Sixty-eight-year-old John Oakes took the same walk every afternoon circling his small community of Murrells Inlet, South Carolina. On Aug. 1, 2024, as the hot summer sun trickled through Spanish moss, his daughter Chrissy spoke to him on the phone before he embarked on his daily stroll.

Two days later, she signed her father’s Do Not Resuscitate order.

John Oakes had been hit by a Buick going 55 mph on Highway 17 as he was crossing near Wesley Road. He’d been walking along the state-created “Greenway Walkway” that said “use at your own risk” — a path the community has complained about to officials for years.

Charleston, the closest major city to where Oakes’s dad was struck, is ranked 12th on the new edition of Smart Growth America’s new list of the deadliest cities for pedestrians in the United States, published as part of its annual “Dangerous by Design” report on pedestrian deaths and unsafe roads.

“There was not a walkway for my dad to cross within two to three miles,” said Chrissy Oakes, who started Safer 17 to advocate for safety improvements on the highway after her father was killed, at SGA’s press briefing on Tuesday. “Fifty-five miles per hour, guys. Do you know how fast that feels when you’re walking and you feel the wind of the cars?”

In 2024, the most recent year available for final federal data, 7,080 people were hit by a vehicle and killed while walking in the United States. Politicians and government officials have touted the 6% decrease from 2022, with the head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration congratulating his agency on a return to pre-pandemic fatality levels.

But the report by SGA researchers Eric Cova, Jaibin Mathew, and Heidi Simon point out that fatalities are still up 72% from 2009 — an uptick that outpaces both the growth in population and vehicle miles traveled.

The researchers attribute the slight dip to traffic congestion after the effects of the COVID-19 lockdown subsided. The U.S. largely relies on congestion to slow cars. When traffic disappeared in 2020, speeds rose on roads still full of pedestrian conflict points, and deaths spiked. Now that traffic is back, speeds are down.

“However, if you ask most of our transportation leaders, the only thing they’re trying to solve is congestion and not safety,” SGA president Beth Osborne said at the press briefing. “Celebrating coming down slightly off of record highs is part of the problem.”

At the current pace of decline, the U.S. won’t return to 2009 fatality levels until 2042. And 96,615 more people will die in the meantime, with pedestrians now accounting for nearly one in five roadway fatalities — a new high.

Lessons from Orlando’s pedestrian safety success

SGA’s report ranks Memphis, Tennessee; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Bakersfield, California; Tucson, Arizona; and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, as the most dangerous cities for pedestrians. Osborne says that in most areas, design agencies are applying “pretty much the same standards” on city streets and interstates — where you don’t have pedestrians, driveways, or cross streets.

But SGA’s analysis also highlighted one bright spot that showed significant change is possible.

The City of Orlando dropped from consistently being in the top 20 most dangerous roadways to No. 25 — one of the largest reductions in five-year fatality rates. The report listed the changes Orlando made as “being more intentional with funding, adopting best practices, and making hard decisions about changing existing roadways.”

These changes include:

• Increasing the number of crossings

• Ensuring all crosswalks have markers and signals

• Improving visibility and lighting

• Drawing driver attention to activity outside of their own lanes

• Prioritizing projects near schools and known speed-concern areas

• Using data strategically to identify where to deploy resources first

“I think they’ve done a really great job looking at those key locations … to prioritize getting to those urgent spots as quickly as possible,” said Heidi Simon, SGA’s director of thriving communities.

In New Jersey, both Jersey City and Hoboken have experienced zero-fatality years.

Though not examined in the organization’s report, Simon says both of those cities have more traffic. They strategically slimmed roadways on streets full of conflict points like parking, driveways, crosswalks and cross streets. Less room for cars on these high risk roads forces drivers to slow down, see the potential problem, and stop.

Hoboken has recorded zero traffic fatalities for nine straight years, since January 2017. Jersey City achieved the same milestone in 2022, but hasn’t sustained it, likely due to implementation issues. Both cities launched formal “Vision Zero” initiatives, redesigning their most dangerous intersections with curb extensions and bollards to improve sight lines, reducing speed limits to 20 mph and installing leading pedestrian intervals that give walkers a head start before cars can turn. Hoboken’s program, spearheaded by then-Mayor Ravi Bhalla, is now studied by cities from Philadelphia to San Francisco as a model for what deliberate, data-driven street redesign can accomplish.

Still, such changes remain an anomaly. SGA researchers found that more than 80% of states and metropolitan areas have gotten more deadly for pedestrians over time. Just 18 out of more than 100 metro areas saw any decrease in long-term pedestrian fatality rates.

Pedestrian safety advocates repeatedly noted the reality of “doubters” in transportation agencies: Officials often don’t want to deviate from interstate standards, favoring moves to prevent congestion rather than preventing pedestrian fatalities.

“We know that design impacts behavior because we all know the word ‘speed trap,’” Osborne said. “We know on a very visceral level that the design of the roadway can change our behavior, but our agencies will not admit it.”

The research also mentioned racial and income disparities, noting Native and Black Americans only make up 16% of the population but 22% of pedestrian deaths from 2020 to 2024. People in lower-income areas are also disproportionately more likely to be hit and killed.

The report frames this as the product of “decades of transportation investment and design decisions that prioritize moving cars fast through communities” rather than serving the people who live there.

“We know what creates safer streets,” Simon said. “We can’t wait for a crash to happen. We need to be fixing our streets now so that more stories like Chrissy’s don’t occur.”

But even after a life has been lost, changing existing infrastructure remains an uphill battle.

Along with advocates from Families for Safe Streets, Chrissy Oakes has repeatedly called the Georgetown County South Carolina Department of Transportation about the safety of the road where her father was struck. They urged officials to conduct a speed study and assess the safety of the road.

“They designated it to an engineer named Skipper, and Skipper has not contacted me,” Oakes said. “My dad died in 2024. That’s crazy.”

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.

Trump Delivers Even More Funding For Immigration Crackdown

On Wednesday, President Trump signed a $70 billion funding package to fund ICE and Border Patrol through 2029, The Guardian reports, without requiring any reform to their practices. These funds are in addition to the $140 billion allotted to the agencies last summer, bringing both agencies’ total budget to $240 billion spread out over four years.

Democrats had attempted to get concessions on guardrails for immigration enforcement after immigration agents killed two U.S. citizens in Minnesota, but Republicans eventually passed the measure through a budget reconciliation process. The extraordinary spending increase on violent kidnappers has also led to corruption; Public Citizen reported in April on a series of shoddy contractors for a detention facility built on the site of a former Japanese internment camp, including one with human trafficking allegations.

As The American Prospect reports, all of this comes against a backdrop of steep cuts to the country’s social safety net programs, including SNAP, WIC, Medicaid, and Medicare.

Local News Deserts Are Costing Local Governments and Taxpayers Financially

A new report from advocacy group Rebuild Local News concludes that the local governments and taxpayers are paying roughly $1.1 billion per year in higher borrowing costs due to the lack of local news infrastructure. The analysis — which estimates extra costs per state — builds upon a 2020 study that linked local newspaper closures to increased municipal borrowing costs.

“Our original study illustrated that the loss of local news leads to a significant increase in borrowing costs for local governments, as lenders are nervous about lending to unmonitored governments,” said Dermot Murphy, a finance professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, who co-authored both studies. “This follow-on report shows just how much the nation and each state pays in extra borrowing costs per year due to their news desert footprints. The costs are significant, and taxpayers ultimately foot the bill.”

Increasing Eviction Rates Boosts Gun Violence, Study Finds

A study by researchers at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine shows that a 1% increase in eviction rates in Chicago between 2021 and 2023 led to 2.66 more shootings in front of the person’s home, The Trace reports.

The study looked at 13,900 survey responses and found that evictions had a greater impact on the number of shootings than race, income, or education. According to The Trace, research of this nature is becoming more challenging as the Trump administration cut $100 million of funding for gun violence research.

In May, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson signed legislation to create a rental registry, ban hidden junk fees, and set up a new agency to settle disputes between tenants and landlords.

More Data Center Bans and Pauses Pass from Coast to Coast

Residents of Monterey Park, California, have voted to permanently ban data centers, the first time such a ban has occurred through a ballot measure, The Guardian reports. The ban received 88.35% of the vote, with close to 11,700 votes cast. Other cities, including Janesville and Port Washington in Wisconsin, have approved measures requiring voter approval prior to building data centers, but this is the first vote to permanently ban them outright.

In New York State, the legislature passed a one-year moratorium on new data centers in the state budget — the first of its kind, according to Spectrum News. The new law will also require environmental impact assessments and include labor protections for new data centers.

Meanwhile, Ohio has spent $2.3 billion on tax breaks for Google, Meta and Amazon data centers, Signal Cleveland found, and a new report estimates that Entergy Mississippi customers have already spent $38 million for infrastructure and other data center-related costs through energy bill increases.

World’s Largest Banks Increase Fossil Fuel Financing in 2025

“Banking on Climate Chaos,” a new report from a coalition of environmental advocacy groups, finds that the world’s largest banks spent $906 billion in 2025 financing fossil fuels – a $64 billion increase from the year prior.

Banks spent $9 trillion in the past decade since the Paris Agreement went into effect, in which 195 countries agreed to the goal of limiting fossil fuels and preventing global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

The report noted that while 26 of the world’s 65 largest banks reduced fossil fuel spending, the largest banks have ramped up spending. These include JP Morgan Chase (12.5% increase), CitiGroup (2.5% increase), Bank of America (5.5% increase), and Wells Fargo (7.2% increase). JP Morgan Chase was the overall largest financier of fossil fuels, at $58.2 billion in 2025.

MORE NEWS

• Trump’s Justice Department is suing cities and states to dismantle gun laws. The Trace

• Can indie pharmacies serve areas abandoned by Walgreens? New plan aims to do just that. Block Club Chicago

• What the stadium petition means for Kansas City’s plan to subsidize a new Royals ballpark. The Beacon News

• Highlandtown’s business district was growing. Then ICE came. The Baltimore Banner

• Delivery warehouse boom is impacting NYC’s low-income neighborhoods most, reports finds. City Limits

• Congestion relief zone results after year one suggest notable road safety benefits. Columbia Mailman School of Public Health

• Polluted rain runoff from big box parking lots could get a crackdown. Los Angeles Times

• Dozens of Boston bus crashes missing from contractor Transdev’s federal record. ProPublica

• An S.F. affordable housing project cost half as much as usual. Can it be replicated? San Francisco Chronicle

• State lawmakers pass bill requiring every homeless shelter in New York to have wi-fi. City Limits

OPPORTUNITIES & RESOURCES

• Envision Resilience is opening applications for its National Design Studio Grant for schools running design studios focused on community-centered approaches to climate challenges. Apply by June 19.

• The Citi Foundation has announced a $20 million request for proposals to support nonprofit affordable housing development in certain counties in California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Virginia, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, South Dakota, and Connecticut. Submit letters of interest by July 1.

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

Atlanta promises a welcoming World Cup for everyone. But just days before kickoff, homeless advocates worry the city lacks the safety net needed to keep unhoused residents from being displaced or jailed amid the influx of hundreds of thousands of visitors.

The concern is not just that Atlanta lacks enough units to house everyone. (That’s typical of a major city grappling with mounting homelessness.) The greater fear is that Atlanta’s alternatives to arrest — outreach, shelter access, and pre-arrest diversion — are so strained that the city cannot absorb the pressures of a global event. If tourists or downtown businesses respond to visible homelessness by calling the police, activists warn, Atlanta could return to the strategies employed in 1996.

Back then, in the lead-up to the Olympic Games, Atlanta built a jail. In the 18 months before the festivities, thousands of poor people were arrested on minor charges, many of them unhoused. Others received one-way bus tickets out of town. Allen Hall, who was homeless during the Olympics, summed it up in an interview with Atlanta Civic Circle: “The jails became homeless shelters.”

With housing scarce and supportive services stretched thin before the World Cup, advocates worry that the more than 3,000 Atlantans without stable housing could face a police crackdown, even if city leaders never explicitly order one.

The city has repeatedly vowed not to further criminalize poverty to polish downtown and its environs for well-to-do visitors who might be unaccustomed to unsheltered people. But choosing not to criminalize homelessness requires political will, coordination, and resources. Advocates say Atlanta is short on all three.

Choosing not to criminalize homelessness requires political will, coordination, and resources. Advocates say Atlanta is short on all three.

Last June, Mayor Andre Dickens pledged to “make sure those unsheltered individuals don’t come anywhere downtown, and throughout the city of Atlanta.” He added, “If you break the law, we have measures to deal with that like any other lawbreaker.”

To advocates for unhoused people, that framing leaves an eye-popping amount of room for police enforcement against people whose homelessness already makes them more likely to be cited or arrested for conduct that housed people rarely have to consider: sleeping outside, sitting too long in a public place, walking in the road, trespassing, and urinating outdoors when bathrooms are unavailable.

“Atlanta has gone out of its way to focus so much on our World Cup guests that [the city is] willing to do that to the detriment of our neighbors experiencing homelessness,” says Tiffany Roberts, the public policy director for the Southern Center for Human Rights (SCHR). “It’s a lot like what happened before the Olympics.”

To its credit, the city recently completed an unprecedented “rapid housing” program, creating 500 apartments for unhoused people in about two years. It now has almost 2,400 permanent housing units citywide and nearly 2,800 shelter beds, according to Cathryn Vassell, CEO of Partners for HOME, the lead agency in Atlanta’s Continuum of Care network.

But capacity is not the same as availability. Most permanent housing units are already occupied. Shelter beds may be full; restricted by household type or eligibility; or unusable for people who cannot safely stay in congregate settings, have pets or partners, or fear losing their belongings. And the latest federally mandated Point-in-Time headcount of Atlanta’s homeless population — which found 3,060 people unhoused citywide, over a third of whom were unsheltered — is widely considered a vast undercount.

That leaves overlapping problems: Atlanta does not have enough permanent housing to end homelessness for everyone, and even its temporary options may not be sufficient — or accessible enough—for the unsheltered people most likely to encounter residents, tourists, and police during the World Cup.

“Common sense will tell you that those people, if they’re not going to be here, are either going to be bussed out of the city to other cities in the South or be arrested and put in jail,” says Matthew Nursey, organizing director with Housing Justice League. “We know this because Atlanta [and Fulton County] did exactly that during the 1996 Olympics.”

That frustration is compounded by the ongoing encampment removal operations conducted across the city over the last year. Between May 2025 and May 2026, the city and its homeless services partners relocated 490 unsheltered people from more than 30 locations in and around downtown into housing, says Annie Hyrila, Partners for HOME’s chief program officer. The number of people who did not ultimately receive housing assistance, however, is unknown, reflected only in Atlanta’s latest Point-in-Time Count.

The legacy of a deceased tent city resident

Atlanta’s recent approach to tent communities is shaped by the death of Cornelius Taylor, an unhoused man killed in January 2025 when a city bulldozer ran over his makeshift home during the destruction of an encampment. His death spurred procedural reforms, including new safety checks and clearer protocols for removals. But advocates say those changes do not address a larger question: Why are people being forced to move when the city still cannot provide enough stable places for them to go?

Roberts says the city’s public posture — that its recent homelessness work is not about the World Cup but about connecting people to housing — is undercut by its own policies. She points especially to the Atlanta Police Department’s (APD) Homeless Outreach Proactive Enforcement (H.O.P.E.) unit, whose standard operating procedures, she says, center on clearing encampments and bringing in police enforcement when people cannot or will not move.

APD declined to make the H.O.P.E. team’s commander, Maj. Jeff Cantin, available for an interview, but said in a statement that “We will enforce the law when safety concerns require it.”

But internal documents and communications obtained by SCHR and reviewed by Shelterforce depict the H.O.P.E. team as an operation limited by business hours — the team works only between 7 a.m. and 4 p.m. on weekdays — and largely driven by nonemergency “disturbance” calls, including complaints about people sleeping near businesses or eating out of trash cans. Essentially, the H.O.P.E. team shows up when people feel uncomfortable around unhoused residents and want something done—but its officers rarely request help from the Policing Alternatives and Diversion Initiative (PAD), which is supposed to be the city’s go-to arrest alternative.

Emails and other public records also underscore tensions between the city and PAD. A ledger of the H.O.P.E. unit’s January 2025 calls for service, for instance, revealed that a police officer seeking assistance sheltering someone was told that the city “is no longer working with PAD” and that the H.O.P.E. team was unavailable that evening.

That call occurred during a contract dispute among the city, Grady Memorial Hospital, and PAD, which ultimately led to PAD’s reactivation but left it unable to assist at downtown’s Center for Diversion and Services, a Grady-operated facility where police can bring people instead of booking them into the local jails. Grady previously subcontracted with PAD and the Georgia Justice Project to provide case management and legal services at the center, but it did not renew PAD’s contract for 2026 and 2027.

PAD was originally funded to facilitate about 40 daily diversions — reroutes from a jail cell to supportive services — but “more often than not, less than 10 are actually being done” because coordination between the city and PAD has fallen apart, says PAD executive director Moki Macías.

“PAD continues to provide case management services to 150 people on our caseload, and we continue to accept diversions from law enforcement and jail,” Macías says. But without the renewed contract, PAD has stopped accepting referrals from the diversion center because it no longer has funding for intake staff there, she says.

“We have not had intake staff at the center for the last two months, which means that people diverted to the center are no longer being connected to PAD services,” Macías says. “Diversion away from jail without connection to community-based services is not diversion; it is just a nicer revolving door.”

“Atlanta is not ready, in part, because the city is attacking everything that is not within its own system,” Roberts adds.

That strife reflects the law enforcement–centric approach advocates for unhoused people say will shape the World Cup.

“If you look at the Downtown Rising plan and … the standard operating procedures for the H.O.P.E. team, what you see is [that] the primary goal is to remove people from encampments and to use enforcement to do that,” Roberts says. “If people can’t be housed, then the directive is essentially to jail them if there’s probable cause for an arrest.”

APD responded that the department and Grady “continues to operate the Center for Diversion and Services to reduce arrests for non-violent offenses associated with mental health challenges, substance use, homelessness, and extreme poverty,” adding that in May alone, the center diverted 155 people from arrest “to immediate care and long-term support services.” The department added that, between January 2025 and June 2026, APD officers completed 1,885 diversions.

Nonetheless, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney echoed advocates’ concerns in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, saying the city’s plan to “eliminate” unsheltered homelessness through outreach and housing initiatives before the World Cup could result in mass arrests, “solely to make the city look nice.”

Since early June, Atlanta’s public defender’s office has been distributing flyers in homeless communities warning of “increased enforcement” on a list of what it calls “zero-tolerance activities,” including sleeping on sidewalks, panhandling, and public urination — so-called “quality-of-life” offenses that unhoused Atlantans are especially vulnerable to being charged with.

Chief Public Defender Kenneth Days says the flyers aren’t meant to threaten a police crackdown on homelessness; they intend to put houseless residents on notice: “I don’t think the intention is that there’s some kind of plan to arrest more people or use this as an opportunity to arrest anybody, but I think [the flyer] gets the message across that any behavior that might normally be tolerated may not be during such a large-scale event.”

APD spokesperson Chata Spikes says that the department was “not aware that this flyer had been created or distributed, and therefore cannot speak to the reasoning behind the use of the term ‘increased enforcement.’”

Hostile architecture

That gap — between available resources and what’s happening on the ground — matters because the World Cup could bring thousands of visitors who may not recognize the difference between a public safety emergency and visible poverty.

“You’re exposing, in the case of Atlanta, 3,000 people to people from across the world who don’t know how to respond — who think [that] calling the police or informing law enforcement will mean they’re going to be treated humanely,” says Jonathan Alingu, co-director of Central Florida Jobs with Justice who has assisted with Miami’s World Cup preparations. “Culturally, we know that’s not the case.”

The threat is already visible, advocates say, in downtown planning conversations.

A February email from Vassell to top city officials described months of meetings with downtown stakeholders who were “strongly opposed” to creating a navigation center — a place where unhoused people could be connected to services.

In another email, Vassell asked city officials to consider removing workout equipment from Woodruff Park — a hot spot for unhoused people just east of the stadium where matches will take place — and installing planters along the park’s water fixture, which she called a “huge priority to reduce sitting/lounging on the ledges.”

Those emails do not show the city ordering people to be driven out of downtown for the World Cup. But they do show that business and civic stakeholders have pressured city officials and homelessness leaders to close encampments, increase police capacity, and make public-space changes meant to discourage people from lingering in one of downtown’s most prominent parks.

Vassell says Partners for HOME has not called for removing unhoused people from downtown and insists there is “no talk or plans” to bus or arrest people during the World Cup. The focus, she says, is “heightened outreach, support, and access to shelter and cooling centers.”

She defends the Woodruff Park changes as part of an effort to make the park accessible for everyone — not just a haven for people experiencing homelessness.

“Some would call it ‘hostile architecture,’” Vassell says. “I think, in general, a planter with flowers is a way to reduce the amount of people just hanging out and sort of taking over the park.”

She says Woodruff Park has become a focal point because of a “density problem,” including open-air drug use and sales, gambling, and unsheltered people congregating in a place where public bathrooms have often been unavailable.

“We’re stuck between a rock and a hard place,” Vassell says. “We are intentionally focused on getting people off the streets and into housing. We’re also trying to have a balanced approach that takes into consideration the residents and the students and everybody else [who] would love to walk through Woodruff Park and not smell urine and feces [or] … feel unsafe.”

For advocates, though, that is exactly the problem: The city can promise compassion, but once the goal becomes making public spaces comfortable for visitors, the people who have no private place to go become the obstacle.

“What we’ve seen downtown is, unfortunately, a little bit of a blurring of the lines between outreach for the sake of getting people connected to care and outreach for the sake of getting people to not be in public view,” Macías, with PAD, says.

An anti-homelessness law, and a possible counterweight

In just the past few months, the legal landscape in Georgia has become more punitive. This spring, Gov. Brian Kemp signed House Bill 295, a state law that allows property owners to seek compensation from local governments they argue have failed to enforce certain laws, including bans on public camping, loitering, panhandling, drug possession, and shoplifting. Advocates say this will pressure local governments to prioritize enforcement over housing and services, especially in places like downtown Atlanta.

The World Cup, they say, could become a proving ground for that pressure.

Jennifer Li, leader of Dignity 2026, a national coalition advocating for more compassionate World Cup planning, says mega-events don’t directly create homelessness, but they magnify the consequences of already strained systems.

In that vein, Li says, the World Cup could become a “threat multiplier” for people whose lives on the streets already leave them disproportionately vulnerable to arrest.

That’s why advocates celebrated a recent policy change in Fulton County.

Devin Barrington-Ward, a member of the criminal justice reform coalition Communities Over Cages, says the group helped pressure Fulton County leaders and Sheriff Pat Labat to limit misdemeanor bookings at the county’s infamously dangerous Rice Street jail.

The change, announced by the sheriff’s office in May, is not a new law but a booking policy set to take effect July 1, during the tail end of the World Cup. Under the policy, the jail will stop accepting most people arrested on non-violent misdemeanor charges. County officials have said between 200 and 300 people are incarcerated across Fulton County’s four jails on any given day for misdemeanor charges — from jaywalking to criminal trespass to domestic violence — and the new policy is intended to drastically reduce the number of people locked up.

But Barrington-Ward warns that it won’t be effective unless the city and county fully fund and utilize alternative options. “We can’t risk creating a door to nowhere by turning people away from being booked at the jail, but then not providing those services for people to get stabilized,” he says.

The bigger picture

As World Cup crowds descend on Atlanta for the city’s first game on June 15, the specter of the 1996 Olympics looms. Will we default to mass arrests? Will unhoused residents who are uprooted be able to return? Will Atlanta learn from the mistakes it could be making? The anxiety felt in the so-called Capital of the South is familiar to activists nationwide.

Li, of Dignity 2026, says human rights planning has fallen by the wayside in many World Cup host cities preparing for the explosion of visitors.

“What we see instead are these superficial measures to sweep problems under the rug and to hide the problem of homelessness, rather than fix it,” she says.

Alingu, with Central Florida Jobs with Justice, says that’s especially visible in Atlanta, Houston, Kansas City, Miami, and other cities where community groups have asked for clearer plans; more nonpolice outreach; increased shelter and cooling capacity; public bathrooms; harm reduction resources; storage for belongings; hotel rooms or other temporary placements for people displaced by the event; and public data on arrests, citations, and encampment clearings during the tournament. “We have the means. We have the resources. We have the human talent to help organize and mobilize people into housing and shelters,” he says. “We just don’t have the coordination that’s required to do that.”

Planning conversations, Alingu explains, are dominated by FIFA representatives seeking little more than tourist amenities rather than policy solutions to lingering challenges such as homelessness. In other words, the problem is not purely financial or political; host committees, local governments, law enforcement, service providers, and community advocates are not in lockstep, leaving police to fill the vacuum.

At this point, advocates say the most realistic best-case scenario may be modest: no mass arrests, no surprise encampment clearings, no displacement masquerading as outreach, and no one shoved out of sight just because the world is watching. Simply put, let unhoused people exist.

That would not solve homelessness. But it could prevent the World Cup from making life worse for people already living in crisis.

The consequences of getting it wrong can outlast the tournament: an arrest record that makes housing or employment harder to secure; a tent, medication, documents, phone, or family photos lost during an encampment clearing; a person pushed away from outreach workers who know them; a fragile support network broken because a public place became inconvenient for visitors.

The World Cup fracas will eventually leave town, says Li. The stadiums will empty, the fans will fly home, and the TV cameras will turn elsewhere. But the consequences for unhoused people in Atlanta and beyond could last far longer.

By moving them out of sight, “you’re not actually fixing the problem,” says Li. “You’re just temporarily putting them in timeout, [causing] extreme harm to the people who are being detained.”

Reporting support for this article was also provided by Atlanta Civic Circle, a nonprofit civic journalism platform that closed its doors on June 1.

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

The World Cup is coming to the U.S., and with it a renewed lobbying push from the short-term rental industry to loosen regulations. The industry argues that hotels will be overwhelmed by the influx of visitors and that vital economic windfalls are at stake.

Leading home-sharing platform Airbnb, an official “supporter” of the World Cup, has announced $5 million in infrastructure investments for certain host cities, including Kansas City, LA and San Francisco. Airbnb is offering a $750 bonus to attract new hosts ahead of the World Cup.

All of the American host cities have citywide regulations in place for short-term rentals. Airbnb, one of the largest lobbyists in the short-term rental market, is pushing to weaken those regulations in LA and New York City.

While some reports indicate that short-term rentals are seeing increased demand, some hosts and hotel operators say demand is lower than expected. Multiple studies show that the proliferation of short-term rentals can raise rents and housing costs. Organizers are concerned that lifting short-term rental regulations for the World Cup or other major events would set a precedent and allow the companies to permanently loosen regulations.

Here is a rundown of how some major cities are addressing short-term rentals ahead of the World Cup.

Los Angeles

According to AirDNA, demand for Airbnbs in the LA area on June 12—when the first game at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, will occur—is up 13% year over year. The LA Times interviewed one host charging $7,000 for one night.

In 2018, the city passed an ordinance regulating home rentals that bars affordable and rent-stabilized housing from being operated as short-term rentals and creates an application process for property owners (or renters with a property owner’s permission) to rent their homes for short periods. Permits must be renewed annually. Hosts are responsible for any nuisance complaints and must pay an $89 registration fee and a nightly fee to the city’s enforcement fund. The ordinance allows hosts to list only primary residences as rentals. Los Angeles County also has its own short-term rental ordinance.

In a 2024 report, the LA Housing Department estimated that 7,500 units were actively in violation of the city’s short-term rental regulations but 300 citations had been issued. The housing department wrote that it “[had] not received the necessary staffing and resources to effectively enforce the Home-Sharing Ordinance.”

FIFA has required all host cities to develop a plan to mitigate the games’ human rights impacts, but LA’s plan only lists existing federal, state, and local government laws and does not propose new measures to address homelessness or short-term rentals.

The region has seen particularly intense lobbying on behalf of short-term rental interests. In 2025, Airbnb spent $19 million at the state level and $360,000 on lobbying in LA, according to Capital & Main.

During a $1 billion city budget deficit last year, Airbnb launched its Save Our Services campaign, asking legislators to weaken short-term rental protections ahead of the World Cup, the Super Bowl, and the Olympics to bring extra revenue to the city’s coffers and to prevent service cuts.

“The city is already facing difficult choices, including potential cuts to public services like trash pickup, public safety and emergency response,” the campaign website reads. “By allowing a limited number of people to rent their second home, Los Angeles can unlock millions in new, annual tourism revenue—paid for by tourists, not taxpayers!”

While some labor unions, including International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the Los Angeles/Orange Counties Building and Construction Trades Council, backed the campaign, another coalition, Better Neighbors LA, put forward a competing plan asking the city to step up enforcement and bring in increased revenue by collecting fines. The group’s report said it had identified more than 200,000 Airbnb listings since 2019 that were noncompliant with the short-term rental law. “If the City were to start collecting all potential fines from noncompliant STR listings and transactions, in two months L.A. would generate roughly $95 million,” Better Neighbors LA wrote.

In April, a line in Mayor Bass’s proposed 2026–2027 budget tasked the Office of Finance and city administrative officer with developing recommendations to allow companies to prepay into the city’s tax for hotels and short-term rentals ahead of the 2028 Olympics, as first reported by LA Material. The proposal would have set aside these prepaid taxes for street cleanliness, sidewalk repairs, park programming and urban forestry. Separately, the budget proposed a temporary relaxation of short-term rental restrictions in the lead-up to the 2028 Summer Olympics, with a sunset in December of that year. Both proposals were suggested by Airbnb, the company told LAist.

Iris Craige, assistant director of policy and research at the economic justice nonprofit Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE), says the group interpreted the term “street cleanliness” in this portion of the budget as allowing Airbnb payments to go toward encampment removal. The organization brought members to protest the proposal at city council meetings.

The city council instead voted to produce recommendations to create a time-limited short-term rental program that would end at the close of 2028, after the Super Bowl, the Olympics and the World Cup.

The program would set a citywide cap on short-term rentals equal to 1% of the existing housing supply: The city of Los Angeles had about 1.6 million units in 2024, 1% of which would be about 16,000. To prevent property speculation, the policy would limit short-term rentals to properties owned by hosts before Dec. 31, 2025. The program would also strengthen enforcement by requiring hosts to sign documents “under penalty of perjury.”

SAJE representatives say they will continue to oppose weakening regulations as they await the city’s report. “While they’re doing research, there’s space for advocacy,” Craige says.

Atlanta

Since 2022, Atlanta has had a short-term rental ordinance that requires hosts to obtain a license from the city. But the city suspended enforcement after the law went into effect and after a lobbying group composed of short-term rental hosts complained, according to an investigation by 11Alive News.

In 2025, lawmakers proposed stronger restrictions that would have required short-term rentals to be 1,000 feet apart and placed a cap on new rentals in multifamily buildings, but none have passed.

Since then, lawmakers have proposed a range of neighborhood-level bans on short-term rentals. An August 2025 ban on new short-term rental permits in the Home Park neighborhood near Georgia Tech passed. A November 2025 attempt to ban short-term rentals in northeast Atlanta failed.

The city of Atlanta has also put forward a human rights strategy, as required by FIFA. Atlanta’s plan pledged to create 500 permanent supportive housing units with wraparound services by the end of 2025, part of a strategy announced in 2025 called Atlanta Rising. It will also remove “traditional barriers such as income, employment, or sobriety requirements, in order to provide immediate stability for those in crisis.” In an email to Next City/Shelterforce, Cathryn Vassell, CEO of Partners for Home, which is administering the plan, writes that the city has “created 500 units of permanent supportive housing through the Rapid Housing Initiative,” and that the final 112 units came online in April.

But the city has not made any plans to address short-term rentals during the World Cup. When Next City/Shelterforce asked about short-term rentals and homeless policy, Michael Smith, deputy chief communications officer for Mayor Andre Dickens, declined to answer specific questions. “There are a number of independently verified sources, both local and national, that have covered the Administration’s work to provide supportive housing, case management, wraparound services and more for our unsheltered residents,” Smith wrote to Next City/Shelterforce instead.

Michael Collins, the director of Play Fair ATL, says that he has heard of people at rental assistance clinics whose leases were not renewed in the past few months.

“The landlord is suddenly not renewing the lease, and they believe it’s to make money during the World Cup,” Collins says.

Collins argues that the city’s entire World Cup planning process was conducted with an eye toward investment rather than toward protecting vulnerable people. He believes that the government’s role in preparing for the games has been minimal.

“The original sin [with] the World Cup in Atlanta is that the planning … is not done by [the] city government, it’s not done by the mayor’s office, it’s not done by the governor. The planning for the World Cup has been outsourced to the Chamber of Commerce,” Collins says.

The Metro Atlanta Chamber is one of eight partner groups on the city’s host committee, which includes the Atlanta Sports Council and the Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau. The Metro Atlanta Chamber Chair, Rich McKay, is the former CEO of the Atlanta Falcons and has spoken with CNBC about his role in preparing the city for the games.

The result, Collins says, is that the host committee has not focused on regulating short-term rentals.

“They’re not accountable to residents,” he says.

New York/New Jersey

In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and city council are fending off a push to weaken an existing short-term rental law, Local Law 18.

Enacted in 2022, the law requires short-term rental hosts to register before listing their rental on an online platform, limits rentals to primary residences and creates a list of prohibited buildings that cannot be listed on short-term rental sites. According to a report by the Mayor’s Office of Special Enforcement, the law successfully “eradicated” most of the city’s illegal short-term rental activity, leaving just 3,000 active registrations by September 2025.

But business lobbying groups such as the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce and Partnership for New York City, both of which count Airbnb as a member, have urged city council to roll back its restrictions.

A bill that would have allowed hosts in one- and two-family homes to rent out properties without being physically present at the residence during a reservation died in the New York City Council in December. Council members voiced their opposition to weakening short-term rental regulations in March.

Meanwhile, hotel demand during the World Cup is lower than predicted, according to The City Reporter.The outlet reports that hotel bookings are down year-over-year for June 13, when the first match at MetLife Stadium takes place.

In nearby New Jersey, the state is governed by a hodgepodge of short-term rental regulations; many municipalities have banned rentals of fewer than 30 days. According to Gothamist, 10 towns in New Jersey are in ZIP codes where hosts are eligible for a $750 World Cup bonus, despite local bans on short-term rentals.

Boston

Boston’s short-term rental ordinance, which took effect in 2019, requires hosts to register with the city and pay a $200 annual fee, mandates that the rental be the host’s primary residence and limits the number of guests.

Towns outside Boston, including Plainville and Foxborough, where Gillette Stadium will host the games, already have their own short-term rental bans in place.

Boston’s games are affecting the short-term rental market across New England. In Smithfield, where Ghana’s men’s team will be staying, the town council is debating a ban on short-term rentals, although it will likely not be in place in time for the World Cup games.

“Short-term rentals in general, not just specifically related to FIFA, have had a big impact … particularly in areas [such as] Newport and South County,” Brenda Clement, executive director of HousingWorks RI, tells Next City/Shelterforce.

“It’s not a bad thing to encourage all of this economic activity and excitement and interest, but when we do it in the context of a very tight housing market, it further exacerbates the problem,” Clement says.

Houston and Dallas

Texas is hosting 16 World Cup matches at the AT&T Stadium in Arlington and NRG Stadium in Houston.

Houston adopted a short-term rental ordinance in 2025 that took effect at the beginning of this year. It establishes a $275 annual fee for hosts to register with the city and operate legally.

A city database shows that just over 5,000 locations had been registered as of late May. The city also set up a website for neighbors to file complaints about short-term rentals, including complaints about noise or illegal rentals.

Airbnb donated $1.3 million to Houston ahead of the World Cup to support green space revitalization, repair the Columbia Tap Trail and fund youth soccer initiatives. It’s the largest tranche of the company’s $5 million payments to host cities.

In June 2023, Dallas passed two separate ordinances governing short-term rental regulations and zoning. The laws establish a process for registering a short-term rental with a $404 annual registration fee and legalizes rentals within the city’s zoning code while limiting their presence in some types of buildings. Enforcement was temporarily blocked by an injunction later that year after a lobbying group of short-term rental hosts sued. In October, the city appealed to the Texas Supreme Court for clarification of the rules before the World Cup.

Even with the injunction in place, the city can crack down on short-term rentals under existing property laws. During a May city council meeting, the city said it had recovered $5.5 million from short-term rental hosts who had failed to pay occupancy taxes dating back to 2020.

“We need to get it right instead of leaving it in litigation,” one legislator said at the council meeting, though nothing new has been introduced.

Kansas City

Kansas City, Missouri, passed a short-term rental ordinance in 2023. The law restricts short-term rentals by hosts who are not primary residents to commercially zoned neighborhoods and limits the number of short-term rentals in single-family homes and duplexes to one every 1,000 feet. Hosts must register with the city and pay a $200 fee.

In December 2025, the city passed an ordinance to encourage residents to open listings during the World Cup. The ordinance allows hosts to register their units in 90-day increments for a lower fee of $50 if it is determined that the city does not have enough lodging for a major event.

According to KCUR, about 400 hosts participated in the program.

Sponsored content from National CAPACD. Sponsored content policy

This piece is part of our Stories of Belonging series, which highlights people who have stepped up to protect their communities from displacement — of residents, small businesses, and the culture that makes a place home.

For most of the 20th century, St. Paul’s Rondo neighborhood was home to a thriving Black community. Tucked into St. Paul’s Summit-University district, Rondo’s religious institutions, community centers, and businesses comprised a neighborhood that served as a hub for Black culture, housing, and economic prosperity across the entire Twin Cities metropolitan area — until the 1950s and ‘60s. That’s when the government displaced roughly 650 families and wiped out businesses to construct Interstate 94, bisecting and decimating the beloved community in the process.

In 2006, when the Twin Cities’ Metropolitan Council decided to extend Minneapolis’ light rail to St. Paul via University Avenue, Va-Meng Thoj and other local business owners and community members were concerned, to say the least. Known as Little Mekong, a portion of St. Paul’s University Avenue near the Minnesota State Capitol serves as a cultural hub for the Twin Cities’ Southeast Asian community. After the Vietnam War, the U.S. government resettled the ethnic groups that partnered in the war efforts, and many refugees — Hmong, Lao, and Vietnamese — ended up in St. Paul. Amid lingering memories of what happened to Rondo, “many businesses, including Asian-owned businesses, felt that this was history repeating itself,” Thoj says.

So, in the years before Metro Transit’s Light Rail Green Line construction began in 2011, Thoj and others with an interest in preserving the community that connects them to their homelands got together. They decided that they would need to advocate for themselves to ensure that the project would benefit them and that any harm it caused would be actively mitigated.

“We were just a collection of small business owners coming together to make sure that our voices were heard,” Thoj recalls. In 2009, with construction looming, the group decided they needed to establish a formal organization to have as much leverage as possible. That’s when they became a formal nonprofit, calling themselves the Asian Economic Development Association, AEDA for short. Thoj is AEDA’s founder and CEO.

The Green Line was completed in 2013. The community’s advocacy, which included suing the federal government and pushing for more stops along the Green Line, ensured Little Mekong was not completely bypassed. Two rail line stops were added in the neighborhood.

Many businesses did perish during the construction, and those that survived are now facing higher rents as surrounding property values have increased. But, thanks in large part to AEDA’s efforts, Little Mekong survived — it still exists as a cultural destination for the Southeast Asian community and beyond. “What AEDA has achieved is really the recognition that the Southeast Asian commercial corridor is worth preserving,” Thoj reflects.

Today, some 16 years later, AEDA is still serving the metro area’s Southeast Asian community.

“We work with businesses that are under-capitalized by providing our own capital, leveraging the little amount of funding we have in the form of microloans, credit builder loans, and small grants so that they can access traditional capital,” Thoj explains. AEDA also provides entrepreneurs and small businesses with trainings that cover everything from business planning and operations to marketing, financial management, and recordkeeping, as well as one-on-one technical assistance. More than 300 Asian entrepreneurs have been supported by these services since 2018.

AEDA’s work has also focused heavily on creative placemaking — the organization was responsible for branding the Little Mekong area in the first place. Through efforts like improving storefront facades, creating public spaces and public art, organizing large night markets, and running a cafe and bookstore, AEDA ensures that Little Mekong continues to be the vibrant cultural corridor that it is.

The organization also runs the Little Mekong Night Market, an annual event that it touts as Minnesota’s largest summer street festival. In 2025, the market brought together more than 50 food, crafts, and merch vendors, and featured live performances and interactive art.

“These small business districts are really vital economically and culturally for their cities, providing important contributions that shape the local neighborhood fabric with unique identities and vibrant street activity. These communities are also immigrant gateways that provide opportunities for new and old immigrants to have housing they can afford and access to jobs and services,” explains Roy Chan, director of neighborhood and place-based strategies at National CAPACD, a nonprofit that supports a coalition of AAPI communities like AEDA across the country, chiefly those that are also low-income.

Through its Cultural Anchors program, National CAPACD offers members like AEDA the opportunity to connect with and learn from peer place-based organizations that advance comprehensive community development in Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities. “We are the conduit that provides the [opportunities for] learning so that members can learn best practices and lessons through engagement with each other,” Chan says.

The ability to come together, connect and learn, and move forward stronger that comes from the convenings has been particularly useful in the ICE era, during which AEDA members have been hit particularly hard in Minnesota.

After a few weeks, AEDA’s staff trained as constitutional observers and began working with organizers in the neighborhood to go door to door to talk to families and document what was happening to them. Xia, the bookstore-café, opened back up as a support center where protestors could make signs and where people — anyone — could gather in order to be in community during a trying time. AEDA also launched a $100,000 small business support fund to try to close the gap created by the loss of customers and revenue caused by the raids for 20 local businesses that kept countless immigrants afraid and inside their homes for months.

Thoj says that it’s going to take a long time for everyone, from immigrant businesses to the Twin Cities as a whole, to recover from the trauma they suffered (and are still suffering) from the brutal ICE raids they endured. But as they do, they’ll be able to share what they’ve gone through and what they’ve learned with other organizations in their Cultural Anchors cohort — a small silver lining shining through a dark chapter in this country’s history.

From surviving the displacement caused by major transportation projects that don’t adequately consider the communities they’re impacting to surviving the anti-immigrant violence of an authoritarian regime, value lies in survival itself. “Culture has an economic value,” Thoj says. “For many of us, we realize that as a given, but it’s hard to put into practice. So it has to be intentional — leveraging the arts and culture of your particular community to combat gentrification, to preserve your small businesses, or to just increase community identity and pride.”

The Bronx gave the world salsa. It gave the world hip-hop. Now the Bronx is staking its claim as the birthplace of a new economic development paradigm.

It’s a paradigm rooted in decades of organizing around projects like the Kingsbridge Armory and the former Lincoln Recovery Center, both of which will soon be transformed under hard-fought community ownership. It builds on what Bronx residents love about their borough — parks, culture, food — more often seen in headlines as the city’s poorest or sickest. It brings a renewed emphasis on local — in terms of ownership, hiring, and even financing.

Last weekend at the Andrew Freedman Home, steps from Yankee Stadium in the South Bronx, leaders from around the borough convened with counterparts from around the country to discuss that paradigm at the inaugural Bronx Economic Development Summit.

The gathering was part of a process to draft the Bronx’s first-ever Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy, or CEDS. Once finalized, the document will be submitted for acceptance to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration in order to unlock new federal funding streams.

CEDS drafting processes are usually led by local governments, economic development authorities, chambers of commerce and other more traditional economic development bodies — entities who often find themselves at odds with grassroots groups like the 5,000-member Our Bronx, who is co-leading the Bronx CEDS process along with the Bronx Economic Development Corporation.

The event’s organizers have come to see the CEDS as a way to bring broader legitimacy and hopefully some new funding sources in support of the economic development vision they’ve been shepherding for decades.

“One of the biggest challenges in this work is what can feel like at times, a divide between community-centered priorities and traditional economic development practice,” said Sandra Lobo, executive director at Our Bronx. “For many residents, the economy is rent, bills, job quality, safety, health, all the things that determine whether life is stable and affordable. For many professionals, the economy is growth, investment, development indicators. Our work…is to connect those realities into one cohesive set of strategies.”

The new Bronx CEDS appears to have buy-in from its local government, too. Bronx Borough President Vanessa Gibson provided welcoming remarks to open the proceedings. Mayor Zohran Mamdani showed up along with a bevy of local officials on the summit’s second day to pledge support for the plan and its priorities. Mamdani cited Our Bronx’s role in the Kingsbridge Armory redevelopment as “a model for how to keep the people of the Bronx in the driver’s seat.”

Working toward EDA funding

With the passage of the 1965 Public Works and Economic Development Act, Congress created the Economic Development Administration as a successor to the earlier Area Redevelopment Administration. Initially, the new agency focused on three types of regions: industrial areas that were behind in the adoption of new technology, degraded agricultural areas, and depleted mining areas.

The EDA started making grants, largely to local governments or their economic development arms, to support economic development planning as well as infrastructure to support new industry. Everything from new roads to expanding water and sewer systems, fiber-optic cable for broadband, harbor or port expansions, even business incubator facilities.

The EDA also makes grants for local governments to create revolving loan funds that provide access to capital for small businesses. According to the Urban Institute, the EDA makes an average of six revolving loan fund awards annually, with award amounts generally ranging from $800,000 to $1.4 million. There are currently more than 500 EDA-funded revolving loan funds across the country, holding more than $1.5 billion in assets.

The total amount of EDA funding has varied wildly since the agency’s inception. Over its first decade, it mostly hovered around $2 billion, peaking at more than $4 billion in 1976. From 1982 to 2019, its funding never cracked $1 billion.

Comprehensive regional economic plans have been a standard prerequisite for EDA funding from the agency’s very beginnings. In 1969, the EDA created its Economic Development Districts program to bring local governments together, sometimes across state lines, into regional planning bodies that made sense from an economic development perspective. There are over 400 designated districts across the country, including many across New York state, each with its own CEDS.

Just north of New York City, the Hudson Valley Regional Council manages an EDA Economic Development District covering seven counties. Next door in Connecticut, the Western Connecticut Council of Governments manages the Western Connecticut Economic Development District. New York City itself is not currently part of an EDA Economic Development District.

In some cases, CEDS get submitted to EDA for the purpose of opening the door to the agency’s other programs without the need for an Economic Development District designation when there aren’t multiple local governments to coordinate between. Brooklyn has submitted a CEDS to EDA going as far back as 1984 and as recently as 2017. Staten Island also submitted a CEDS to EDA back in 2005 and as recently as 2020. (In NYC, each of the five boroughs is its own county, which the EDA recognizes as a local jurisdiction for CEDS purposes.)

Over recent years, the EDA has provided $1.3 million for a small business recovery program in Brooklyn, $1.1 million to build out space in a city-owned building in Brooklyn for two biotech companies working on products related to Covid-19 treatment, and $2.4 million for a revolving loan fund managed by a Brooklyn-based nonprofit supporting small businesses in Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, the Bronx, the Hudson Valley and New Jersey.

In the wake of Covid-19, the Bronx Economic Development Corporation, a nonprofit not affiliated with local government, sought EDA funding to help recover from the pandemic’s lingering economic impacts as well as dealing with the instability of other federal funding streams for community development. But EDA officials explained they couldn’t access it without first submitting a CEDS.

That’s when the nonprofit turned to Our Bronx, a grassroots organization which had already spent years laying the groundwork for the community engagement plan that the CEDS process required.

A comprehensive plan for the Bronx

Back in 2019, the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition — today known as Our Bronx — helped form the Bronx-wide Coalition, a group of community, faith, and labor organizations from across the Bronx. Over the next four years, the coalition led a series of conversations with Bronx residents and business owners across the borough to generate ideas and priorities for community and economic development.

The result was the Bronx-Wide Plan, a first-of-its-kind comprehensive planning document for the Bronx.

Though the Bronx has a population of 1.4 million, there had been no official or unofficial comprehensive plan for the borough — nor is there for any of New York City’s other five boroughs, nor the city as a whole. New York is unusual in this regard; most states require local governments within their jurisdictions to have a periodically updated comprehensive or general plan as a guide for long-term infrastructure, housing and economic development. Cities of comparable population to the Bronx alone — including Philadelphia, San Antonio, Dallas, Phoenix, and San Diego — all have comprehensive or general plans.

The coalition’s idea was for the Bronx-Wide Plan to influence spending and investment priorities at every level of government and the private sector. Budget bills at all levels of government would start supporting projects cited in the plan. Banks of all sizes would start funding some of the plan’s sundry proposals or initiatives, demonstrating their compliance with the Community Reinvestment Act. Philanthropic foundations of all sizes will begin making grants and other investments directly in alignment with the plan, and they won’t be shy about seeking credit for doing so.

Some of the projects outlined in the Bronx-Wide Plan are now a reality, or on the way. There’s a new credit union branch in the South Bronx, operated by the Lower East Side People’s Federal Credit Union. The long-vacant Kingsbridge Armory has a new redevelopment plan approved by City Council that includes a historic community-ownership component as well as space for Our Bronx to incubate worker-owned cooperatives.

When the Bronx Economic Development Corporation turned to Our Bronx about forming a partnership in 2024, it all made perfect sense as a way to broaden the conversation and add legitimacy as a result of all the ideas they’d spent years hashing out gaining federal certification as a CEDS.

“We already had the civic infrastructure across all those sectors,” Lobo tells Next City. “I think people were excited about what it meant to expand the work that they were doing. The Bronx-Wide Coalition already had faith, community, and labor at the table, and now we had anchor institutions, we had educational institutions, finance. We had banks coming in and wanting to learn more and understand how they could partner.”

The new best practices

If last week’s summit was your introduction to economic development, you would be forgiven for thinking community control of land or worker-ownership of businesses were mainstream economic development across the country.

The conveners invited speakers from Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, and even as far as Oakland, California, to share their stories and exchange notes about the work they are doing in their communities. The parallels were endless; the conveners’ intent was to take a page out of the conventional advocacy playbook by showing that the community-controlled or worker-ownership approaches they’re championing in their CEDS also have champions elsewhere.

“We wanted to make sure that folks understood we weren’t inventing something, that we actually had really incredible models that were successful at scale in all different kinds of places across the country,” Lobo says.

“They are not fringe strategies. They’re actually sound, financially sustainable, and really important strategies to affordability and stability in the long run.”

In an opening keynote, Nneka Onwuzurike spoke about her time working at the City of Chicago, where she started out working for its Office of Equity & Racial Justice and eventually ended up as first deputy mayor for business and neighborhood development. During her tenure, Chicago made a $15 million commitment to “community wealth building,” providing grants to an array of community-controlled real estate projects, housing cooperatives, and worker-owned cooperatives.

To keep that work moving forward, Onwuzurike told attendees, the most important thing isn’t having the best data, developing the proper legal structure, or securing more funds. The most important thing is, still, relationships.

“What I’ve come to learn over time is that the most important infrastructure we are building isn’t a financial infrastructure or legal infrastructure, it is a people infrastructure,” Onwuzurike said. “Who are the entrepreneurs, who are the visionaries, who are the weavers and connectors, the storytellers and archives, the facilitators and mediators who are already in relationship with? And importantly, who have you not yet recruited into this work?”

In a breakout session on community-controlled real estate, Adriana Abizadeh-Barbour of Philadelphia’s Kensington Corridor Trust reflected on seeing real estate as more than just financial or commercial assets. As her organization continues to build on its already 32-property portfolio, its real mission starts to become clear.

“A lot of folks see us as real estate development, but we’re really a power organization,” Abizadeh-Barbour said. “Real estate is a tool, a commodity, and we want to decommodify land as a base for power. Those who have amassed land have amassed wealth, those who have amassed wealth have amassed power. We are building power to redesign systems that have been intentionally designed to cause harm.”

It’s a message that was also reflected by her co-panelist Noni Session of Oakland’s East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, whose project to revitalize the historic Esther’s Orbit Room as an anchor for a broader cultural corridor revival recently commenced gut renovations.

“Once we acquired Esther’s we started to feel the symbolic, economic, historical place it held in everyone’s imaginations,” Session said. “It’s become a vehicle for organizing.” While it’s at a far different scale, the Kingsbridge Armory has played a similar role as a tent-pole for organizing around community-control of real estate and economic development in the Bronx.

In another breakout panel, Onwuzurike went deeper into her experience supporting a nascent community wealth ecosystem in Chicago. She first credited the co-ops and community land trusts in that ecosystem, many of whom have organizing histories that go back long before her time in city government. Inviting them in to help shape the city’s community wealth building approach required getting used to discomfort as a public official.

“You have to come with a blank slate,” Onwuzurike said. “For me, I get a little anxious that I need to come with something for folks to react to, but in doing that it replicates the same harmful system. One of the most important things we did together was come up with a shared definition of community wealth building, what is it, and more importantly what it isn’t.”

Now, the definition they created collaboratively — “local democratic and shared ownership and control of community assets” — is being used by city agencies as well as foundations in announcing opportunities for funding or real estate development.

This story has been corrected to reflect that the Bronx Economic Development Corporation and Our Bronx began working toward a partnership in 2024, not last year.

New York City’s growing community land trust movement will hit a new milestone next month, as the East New York Community Land Trust is set to become the first in city history to purchase a commercial property off the private market.

The CLT will turn a vacant, two-story brick building into the “East Brooklyn Liberation Center,” a headquarters for the nonprofit with affordable office space for other local businesses and organizations.

The acquisition of this $2.3 million building puts New York City on the list of places where CLTs have transferred residential, commercial, and mixed-use property from the private market to the stewardship of local residents, joining the likes of St. Paul, Denver, and Oakland.

The East New York CLT works to preserve and expand affordable housing options in East New York and Brownsville, two working-class neighborhoods at the eastern edge of Brooklyn facing a rising affordability crisis and a wave of gentrification approaching from the west.

“Removing land from the speculative market is building power in the neighborhood,” says Boris Santos, the president of ENYCLT.

The nonprofit made waves in 2024 when it became the first New York City CLT to buy a multifamily apartment building off the private market. It’s currently converting the 20-unit building into a shared-equity housing cooperative.

The Liberation Center will allow it to achieve another central goal: not only keeping residents in the community, but increasing their economic stability and opportunities. The center will be designed to foster the growth of local businesses, nonprofits and worker cooperatives, Santos says.

The purchase was also necessary for the CLT itself, which had outgrown the coworking space it shares with another nonprofit. With almost 100 dues-paying members, meeting space was getting tight, Santos says.

“We are growing so fast, at such a tremendous pace, that we decided this space is not sufficient for us,” he says. The Liberation Center will let the nonprofit grow its base and its capacity to identify and purchase land.

“This community center will allow us to expand and go more full throttle on our work. You’ll be seeing us going after more and more buildings.”

ENYCLT borrowed its fundraising model from OakCLT, which has bought several mixed-use properties in Oakland, explains ENYCLT’s director, Hannah Anousheh.

ENYCLT secured over $1.5 million in low-interest loans from nonprofit lenders like the New Economy Loan Fund and The Working World; $250,000 in 0% interest investments from high-networth individuals; and is closing in on $800,000 in individual contributions. State Sen. Julia Salazar also committed $1 million to the project.

Public money moves slowly, though, so Santos’s team got creative with fundraising – even holding a dance party fundraiser at the Bushwick club Nowadays this spring.

A major milestone

Other CLTs in New York City have acquired property from the city itself. Cooper Square CLT acquired the land under 23 buildings in the Lower East Side in the 1990s and East Harlem El Barrio CLT purchased four buildings for $1 each in 2020. Some of these buildings contain commercial space, too.

But ENYCLT’s acquisition of a standalone commercial property off the market creates a model for how local CLTs can use collective land ownership to boost the local economy and increase economic opportunities, says Deyanira Del Rio, executive director of the New Economy Project. The organization coordinates the NYC Community Land Initiative, a coalition of New York CLTs and other mission-aligned organizations.

“It’s going to be a hub for cooperative economics and community wealth-building in a community that urgently needs it and has experienced waves of predatory lending, foreclosure, and rezoning,” Del Rio says. East New York and Brownsville, neighborhoods where Black and Hispanic residents make up over 80% of the population, have median household incomes far below the city average.

Recent city funding is making up for decades of underinvestment in these neighborhoods. A $146 million infrastructure project announced by the city last fall will connect the low-income Jewel Streets neighborhood to the city’s sewer system for the first time and fortify it against frequent floods — largely due to ENYCLT’s advocacy.

A 2016 rezoning created almost 6,500 affordable housing units, but much of it was built along one thoroughfare, and lots of recent construction had been on market-rate units, Santos says.

The Liberation Center, which Santos hopes will open within the next two years, could set a precedent for similar purchases by other New York CLTs soon, Del Rio says.

Western Queens CLT, formed out of the resistance to Amazon’s plan to build a headquarters in Long Island City in 2018, is submitting a plan to the city to reinvent the underutilized building offered to Amazon as the Queensboro People’s Space, a hub for local manufacturers, artists, vendors and even farmers.

“There’s been a real flourishing of this movement through policy and public and private funding support,” Del Rio says. “We’re going to see even bigger gains in the years to come.”

A new era for community ownership in NYC

The momentum reflects a resurgence of New York’s land trusts, which jumped from just two in lower Manhattan in 2012 to over 20 citywide today. This boom was partly spurred by the global financial crisis, when communities sought to protect local homes at risk of going into foreclosure, Del Rio explains.

ENYCLT itself formed at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when East New York’s housing crisis hit another peak, according to Santos.

The city’s CLT movements grew out of two eras of stark inequality — the late 1960s and the post-recession world, says John Surico, a Senior Fellow for Climate and Opportunity at the Center for an Urban Future.

As a “deeply flawed” housing market renders the city increasingly unaffordable, Surico foresees more CLTs and other local organizations springing up to reimagine housing and wealth generation in their community.

“There will have to be new forms of ownership, new forms of working and new forms of rethinking space,” he says. “A truly thriving city is one that has a diversity of ownership models.”

New York, home to one the country’s first CLTs in Cooper Square, fell behind other cities over the decades — but the tide is shifting, organizers and researchers say.

A culture of red tape is giving way to one of greater support for community land ownership, Surico says. “There’s an openness to having those conversations when before it was an immediate ‘no,’” he explains.

CLTs have secured millions in funding from the NYC City Council since 2019, and the new administration has expressed firm support for the movement.

The Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA), which would give qualified nonprofits an early bid on properties that hit the market, reached majority support in the city council shortly after being reintroduced last month. Mayor Mamdani has backed the legislation — which passed in December but was vetoed by his predecessor Eric Adams just before he left office — saying it is “about putting power back in the hands of the people.”

The mayor’s new housing plan, which announced a plan to create 200,000 units of affordable housing and preserve another 200,000 over the next decade, states a commitment to work with CLTs in advancing affordable and cooperative housing projects.

“We feel like we’re being heard by the mayor on many fronts when it comes to this plan,” Santos says, adding that he sees his organization’s work as a major driver behind these commitments.

“Without social movements, without that energy on the ground, there wouldn’t be any new policy.”

This story has been updated to clarify that some previous CLT acquisitions were not necessarily purchases and to correct that ENYCLT’s acquition is funded by the New Economy Project’s subsidiary loan fund.

This story was originally published by Stateline.

A growing number of incarcerated people across the country now have access to free phone calls and other communication services, a shift some advocates say is strengthening family connections, improving prison conditions and easing reentry after release.

A recent report from Worth Rises, a nonprofit that advocates in opposition to the prison industry, found that an estimated 330,000 incarcerated people nationwide now have access to free prison or jail communication services, including phone calls, video calls and electronic messaging in some jurisdictions.

For decades, incarcerated people and their families often paid steep rates for phone calls and other communication services through contracts between correctional facilities and private telecom providers. In recent years, several states and local governments have moved to make those services free, arguing that regular family contact can improve rehabilitation and reduce recidivism.

The group examined six prison systems — California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York and the federal prison system — along with more than a dozen county jail systems, including facilities in Los Angeles, New York City and across Massachusetts.

The researchers found that the free communication policies reduced average costs by about 62% for state prison systems and 68% for jails after agencies negotiated contracts directly with providers. The report’s authors argue that finding could make free calls an appealing cost-saving strategy for states and local governments.

The free communication policies have generated nearly 600 million additional phone calls and 6.4 billion more minutes of connection between incarcerated people and their loved ones, according to the group’s estimates. In prisons included in the study, average daily call use per person increased from about 25 minutes to nearly 45 minutes after communication became free. In jails, daily usage more than doubled, from roughly 27 minutes to nearly 57 minutes a day.

The report also found the policies have saved incarcerated people and their families more than $622 million to date. Most of those savings flowed to Black and brown families, who are disproportionately affected by incarceration, according to the report.

Correctional staff at the facilities included in the study broadly supported the changes, according to the report, describing free communication as a tool that reduced tensions inside facilities and improved safety for both staff and incarcerated people.

The report also found that removing the cost of calls changed the nature of communication between incarcerated people and their families. Instead of limiting conversations to urgent or financial matters, people were more able to maintain regular contact, help care for children, coordinate housing and employment plans, and prepare for release.

Cerianne Robertson spent years watching a city change as it prepared to host the Olympics. While living in Rio de Janeiro and working as a journalist, Robertson says she and her team saw the displacement happen. From 2014 to 2018, she reported on evictions that helped make way for the Olympic park and related transit infrastructure.

About 77,000 people were displaced from their homes — mostly in favelas — by the city government between 2009 and 2016, the year Rio hosted the Olympics. Robertson says while not all of the displacement was directly related to stadium builds or Olympic transit, there had been very few government-led evictions before 2009. Based on the work she and her team were doing, they understood most of those evictions as part of the city’s efforts to “clean” the city ahead of the Olympics and the World Cup, which took place there in 2014.

She mainly covered Vila Autódromo, a historic working-class favela that was almost entirely displaced from the edge of the Olympic park.

According to Robertson, the city didn’t want a favela visible next to the park. The mayor and the developers who donated to his campaigns wanted to use the Olympics as an opportunity to clear valuable land next to a lagoon for the development of luxury apartments.

While Robertson was in Rio, she received a call from a group of people based in Los Angeles looking to organize against the Olympics coming to their own city. They were hoping to learn from her and other organizers.

A decade later, Robertson, assistant professor of communications at Fordham University, is an organizer with that very coalition now called NOlympics LA. The coalition formed in 2017 and is now made up of more than 40 organizations. The coalition has one demand. They’re asking city officials to protect their residents from displacement and to stop Los Angeles from hosting the 2028 Olympic Games. And it’s not without reason.

While mega events have often been framed as bringing in revenue and opportunities to their host cities, the facts paint a very different picture. The New York Times reported that every Olympics since 1960 has run over budget, at an average of 172% in inflation-adjusted terms, according to an analysis by researchers at Oxford University. After the Rio 2016 games, the city was left with a debt that began at $32 million and culminated in $113 million. Organizers in Paris, Tokyo, and Brazil have been sounding the alarm on the tremendous displacement and harm caused by the mega events that severely impacted the low-income and working-class people within their communities.

In Los Angeles, which is one of 11 U.S. cities hosting the World Cup games this month, residents are already being displaced as new short-term rental laws go into effect. Airbnb, one of the official Olympic sponsors, is offering $750 direct cash incentives for people to become short-term rental hosts for the World Cup.

An Airbnb-backed campaign pushing hard for short-term rental exemptions has nearly gone into effect in preparation for the games. Additionally, state bill AB 1953, which would impact all jurisdictions across California, was introduced in February and would affect current short-term rental regulations by restricting them for two specific scenarios. One scenario is a special event period, which, according to organizers from NOlympics LA, is very loosely defined, but includes events like the Olympics or World Cup. Ultimately, the policy would incentivize building owners to disavow lease agreements before 2028 in areas surrounding where the games will be held so that landlords can instead charge much higher rates for shorter increments of time.

The second scenario for exemptions is during a declared state of emergency, like when California endured extreme wildfires last year.

For example, landlords could charge the same rate they charge current tenants for monthly rent for just 1 to 2 nights, according to Chris Tyler, communications manager at Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE) and member of NOlympics LA.

In a city where decades-old political choices have led to a massive housing crisis and the average housing takes nearly five years to complete, it’s no wonder that Los Angeles organizers are seriously concerned.

Residents of Inglewood, a majority Black and Latino area where SoFi Stadium is located and where the Olympics and World Cup will be held, are particularly vulnerable to displacement, given that property owners are being incentivized to terminate their leases and push out long-term residents.

According to Tyler, Los Angeles quietly signed a contract with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to host the Olympics within 11 days of the contract release. The contract states Los Angeles is responsible for any Olympics-related debt that has been accounted for, which could cover a host of casualties like delays due to weather.

The contract creates a financial liability structure where the city covers the first $270 million in cost overruns, followed by the state of California covering the next $270 million, with the city liable for any amount beyond that. A February 2026 report by SAJE breaks down several major expenses the contract doesn’t account for, including city staffing and service overcharges, enhanced city resources (overtime for police, sanitation workers, etc.), increased need for sanitation, street cleanup, and trash collection, and city staff time devoted to executing the Games, which is described as an “implied agreement.”

According to Tyler, the city could end up having to cover more than $6 billion in expenses and possibly even more.

So, is that cause to cancel the games? Some argue it is. And cities have canceled these types of mega events because of costs in the recent past.

After realizing the 2026 Commonwealth Games, another international multi-sport event, would cost about $4.8 billion, Victoria, Australia, decided to terminate its contract with the Commonwealth Games Federation. Other cities have previously withdrawn their bids to host the Olympics because of the expensive bill the games force onto cities.

“I think it’s possible to cancel the Olympics. The city council could theoretically turn around tomorrow and just do it…,” Robertson says, referring to a decision Victoria, Australia made in 2023 to pull out of hosting the 2026 games after realizing how much it would cost its citizens.

“The political leaders there realized that it wasn’t worth it… So there is a model. It is possible. Whether there’s political will to do so is a whole other question,” Robertson continues.

The work Robertson and others have done has already affected history, as the NOlympics LA just might be the longest-running anti-Olympics coalition among a host of transnational coalitions given its decade-long stint and continued commitment to Angelenos.

While organizing against mega events is not new, its becoming a transnational movement is, and Robertson has been there to see that evolution firsthand. NOlympics LA is a part of a growing transnational movement called NOlympics Anywhere. Robertson attributes a lot of the work done by NOlympics LA to building on the work done by organizers from previous Olympic cities.

And while they’ve all done important organizing, the movement of the games makes it difficult to build even more momentum.

“I think the challenge has been that this work has been done often on a local scale, for many years now. The problem is that because the Olympics picks up and moves to a new city, people often start from scratch, especially when the bid is happening, and there’s not a ton of transparency,” says Robertson.

Additionally, it has been widely reported that mega games lead to an increase in surveillance and policing. The federal administration’s continued attacks on immigrant communities, which made up about 35% of the population of LA County in 2021, put their residents at even higher risk of displacement.

In the midst of this reality, “the city is planning on using public dollars to host a giant corporation party,” says Tyler.

The Olympics are also expected to impact traffic.

According to Tyler from SAJE, the games were originally pitched as “car-free” Olympics and that has now become “transit-first” Olympics. And Metro CEO Stephanie Wiggins told ABC7, “Being car-free, you will not be able to drive as a spectator to any of the venues. You have to take transit, walk, bicycle or get dropped off.”

The transit-first plan relies heavily on busing and doubling the size of Los Angeles’s current bus fleet, says Tyler.

But the transit agency is still waiting on $2 billion from the Trump administration to acquire additional buses, and Uber remains the official Olympic partner for “rideshare, bikes, scooters and delivery.”

According to Tyler, lay people will not be able to approach the venues in a car, and anybody who does will most likely be scanned by the Department of Homeland Security before entering the perimeter. There is no transit plan without more policing and invasive searching — and those plans are growing more intense, says Tyler.

“What is the price we’re going to have to pay to the Trump administration to make this deal happen? It does feel like we’re being held hostage,” says Tyler.

Meanwhile, the Olympic organizers, also known as LA28, have promised a build-free, car-free, environmentally conscious plan that would be transparent and accessible. According to city council officials and the NOlympics LA, that has been far from the reality, and the consequences are already impacting residents.

And the LA City Council has voted to fast-track development for temporary structures for the 2028 games, which will include bathrooms, training facilities, media centers, fan zones, and more. And the city has built three new stadiums since it became the official host city for the 2028 Olympics.

Robertson, the mega events researcher, argues that while these stadiums, which were built in the last five years, were not directly a result of the Olympic 2028 contract, they are part of a larger goal to ensure Los Angeles is mega-event ready at the drop of a hat.

She says there’s a claim that Los Angeles didn’t need to build anything, and technically that was probably true.

“But the Olympics are always seized upon by developers as an excuse to build something… That’s kind of the point for when cities bid for these mega events,” Robertson says. “It’s not just about saying we technically have what we need. They want to shine, they want to dazzle. They want the latest technology, the latest infrastructure, and that’s what’s driving what we’re seeing.”

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.

This story was produced with support from the Solutions Journalism Network’s How Government Responds Innovation Fund.

I’m on a tree-lined street in Lincoln Park, a city in Metro Detroit, studying a curb ramp — the part of the sidewalk that slopes down to meet the street at an intersection so that someone using a wheelchair can safely cross. I mark the ramp “good” and move on.

Psych! I’m not in Lincoln Park. I’m labeling and rating sidewalks from the comfort of my own couch in L.A. using Project Sidewalk, an online crowdsourcing platform dedicated to improving sidewalk accessibility.

Part immersive video game, part educational tool, Project Sidewalk allows people around the world to navigate down virtual streets using Google Maps Street View imagery, cataloging broken sidewalks, missing curb ramps, and faded crosswalks. That crowdsourced data, in turn, can feed powerful AI tools to detect and catalog sidewalk issues automatically.

Founded in 2012, Project Sidewalk was created to solve a fundamental problem: Cities don’t know the condition of their sidewalks. This spells disaster for pedestrians, especially people with disabilities.

The goal was initially to map every sidewalk, everywhere, all at once — but that’s shifted over the years.

“AI has never been better,” says Jon Froehlich, Project Sidewalk co-founder and professor of computer science at the University of Washington. “It’s certainly not good enough as an expert evaluator, and it most certainly can’t capture the perspective of lived experience.”

Instead, Project Sidewalk has become a powerful tool for community engagement and grassroots political action on the local level.

Starting in 2021, Girl Scouts and community members in Oradell, New Jersey, mapped nearly 36 miles and identified over 11,000 potential sidewalk issues. The Scouts then presented their findings to the city council, advocating for adding missing curb ramps to improve accessibility.

Mapping sidewalks is hard but machine learning has shown great promise on one front: finding curb ramps. A recent mapping attempt found that a new ramp detection tool was more accurate than humans at 96.9% in Vancouver, Washington.

However, AI is not as good at finding things that are caused by nature, like sidewalk uplifts from tree roots, says Froehlich.

Where the sidewalk data ends

Many sidewalks in the U.S. are either missing or broken — but so is available sidewalk data. Part of this is due to a fear of liability, experts say.

If someone trips and falls due to a crack in the sidewalk and can prove that the city knew about the issue, could that mean an expensive payout in the case of a lawsuit?

“If only we had a nickel,” jokes Froehlich about the number of times he’s heard this.

To combat this fear, the Great Lakes ADA Center published a story map about ADA lawsuits. Part of the problem, says Yochai Eisenberg, site lead for Project Sidewalk at the University of Illinois Chicago and co-author of the report, is the lack of clear guidance from the federal government. Despite this, he believes data is an asset, not a liability.

“Having data, having a plan, making progress towards that plan is just the clearest way to defend against any lawsuit,” he says.

In fact, cities are required to develop and maintain an up-to-date ADA transition plan showing how they will make streets and sidewalks accessible to people with disabilities. Unfortunately, very few cities have a compliant transition plan.

Instead of being driven by data, sidewalk improvements are often driven by complaints. But with a dual approach of crowd-sourced data and community engagement, some cities have won infrastructure dollars to improve accessibility.

In Mendota, Illinois, community members, including middle and high school students, mapped streets and won $3 million in grant funding.

“They’re an older city, they had a lot of missing sidewalks, a lot of missing curb ramps,” Eisenberg says. “So it was clear why they could make a clear case about why the funding was needed for receiving that grant.”

Sidewalk data alone isn’t enough to fix broken sidewalks, but without it, it’s impossible to do so equitably, believes Laura Messier, a researcher studying the relationship between public health and the public-right-of-way. (Froehlich is a member of her dissertation committee.)

“The inventorying of the sidewalks could very much show people, ‘Yes, we are moving toward improving these conditions,’” she says. “But again, only if combined with actual money and actual action.”

Compared to roads, sidewalks have historically been underfunded and treated as secondary transportation infrastructure. Many people are surprised to learn that sidewalk maintenance is often the responsibility of the adjacent property owner, further fragmenting governance of the public-right-of-way.

“Someone is also going to have to coordinate them and basically force them to do that work, because they’re not going to do it on their own,” Messier says. “It just seems, on its face, insane.”

Where control of the sidewalk ends

In Denver, voters passed a 2022 ballot measure for a special fee to fund sidewalks.

“For the first time, sidewalks will function more like streets, with ongoing citywide care, consistent standards, and dedicated funding,” reads the sidewalk program’s website.

To Messier, the path to better sidewalks lies in cities taking ownership of sidewalks as public space. This shift, from property owner discretion to public asset is long overdue — but not everyone wants sidewalks.

“In my own experience in Dallas, I definitely talked to people who did not want sidewalks in front of their house, because there was this perception of, ‘You’re inviting the public in,’” Messier says.

In Seattle, Froehlich was surprised to find that one of the wealthiest neighborhoods has very poor infrastructure.

“They have sidewalks on both sides of the street, but not a lot of curb ramps,” he says. “I don’t know if that’s a measure of closing off that peninsula because they already feel a little insular.”

The future of better sidewalks might be the next generation. An eighth grade student in Waltham, Massachusetts, told his teacher about Project Sidewalk and the entire class is now mapping sidewalks as a civics project. So far students have mapped nearly 18 miles or about 12% of the city’s sidewalks.

KiAnna Mckee-Steen, project coordinator for the University of Illinois Chicago, is developing K-12 curriculum for Project Sidewalk and has witnessed firsthand how it’s changed how students view the world.

“This wasn’t an issue that I was aware of growing up,” Mckee-Steen says. “I had streets that had sidewalks, I had streets that didn’t have sidewalks, but we just walked in the street. I didn’t realize how much people were impacted that couldn’t move like me.”

Sponsored content from The Culture & Community Power Fund. Sponsored content policy

This sponsored series is created in partnership with The Culture & Community Power Fund (C&CPF), a national funders’ collaborative advancing the role of culture in building identity, agency, and collective power. This series explores the cultural ecosystem—the traditions, stories, rituals, and spaces that sustain frontline communities—and what it takes to support and strengthen it. Read the complete series.

The Assembly of Black Possibilities gathered practitioners of solidarity economics in Chicago last September to discuss ways to put money and resources into the hands of communities harmed by white supremacy—with the belief that communities know best what they need.

And it was another chance to come together for member organizations of The Culture & Community Power Fund, a national funders’ collaborative that supports organizations working on the front lines of communities impacted by systemic oppression. C&CPF sends these organizations unrestricted, flexible gifts that they can distribute within the community as they see fit.

Walking into the reception with big smiles on their faces, one participant, Cierra Peters from the Boston Ujima Project, screamed and ran to hug another woman, LaShaunda Pickett-Renee, the chief equity and executive officer of Ashé Cultural Arts Center in New Orleans. Practitioners from more than six cities laughed, swapped stories, finished each other’s sentences, and got fired up for the next day’s presentations at The Assembly of Black Possibilities. That everyone was having a great time was a testament to the joy that has emerged from these partnerships.

The partner organizations don’t just work within their own communities; they also learn from each other. Erik Takeshita, director of C&CPF, calls this “translocal learning”—a self-directed practice in which organizations use C&CPF funds to visit one another’s neighborhoods, bring community members along, and exchange ideas in ways that feel authentic and reciprocal.

“Community power isn’t built and effectuated by a single organization,” says Takeshita. “It’s actually a whole ecosystem. Philanthropy has pitted folks against each other. We’ve tried to turn that upside down.”

Since its founding, The Culture & Community Power Fund has invested in a series of community organizations, including more than $8 million in unrestricted gifts to six long-term partner organizations: Boston Ujima Project, Ashé Cultural Arts Center in New Orleans, Northend Christian CDC in Detroit, Center for Transforming Communities in Memphis, The Village of Arts and Humanities in Philadelphia, and Asian Arts Initiative in Philadelphia.

These organizations distribute funds to their communities through localized grants and awards, property purchases for affordable housing or arts spaces, community land trusts, and other investments that strategically empower communities to grow from within. And they’re sharing what they learn along the way.

The Center for Transforming Communities in Memphis, for example, adopted a framework called Measuring Love for its surveys to understand, in residents’ own words, what their community actually needs. The feedback the surveys gather informs a number of projects, including efforts to expand affordable housing.

“This qualitative data is the difference between traditional affordable housing and what we hope will be one of the largest land trusts in the country,” says Center for Transforming Communities executive director Justin Merrick. “We’re using Measuring Love to help people understand why this modality is so critical for resident voices in how we develop the city.”

Measuring Love is going beyond a Memphis experiment. As partners visit one another’s neighborhoods, organizers from Boston, Detroit, and New Orleans have sat with the Center for Transforming Communities to hear how the framework is reshaping land trust and anti-displacement work on the ground.

As they deepen relationships, a theme that has emerged across these organizations is that building community power requires residents to have an ownership stake in the places where they live. Achieving that requires permanent, structural change.

Northend Christian CDC in Detroit has directly addressed its local food desert by establishing a farm, a land trust, and a food cooperative. “We are one of four partners who formed the Black Farmer Land Fund, designed to raise money to pay Black and brown growers to purchase land and any technical assistance they may need to expand their work,” says Natosha Tallman, program director for Northend CDC.

Art, too, is a vehicle for community ownership. The spaces held by Ashé Cultural Arts Center, Village Arts, Asian Arts Initiative, and Boston Ujima Project are not just cultural anchors, they are claims on place.

“We can talk about art as a strategy for claiming space and practicing freedom,” says Peters, the director of communications, culture and enfranchisement for Boston Ujima Project. “It’s what keeps our work human—connected to our senses and our somas.”

When C&CPF funds travel between organizations, it isn’t just staff who go. Community members come along too. “The Village brought a delegation down to New Orleans, or the New Orleans folks brought a group of people up to Detroit,” says Takeshita.

The result is a network that is at once deeply local and genuinely national. The organizations are rooted in place, but reaching toward each other.

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.

The latest addition to Seattle’s already impressive public transit system opened to great fanfare this spring when more than 200,000 people rode the Crosslake Connection light rail line.

Its March 28 debut was second only to the parade that followed the Seahawks’ Super Bowl victory as Sound Transit’s busiest day ever. Trains now glide across Lake Washington on what is believed to be the world’s first electric rail line that spans a floating bridge, linking the city with Bellevue and Redmond, and doubling the frequency of stops in the heart of Emerald City.

Those same tracks will carry tens of thousands of fans downtown to Lumen Field for the six World Cup matches the city will host between June 15 and July 6. Kirk Hovenkotter, who leads the transit advocacy organization Transportation Choices Coalition, has no doubt that Seattle’s sustained commitment to public transit helped it become a host city.

This summer’s spotlight follows an earlier snub. When the World Cup came to the United States in 1994, Seattle hoped to host matches at Husky Stadium but came away empty-handed.

In the 32 years since, the metropolitan area has grown from 2.5 million people to more than four million. Its transportation infrastructure has boomed as well. Steady investment that began with voter approval of the Sound Move transit package in 1996 helped launch light rail in 2008 and turn Seattle into one of the country’s most ambitious builders of public transit. This summer’s World Cup became the deadline for opening the Crosslake Connection.

“Our region hasn’t been preparing for the World Cup for 18 months,” Hovenkotter said. “It’s been preparing for 18 years.”

Seattle is one of 16 cities, 11 of them in the U.S., that will host matches in a tournament FIFA, the sports’ sanctioning body, expects to draw more than five million fans. Several are using the event as an opportunity to open rail lines, redesign bus networks, and make other changes that will benefit residents long after the final match. Some cities used the tournament as a deadline. In others, it helped build support for projects or push delayed efforts over the goal line.

These investments come as rail and bus systems nationwide continue recovering from the steep ridership decline sparked by the pandemic while confronting aging infrastructure and a dire financial outlook. In a country that is less supportive of mass transit than other nations, the World Cup has become an unusual catalyst for change.

Plenty of stadiums remain disconnected from public transportation, of course. But what’s happening in places like Seattle and Atlanta shows that a mega-event like the World Cup can strengthen transit systems — if the investment starts long before kick-off.

The World Cup’s infrastructure legacy has often been more cautionary than celebratory. Past tournaments have raised questions not only about human rights violations and environmental harm, but about whether host cities deliver the public benefits they promise. Brazil and South Africa, for example, failed to fulfill the mass transit commitments they made.

Such disappointments often reflect a broader problem: Host cities plan first for the event, then for the people who live there, said Simon Kuper, who wrote World Cup Fever and has attended nine World Cups. He likens it to hosting a wedding. “Let’s say it’s at the house,” he said. “You paint the house, you fix the toilet, you fix the door that wasn’t working, you redo the kitchen.”

But the transit needs of 80,000 fans differ from those of residents. “You risk overinvesting in the route to the stadium and not in what makes residents’ lives better every day.”

Seattle followed a different plan. The $1 billion Crosslake Connection was not built for the World Cup –– the money came from a funding package voters approved in 2008, 14 years before Seattle’s selection as host city –– but Sound Transit used it as a deadline for finishing a project that was three years behind schedule.

“It was like, ‘We’re going to do everything. We’re going to move heaven and earth. We’re going to be working every shift to make sure that when the world is here, our flagship bridge and our double capacity are ready to run passengers,’ and they were,” said Henry Bendon, a public information officer with the agency.

Building infrastructure matters, but so does helping people use it. Brian McCullough, who lived in Seattle from 2014 until 2020 and is now an associate professor of sport management at the University of Michigan, said communication will be key to the system’s success.

Here, too, Seattle has a blueprint. When it hosted the 2018 Special Olympics USA Games, McCullough helped with a campaign encouraging athletes, coaches, and caretakers to use alternative transportation. The plan included providing them with free rides on the city’s expansive light rail system. It worked: Initially, 78 percent of participants planned to rent a car, but in the end, only 7 percent did. Sound Transit has an extensive messaging campaign geared toward soccer fans, including signage in the languages of the countries playing in Seattle.

That lesson is shaping preparations for the World Cup that could further benefit residents, too. Sound Transit expanded its airport bus service to provide 24-hour rides to and from Seattle. The Legislature funded an intercity bus between Pasco, a city in the state’s rapidly growing southwestern corner that is hosting a tournament event, and Spokane, which is hosting an Egyptian team with one of the sport’s biggest stars. It also increased frequency on other routes throughout the state. Hovenkotter hopes those improvements are here to stay.

“It’s going to be hard to disinvest in this once these start running and people start benefiting from it,” he said.

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.

Colorado Becomes First State To Enable Artist Corporations

A bill signed by Colorado Gov. Jared Polis creates a new LLC-like corporate classification designed specifically for artists and creatives, called an A-Corp or Colorado Artist Companies, The Colorado Sun reports.

Under the A-Corp classification, artists retain 51% shares in companies and the power of outside investors to control the company’s operations is limited. It also allows artists to receive shares in the company by creating art for the company rather than issuing capital.

According to the Sun, “artistic work licensed to the A Corp can never be transferred to nonartist investors or third parties.” It’s an intellectual property structure that runs counter to the work-for-hire norm that has governed most creative industries.

The business structure, originally envisioned by Kickstarter founder Yancey Strickler, has not yet been adopted by any other states but is reportedly being closely watched by other lawmakers and arts advocacy groups.

Small Georgia Town’s ICE Lawsuit Could Set Legal Precedent

The Trump-voting town of Social Circle, Georgia, is taking the Trump administration to court over plans to convert a warehouse into one of the country’s biggest immigration detention centers. Legal experts tell The Guardian its approach could have broad implications.

The lawsuit is reportedly the first filed by a local jurisdiction rather than a state attorney general — and it’s coming from a town where nearly 75% of residents voted for Trump. The lawsuit, filed last month, goes beyond similar cases which have challenged the detention centers on environmental review grounds under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Social Circle’s complaint also invokes the federal Administrative Procedures Act, which requires federal agencies to engage in reasoned decision-making, and Georgia’s public nuisance law, arguing that the facility would harm residents’ health, safety, and wellbeing. Social Circle has about 5,000 residents; the proposed detention center would triple that population, straining drinking water, sewage, and emergency services.

Legal experts say the combination of claims is notable. “This can frame placing these facilities in these towns in a different way,” Timothy Lytton, a law professor at Georgia State University, told The Guardian.

Upset in Los Angeles City Attorney Race

California Department of Justice Deputy Attorney General Marissa Roy has so far garnered the most votes in a race to become the next Los Angeles city attorney. She is followed by police union-backed candidate John McKinney – which means the two will progress to a runoff election in November and that current city attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto has been ousted.

Roy — whose endorsements include a broad coalition of 28 labor unions, a YIMBY group, the L.A. chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, and Jane Fonda’s climate PAC – told L.A. Focus that she would use the office to sue the Trump administration and ICE, expand wage theft lawsuits and stop illegal evictions.

She also criticized Soto for driving up the city’s liability costs: The city is expected to pay $320 million in various settlements this year. Soto was also criticized immediately after last year’s wildfires for not prosecuting more landlords for price-gouging.

In other closely-watched California elections: Karen Bass will either face right-wing reality TV star Spencer Pratt or DSA member Nithya Rahman in the general election. The governor’s race is still up for grabs, with Republican Steve Hilton and Democrats Xavier Becerra and Tom Steyer all in contention for two slots of November’s general election.

Report Indicates Limited NYC Rent Freeze Risk

A Moody’s report looked at 481 loan products covering buildings in New York City’s rent-stabilized portfolio and found that only 6% of landlords would face default as a result of a five-year rent freeze.

The report concluded that some landlords would be able to pay their mortgages by raising rents on market-rate apartment buildings and that others were solvent. Many landlords of rent-stabilized buildings in New York City purchased them with loans that could only be repaid through deregulation, something that became more difficult after 2019’s rent laws.

The analysis specifically looked at mortgage-backed securities, or housing debt bundled together and sold on the market as an investment. Landlord lobbies had previously argued that many apartment buildings are debt-burdened and would be underwater if a rent freeze went into effect.

Report Endorses Spokane Land Value Tax

A new report from the Center for Land Economics looks at the viability of a land value tax in Spokane, Washington, where $1 billion worth of land is currently undeveloped. Land value taxes propose higher taxes for underdeveloped vacant land in order to incentivize development and curb speculation.

Because Washington state law prohibits land from being taxed at a different rate as buildings, legislators have crafted a workaround that would exempt buildings from tax collection while taxing both land and buildings at an overall higher rate.

According to the report, this approach would lead to an overall 4% tax decrease for single-family home owners, 10% decrease for large multifamily apartment buildings and would increase vacant land and parking lot taxes by 110%. So, a good thing.

MORE NEWS

• Thanks to two new laws, more Virginians can save with community solar. Canary Media

• Israel kills 11 in strikes on Gaza; Hezbollah rejects “illusory” ceasefire as Israeli assault continues; House passes war powers resolution. Dropsite

• 15,700 zombie storefronts sit empty across NYC, new report says. The City Reporter

• Mexico City raises requirements for urban projects. BNamericas

• California makes controversial change to cap-and-invest program. Canary Media

• After the Trump DOJ halted police reform, Louisville stepped in. Then officers shot and killed Katelyn Hall. ProPublica

• Vancouver unveils its World Cup human rights plan. and gets blasted. The Tyee

• Advocate says Northern Illinois Transit Authority Act, now in effect, will improve transit around Chicago area. CBS Chicago

OPPORTUNITIES & RESOURCES

• Arbor Rising is seeking to support nonprofits building pathways out of poverty, particularly in education and job training. Grantees will receive $125,000 in unrestricted funds plus capacity-building consulting. Submit a letter of interest by June 9.

• The Decolonizing Wealth Project is accepting applications for its Indigenous Earth Fund, which supports advocacy campaigns and movement-building efforts that center Indigenous solutions to the climate crisis. Apply by June 11.

• Envision Resilience is opening applications for its National Design Studio Grant for schools running design studios focused on community-centered approaches to climate challenges. Apply by June 19.

The Citi Foundation has announced a $20 million request for proposals to support nonprofit affordable housing development in certain counties in California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Virginia, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, South Dakota, and Connecticut. Submit letters of interest by July 1.

This story was produced in partnership with Technical.ly, a news organization that reports on local innovation economies in the United States, through the Philadelphia Journalism Collaborative.

Across the U.S., mayors and city councils have been making bold promises to solve the urban housing crisis. In Philadelphia, Mayor Cherelle Parker is looking to modular building as an essential part of her plan.

Parker’s ambitious $2 billion Housing Opportunities Made Easy (H.O.M.E.) initiative set out to create 30,000 affordable units across Philadelphia through restoration and construction. But her administration faces the same challenges that have hit cities across the country, from Los Angeles to Maine.

Building material costs have climbed more than 41% since the pandemic began. Tariff and supply chain disruptions added thousands to the price tag. The construction industry faces a shortage of roughly 350,000 workers.

To make H.O.M.E. happen in this environment, the city is looking beyond conventional options.

“It needs to be all of the above: union, non-union, modular, panelized, 3D printed — all of the above,” says Tom Hardiman, executive director of the Modular Building Institute and the Modular Home Builders Association. “If we do that, I think we can, collaboratively, build a lot more housing than we can if we each try to compete with each other.”

Traditionally, single-family homes are “stick built,” with workers constructing the building on site, piece by piece. With modular construction, homes are built off-site in a factory — either as entire “volumetric” boxes or large “flat-pack” panels — then shipped to their final location for assembly.

Some companies are experimenting with 3D printing — using large-scale printers to extrude layers of concrete or other materials to form walls and structural elements — and robotic construction, seeking to automate some of the most labor-intensive steps in the building process.

Each approach promises to shorten timelines, reduce waste, and ease the strain on a shrinking workforce. None is a silver bullet.

​​Arica Young, director of Housing Access and Affordability at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and a Philadelphia native, notes that leveraging these new techniques requires intentional forethought.

“You can’t use the same planning mechanisms for modular or manufactured housing that you do for site-built. They are two completely different systems that have different requirements,” Young says.

A modular home isn’t automatically an affordable one. Elements such as design, inspection approvals, utilities and land acquisition and remediation must be pre-aligned to ensure the process moves forward. “So, if you don’t know that, and you go in to use modular or manufactured,” she says, “you might find it actually costs you more. Because you haven’t been able to optimize the efficiencies there.”

A modular housing factory in North Philly?

Mayor Parker’s proposed 2027 budget, introduced in March, includes $10 million designated for modular building. It is the only technology the city has specifically identified as part of its campaign, in part because it’s a relatively well-established option. Other developers and public housing agencies around the country have successfully constructed affordable and below-market rate housing using these techniques, passing their cost savings onto tenants.

Building houses in a factory offers the cost efficiencies and waste reduction of buying and producing in bulk. It also removes interruptions created by weather, and in turn decreases costs from a shortened construction timeline.

An Urban Institute analysis found that modular single-family homes could be built about two months faster than traditional, stick-built homes, as of 2023. About 20% of new modular-built homes sold for less than $300,000, as compared with about 14% percent of stick-built homes.

“We can dramatically increase the supply of housing much quicker than conventional construction,” says Hardiman, of the Modular Building Institute. “That plays into the market dynamics: more supply … your costs are going to bend downward.”

Volumetric Building Companies is one Philadelphia-based modular developer that has already built several market-rate apartment buildings, including SOLO on Chestnut at 43rd Street in West Philly — where they estimated saving a year’s worth of construction time — as well as a 324-unit student housing facility near Temple University in North Philly.

In 2023, the company completed construction of Veteran’s Village, a 47-unit apartment building in Philly’s Frankford neighborhood, developed with the VBC Giving Foundation to provide affordable homes for veterans experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity. Modular construction meant it took 14 months and $6 million to build, which the developer says is “only a third of the typical budget for similar projects.”

The modular housing industry is expected to grow 7.8% annually through 2030, according to a market analysis report by Grandview Research. Volumetric building currently accounts for slightly above 5% of new construction, per Hardiman.

Depending on size, land cost and equipment type, building a modular factory can cost at least $10-50 million, he said. Philly’s budgeted $10 million “may be used for site preparation and utility and infrastructural improvements for a modular housing factory and/or the development of modular housing on publicly owned land,” Jamila Davis, the communications supervisor for the Department of Planning and Development, told Next City and Technical.ly.

There are already 17 volumetric modular factories located within 200 miles of Philadelphia. That’s roughly the distance for distribution before transportation costs become excessive, according to Young, of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Philly is considering building another one, perhaps right in the middle of the city.

Per Davis, officials are currently reviewing responses to a March request for information to construct such a factory, or multiple ones. The administration is eyeing the 35-acre Logan Triangle in North Philadelphia as a potential factory site. The city previously demolished nearly 1,000 homes there after they were found to be sinking into the ground.

Young expressed concerns about the location, where remediation has been off and on for decades.

“It’s a great location in terms of transportation, but what worries me is the land itself,” she says. “I wonder, does the time it takes to remediate and make that a safe location to put a factory negate your ability to actually produce houses fast enough? … Don’t get me wrong — everywhere you would put it, it’s going to need some kind of remediation. But that site to me seems exceedingly problematic.”

Then there’s the question of speed. Parker’s administration has pledged to build 13,000 new homes before her first term expires at the end of 2027.

Rachel Siegel, a senior officer on the Housing Policy Initiative at the Pew Charitable Trust, believes it could therefore be beneficial to utilize the existing factories, possibly creating a pilot program to determine whether modular is a good solution to Philadelphia’s housing shortage.

“It’s reasonable to start with what exists already,” Siegel says. “If this needs to get started sooner, if there are other factories out there that could be leveraged.”

The promise of construction jobs — of a different kind

Building a modular construction factory locally would check off H.O.M.E. initiative’s box for creating jobs for Philadelphians — jobs that Parker has been adamant will be union positions.

“The Building Trades are gonna do the work,” Parker said at a press conference launching the initiative last February, referring to the umbrella group of more than 50 local unions in the construction industry. “They [are] gonna help us train, as well, the next generation of skilled tradesmen and women in the city of Philadelphia.”

The City’s request for information on factory development and operations includes a request for “recommendations, best practices and innovative ideas for incorporating workforce development goals” into the factory’s operations.

Modular manufacturing jobs can be appealing to younger people entering the workforce, Hardiman says. They don’t need to travel to various job sites, the environmental conditions are predictable, and while they are still factory jobs, the manual labor is substantially less than for a typical contractor due to hybrid automation.

With Pennsylvania’s Department of Labor & Industry estimating a shortage of 300,000 skilled trade workers by 2030, gains based on these factors could prove vital.

“We’re falling further behind on housing shortages,” Hardiman says. “On-site labor is tight now, and it’s only going to get more restrictive in the next five years. There’s more people exiting the construction trades than entering. I think it’s just going to get worse in the next five years unless we do something like modernizing or industrializing the construction.”

This story has been updated to correct the name of the Modular Building Institute, which we mistakenly called the Modular Housing Insitute.

We are in the middle of the most significant push for new housing in a generation. State legislatures are racing to pass zoning reform, fast-track permitting, and incentives for new construction. Congress is moving bipartisan legislation to ease housing regulation and speed development. As someone who has worked in and around affordable housing for 25 years, these are welcome and long overdue efforts.

There’s plenty to like in this new supply agenda, but it’s missing a key piece: a plan to preserve the affordable housing we have and all the new housing we are hoping to build.

National Housing Trust, the nonprofit I lead, is living proof of the preservation challenge we face. More than half of the properties in our 3,000 affordable home portfolio are struggling financially, which has led to deteriorating physical conditions. We are forced to draw on our own reserves just to keep them operating and are working hard to keep up with needed repairs.

Three forces converged to get us here.

First, rents have gone up while rental income for affordable properties has stalled. Nationally, the number of units renting for less than $1,400 per month declined by 9.3 million between 2014 and 2024, according to research from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. During the same period, units renting for $1,400 or more grew by 11.8 million.

It’s easy to assume that few people depend on rents below $1,400, but the math tells a different story. A full-time worker earning the national average minimum wage of $11 per hour takes home roughly $1,760 a month before taxes. After paying $1,400 in rent, there’s almost nothing left for food, transportation, or childcare. Inflation makes the equation even more difficult, with grocery prices up nearly 30% since 2020 and gas up 28% in just the last year. Low-income workers are struggling to pay rent, and it is showing up in the collections data of affordable housing owners across the country.

Second, operating costs are rising fast. Utilities, insurance, and labor have all seen double-digit increases. Market-rate property owners handle this the same way they always have: they raise rents. By definition, affordable housing owners cannot do the same, particularly when residents’ incomes aren’t keeping pace. That gap between revenues and expenses has been widening for years. Owners are writing checks to cover mortgages, while there are no funds available to fix leaky roofs or get rid of pests.

Third, we have no system designed to fund the maintenance and preservation of affordable housing. Without resources for preservation, homes deteriorate past the point where repair is possible and we lose them forever.

Some will point to the recent expansion of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit and the billions of dollars now flowing into preservation funds. Both are real and welcome. But the LIHTC is a deep subsidy best used to finance new construction or complete renovations, not the regularly required updates and replacements that sustain real estate. And private preservation funds focus on middle-income housing, because it generates enough rental income to pay investors back. Housing affordable to a bus driver or a home health aide cannot produce the returns investors seek. 

Zoning and permitting reforms are needed, certainly, but they are not a complete housing strategy. Building more market-rate housing and letting it filter down to lower-income families takes decades — and in the meantime we’ll end up losing the housing that is most affordable today.

We need a Supply+ agenda, one that builds new homes and maintains both those new homes and the homes we already have.

The core of that agenda is a new tool: a shallow subsidy for preservation. In exchange for low-cost capital, affordable housing owners would maintain their properties in good condition and offer stability to residents and communities. Deeper subsidies would be reserved for new or currently offline homes. Existing homes could be retained in our scarce housing stock so that our new supply is truly additive.

If our goal is to expand access to housing and promote economic opportunity, we need to build more housing, maintain the housing we build, and preserve the housing we have. Without a Supply+ agenda, no amount of new construction will be enough to address the housing crisis.

To celebrate our 150th episode, the Next City podcast is turning the tables. Editorial director Deonna Anderson takes the host seat to interview executive director Lucas Grindley, the usual moderator, about the solutions that have stuck with him since the show’s launch in 2021. 

Together, they revisit reporting on solutions across housing, transportation, and economic justice. Highlights include Houston's $52 million community land trust, Boston's fare-free bus experiment, and Philadelphia's Kensington Corridor Trust and its model for community ownership.

The episode features archival clips from past guests, including: 

• Adriana Abizadeh, executive director of the Kensington Corridor Trust
• Ashley Allen, executive director of the Houston Community Land Trust
• Valencia Gunder, a lifelong Liberty City resident and organizer featured in the documentary Razing Liberty Square
• Rosanne Haggerty, CEO of Community Solutions
• Jascha Franklin-Hodge, former Chief of Streets for the City of Boston
• Aisha Nyandoro, CEO of Springboard to Opportunities

Listen to the episode below or subscribe to the Next City podcast on Apple, Spotify or Goodpods.

Public school closures across the country are driven by a mix of factors like declining enrollment, lower birth rates, expanded school choice, and pandemic-era disruptions. After the last bell, buildings often sit vacant for years, unraveling community ties, and potentially accelerating displacement. But there are cities where buildings are being reimagined to serve neighborhoods in new ways.

In this episode, Linda Jacobson, a senior writer for The 74, shares her reporting on the record number of former schools being converted into housing. Paola Aguirre Serrano, urban designer and partner at Borderless Studio, shares what she’s learned from tracking Chicago's 2013 closure of 50 schools, explaining why redevelopment moves quickly on the North Side but stalls for years on the South and West sides. And Lindsey Scannapieco, managing partner and founder of Scout, tells the story of transforming Philadelphia's 340,000-square-foot former Bok Vocational High School into a thriving creative hub housing more than 700 workers, while pushing back against financiers who pressured her to convert it into luxury housing.

“Can you imagine what young people feel to walk along a closed school for 10 years?” Aguirre asks. “What does that say about their city? What does it say about all of us?”

“I think there is a lot of community pain that comes with school closure, and that needs to be acknowledged,” Scannapieco says. “Change is hard, and schools house a ton of institutional memory, and we need to think about how we also preserve that.”

This episode is based on a Next City webinar available in our library and was made possible with support from the William Penn Foundation. Listen to the episode below or subscribe to the Next City podcast on Apple, Spotify or Goodpods.

At the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission headquarters in Virginia, staff knew their crumbling asphalt parking lot was in desperate need of repair. But instead of replacing the lot with more dark blacktop, the group chose an alternative.

The new parking lot, completed last year, includes porous concrete panels and areas with native plants and recycled materials to make the lot cooler and less prone to flooding.

With the new panels, “the rain infiltrates faster than it can puddle and stop on the surface,” said Jill Sunderland, the commission’s senior water resources planner.

“You notice too, that it’s cooler,” Sunderland added. “You really can tell a difference out there … not to mention it’s just more inviting.”

The project is one example of how dozens of cities and other groups around the U.S. are using alternatives to traditional asphalt lots in order beat the heat and curb water runoff — especially as climate change worsens.

The City of New Orleans has required its Department of Public Works to use permeable paving in lots and other spaces where practical. In Indianapolis, the Newfields art museum transformed one parking lot to include bioretention rain gardens and another with a permeable grid instead of traditional blacktop. Denver’s dePaving a Greener Denver initiative is looking to slash the city’s cover of parking lots and other impervious surfaces.

Another way cities are cutting back on pavement is by dropping regulations that require a minimum number of parking spaces for new residential or commercial buildings. Buffalo, New York; Austin, Texas; and Minneapolis are among the cities that have changed these policies in recent years.

Asphalt industry representatives, meanwhile, are touting advances in that material while also cautioning that parking lot owners should carefully consider the durability of any non-asphalt alternative.

Here’s a look at a variety of alternatives to traditional lots.

Cooling technologies and shading

In some downtowns, parking takes up a quarter or more of the land, and studies show that more than a third of parking spaces can sit empty at any given time, according to Adam Millard-Ball, a professor of urban planning at UCLA. Many lots see infrequent use at sporting arenas, malls or offices. So some entities offer grants for cities and businesses to replace or transform these hardscape parking areas, which have traditionally been made from asphalt.

Reflective surface coatings or treatments, as used in Los Angeles’ Pacoima neighborhood, function like paint to keep the ground from absorbing as much heat.

Incorporating vegetation also helps regulate temperature by absorbing energy and releasing moisture.

Sacramento, California, requires parking lot developers to plant enough trees to shade half the lot within 15 years of its construction. Washington, D.C., and Seattle have green area requirements for landscaping, particularly for new development. Some cities leverage solar panel installations as shade structures.

Without these fixes, dark paved surfaces can trap heat and drive temperatures up by as much as 20 degrees. That heat typically builds up during the day.

The heat spreads, contributing to what’s known as the urban heat island effect, said Vincent Cotrone, extension educator of urban forestry at Pennsylvania State University. Warmer neighborhoods often lead to high energy use, as people rely more on air conditioning to stay cool. Those AC units push hot air back outside.

Stormwater runoff solutions

Other alternatives aim to solve problems that occur when impervious pavement prevents rainwater from soaking into the ground. When water runs off paved surfaces, it can carry pollutants like oil and heavy metals into nearby waterways, said Cotrone.

More advanced than gravel, lattice pavers allow for grass to grow. These, as well as interlocking pavers that create spaces between individual units, allow for rainwater to filter through. Other permeable substances used for runoff control include stone beds, brick pavers or honeycomb-style structures.

The Hampton Roads Planning District Commission uses a stamped, grooved concrete border, so that when stormwater runoff flows from traditional concrete to the porous concrete, sediment gets trapped instead of clogging up and needing maintenance.

Long channels of plants known as bioswales and recessed sections known as rain gardens both use sand, soil and plants to filter pollutants before stormwater reaches streams or sewers.

At the Newfields museum in Indianapolis, one parking lot features rain gardens, while the overflow parking lot is made of recycled plastic grid pavers.

“It has worked really well for us because we don’t park on that lot every single day,” said Jonathan Wright, director of the garden. “Why should it be asphalt and not breathing and not permeable when you only need to use it 10% of the time?”

The cost of alternative materials

Alternative materials may cost more up front, so experts said that it’s important for owners to do a cost analysis that factors in other benefits over a parking lot lifetime.

“If we were going to just repave it with asphalt, we could have done it significantly cheaper,” said Sunderland, of the Virginia project. “It’s more expensive initially, but you get so much more life out of it.”

Buzz Powell, technical director at the Asphalt Pavement Alliance, a coalition of national industry groups, said asphalt is more versatile and designed to handle heavy traffic better than some of the newer alternatives, and that any new pavement may need repairs eventually.

“I just think we need to be really, really careful when we put alternative systems in to make sure that we have a good understanding of what the life cycle impact is gonna be,” Powell said. “Some things can be really sexy on the front end and look good on paper, but then when you run a trash truck over it, it can’t handle the stresses and strains.”

Asphalt can be installed at different thicknesses for different needs, and porous asphalt is becoming more popular. He said it may repair more easily — and all options are going to have tradeoffs as far as environmental impact, longevity and maintenance, depending on use.

“My focus is 100% to make asphalt better,” he added. “If we do better asphalt, that means better mixing materials, better structural pavement design, and better pavement preservation.”

Some experts who favor alternatives also worry that budget-constrained cities interested in redoing parking lots won’t be able to find the funding.

“We are headed in the right direction, but at the same time, we’ve got acres and acres of nothing but blacktop parking lots that sit there and age and again, heat up,” said Cotrone. “And we just don’t have the dollars to go retrofit those.”

But ultimately, improving how parking lots are built, or reducing how much space they take up altogether, can help address multiple challenges at once, from heat to water quality to related inequality issues.

“The reality is, one city changing their surfaces is just not by itself not going to have a big impact,” said Greg Kats, founder of the Smart Surfaces Coalition. “But once cities are able to understand in a rigorous way the scale of the benefits… it’s kind of intuitive.”

Read more of AP’s climate coverage. The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Sponsored content from Rutgers-Camden University. Sponsored content policy

We live in a world where knowledge is politically contested. For universities, this is both an existential and immediate crisis. It is an existential crisis about the future of educational institutions. But for many of us who have dedicated our careers to research, there’s an increasing need in the present moment to justify that work to a skeptical public. That’s not just on the political right, where there’s an anti-intellectual sentiment that equates research with being “woke” and frames universities as a cause of the widening culture war. It’s also on the political left, where universities can be seen as neoliberal institutions that have extracted from communities and defended the status quo. This dismissal of research institutions is happening in a world where austerity, nativism, and violence intersect with families stretched thin by increased costs. Can research matter in this political context?

Here at the Center for Urban Research and Education (CURE) at Rutgers-Camden University, we think yes. But we also take seriously the critique that too often research has been insular and faced the academy, rather than being collaborative and facing community. In response, when we launch a new research project, the first question we ask is, “how can this research fit into an existing community theory of change?”

This model starts with what’s already happening on the ground. Community members working for food justice, or affordable housing, or to increase local jobs are not asking us to produce research telling them how to do their work. They’re inviting us to join them in their work by doing what we do best: research.

One way we’ve put this ethos into practice is through our Hidden Hands project. Hidden Hands started with a text message from a friend and activist working for a local community development corporation (CDC). The text asked if I’d read a report on corporate ownership of housing that in Newark and if we could help local CDCs do similar research here. Camden’s community development corporations had been talking, and they found they had a shared struggle – they were losing out on home purchases to Limited Liability Corporations (LLCs). The legal structure of these LLCs made it hard to figure out who the owners were, and potentially enabled bad actors to exploit residents through the obscurity. The CDCs had started collecting data on who was purchasing tax liens in the city – but they’d run into walls with the data collection and wanted to know if we could help.

Our collaboration started small. We placed a Community First Fellow – our fellowship program hiring graduate students to work projects that further the mission of community organizations – to work with the CDCs on the data set. The results were promising enough that we reached out to two funders within Rutgers University and applied for grants to continue the work. Thankfully, both the Rutgers Equity Alliance for Community Health and the Rutgers Innovation Fund saw the value in what we were doing and supported the continuation of our research.

The next step was publishing our results. Our first report showed the dangers of LLC ownership including code enforcement issues, worse maintenance of the home, and other neglectful practices of institutional landlords. The report traced multiple LLCs back to single corporations using their registration address, and even identified a single corporation that owned 512 properties – more than any corporation in the Newark report. Our second report focused in on the neighborhoods served by the city’s largest CDCs – St. Joseph’s Carpenter Society , Parkside Business & Community in Partnership (PBCIP), Camden Lutheran Housing, Inc., and Heart of Camden. It showed that while the vast majority of LLC-owned homes were by LLCs out of the city, most were regional and both strategies and buyers differed by neighborhood.

Those reports are starting to garner attention. Twice now, we’ve been invited joining other Rutgers housing scholars and present the findings in New Jersey’s state capital. First to legislative aides, and second to the New Jersey governor’s housing team. This summer, we’re bringing these results to community meetings in Camden’s neighborhoods.

This is what research that matters looks like. It’s grounded in the concerns and insights of folks on the ground doing the work. It helps them understand their context and do their work better. It scales to inform regional policy. And it connects to a broader community of scholars seeing similar things in other places.

Please join CURE’s listserve to learn about more projects like Hidden Hands.

The empty, worn-down building at 349 East 40th Street in the South Bronx has had many lives.

It was constructed during the mid-1930s as a Public Works Administration project and opened as the Mott Haven Health Center. Forty years later, following a nonviolent takeover of nearby Lincoln Hospital by the Black Panthers and Young Lords, it reopened as the People’s Detox Center, where a group of radical doctors and community leaders pioneered gender-responsive drug recovery, as well as acupuncture as an alternative to methadone to treat heroin addiction.

“This was an act of determination from the community that was trying to create its own answers and solutions to the problems affecting it,” says Mychal Johnson, a co-founder of South Bronx Unite, an organization formed in 2012 to do similar community-driven work.

In 1978, then-Mayor Ed Koch forcibly evicted People’s Detox Center from the building. It operated as a city-owned health clinic until that shuttered in 2013. For over a decade, South Bronx Unite organizers were determined to bring it back into community stewardship.

This month, a community land trust will close on the building. This September, construction will kick off to make their vision a reality: this time as the Health, Education, and Arts (HEArts) Center.

“It’s like a full circle,” Johnson says. “Where the needs of the community have still not been satisfied … we need to do it ourselves.”

‘We will not be denied or ignored’

South Bronx Unite was born out of a community struggle against a 2012 proposal by New York State and City to grant over $130 million in taxpayer subsidies to online grocer FreshDirect to relocate its diesel trucking warehouse to the South Bronx. Residents sued the city and Fresh Direct for its failure to conduct an adequate environmental review. They lost the legal battle, but founded the organization.

Just a year later, the former People’s Detox Center — which was still a health clinic providing acupuncture but run under the city agency Health + Hospitals — shuttered.

“We were very well informed about the work being done there, and also saw how the structures who owned the building abandoned it,” says Dr. Melissa Barber, a co-founder of South Bronx Unite. Barber used her medical training in Cuba to mobilize COVID-19 response in the South Bronx.

“It’s been abandoned for over a decade, and the feeling was that we needed to get this moving, since we know what services can be done here and what the community needs.”

The South Bronx experiences some of the most severe health inequities in the United States, and is saturated with waste facilities, power plants and warehouses alongside highways carrying diesel trucks. The area is sometimes referred to as “Asthma Alley.”

Between 2013 and 2022, South Bronx Unite led a prolonged, multi-pronged community engagement to reclaim the former People’s Detox Center. They wanted to build excitement and buy-in around the property, “to bring people together to celebrate the concept of a building for us,” Johnson explains. South Bronx Unite hosted an annual HEArts Festival in the building’s cul-de-sac, eventually hosting monthly events outside the property.

They also wanted community ownership. By 2015, South Bronx Unite facilitated the creation of the Mott Haven-Port Morris Community Land Stewards. “This was the first Bronx-based community land trust, and it’s very unique because we didn’t start out with affordable housing or land acquisition for housing purposes — we started with a community center,” says Barber, a founding member of the land trust.

Organizers knew they’d have to fight to be heard by city officials, whether it was around the Fresh Direct proposal or future of the health center. In 2015, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio visited the popular South Bronx restaurant La Morada. “One of our members was eating there with his family and called us — we had been trying to meet with him forever,” recalls Barber. “Within 15 minutes, the building was surrounded, like we’re not letting you leave because we need to talk to you.”

She continues: “Press events, city hall marches, we were there … we showed out as a force to say we will not be denied or ignored, this is what we want.”

Building a vision

They also made pivotal partnerships. The Land Stewards worked closely with the New Economy Project and the citywide NYC Community Land Initiative coalition. “They were part of a two-year learning exchange where we did a pretty deep dive training to learn the ins and outs of CLTS, from development to land stewardship to governance,” says Deyanira Del Rio, executive director of New Economy Project.

In 2016, the Land Stewards partnered with architect Nandini Bagchee and her students at the City College of New York to kick off a community design process.

“It started off in this very hypothetical academic space, but that did allow us to do a lot of the community visioning in a very free and fluid way,” she explains. In 2018, South Bronx Unite secured enough funding to hire Bagchee to create a feasibility study.

Bagchee wrote in-depth about the process for Urban Omnibus. With no physical access to the building, South Bronx residents and architecture students mapped the community’s core needs, and visioned the future of the center through experimental, hands-on workshops.

In 2018, the team finally got access inside the three-story, 22,750-square foot building. They were inspired by an expansive skylight and terraces, originally designed to bring sunlight inside to treat tuberculosis.

A vision took shape: bright, comfortable and flexible space to accommodate health, education and workforce development programs, offices, a commercial kitchen and cafeteria, and a grand theater.

“I was interested in how to maintain this idea of flexibility within the programming and the design, while also having some kind of character or identity to these spaces,” says Bagchee.

As the design progressed, the Land Stewards continually laid pressure on the city to release a “request for proposals” for the building’s redevelopment. The RFP finally came in 2022. By then, as Barber puts it, “we had formulated our ideas into realistic pitches of what we could do.”

Elise Goldin, the campaign organizer with New Economy Project, recalled a community visioning session led by the city following the RFP. “The Mott Haven-Port Morris Community Land Stewards turned out — there were probably 100 community members, food, celebration and amazing community vibes,” she recalls. “And they all had one unified vision, which was the HEArts Center, which was really powerful.”

Making it real

The Land Stewards needed a development partner to show the city their vision was feasible. Alembic Community Development joined the team in 2023 to help develop their RFP. “We see our role as trying to implement the vision that the land spent over a decade facilitating,” says principal Jonathan Leit. They agreed on a 50/50 ownership arrangement, split between Alembic and the community land trust.

The city awarded Alembic and the Land Stewards the property in fall of 2023, a massive win for the land trust and South Bronx Unite. It also marked a significant shift for the project, in which the team had to secure at least $40 million to renovate a building in “really rough shape,” as Leit put it.

“There have been some degrees of separation between the design process, finding the right developer, and then the developer’s own complicated task of trying to keep everything in balance,” notes Bagchee.

Financing was a complex endeavor, which Bagchee sees as unavoidable “unless the government were willing to release funds to the community more directly.”

The team secured financing through federal New Market Tax Credits provided by four different community development financial institutions, federal and State of New York historic tax credits, city capital funds, and state grants for community and climate resilience. This past December, the state awarded the team a $2.5 million environmental justice grant. (The center will have geothermal power and LEED Gold certification.) The Leviticus Fund and Reinvestment Fund, two community development financial institutions, also joined forces to provide $2 million in fully unsecured predevelopment loans.

“Months before the project is going to break ground, it’s fully funded,” says Barber. “There were people who outright and blatantly told us it could not be done.”

Closing on the building this month marks the final step before construction. Alembic estimates 24 months of work with an opening in 2028. “This will be a completely comprehensive gut and reinstallation of new systems,” says Alembic principal Mike Grote.

The skylight and an original stairwell will be restored, while new stairs and an elevator will be added. The back of the building will transform into a double-height, multi-purpose theater. Flexible office and programming space will be throughout all three floors, with the second floor dedicated to office and training space for Green City Force.

For the Land Stewards and South Bronx Unite members, there’s no sense of disbelief that their vision is becoming reality — in their eyes, there’s a sense of destiny that the building is returning to community stewardship.

“It brings a lot of joy,” Johnson says. “And [it’s] showing that we cannot stop here, we can keep doing ground-up, community-envisioned projects to create the healthier outcomes we require.”

This story has been updated with additional details of the center’s predevelopment funding.