Baltimore mobile crisis teams — and the new service — is to find out what people in crisis may need and how to connect them to those resources instead of arresting them.

From 2021 to 2025, Baltimore’s homicide rate decreased by 60%, setting records for the drop in violence. But at the same time, drug overdoses made national records, as about 1,000 people here died of an overdose each year from 2020 to 2023.

In 2018, Baltimore opted out of a global settlement that other jurisdictions made with opioid makers and distributors and instead sued them independently. As the opioid-related lawsuits were settled, city officials decided that the settlement awards it receives must be spent on drug-related harms — or on services that help prevent addiction, such as housing support, healthcare, and education.

One new program seeks to directly address overdoses by placing boxes of the overdose reversal drug naloxone at every subway stop. Expanding 911 services is part of a larger strategy to beef up city services, with $15 million in settlement funds allocated so far, according to Sara Whaley, Baltimore’s director of overdose response. Whaley hopes the expansion will help the city think differently about how it responds to residents in crisis — regardless of why they’re calling 911.

She views the calls as an opportunity to help solve a problem rather than be punitive. “What are the wraparound services and support that can help prevent them from being involved in this, in that emergency system?” she said.

For example, the person falling asleep in a store may need connection to community housing. The goal is to reduce violence, get people proper resources, and avoid the cycle of incarcerating people dealing with poverty, addiction, and mental health.

Rebecca Neusteter, executive director of the Health Lab at the University of Chicago, studies the impacts of services like these. She said they offer peace of mind for callers that “they’re going to be met with the right response at the right time.”

“We also see responders themselves feeling like they have a better toolbox in their ability to pursue actual resolution to these calls,” she said.

To expand its system, Baltimore looked to cities — including Durham — that have adopted similar models to reroute callers who don’t need emergency responders.

Durham’s diversion program is called the Holistic Empathetic Assistance Response Team, or HEART. The program estimates it has diverted more than 12,000 calls in four years. It said police backup was needed for only 0.02% of those calls and that response times have improved for all types of 911 calls.

Durham has collected descriptions of the HEART calls, showing that nonpolice responders in Durham have helped with everything from finding housing for a woman fleeing domestic violence to setting up medical appointments for a homeless veteran.

In one case, a hotel manager called 911 asking for help finding a blind man housing for the night, since the hotel didn’t have accessible rooms available. The HEART responders booked him a room and the next day provided a ride to meet with an organization that could help secure housing.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

This story was produced as a collaboration between Bolts and Injustice Watch, and is republished with permission.

In March 2024, a traffic stop for an alleged seat belt violation quickly spiraled into a hail of exchanged gunfire that resulted in 26-year-old Dexter Reed being killed by plainclothes police officers.

In response to the ensuing outcry, Chicago police leadership promised to finally confront the enormous number of traffic stops that have characterized life in the city’s Black and Latino neighborhoods—and the complaints of abuse, racial profiling, and excessive force that have trailed them.

In the two years since Reed’s death, the number of traffic stops by Chicago police each month has dropped by tens of thousands, and the department has proposed a traffic stop policy that imposes some restrictions on searching drivers but still allows officers to make stops for minor issues such as registration violations in search of evidence of unrelated crimes.

Amid these changes, however, Chicago police have continued to conduct hundreds of thousands of off-the-books traffic stops, failing to disclose them to a state oversight agency in violation of Illinois law, Bolts and Injustice Watch have found.

With Superintendent Larry Snelling stepping down last month, after three years at the helm of the department that were widely seen as mostly controversy-free, a new analysis by the newsrooms finds the problem of unreported stops has gotten worse on his watch.

An investigation by Bolts and Injustice Watch published in the summer of 2024 found the Chicago Police Department had failed to report more than one-third of traffic stops—a staggering 200,000 encounters—over the prior year.

The department finally acknowledged the problem at a June 2025 city council meeting, where a deputy director promised his office was working on a “fix.”

But in the year since, the percentage of unreported stops has risen to more than half, according to the analysis.

The unreported stops have kept watchdog agencies and advocates from seeing the full picture of who officers are pulling over, why they are stopped, and what unfolds during the encounter.

“It is really hard for the public to hold our authorities accountable when we are operating with flawed data,” said W. Robert Schultz III, an organizer for the Active Transportation Alliance, which works toward making Chicago’s roads safer. “These practices undergird a culture in law enforcement that sees the world outside their cruiser to be the enemy. It really produces harm. It destroys trust.”

Community advocates have long warned that traffic stops breed resentment and distrust among Black and Latino communities. Snelling broke with previous leaders by admitting that officers used supposed traffic violations as a pretense to stop and search vehicles to investigate unrelated crime, while pledging to cut down on that practice.

During his tenure, total traffic stops dropped from over 60,000 per month to under 40,000.

But with Snelling’s retirement July 15, Chicagoans are left with an even murkier view of how CPD patrols the streets than when he took office. The transparency issue “sheds doubt on the the weight” of the improvements that Snelling made, says Amy Thompson, an attorney for Impact for Equity, a non-profit public interest law and policy center that has been following the issue of traffic stops in Chicago. Thompson also previously served on the state’s Racial Profiling Prevention and Data Oversight board.

“Superintendent Snelling has said that he does not agree with the practice of widespread dragnet traffic stops, and that seems to have been true given what we’ve seen in terms of decreases in numbers,” Thompson said. “But when it is clear that there are stops that are going unreported, it begs the question: What is happening in the shadows? How much credence can we give this when there are things going on out there that we are not being informed about?”

CPD did not respond to multiple requests for an interview with Snelling or interim superintendent Fred Waller and ignored written questions about the findings.

Chicago has long violated state traffic-stops law

State law requires officers to fill out a form, known as a blue card, each time they pull someone over. The lengthy forms include detailed information about where the stop occurred, who was stopped, the reason for the stop, and the outcome—whether the driver or vehicle were searched and if a gun or drugs were found.

Bolts and Injustice Watch found the hidden stops using dispatch records maintained by the city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications, which logs every time police radio to report that they are pulling a driver over.

Internal weekly activity reports circulated by Chicago police commanders obtained through public records requests show that department leadership uses the same dispatch logs, alongside the blue cards, to track how many traffic stops officers are making per month.

Those records show twice as many traffic stops as the city’s official count over the past year, but they typically reveal practically nothing about the circumstances of the encounter.

The data reported to state regulators, though incomplete, has consistently shown Chicago police are many times more likely to stop and search Black drivers, and that most stops are made for non-safety issues. Fewer than two percent of traffic stops reported by Chicago police to the state were for speeding, while expired registration accounts for over a third of documented stops.

“There are hit-and-runs and 911 calls that don’t get a quick response or go unsolved,” Schultz said. “It just seems like we’re spending a lot of law enforcement time on stuff that brings very little return.”

The Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA), the oversight agency that reviews misconduct complaints against the police, has routinely noted the problem of incomplete police data in its investigations. The agency warned police leadership in a letter after Reed’s killing that several investigations in the same West Side district had “been impeded by a consistent lack of documentation,” including traffic stop reports, body worn camera footage, and other written logs.

The investigation into the officers who pulled Reed over also surfaced a pattern of unreported stops. Though the officers were cleared of most allegations and COPA deemed the shooting justified, the agency questioned whether the initial stop was warranted and pointed to a string of other complaints involving the same officers conducting stops, pat-downs, and searches without any reasonable basis. Several of those prior stops were never documented, and officers were disciplined with suspensions of up to 25 days.

Efforts at traffic stop reform stalled under Snelling

Following Bolts and Injustice Watch’s initial investigation, 5th Ward Alderman Desmon Yancy pressed CPD Deputy Director Noe Flores on the vast discrepancy in traffic stop data during a June 2025 city council committee hearing. Flores said the department would create a consolidated electronic record-keeping system for all kinds of stops to “hopefully reduce some of those differences and fluctuations.” The department debuted a new electronic reporting system in February to replace the blue cards, but data shows the new system hasn’t led to a sustained reduction in undocumented stops.

After Reed’s killing, the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability (CCPSA), a civilian oversight body with the power to approve new CPD policies, made traffic stops a central reform priority, holding several months of listening sessions across the city to learn from residents’ experiences and gather input to shape new rules around traffic enforcement.

“It seems pretty clear, just from a numbers perspective, that traffic stops have in large respects replaced stop-and-frisk, which has a similar logic to sort of stopping people with the hopes of finding something else,” said Aaron Gottlieb, a University of Chicago professor who served on the CCPSA until June. “From my perspective, it’s pretty clear that if we want this practice to change, the rules need to change. What we have to reckon with is whether this a good practice … to use a pretext to search for something else that they don’t actually have evidence for.”

But no clear action has been taken to reform CPD traffic stop policy.

In June 2024, Snelling said he would bring traffic stops under the federal consent decree, the ongoing reform process focused on constitutional policing that, since 2019, has been overseen by a federal judge, the Illinois attorney general, and an independent monitoring team.

However, that process has dragged on for more than two years, longer than the negotiations that resulted in the initial consent decree settlement, and CPD has neither adopted a traffic stop policy nor come to an agreement on whether traffic stops will even come under federal oversight.

Snelling’s approach has drawn criticism from those who doubt the consent decree is the most effective path to reform. The Free2Move Coalition, a group of advocacy organizations dedicated to racial equity in traffic safety, worried it would weaken local control, since matters under federal supervision are exempt from the otherwise sweeping policymaking authority granted to the CCPSA. If traffic stops are ultimately folded into the consent decree, the CCPSA would help draft a policy and negotiate with CPD on its terms—but if the civilian board and the department can’t reach agreement, the final word would rest with the federal judge.

The Free2Move Coalition has said it prefers that the CCPSA maintain full control of traffic stop reforms, but the CCPSA has yet to act on its authority to set rules for the department on the issue.

In the spring of 2025, the police department and the civilian board each released draft policies on traffic stops. They were remarkably different in their goals for the reform. Snelling’s proposal conceded the department’s use of traffic enforcement as a pretext to investigate unrelated crime, but it still left officers discretion to “strike a balance” between the safety benefits of pretextual stops and the harm they cause communities. The CCPSA’s proposed rule, by contrast, embraced several of the restrictions backed by the Free2Move Coalition—among them a ban on stops for minor equipment and registration violations.

Negotiations around the policy are kept private under the rules of the consent decree, and the secrecy around those conversations and the prolonged timeline “reinforce our concerns of why this route has potential issues,” Thompson of Impact for Equity said.

But Gottlieb said there is no inherent reason why Chicago Police must pursue the policy through the consent decree, and the department can enact a meaningful reform without federal supervision.

Traffic stops are among the most volatile and dangerous interactions for officers as well as drivers, according to Gottlieb, and some cities that have restricted stops have reported fewer misconduct complaints and fewer incidents escalating. Police leaders in several cities voluntarily banned pretextual stops or limited stops for certain low-level violations, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Fayetteville, North Carolina. “It could be a win-win and make everyone safer,” Gottlieb said.

But Snelling’s departure could further delay consent decree talks and calls into question whether the department will see through the reforms he initiated. The CCPSA has until November to assemble a short list of candidates to replace the police superintendent, but it is unclear whether Mayor Brandon Johnson’s selection will stay on the job past next year’s mayoral election. Without a policy on traffic stops in place, “it’s up to the whim of whatever the superintendent would like to do, because all of these decreases have happened on an informal basis,” Thompson said.

“We don’t know whether the next superintendent is going to have the same position and understand that these kinds of traffic stops not only are ineffective but also are harmful to communities of color,” Thompson said.

The drop in traffic stops over the past few years is a sign that Snelling has followed through on his commitment to ease up on traffic enforcement. But the purpose of a policy on pretextual stops isn’t only about how many drivers get pulled over, Gottlieb said. Rather, it is about having standards to ensure that when officers initiate a potentially risky encounter, it is done for the right reasons and not for a hidden motive.

“I don’t think there’s a number of stops that we should be targeting. It’s about the reasons for the stops, and how they are using their power,” Gottlieb said. “In my view, traffic safety should not be used as a way to try to fight crime. It’s more of an ethical question about, do you believe that this is how people should be treated when there’s no evidence of any benefit?”

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.

More Cities Cancel Flock Contracts

The City of Tempe, Arizona, will turn off all of its Flock cameras despite an $80,000 contract, and nearby town Cave Creek also announced it will end its contract, The Hill reports. More than 140 cities have rejected automated license plate readers, according to the anti-surveillance site DeFlock. As of early August, at least 50 law enforcement officials across the U.S. had been accused of misusing Flock or other license plate readers, including by stalking partners, according to a Washington Post investigation.

After Weeks Without Power, Gary, Indiana Is in Recovery Mode

Power has been restored in Gary, Indiana, where residents spent about two weeks without it. On Aug. 11, a 99 mph wind gust tore through the predominantly Black city, “battering neighborhoods and knocking out power to nearly 38,300 utility customers,” Capital B Gary reported.

But the slow power restoration in Gary is raising questions for local leaders, the outlet reports. NIPSCO, the utility, is facing an investigation and a class-action lawsuit related to its vegetation management practices, which the filing alleges may have contributed to widespread outages.

Investigation Finds Millions of Dollars From Israeli Military to U.S. Universities

Drop Site News tracked more than $15 million in unreported funds from the Israeli Ministry of Defense and Israeli defense contractors funneled into U.S. universities for weapons research. The money came in the form of gifts, research grants, and tuition payments. The outlet reported that the dollars went to dozens of colleges and universities around the country, including Columbia, Cornell, Princeton and Harvard. The 2026 National Defense Authorization Act entrenches cooperation between the United States and Israel, including intelligence sharing, training and weapons manufacturing.

Feds Colorado River Plan Puts Nevada At Risk

The U.S. Interior Department introduced guidelines for Colorado River water use for the next decade, which immediately led the state of Nevada to sue, claiming that it would cause environmental and human harm, The Land Desk reports. The federal government intervened after the seven states that share the Colorado River’s water were unable to reach a deal to replace 2007 and 2019 agreements about the body of water. The river has been receding in recent years thanks to climate change-induced warmer temperatures. Land Desk reports that depending on how much the river’s level drops, Nevada could lose 71% of its allotment, and that Las Vegas, which gets 90% of its water from the Colorado River, would face huge impacts.

Chicago Study Criticizes “Tax-Increment Financing”

The University of Illinois Chicago’s Great Cities Institute released a report looking at over 40 years of the city’s tax-increment financing (TIF). The financing strategy relies on future revenue from property value increases as a way to pay for economic development projects. The report found that very little of the property tax increases in TIF districts were attributed to TIF-financed projects. According to the report, while the TIF district is active, “schools, parks, libraries, community colleges, counties, and other taxing bodies do not share in the growth of the tax base generated within those districts.” It also found most of these captured property tax increases were diverted to financing projects downtown and more affluent areas.

MORE NEWS

• On Louisiana’s disappearing coast, a natural gas terminal is poised to become the largest in the U.S. Grist

• Amnesty UK reportedly using copyright law to erase its own report on anti-trans groups and target activists. Erin In The Morning

• Supreme Court sides with Trump administration on mail voting restrictions. AP

• The teenage girls behind a $25 minimum wage fight in rural Alaska. The 19th

• Trump EPA aims to exempt data centers from disclosing air pollution, advocates warn. The Guardian

• Palestinians asked for help against settlers. Israelis detained Palestinian workers instead. The Intercept

• Cities need more land. Golfers aren’t giving up theirs without a fight. Bloomberg Citylab

OPPORTUNITIES & RESOURCES

• The Pratt Center for Community Development’s new Community Planning & Research Accelerator will support four community-based organizations working on housing, climate, economic justice, planning, and land use with project funding in technical assistance. Apply by Aug. 31.

• The Nationwide Foundation is funding nonprofit organizations working to address communities’ basic and emergency needs, crisis stabilization, financial security, housing stability, and family empowerment. Apply by Sept. 1 after completing a mandatory grant training.

• 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.

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

This story was originally published by Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.

Nearly two years ago, Hurricane Helene knocked out power in Burnsville, North Carolina. Fire Chief Niles Howell had to use the station’s generator to keep everything running. Through the storm, and the devastating flooding that followed, the fire department provided a landing pad for helicopters, a base for search-and-rescue operations, and a field hospital to triage and treat the wounded.

But even in less trying times, Howell can’t risk another blackout. The station is a community hub for the small town, and Howell regularly worries about running out of fuel for the generator.

He can stop worrying. The fire department will soon install 40 kilowatt-hours of solar panels and double that amount of battery storage as part of a statewide microgrid project targeted at communities recovering from Helene.

“I love redundancy, because inevitably what you plan for will fail at some point in time, so the more avenues you have to keep things going, the better off you are,” Howell says.

A growing number of organizations and even states are reaching the same conclusion. With the Appalachian mountains repeatedly battered by extreme rain and flash flooding in recent years, small-scale energy resilience projects are catching on. Many recent developments are popping up along the path Helene tore through western North Carolina.

The state Department of Environmental Quality invested $5 million in 26 microgrid projects last August, in partnership with a coalition of nonprofits dedicated to the expansion of sustainable energy. The goal is to build 24 stationary microgrids and two mobile ones, with five sites announced in June.

This mirrors similar projects in storm-battered communities across the United States and its territories. Private and nonprofit microgrid networks have helped keep Puerto Rican communities electrified through increasingly violent hurricanes and an aging grid prone to frequent blackouts. Hurricane Ida prompted churches and community centers in New Orleans to launch a string of privately funded “lighthouses.”

Solar microgrids, in short, are capable of powering one or more buildings, and some of them can also send electricity to the grid. They often feature large batteries designed to store energy to keep power going for days without sunshine. Stationary microgrids, which, as the name suggests, remain in one place, are found throughout the country, sometimes powering essential infrastructure like hospitals and wastewater treatment plants. One system operated by Duke Energy powers all of Hot Springs, North Carolina, and kept the lights on during Helene. Others are mobile and can be wheeled to wherever they’re needed. The technology is expensive, and all but one of the five stationary microgrids slated for western North Carolina will cost over $100,000, a burden a small community organization would struggle to bear on its own.

The small, portable, trailer-mounted systems, which the renewable energy advocates at the nonprofit Footprint Project call “beehives,” feature batteries and work in sunny and cloudy weather alike. “Cooler bees” include fridges and freezers for medications and food, “power bees” provide charging stations for phones and other devices, and “water bees” filter water. “Because they are mobile, these bees can be towed immediately to communities hardest hit in disasters,” says Footprint Project CEO Will Heegaard.

These “bees” provide up to 100 kilowatt-hours of energy, and could power a large building for up to 10 hours. The Footprint Project is prioritizing installing them outside food banks, fire stations, community centers, and libraries, all of which can store supplies and serve as a hub of community operations during a disaster.

Two mobile solar power trailers will be ready to deploy in 2027, and installations at five of the planned stationary sites will begin this summer. Sara Nichols of the economic development group Land of Sky Regional Council says she hopes this project can demonstrate that a combination of philanthropic and public funding can support small-scale renewables, even when federal changes have reduced the accessibility of solar for many.

“We are essentially setting the model and the precedent for what we hope will be a much bigger statewide and national project to duplicate,” Nichols says.

Reid Wilson, who leads the Department of Environmental Quality, is already talking with potential partners around the state about using small-scale solar to build out local climate resiliency throughout North Carolina, though nothing official has come of it yet. Federal funding could one day help, he hopes, but he isn’t going to hedge all his bets on it. Governor Josh Stein asked the General Assembly to include $1 million for microgrids in his $792 million request for Helene relief funding. It didn’t make the cut.

This story was copublished with Hyperallergic, a leading voice in contemporary perspectives on art and culture.

While biking the perimeter of Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York, on a sunny August afternoon, the pedal strokes are smooth. On the Citi Bike, I ease through all of Park Slope and most of Windsor Terrace, but as I bike through Prospect Lefferts Gardens, also known as Flatbush, tension builds. When I enter the park at Lincoln Avenue, where Flatbush begins, there is a massive shift in my ability to move. It is jarring, and I’m forced to dismount.

I’m riding around with a device attached to the e-bike that manipulates the brakes depending on the levels of rent affordability in the neighborhood you’re biking through. The device is an artwork called “Ground Truth,” Justin Blinder’s latest creation and part of an exhibition with the same name that closed on August 2.

This work was made possible with money from Idle Hands, an art incubation program founded in 2025 by Linden Renz and Gabrielle Sirkin. Blinder was the Idle Hands Incubation award’s inaugural winner, cashing out $10,000 and loads of professional support to make Ground Truth a reality.

The device uses data from the United States Census Bureau’s American Community Survey on rent-burdened neighborhoods. Once attached to any Lyft Citi Bike, it draws on GPS and the housing-affordability data to create physical resistance for riders in cost-burdened neighborhoods, easing up in more affordable ones. A resident is considered rent-burdened if they pay 30% or more of their monthly income towards rent.

Blinder got the idea for Ground Truth while working as a food delivery bike rider struggling to make ends meet. He was impacted by how starkly the financial realities of people living in New York City contrasted with one another despite living in such close proximity.

“There were so many extremities just within small regions. To me, that’s just such a fascinating aspect of the crisis,” Blinder tells me. “You can be in one block where people are significantly less rent burdened and go to another where it’s totally a different story.”

This isn’t Blinder’s first time translating data into a physical experience. During the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, Blinder created a computer malware program called Pandemic Pulse that would slow down his computer’s CPU in proportion to local infection rates and dim the computer screen based on the rate of local deaths.

“Every morning I remember going to the New York Times homepage and seeing the COVID infection rates, and it’s basically just like, charts and a map. But all of that [information], at the end of the day, is people… All of these people have family members. There’s a story behind them,” Blinder says. The malware would interrupt his work and make it harder to see his computer or use it at all on days when the numbers were particularly high.

“I think one huge component is that there’s so much variation in terms of affordability,” says Blinder. While biking through neighborhoods with New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) housing, for example, the device didn’t create the tension he expected, making for an easy ride.

“It just shows how NYCHA housing is sort of working. It’s not necessarily more affordable for people there, but at least that aspect is dampened by proper policies,” says Blinder.

Bed-Stuy is home to Brooklyn’s oldest Black community. Despite decades of gentrification, Black residents remain the neighborhood’s largest racial group, making up 38% of its population. In Bed-Stuy, bike lanes have been and continue to be a major point of controversy.

After reading minutes from Bed-Stuy Community Board 3 meetings, Blinder realized that it wasn’t a failure on the city’s part, but a result of community members who did not want bike lanes in their neighborhoods.

Bike lanes have historically been linked to increased gentrification, rising rents, and real estate speculation. From highways to bike lanes, transportation development and displacement have historically existed hand in hand. Studies show that “green gentrification,” when a neighborhood gains a new seemingly eco-friendly infrastructure such as bike lanes, does lead to the displacement of lower-income residents. In addition, some residents may not use this infrastructure for various reasons, whether due to preferences for other modes of transport or affordability.

“A lot of times the bike lanes are a conduit for people to move through the neighborhood and not invest in it. So maybe people are just going through their neighborhood benefiting from this infrastructure, but the community doesn’t actually benefit otherwise,” Blinder says.

Blinder wanted this device to force people to stop in neighborhoods that are often treated as transportation routes rather than destinations. He says his work is designed to be dialogic, and that he hopes Ground Truth will offer a critique of the affordability crisis within both housing and micro-mobility as e-bike rental costs continue to rise.

“It’s not really to get people to talk about an issue that they haven’t talked about before, but more a different perspective on an issue that’s very much present. In this case, it was affordability,” Blinder says. “What we think affordability looks like, and how that can often be much more complex, and many times we don’t have any clue what it actually looks like.”

This story was produced through our Equitable Cities Reporting Fellow for Anti-Displacement Strategies, which is made possible with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

You are standing at a crosswalk.

The light is red. A bus roars past you a little too closely. Your phone buzzes with a BOGO offer from Starbucks. A billboard changes from a perfume ad to a phone number of a personal injury law firm. Someone is talking about their cheating ex-boyfriend beside you. The walk signal starts flashing. You step forward, but a pickup truck next to you is already inching into a right turn.

Before you cross a single street, your brain has already sorted through a dozen competing demands. Then you arrive at work, class, or the library and wonder why on earth you cannot concentrate. What’s wrong with you?

We tend to treat that feeling as a personal fault. Put down the phone. Stop scrolling. Have better discipline. But city design is asking people to maintain attention in environments deliberately designed to fracture it. While urban planners carefully measure traffic congestion, pedestrian flow, and air pollution, they rarely ask: What is all of this doing to the brain?

Neuroscience gives us a reason to take this issue seriously. Attention depends on limited-capacity cognitive systems that must continuously select which information receives priority while suppressing competing stimuli. Neuroscientist Grace W. Lindsay, in a 2020 paper on attention, describes attention as “the flexible control of limited computational resources.” The brain must therefore continually determine where to direct and route information rather than processing everything in our environment with equal priority. Visual features, including color contrast, intensity, and motion, can automatically attract attention without conscious effort, Lindsay explains.

Yet our public infrastructure is designed to keep people engaged, no matter the cost.

Solving the damage city infrastructure has on the brain does not imply a city with no stimulation at all. After all, the stimulation a city provides is the very reason why so many people want to visit or live in urban environments. And even as it exposes people to specific environmental risk factors, urban life provides a multitude of health benefits, including social, educational, career, and leisure opportunities.

But urban planners and policymakers can enhance public health and wellbeing by mitigating the cognitive demands placed on residents. That could mean limiting digital advertising in particularly crowded public spaces, expanding quiet areas, planting more trees, and creating pedestrian spaces that allow for sensory relief. It could even take a more systematic approach, such as requiring attention-impact assessments for major public projects.

São Paulo’s Clean City Law offers one example of what this could look like. In 2007, the city prohibited outdoor advertising, requiring more than 15,000 billboards to be removed and subjecting hundreds of thousands of business signs to restrictions. As the 99% Invisible podcast reported back in 2016, the law also required bus, taxi and poster advertisements to go, while the city later began reintroducing some advertising in more controlled forms. It’s proof that cities can decide what commercial messages occupy shared public space, rather than treating every available surface as advertising real estate.

Beyond reducing the visual clutter of billboards and road signs that distract pedestrians and drivers alike, cities can also embrace outdoor lighting codes to help keep our skies free of unnecessary light pollution. Pittsburgh’s first-in-the-nation Dark Sky Ordinance, crafted in partnership with dark sky experts, uses shielding, dimmers, and warmer lighting in all of city parks, facilities, and streetlights. Not only does it mitigate light distraction and glare, it also reduces energy waste. Planners can consider how to design nighttime spaces to help people see without asking them to look at unnecessary light.

Cities can also reduce cognitive demands by changing the decisions people are required to make in the first place. Consider right turns at red lights. In Cambridge, as part of its Vision Zero plan for road safety, city officials banned right turns on red due to drivers looking for gaps in traffic failing to double-check for pedestrians and cyclists. Banning rights on red in dense urban areas could remove one more stress-inducing variable from an already complicated environment.

Indeed, cities can also protect our attention by simplifying the environments we are required to navigate. Slow streets and pedestrianized streets help eliminate obstacles and interference so pedestrians can move safely without constantly navigating hazards. Barcelona’s famous Superblocks are a more dramatic example of how cities can transform car-dominated spaces into people-centred ones, reclaiming streets for uses beyond moving cars.

Researchers caution that Barcelona’s transformation remains an “unfinished policy paradigm shift” due to political challenges, but protecting human attention does not require cities to become quiet or empty. It requires considering what our infrastructure is asking our brains to do and whether there are better ways to design it.

Even with such interventions, attention will always remain a limited resource that our environments and public space will ask us to spend. If cities constantly demand our attention, they should also provide places where we can recover it. In a 2008 study, psychologists compared participants who walked through an arboretum with those who walked through an urban environment. Afterward, the nature group performed better on a test of directed attention, suggesting that exposure to natural environments may help restore attentional functioning.

Attention deserves to be treated like any other public resource, something cities have a responsibility to protect rather than exhaust. We already ask whether a street is safe, accessible, and walkable. We should also ask whether the people moving through it have any mental space left when they arrive.

I never imagined, back when I started taking driving lessons in the fall of 2023, that I would one day feel grateful for every practice session I had in Gaza City.

During every lesson, we wound through many streets, sometimes sharing the car with more than one trainee, spending over an hour moving between roads and neighborhoods. I looked out the windshield then without thinking much of it — the buildings, the sidewalks, the shops, the trees, the traffic. The details felt so ordinary.

Weeks later, after Israel’s bombing campaign had begun and my lessons at Al Shati Driving School had come to an abrupt halt, I would cling to those memories. When I passed through those same neighborhoods again, I would close my eyes, unwilling to overwrite my recollections. Sometimes, I forced myself to keep them open so I could document the destruction with my camera, so I could bear witness to these scenes of ruin.

During the first week of the war, the Palestine Tower was bombed. The tower housed the radio station where I had worked for eight years, alongside other media institutions. I lost my job due to the war, but it felt even worse that I would never see the tower again. I couldn’t walk down Al-Shuhada Street, west of Gaza City, and see the rubble left where the tower had stood so tall and strong every morning. I was afraid to face its new image, broken and demolished.

Every time I compare old photos of Gaza to what my city looks like today, I’m overcome by tears. The photos no longer bring feelings of nostalgia. They bring fresh pain, reminding us of the scale of what we’ve lost.

Returning to the wheel

A few months ago, I learned that driving schools had resumed operating after more than two years of forced closure. I know I won’t be able to buy a car anytime soon; cars that used to cost around $10,000 now sell for more than $40,000, on top of soaring prices for the limited supply of fuel. Still, I decide to go back and finish my lessons at Al Shati.

When I sit behind the wheel again, the neighborhoods I navigate are unrecognizable from what I’d driven through two years prior. The streets I memorized are gone. The landmarks are rubble. The roads are littered with rubble and abandoned vehicles. Buildings that once buzzed with life have turned into tents sheltering the displaced.

The UN’s satellite centre estimated back in 2024 that 65% of Gaza’s roads had been damaged. A more recent assessment by the World Bank, the European Union, and the United Nations puts the number even higher, closer to 87%, and found that in North Gaza and Rafah, nearly nine out of ten roads are now impassable. Salah al-Din Road, the highway that once ran the length of the strip, is gone in all but a few stretches. Gaza City Municipality says more than 500 miles of paved streets have been ground down to dirt.

Along the roads now, it isn’t normal traffic that catches drivers’ eyes, but lines of people waiting — to fill water containers, for a food parcel, in front of a soup kitchen. The city no longer moves to the rhythm of work or school, but in search of the most basic means of survival. I’m no longer stopping for children in school uniforms, crossing the streets on their way to class. Now, they carry burdens bigger than their own bodies. Water containers, places in aid lines, lives inside tents that resemble nothing of what childhood should look like.

Meanwhile, the driving school manual shows tree-lined roads and people dressed neatly for work early in the morning.

Even the driving lesson itself feels different. My instructor, Karam, is constantly anxious that the car’s tires will be damaged. It’s not paranoia. A single tire now costs around $1,500, given how hard it is to bring spare parts into Gaza, so any damage could mean the car stops running entirely.

The driving school’s owners had bought this car only two months before the war, planning to expand the school. The war stopped all of it. Only a handful of students had trained on it before it was damaged during the bombing. The car was left with its windows shattered and various mechanical faults, its owners forced to replace the broken glass with plastic sheeting just to get it back on the road.

I look at the car now and feel it resembles Gaza itself: new, full of promise, battered by the war, but still moving with whatever means are available. Its owners still try to keep it on the road, just as the people of my city try to keep living.

Al Shati Driving School’s director, Ihab Shaheen, tells me that Gaza’s driving schools face unprecedented challenges: an ongoing shortage of diesel and gasoline, sharp increases in the price of motor oil and spare parts, and widespread road destruction.

Barely a day goes by without one of their fleet’s cars breaking down or a tire getting damaged. Sometimes they’re forced to use burnt or recycled oil just to keep the cars running, though they know it damages the engines, Shaheen says. But even when a car stops running entirely, they don’t let it go to waste.

Shaheen and his team dismantle the vehicle and use whatever parts are still usable to repair the cars that are still on the road. Scavenging from a dead car is often the only way to keep a living one moving: A spare part that used to sell for around $300 before the war now costs around $1,300.

Before the war, cars outnumbered people. Today they’ve become rare. The school’s fleet has diminished, too: It owned 10 training cars before the war, but only four remain functional. Three were taken out of service after direct bombing damage, while the rest need constant maintenance.

Instructors have learned the safest routes by trial and error, now choosing paths with less damage to avoid potholes and rubble scattered across the streets, protecting the few working cars they have left.

Makeshift mobility

Before the war, I imagined getting my license would mark the start of a new chapter: driving my own car to work, moving freely through Gaza’s streets. The war stole those dreams, as it stole so many things we had taken for granted.

But Gaza has not stopped moving. The instinct to rebuild, to improvise, to persevere runs through the rest of the city, just as it does at my driving school.

UN teams have established two rubble recycling centers in Gaza to turn war debris into construction materials, while a feasibility study is underway to examine whether 57 million tons of rubble could be recycled to reclaim coastal land.

The organization Architects for Gaza is working with Gaza’s municipality on community-led reconstruction proposals for specific destroyed sites, including the Yarmouk Cultural Complex.

Meanwhile, on the ground, residents are clearing their own streets by hand, collecting and repurposing debris, and improvising informal transport networks in the absence of functioning infrastructure.

Horse-and-cart setups have spread widely. Residents have built their own tuk-tuks and bicycles, which have replaced ambulances, delivery services, and taxis. People are recycling spare parts salvaged from destroyed vehicles. Some drivers have resorted to running vehicles on cooking oil instead of diesel; others extract makeshift fuel by burning plastic materials.

They’re workarounds nobody would choose, but they keep people moving when nothing else will. They bring me hope – and then, when I think of the scale of the destruction, despair.

Sitting behind the wheel again in a city rebuilding its own roads by hand, I navigate places I no longer recognize. In Gaza now, nobody is checking to see if I have a driver’s license. The roads barely exist. The traffic signals and street signs are missing. I keep driving anyway.

This story was published in collaboration with Egab.

This story was originally published by Canary Media.

Any time, day or night, parents experiencing homelessness, domestic violence, or other emergencies can drop their young kids off at the Crisis Nursery in Urbana, Illinois, and know they’ll be safe and cared for.

Funding is a constant challenge for the 45-year-old nonprofit organization. But it was able to create a bit of financial breathing room by putting solar panels on its roof back in 2020, leading to significant savings on its energy bills.

Crisis Nursery was one of the first beneficiaries of Illinois Solar for All, a state program to make the clean energy source accessible to households, nonprofits, and public facilities in lower-income communities and areas facing environmental injustice. Participants receive at least half the value of the energy generated by their solar array, with no up-front costs for buildings with four or fewer units, as well as no or low up-front costs for larger projects.

The program, created by a state law that took effect in 2017, was slow to get off the ground. The available funds went largely unspent for years, despite the savings on offer.

But in recent years, the program has become a success — and a lesson in the importance of long-term commitment and extensive grassroots engagement, as administrators and advocates see it.

During the initiative’s last cycle, from June 2024 to May 2025, more projects were approved than in its first five years combined, according to the Illinois Power Agency, the state entity that oversees the program. Last year, the Illinois Commerce Commission ordered a funding boost of $20 million, and every last dollar went out the door ​“almost immediately,” the Illinois Power Agency said in its latest annual report.

New application windows for Illinois Solar for All are open through September, for different types of projects, and program administrators expect heavy interest, including from those wait-listed in the last round.

State-level solar programs with an equity focus are especially important now, advocates say, given the Trump administration’s cancellation of the federal Solar for All initiative created by the Inflation Reduction Act. President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans also slashed tax credits for residential and large-scale solar projects with last year’s megabill.

Just as Illinois Solar for All is coming into its own, the loss of federal incentives raises new challenges. Without those dollars, the state funding simply won’t go as far as it once did.

“It’s a big swing,” said Wade Halva, who has long advocated for clean energy in southern Illinois, as a pastor and associate director of programs for Faith in Place, an environmental justice organization. ​“Does it mean the state program has to change? Can we even do residential at a guaranteed savings rate without federal incentives?”

But Jennifer Schmidt, Illinois Solar for All senior program manager for the Illinois Power Agency, sees a silver lining. ​“A sense of urgency driven by the sunsetting of federal tax credits,” she said, has helped fuel the recent success of Illinois Solar for All — and she expects the momentum to continue.

Many Illinois residents — particularly those in rural areas where solar adoption was low — had never considered putting panels on their roofs. Others may have liked the idea but felt they didn’t have the bandwidth to manage a complex home upgrade like solar, even if it was low- or no-cost.

And plenty of residents were just plain skeptical of a government program that sounded too good to be true.

“The first hurdle was getting the idea that the program existed out there — that it was real and it wasn’t a scam,” Halva said. ​“We were targeting people on the residential side who had written off getting solar because there was no way it was affordable.”

Once households decided to move forward, some faced new challenges. One common example: Many applicants had old roofs that needed to be updated before panels could be attached. Last fiscal year alone, Illinois Solar for All funded 88 roof replacements.

Things were a bit different for nonprofits and public facilities. Even if those organizations wanted to take advantage of Solar for All in the early years, the economics weren’t always on their side, because, as tax-exempt organizations, they could not access the federal tax credits for solar. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act changed that — but it didn’t change the fact that these organizations were not very familiar with solar energy.

“So they hadn’t looked into it,” Halva said. ​“We ended up doing a lot of baseline solar education because we were reaching out to parties who had no market for it before.”

Crisis Nursery’s participation in the program is an example of this kind of outreach. Illinois Solar for All administrators contacted the nursery staff, encouraging them to participate and arranging a lease agreement with a solar developer in which the nonprofit paid nothing up front.

“We have a 10,000-square-foot building, so every little bit helps, especially during seasons when we are running our utilities” around the clock, said the nursery’s executive director Stephanie Record. ​“A lot of businesses may be able to alter their temperatures when people aren’t there to conserve energy. We have to be at that constant level of heating and cooling 24/7.”

This story was produced as part of Next City’s joint Equitable Cities Reporting Fellowship with Resolve Philly’s Germantown Info Hub.

Twice a month on Saturday mornings, sisters Sonia and Sonam Parikh drive out 45 minutes to pick up about 2,500 pounds of food from Trader Joe’s. As the founders of The People’s Fridge (TPF), they’ve built a partnership with the company, one of its many partners, that contributes to a monthly intake of 8,000 pounds of food that is then distributed to West Philadelphia residents in need.

Along with a group of volunteers, the Parikh sisters sort and store food in the 1,000-square-foot warehouse they’ve been operating out of since January. Then they transport it to Cedar Park, where a line of families are usually waiting before the free food distribution begins.

“When we planted the seed, we did not know how big it was going to grow,” says Sonia Parikh, who co-founded the initiative in 2020 as a 24/7 community fridge where neighbors could drop off and pick up donated food. “And it was growing so rapidly because the need for food was growing so rapidly.”

The community fridge movement was born in Europe around 2012, and gained traction in Philadelphia and other U.S. cities during the pandemic. From Germantown to South Philly, at least 40 community fridges are currently on the frontlines of addressing food insecurity, with volunteers experimenting with different strategies to reach residents and scale up their operations to meet rising hunger levels.

Philly has historically had higher levels of food insecurity as compared to the rest of the country, but a 2025 report from the city’s Office of Homeless Services shows that the problem has seen a recent uptick, reaching nearly 20%, after a decade of decline.

The Share Food Program, the region’s leading hunger relief organization, said in May that the state’s 18 food banks have seen a 40% spike in need over the last two years. The program helps distribute food to more than 300 fridges and pantries around Philadelphia and runs an online database to help residents locate their nearest food pantry or community fridge.

A May report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found a sharp increase in food insecurity levels of hunger across the nation since 2020, with especially non-white households, low-income households, and households with young children taking the biggest hit.

Community fridge and food pantry organizers point to rising food costs, limited food options for families in retailers — and major federal shifts to benefit programs. Pennsylvania Department of Human Services data show that more than 32,000 fewer Philadelphians were receiving SNAP benefits in May 2026 than in December 2025, amid stricter eligibility requirements imposed by the Trump administration.

As traditional food aid systems face rising demand, benefit cuts, and less grant support, Philadelphia’s community fridges have grown from pandemic mutual aid projects into a more permanent — and increasingly large — part of the city’s hunger relief network.

Here’s a look at some of these community fridge and mutual aid efforts across the city.

The People’s Fridge: Scaling through warehouse distribution

In September 2020, Sonia and Sonam Parikh launched The People’s Fridge (TPF) as a way to carry on the legacy of their late father, who passed away from COVID-19. He had been a key figure in their local community and often provided meals for those in need.

Their neighborhood had recently lost six supermarkets within a two-mile, Sonam recalls. “People actually had nowhere to get food and it was so obscene,” she says.

“Whether it was because people didn’t have jobs anymore because of COVID, or weren’t able to go to a supermarket, or lacked the ability to get transportation to get to further supermarkets, we realized that people in our immediate neighborhood were not sure on where to get groceries.”

They began by cooking 40 pans of lasagna every week for neighbors in need of support. By August 2020, they had installed a 24/7, public fridge near Malcolm X Park.

Like most community fridges throughout the city, TPF’s model began with neighbors and volunteers’ donations and effort. Volunteers bought groceries, stocked the fridge, and were reimbursed by TPF thanks to an online fundraiser.

“We kind of started out as a little duo, and then we grew into five, then 10, then 12, and today we have 40 active volunteers,” Sonia says. “We saw a lot of success when the community started to help us build this vision as well.”

The demand for the fridge was obvious, and immediate: Volunteers would drop off food four or five times a day, and the fridge would regularly be emptied out within 20 minutes. By 2025, organizers realized their three-door commercial refrigerator was insufficient to meet the level of need.

This past January, TPF transitioned to a warehouse space, drastically expanding the capacity of food that organizers can store and share with residents. TPF, which has a freezer, multi-door fridge, and numerous shelves in its warehouse, is now equipped to provide neighbors in need with all types of groceries, including fresh produce, canned goods, snacks, dairy products, deli meat, pantry items, frozen meat and goods, and more.

Their food distributions at Cedar Park are held on the second and fourth Saturdays of every month. Any food left over from the distribution is either stored in the warehouse or dropped off to other community fridges across the city.

Since its founding, The People’s Fridge has distributed more than 2 million pounds of food. But the need has only “tripled or quadrupled” since they began their efforts, Sonam says, because the long-term economic fallout of COVID-19 has gone unaddressed.

“Grocery stores in the area didn’t open back up. Jobs never became the same. Funding dried up under the current administration — 60% of the grants that we would have applied for don’t exist anymore,” she says. “I would consider things today so much more crisis-driven in terms of food supply, food cost, and scarcity than anytime in 2020, and that’s what’s so devastating.”

Germantown Community Fridge: meals, markets, and 24/7 mutual aid

The Germantown Community Fridge was also founded in September 2020, during the initial waves of the pandemic. It’s continued helping the local community battle food insecurity since. Neighbors can drop off and pick up fresh produce, dairy products, and canned foods, as well as prepared meals with a date and allergy label.

As a 24/7 mutual aid resource, it’s been fueled by volunteer support and community donations, as well as partnerships with local businesses. In the last seven months, fridge volunteers have cooked around 14,000 meals to distribute to the community, providing an average of about 2,000 meals a month.

“The community fridge can’t happen without the community,” says organizer Shannon Sims. “I’m forever grateful for all the people that show up, whether they’re taking food for the fridge or they’re leaving food for folks at the fridges. I know we have a strong pool of volunteers that help in many ways, but there’s also so many hands that touch the fridge that we’re not aware of.”

Volunteers regularly pick up donations from a network of businesses that have partnered with the initiative, including the Northwest Mutual Aid Collective, Sharing Excess in West Philly, Bredenbecks in Chestnut Hill, Weavers Way Co-op in Germantown, Merzbacher’s Bakery in Germantown, Philly Food Works in Hunting Park, and Germantown Kitchen Garden. Volunteers can also shop for groceries to fill the fridges and then receive reimbursements from Germantown Community Fridge.

The fridge’s organizers have also hosted public events to extend their outreach and impact. It began with an annual birthday party for the fridge every September; now, the organization hosts Neighbor Table events every month in the basement of the First United Methodist Church of Germantown.

“We say that it’s a community meal,” Sims says. “If you are in need, you can show up. If you just happen to be walking by the fridge, you can show up. We have people that are in the church for other events, and then they come down to grab a bite to eat.”

Organizers try to make the event feel “dignifying” for participants.

“We use all real plates, all real silverware, and everything, just so it feels like a family meal more than anything else,” Sims says. “They can sit down and have a meal, and then take a [to-go] package and everything, whatever fits with their timeline of the day.”

Twice a week, congregation members and other volunteers cook meals for the fridge. Students from Green Street Friends School sometimes make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the fridge, helping teach youth about food access and mutual aid.

They have also recently begun quarterly Kindness Market, which operate like a free pop up grocery store where there’s also pet foods, toiletries and other essentials just to give some boost and support to neighbors.

Sims says the need seems higher now than ever before, especially with cuts to SNAP, WIC, and Social Security benefits – but the level of support is also higher.

“Even day to day with the fridge, it can empty out within a half hour, and it can also get filled up within that half hour,” she says. “We have a couple different seniors that have spoken to us too over the years, especially as of lately, saying their Social Security just isn’t cutting it enough.”

South Philadelphia Community Fridge: Building a neighborhood network

With its first fridge launched in August 2020, the South Philadelphia Community Fridge (SPCF) is another mutual aid nonprofit that was founded during the pandemic

“There was a real increased need for food aid and mutual aid resources in South Philly. A lot of people were having trouble making ends meet,” says SPCF volunteer and organizer Benji Aaron. “We had one location at the start, and we were like, pretty much, figure it out as we go, and we’ve really grown over the last six years.”

Today, the SPCF, which is fiscally sponsored by the Hack Foundation, has eight locations across South Philly that operate as either fridges, pantries, or both, with a presence that spans from the Passyunk Square area all the way to Grays Ferry.

“I would like the community fridges to be as prevalent as the corner store,” Aaron says. “So that people can go pop over and get what they need in their neighborhood, and not have to worry about transportation or not being able to afford it.”

A robust network of partner organizations has also developed over the past six years, with food organizations including the Share Food Program, Small Things Philly, Double Trellis Food Initiative, Mighty Bread Company, and The People’s Kitchen Philly.

In spring of this year, JD Sports provided them with the funding to install their eighth fridge location at Audenried Charter School, purchasing the fridge, pantry, and materials to make a protective shelter. Students at the school helped build the fridge and shelter out of their old gym bleachers.

Even with support from these partners and foundational grants, community contribution remains crucial. On their Slack chat of volunteers, Aaron said there are 600 members. Of those, 50 to 75 people actively volunteer on a weekly or even daily basis.

“People step up and pitch in, and it’s really a great testament to the power of community and teamwork that we’ve been going on this long,” Aaron says. “We all are volunteers, and we all have busy lives with families, friends, commitments, and jobs, and it’s really important that none of us feel like all the expectations or burdens are on one person at any one time. We can share resources and share responsibilities.”

SPCF also reimburses volunteers for up to $50 a week to buy groceries or ingredients for filling the community fridge with food and pre-made meals.

Aaron says the need for the fridges remains high.

“Not a week goes by that I don’t get an email from somebody saying, ‘Hey, how can I access the fridge? How does this work? I’ve got a terrible story about losing my job or losing my SNAP, how can I get help?” Aaron says. “There’s definitely been an uptick in that.”

The Friends’ Fridge: School-based food access

At St. James School in North Philly’s Allegheny West neighborhood, its Welcome Table team serves as a resource hub for the school’s community and its neighbors.

Another mutual aid effort formed in 2020, the Welcome Table has aimed to bring residents closer to fresh food and other essentials in an area that some describe as a food desert.

“There’s all these corner stores everywhere. We didn’t have a Shop-Rite until like 2017, which is the closest grocery store,” says Tiana Jones, assistant director of the Welcome Table. “The corner stores are still what’s present, and a lot of them just have junk in them. There’s no healthy foods.”

Many Allegheny West residents have shared personal stories of food insecurity with her.

“When people are telling you stories about different things that they’re going through, you begin to see it more, know that it’s happening,” she says. “Then it’s like, ‘Oh, we can disrupt change and do something about this.’”

In 2023, St. James, Penn Charter, and Mt. Airy Presbyterian Church partnered up to work on food access. The following year, the Welcome Table community fridge was established at the school.

Like most fridges and pantries, neighbors can find produce, breads, pastries, non-perishables, dairy, meat, and more.

“While we supply food, it’s community driven,” Jones explains. “So our neighbors and friends will donate. We like to say, ‘share what you have, take what you need.’”

Growing from a small network of supporters, they now have a team of 25 to 30 volunteers who help out with the fridge and at the Welcome Table’s weekly no-cost farmers market, hosted every Saturday morning. The Welcome Table also has a five-person staff that facilitates programming.

Jones says community members have expressed that the fridge and free farmers market have helped them financially.

“Maybe they didn’t have to focus on buying groceries this week because they were able to come to the market,” Jones says. “So then they could go and use that money that they would use for the market, [to] go and pay that bill that they’re behind on, or pay towards something else that is helping them in their life.”

The farmers markets now draw an average of 110 visitors, a number that’s gone up since the effort began. “Throughout the years, we’ve definitely seen expansion,” Jones notes. “With numbers getting higher in terms of attendance, and also with inflation and food costs rising, there’s been more money put out on our end.”

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.

Local Governments Look To Fines and Fees as Budgets Tighten

A Pew Charitable Trust report looks at a nationwide push for local governments to be less reliant on fines and fees to replenish city and state budgets, and suggests that budget shortfalls risk undoing progress.

Roughly $13.9 billion in fines and fees were charged to Americans in 2022, according to the report. It looks at how recent federal policy changes, including the 2025 federal tax law, Medicaid cuts, and SNAP cuts that shifted financial burdens to local governments could risk exacerbating the practice after years of reform.

Many state and local governments leaned heavily on fines and fees to balance their budgets after the 2008 financial crisis, a problem compounded by property tax reductions in the decades prior. The practice was highlighted by a 2014 Department of Justice report initiated after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

Texas Governor Shuts Down DFW Airport Prayer Room

The Texas Tribune reports that the Dallas Fort Worth International Airport had planned to install an ablution station, commonly used by Muslims to cleanse themselves before prayers, but has now paused the plan after a letter from Gov. Greg Abbot claimed that the room was illegal because it singles out a specific faith.

The incident is part of a growing anti-Muslim backlash in Texas. Abbot threatened to rescind funding over the washing facilities, saying that the state and federal constitutions “prohibit government from facilitating this sort of discrimination.” An interfaith chapel at the airport has had an ablution station since 2019, KERA reports. A spokesperson for the airport said that the plans for the ablution station, which would be privately-funded, were internal and preliminary.

Idaho County Law Enforcement Compiles ‘Foreign Born List’ for ICE

Officers in Canyon County, Idaho’s probation office have provided ICE’s Boise office with a list of foreign-born people on probation, seemingly without validating whether those people are in the country illegally, InvestigateWest reports.

Reporters uncovered more than 140 emails between the offices in a recent three-month period, including emails showing that probation officers were regularly notifying ICE agents about when certain probationers would be at their office; confirming whether ICE was coming to apprehend a probationer before an appointment; and providing ICE with a probationer’s address and license plate information.

In response, county officials told InvestigateWest that the ICE has requested a list of people that could be in the country without authorization “typically on an annual basis and across administrations,” likely “as far as the Obama administration.”

National Debt Soars to $40 Trillion

The U.S. national debt surpassed $40 trillion for the first time this week, the Associated Press reports. The debt has grown steadily over the last four presidential administrations but has nearly doubled since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in December 2019.

The government has a federal borrowing limit of 41.1 trillion that it may reach in 2027, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center. A higher national debt can impact borrowing costs for everyday Americans as the government is under tighter constraints. U.S. treasury bond yields spiked to their highest level since 2007 this week, a sign that lenders are losing faith in the government’s ability to pay back its debt.

Lawmakers and Activists Target Anti-BDS Laws in Five States

Illinois legislators are trying to repeal a 2015 anti-BDS law, one of five states where activists are moving to repeal such laws, Jewish Currents reports. The Illinois law requires the state’s pension funds to divest from companies that boycott Israel.

Another bill introduced in Wisconsin would repeal that state’s law, which bans the state government from contracting with companies that boycott Israel. But 38 states currently have laws targeting or criminalizing the movement to boycott, divest, and sanction Israel, according to Jewish Currents — meaning a campaign to legalize boycotts of Israel across the U.S. will be a long road.

MORE NEWS

• Abandoned homes in Baltimore are now being fought over in bidding wars. WSJ

• Floods can leave communities facing higher overdose deaths for years. Grist

• The five big legal questions holding up billions in climate funding. Heatmap News

• Honolulu considers fining, jailing homeless over shopping carts. Honolulu Civil Beat

• A new era of electricity inflation has transformed the Northeast’s carbon market. Heatmap News

• Trump 2.0 has deleted or altered nearly 400 federal datasets, endangering public health, education, and more. The Guardian

• U.S. apartment buildings have tipped toward heat pumps. Canary Media

• ‘Future-proof’ or ‘a strategic mistake’? Inside the MBTA’s effort to electrify its commuter rail system. Commonwealth Beacon

• An instructive win for transit in Spokane. Human Transit

• This California town booted out its leaders. Now they’re refusing to leave. The Guardian

OPPORTUNITIES & RESOURCES

• The T.D. Jakes Foundation is accepting applications for its Social Impact Grant Challenge from nonprofits working on financial inclusion, educational access and workforce readiness, or community transformation and wellbeing. Apply by Aug. 23.

• The Pratt Center for Community Development’s new Community Planning & Research Accelerator will support four community-based organizations working on housing, climate, economic justice, planning, and land use with project funding in technical assistance. Apply by Aug. 31.

• The Nationwide Foundation is funding nonprofit organizations working to address communities’ basic and emergency needs, crisis stabilization, financial security, housing stability, and family empowerment. Apply by Sept. 1 after completing a mandatory grant training.

• 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.

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

Makai Podolskiy rides a Citi Bike almost every day. The subway doesn’t run near his house in central Brooklyn, and backed-up traffic often makes the bus a slow ride. E-bikes allow him to bypass all the cars and get to his job as a city lifeguard on time.

“It’s a simpler and easier way to move around,” he tells Next City from a bike dock in Williamsburg. But it comes at a steep price — as a non-Citi Bike member, a 25-minute ride can set him back at least $20. He remembers the same ride costing him about $5 as a kid.

“It’s gotten way out of hand, the expenses on these bikes,” he says.

New York City boasts the biggest bike-share program in the U.S. — and even the world, outside of China. It’s also, by far, the country’s most expensive. And it’s getting pricier every year.

That could change in the next few years, however, if a campaign to cap Citi Bike rides at $3 for members gains allies in city hall.

This would tie Citi Bike fares to the cost of a trip on a city bus or subway, and acknowledge bikeshare as a vital form of public transformation in its own right, advocates say.

Since launching in New York City in 2013, Citi Bike ridership has increased sharply, but so has the price to ride. Citi Bike members paid about $4.50 for a 45-minute e-bike ride in 2020. That same ride can cost over $12 today, and for non-members, it can easily clear $22. Membership, meanwhile, costs $239 a year, a 92% increase in inflation-adjusted dollars since the program launched.

Meanwhile, that same ride would cost bike-share members between $4 and $7 in cities like Boston, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., where annual memberships can cost at least $100 less, according to Transportation Alternatives, the group behind the $3 Citi Bike campaign.

Lyft, which operates New York’s Citi Bike program, also runs the programs in these cities — and supplies bikes to 55 cities globally including Honolulu, Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro, and Dubai. It just charges New York City riders much more.

Rides on the city’s blue, non-electric bikes are much cheaper, but e-bikes account for 72% of Citi Bike’s ridership.

The price gap is even more stark abroad. A 45-minute ride would be about $2.40 in Paris, $1.35 in London, and $1.05 in Tokyo, according to Transportation Alternatives.

“Citi Bike is too damn expensive,” Brooklyn councilmember Lincoln Restler told Next City at the official launch party for the campaign’s launch party on Aug. 12. Restler first introduced a bill linking the price of a Citi Bike ride to a subway ticket in 2024.

“Riders are getting gauged. It should not cost a penny more than a subway or a bus ride to take a trip on a bicycle.”

Restler said he’s taken over 5,400 Citi Bike rides himself, and routinely bikes up and down his district along Brooklyn’s waterfront. Each ride now tops $10, which he said “adds up real fast.”

While the $3 Citi Bike campaign supports Restler’s bill, organizers are focused on 2029. That’s when Lyft’s contract with New York City runs out, and the campaign wants the Mamdani administration to push for a much more affordable bike-share program at the bargaining table.

A bike-share monopoly

Lyft’s monopoly over the city’s bike-share program has empowered it to raise prices as it pleases, says Alexa Sledge, Transportation Alternatives’ Senior Director of Communications and Strategy.

“Lyft sees a market opportunity,” she says. “They see an ability to raise those prices repeatedly and repeatedly and repeatedly, and people will still ride because at the end of the day, there’s journeys in New York City that just don’t really make sense on the bus or on the subway.”

Lyft did not respond to Next City’s request for comment.

While Citi Bike has expanded to previously underserved neighborhoods, Sledge says the product has begun to deteriorate in several ways. Advocates say they’ve increasingly seen unserviceable bikes and full stations that require riders to circle blocks seeking somewhere to end their ride – a claim Next City observed firsthand while visiting Citi Bike racks across the city this week.

“Every single minute you’re circling looking for parking is a minute that Lyft is getting out of your wallet,” she says.

However, Sledge says the Mamdani administration will have leverage at the table with Lyft, as New York City’s contract is one the company will not want to lose.

“This is an absolutely massive market for Lyft, and one they want to continue operating in,” Sledge says. This past June alone, there were almost 5.5 million Citi Bike trips, netting Citi Bike over $32 million in total revenue. That’s a $7.8 million increase from June 2024, during which time ride fares have increased by over 35%.

Will Livingston, an NYC Department of Transportation spokesperson, tells Next City that Citi Bike factors into the administration’s commitment to “creating a more affordable city,” and that it will go to the table looking to “secure the strongest benefits for riders and their wallets.”

Bikeshare as public transportation

Most cities with cheaper bike-share programs share something in common, Sledge says: They subsidize those programs.

Capital Bikeshare in the D.C. area, operated by Lyft, gets the majority of its operating costs covered by the government. Paris gets up to 70% of its costs subsidized. Some cities, like Austin, oversee their bike-share fleets themselves.

Meanwhile in New York, Lyft pays for the city’s program with private sponsorships and user fees. Charging non-members double the rate helps ensure profit, Lyft says. Transportation Alternatives argues that this burden should be passed from riders to the government.

“The biggest roadblock we’re seeing in New York City is that we still look at bikeshare as private transportation, whereas bikeshare is public transportation, just like the subway, just like the bus, just like the ferry,” Sledge says.

The Department of Transportation, which operates Citi Bike in partnership with Lyft, says the program plays a crucial role in “extending the reach” of public transportation into transit deserts, but doesn’t place bikeshare in that category itself.

Transportation Alternatives has several other ideas to make the program more cost-efficient, including building smaller docks in underserved areas that don’t require the usual footprint, getting the government to cover Citi Bike memberships for public employees, and transforming more stations into charging ports. The city has electrified 32 of its 2,200-plus stations so far, Livingston says, adding that it plans to build on this and to pass on savings to riders.

Sledge says she’s optimistic about the campaign’s future under an administration with such a strong focus on affordability and improving public transportation — and a particular support for cyclists.

Podolskiy is excited, too. “If I could move around the city the way I need to, and it only cost me $3, I wouldn’t take the train,” he says.

Cities across the Midwest have embraced a new way of addressing unsheltered homelessness by helping swiftly connect people with services and housing opportunities.

Tulsa’s unsheltered population fell 31% between 2025 and 2026, and the city reports no remaining major encampments downtown. Indianapolis moved more than 220 people from the street into housing since last summer. Cleveland has housed more than 200 people since 2024, enough to convince its city council to extend its program another two years.

The efforts are adaptations of the Direct-to-Housing model, developed by Houston-based Clutch Consulting in 2022 to help its home city reduce its unsheltered homeless population. The model streamlines pathways to housing by surging services like street-based medical care, outreach, and case management to a particular encampment for between four and six weeks. People engaged with the program are then placed into temporary housing with rental subsidies for up to a year while they find a more permanent solution.

On the back end, Clutch Consulting also works with city departments, management districts, and property owners to ensure encampments remain permanently closed after people are in housing. That includes maintaining “presence or patrol” in a specific area to immediately engage people who experience unsheltered homelessness, and redirect them out of the area, explains Mandy Chapman Semple, a consultant at Clutch and Houston’s first Special Assistant to the Mayor for Homeless Initiatives.

“The whole point is we’re not going to allow a new encampment to become established in this environment,” Semple tells Next City. “We’re going to intervene immediately, and we’re going to force a re-direction because if those individuals remain there, those individuals can’t get the help and the support they need.”

Broadly speaking, the initiative has shown considerable promise. Across the nine cities listed on Clutch’s website that have adopted a local Direct-to-Housing model, roughly 85% of the people engaged do not return to homelessness within a year. Partner cities like Dallas and New Orleans have seen greater-than-20% reductions in unsheltered homelessness in just a couple of years.

The Direct-to-Housing model has also shown it can address a couple of major issues homeless service providers face. For instance, Semple said the model can help cities use their limited financial resources for homeless services more efficiently by combining municipal, nonprofit, and private initiatives. That is happening at a time when federal budget cuts and policy shifts have nearly drained funding available for Housing First and other services.

At the same time, Republican-held legislatures in states like Indiana, Oklahoma and Missouri have passed new laws prohibiting camping on public property in the wake of the 2024 Supreme Court decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson. These laws impose criminal penalties on people who are unsheltered, which can make it more difficult for people to leave homelessness by adding criminal charges to their background checks.

“Communities across the country are looking for a ‘right now’ solution to homelessness,” says Rosanne Haggerty, CEO of Community Solutions, the nonprofit that has helped develop the Direct-to-Housing mode in partnership with Clutch. “And this is one that works.”

Creating a new path forward

Semple explains that the Direct-to-Housing model was born out of a pandemic-driven need to quickly connect people who are homeless with non-congregate shelter.

Unfortunately, cities like Houston did not have the shelter capacity to meet the needs of people who were unsheltered at the time. So, the group began devising a way to get those people into housing as quickly as possible.

The model seeks to accelerate work that many cities are already doing to address unsheltered homelessness. For instance, Semple says Clutch works with cities to develop a menu of targeted resources that get people in encampments into housing instead of simply putting them on a list. Then, Clutch works with local elected officials to devise a maintenance plan to ensure the encampment does not reappear once people are in housing.

“It’s built on all of the principles that are already in play in the homeless response system,” Semple says. “But what it challenged us to do is take all of those principles and apply them in a more targeted and accelerated way, and then work with our partners to then maintain closure behind those direct to housing activities.”

The model was launched at a critical time for homeless service providers. The growth of unsheltered homelessness during the pandemic created a public perception that efforts to reduce homelessness weren’t working, Haggerty says. At the same time, the pandemic-induced surge of funding for services has waned, forcing many municipal leaders to find creative ways to maximize the limited funding available to them.

“It’s a reality check,” Haggerty says, one that is generating positive results across the Midwest.

Haggerty explains that there are several benefits to the Direct-to-Housing model outside of getting people who are unsheltered into housing. She says the model can resolve common frustrations mayors and chiefs of police feel about addressing homelessness, and give them more time to address real public safety threats. The model has also shown promise at combining the efforts of municipal, nonprofit, and private businesses to address homelessness, she says.

Semple adds that landlord engagement is also a key part of the model that gets overlooked because of its focus on resolving unsheltered homelessness. Clutch’s model includes funding to arm specialists to negotiate with landlords to provide units for people who are leaving homelessness. The model also includes funding for some property management priorities such as helping them with inspections, voucher applications, and managing tenancy risks.

“We’re offering a partnership that helps to balance or manage more effectively that risk, and it’s person-centered,” Semple says.

Clearing encampments in Tulsa

One city where the Direct-to-Housing model has had an immediate impact is Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Since Tulsa launched its Direct-to-Housing model, the city has seen a 31% reduction in unsheltered homelessness between 2025 and 2026, from 496 people to 339, according to local Point in Time Count data.

Tulsa has struggled with unsheltered homelessness in recent years for a variety of reasons. Mark Smith, CEO of Housing Solutions Tulsa, explains that the average rent in the city has increased by 26% since the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020, which has caused several low-income households to lose their housing. Tulsa is also a major transportation hub, and some people become homeless for reasons as simple as missing their bus home, Smith says.

Safe Move Tulsa, the city’s local adaptation of Clutch’s model, was launched in 2025 after the city’s unsheltered homeless population nearly doubled between 2021 and 2024, up to 534 people. The program includes nearly a dozen local agencies that coordinate encampment responses with the goal of providing housing for 1,300 housing-insecure people.

So far, more than 500 people who are housing insecure, including people who were already in shelters, have been placed in housing since September 2025, according to the program’s website. There are also no more major encampments in downtown Tulsa, Smith adds.

Smith says Safe Move has also helped improve relations between police, code enforcement, and people who are unsheltered. Camping on public property is illegal both in Tulsa and across Oklahoma, which often required law enforcement to respond to cases of homelessness. The issue was compounded by Tulsa’s lack of available shelter, Smith adds.

“Many people would be on the housing waitlist for the homeless response system for many years, and so there wasn’t resolution that was happening,” Smith says. Meanwhile, police officers and first responders had grown tired of pushing encampments around the city. “It just wasn’t satisfying for anyone,” he adds.

Phase one of the program was launched with a $6 million investment from the City of Tulsa, as well as $4 million in funding from local businesses and foundations. Smith says the city has committed funding for the additional two phases of the program, and Housing Solutions Tulsa is currently fundraising for the remainder.

Going forward, Smith says the city needs about $20 million to execute Phase Two of Safe Move Tulsa, which is slated to begin in late 2026. The phase will focus on creating more bed turnover in local shelters. To sustain the system, Tulsa estimates it needs about $30 million annually.

Indianapolis’ timely response

Indianapolis is also experimenting with a program called Streets to Home Indy, which aims to rehouse 350 people experiencing homelessness by the end of 2026 using a local version of Clutch Consulting’s Direct-to-Housing model.

Like Tulsa’s iteration, Streets to Home Indy is a three-phase program that combines resources from nine local organizations to get people who are unsheltered into housing instead of being arrested or fined for sleeping outside when there is nowhere else to go.

The program, which is led by Indiana’s Coalition for Homelessness Intervention and Prevention (CHIP), received a $2.7 million investment from the city as well as $2.7 million from philanthropic, faith, corporate, and individual donors, local news station WFYI reported.

The first phase of the program has helped house 220 people who were homeless since it was launched in June 2025, according to the report. The second phase will address chronic unsheltered homelessness and the third phase will focus on homelessness prevention.

Chelsea Haring-Cozzi, CEO of CHIP, told WFYI that the results so far have been encouraging.

“I think what’s most encouraging is that we’re really proving people can move directly from the streets into stable housing much faster when we work together and with that kind of urgency and coordination,” Haring-Cozzi told the outlet.

Streets to Home Indy was launched at a time when Indianapolis has struggled to make a dent in its overall homeless population. According to the latest Point in Time Count, there were more than 1,800 people experiencing homelessness in the city in 2026, which is nearly the same number of people who were counted in 2025.

At the same time, Republican lawmakers in the Indiana state house passed a bill outlawing public camping on public property. People sleeping outside will be given a 48-hour notice to relocate or risk incarceration. The new law may also result in criminal penalties, which can compound existing challenges to obtaining housing.

Despite those headwinds, Streets to Home helped Indianapolis record a greater-than 17% decline in unsheltered homelessness in just one year. In 2026, there were 272 people who were unsheltered in Indianapolis compared to the 331 unsheltered people counted in 2025, according to the data.

Haring-Cozzi told WFYI that the program needs to identify long-term funding sources, which may be complicated by uncertainty surrounding federal funding.

‘This is the way’ in Cleveland

Quickly resolving cases of unsheltered homelessness can also help people feel a greater sense of belonging, as Cleveland’s model has shown.

Cleveland launched its local Direct-to-Housing model, called A Home for Every Neighbor, in 2024, to address the rise of unsheltered homelessness. It was created using $2 million in local funding as $2.7 million from federal pandemic funding, Signal Cleveland reported.

Read more: From Tent to House in 11 days: A Close Look at Cleveland’s New Response to Homelessness

Like other models, A Home for Every Neighbor combines resources from Cuyahoga County, the Office of Homeless Services (OHS), and the Cleveland/Cuyahoga County Continuum of Care. There are also incentives available for local landlords to increase the amount of housing opportunities for people who are homeless.

Since 2024, the program has helped more than 200 people who lived unsheltered find stable housing.

Signal Cleveland recently shared the journey Marthe Marie Vernet, her son, and their family dog, Gorgeous, went through after they became homeless following a dispute with their landlord. They lived unsheltered because friends and family could not bring them in, and no local shelters served families, according to the report.

That was until an outreach worker with the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless contacted Vernet and started her application for a new home. Within two weeks, Vernet and her son were out of the tent and living in a two-story home in Ohio City, the report added.

Vernet told the outlet recently that it was an answer to her prayers.

“Every day I start doing something to make it nice,” Vernet told Signal Cleveland. “I clean the wood [floors and molding]. I like wood, so I make it shiny. … I try little by little to make it nice.”

The success of the program convinced Cleveland’s city council to invest another $1.9 million to extend the program for an additional two years. Private funders chipped in another $530,000 as well, Signal Cleveland reported.

“In the scheme of our overall city budget, this is not breaking the bank,” Cleveland Ward 7 Council Member Austin Davis told Signal Cleveland. “It’s the equivalent of paving four streets — which is important too. But there are no other solutions for chronic homelessness coming, and there are no other methods that work. This is the way.”

This story has been corrected to remove Iowa from the list of states that banned camping in public property. The legislation did not make it past committee due to pushback from local advocates; however, Des Moines and a few other cities in Iowa have implemented their own camping bans.

When people leave incarceration, freedom comes with instructions.

Find work. Secure housing. Replace your identification. Report to supervision. Apply for benefits. Reconnect with family. Learn technology that may not have existed when you went inside. Stay out of trouble while rebuilding a life with limited money and a criminal record waiting at nearly every door.

Determination alone can’t carry a person through all of that. Having a place to begin working through that instruction manual and get support through the process is necessary. For me, one of those places was the Austin Central Library.

I used the library to research, write, and build something that belonged to me. It gave me access to information, technology, and a quiet public space where I was not reduced to my past. Eventually, two books I wrote on my own reentry experience became part of the Austin Public Library catalog. I call that journey “from a library card to a library catalog.”

My story is personal, but the lesson is public: Libraries are already part of the reentry system, whether cities recognize it or not. Cities should now take the next step by creating library-based reentry navigation programs that connect returning residents with employment assistance, legal help, digital training, housing resources, and peer support.

Here in Austin, we already have pieces of that infrastructure. The Austin Public Library provides public computers, printing, job-search tools, and online learning resources. Its website includes information specifically for formerly incarcerated people. Library cardholders can use Brainfuse JobNow for employment assistance and LearningExpress Library for workplace skills, GED preparation, and professional licensing exams. The Austin/Travis County Reentry Roundtable also connects people affected by the criminal legal system with resources and works with service providers, advocates and community members to improve reentry in Central Texas.

But too many of these elements remain separated. A person returning home may be told to contact one organization for employment, visit another office for legal questions, search a website for housing help, and create several online accounts before receiving meaningful assistance. That’s difficult for anyone. It becomes harder when someone lacks reliable transportation, internet access, a working phone, or confidence using modern tech.

A resource list is useful; a trusted person sitting across from you at the table is better.

Some major library systems have already begun developing such initiatives, showing that libraries can do more than place information on a webpage. They can become active bridges between incarceration and community life.

Brooklyn Public Library’s free Welcome Home program provides formerly incarcerated New Yorkers with one-on-one reentry navigation, guidance on housing and health, connections to local organizations and a supportive community led by people who understand reentry firsthand. San Francisco Public Library operates Jail and Reentry Services, which works with reentry organizations to connect people leaving incarceration with library services and other community resources.

Austin could begin with a small pilot at the Central Library and one neighborhood branch selected through community input. On scheduled days, a trained reentry navigator could meet with residents and help them identify immediate needs, complete basic steps, and reach the correct service provider without being sent from office to office.

The navigator would not replace librarians, parole officers, attorneys, social workers, or workforce counselors. The position would connect people to those professionals and help them understand what to do next. And, on the flip side, this work should not be added to the responsibilities of already-stretched library employees.

When cities want libraries to serve as reentry infrastructure, they must fund the people and partnerships required to do it well. That means paying for a dedicated navigator, staff training, secure technology, private meeting space, and community partnerships. Peer mentors with lived experience should also be compensated. Their knowledge should not be treated as volunteer testimony while everyone else at the table is paid.

An Austin pilot should be built around local partnerships, ensuring that residents with lived experience are included in its design. Workforce organizations could offer scheduled employment assistance. Legal partners could help residents understand record-clearing options, occupational restrictions, fines and other barriers. Housing navigators could explain application requirements and identify programs that do not automatically reject applicants because of a conviction.

Digital help is crucial. Someone can leave incarceration ready to work and still be stopped by something as simple as not knowing how to upload a document, recover a password, or join a video interview. A strong reentry program should add hands-on help with email, résumés, applications, document scanning, online accounts, and virtual interviews. It should also provide private space when someone needs to speak with an attorney, caseworker, or potential employer.

A library cannot erase a criminal record. It can’t force an employer to hire someone, create affordable housing, or repair the many systemic failures of the reentry system. But a library can shorten the distance between a person and the help that already exists. It can offer a public doorway that does not require someone to explain his entire history before entering. It can provide technology, information, dignity and a place to imagine a future beyond survival.

The reality is that public libraries are already reentry infrastructure – and it’s time we fund and organize them that way.