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.

East Oakland Nonprofit Acquires Vacant Lot To Build Affordable Housing

A Black-led nonprofit community development corporation in East Oakland has acquired a long-vacant lot for just $10, with plans to build affordable housing there, The Oaklandside reports.

The Alameda County Board of Supervisors approved the transfer of the blighted corner property to the Black Cultural Zone for a nominal amount, using a rarely-used tool under the state tax code. Called a Chapter 8 tax sale, it allows public agencies to acquire tax-defaulted properties for public use if the money owed on a property exceeds its value. The lot had sat empty for more than 30 years – after its previous owner, Oakland Community Housing Inc., dissolved in 2013 — racking up $1.7 million in back taxes and fines, and failed to sell at multiple auctions.

Alameda County Treasurer-Tax Collector Henry Levy says he has identified at least 10 more abandoned, tax-defaulted lots that can be transferred to nonprofits through Chapter 8 tax sales.

Report: ICE Arrests Lead to Decline in Jobs

A new report from Immigration Research Initiative found that ICE raids have decreased job rates for immigrants and U.S.-born workers alike, findings that are in line with the results of multiple studies published even before Trump returned to office.

Researchers looked at employment statistics between January and November 2025 and found a 2.5% decline in employment for immigrant men for every 1,000 arrests by ICE. For U.S.-born citizens, there was an employment decline of .5% for every 1,000 arrests. The report attributes this to other immigrants staying home to avoid arrests, leading to decreased foot traffic on businesses and a cascading impact on the economy. These are larger decreases than those found in previous studies, likely because of the indiscriminate nature of ICE arrests in the second Trump term, the report said.

Wrongful Death Climate Lawsuit Moves Forward

A landmark lawsuit alleging that fossil fuel companies are responsible for a woman’s heat-related death in Washington state in June 2021, during the state’s hottest-ever day, is poised to move forward, according to Grist.

Misti Leon, the deceased woman’s daughter, has sued Exxon Mobil, BP, Shell, Chevron, and other companies on the testimony of scientists that the heat dome effect that killed her mother would never have occurred without climate change. About 1,200 people in the region died of heat-related deaths the same week as Leon’s mother, according to Grist.

Earlier this month, a judge ruled against a motion from the oil companies to dismiss the lawsuit. There are close to 40 similar lawsuits that have been filed across the country, including five that are in discovery, according to Grist. They build on revelations that Exxon Mobil knew about fossil fuels’ impact on the climate since the 1970s.

100 Tenant Associations Organized Through City Program

As of Tuesday, 100 tenant associations across New York City have joined a city-run program that organizes and supports tenant groups as they attempt to get their landlords to make repairs, according to BK Reader. The city’s Partners in Preservation program began under the De Blasio administration and funds 20 different community organizations that organize tenants. It is funded by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development and NYC Housing Development Corproation.

The new tenant association in the Bath Beach neighborhood was formed in a building first canvassed in late 2025 by the nonprofit Fifth Avenue Committee. Since sending their landlord a letter in March 2026, tenants have secured a commitment to repair issues that have plagued the building for more than a decade, according to Michelle de la Uz of Neighbors Helping Neighbors, a subsidiary of Fifth Avenue Committee.

Report: Data Centers Keeping Coal Alive

According to a report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, C02 emissions in the U.S. increased by 2% in 2025; in the electric power sector they increased by 4%. The report attributes this to “growth in electricity demand from data centers and manufacturing facilities,” as well as above-average summer temperatures.

While emissions increased in all sectors, the largest share of that increase was from an increased use of coal power. According to Grist, this marks a shift from the past few decades in which power generation in the U.S. was mostly flat. Data centers are expected to account for 10% of U.S. energy generation by 2030. In Louisiana alone, Meta is pushing for 10 new gas-fired plants to power its enormous data centers.

MORE NEWS

• Vancouver City Council kills densification plan after fierce public backlash. Daily Hive

• $530M from state millionaire tax will go to Boston’s MBTA transit agency. Smart Cities Dive

• Street homelessness went up in Los Angeles. In Nithya Raman’s district, it was nearly cut in half. LA Times

• Congress budgeted billions for big transit projects. Trump isn’t spending it. The New York Times

• Missouri library defiantly holds LGBTQ story hour despite funding and legal state threats. Erin in the Morning

• Wealthy Bay Area cities are making progress on housing goals — but they’re almost all ADUs. San Francisco Chronicle

• Employers stall labor contracts for years. A new bill could change that. The American Prospect

• Why are Durham’s breweries drying up? IndyWeek

• New Orleans ‘crime cameras’ spark fears of construction worker surveillance. Prism

• As 7 Save A Lot stores close, South and West Siders increasingly worry about grocery options. Block Club Chicago

OPPORTUNITIES & RESOURCES

• DEADLINE TODAY: The University of Pennsylvania’s Lipman Family Prize is accepting applications from nonprofits around the world that are showing leadership and innovation in the social sector. Awards range from $150,000 to $300,000. Apply by July 31.

• Borealis Philanthropy’s new Just Futures Initiative is accepting funding applications on a rolling basis from organizations advancing community safety, reform, justice, and belonging. Fill out an eligibility quiz to receive access to the Letter of Interest form.

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

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

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

In the 2024 political debate, Democrats doubled down on familiar refrains: The most important election of our lives. Democracy is on the ballot. This is our civic duty.

On Election Night, that urgency failed to bear out. When all the votes were tallied, nearly a third of the country had sat out the election, a silent damnation of a democracy that has failed them.

As we head into another election cycle, politicos and podcasters have debriefed candidates, messages, and party failures – everything but the most important predictor of turnout: do voters trust that casting their ballot will result in a government that listens to them?

For the growing majority of the American public, the answer is no.

While financial and military support for the Gaza genocide exacerbated distrust in political leaders, it’s only the most recent addition to a growing body of evidence that American democracy fails to respond to public will.

Each year, more Americans grapple with why guns aren’t regulated despite the latest mass shooting, why investors are bailed out after selling scammed mortgages, why digital spaces aren’t penalized for spreading lies and misinformation. From 1958 to 2025, Americans’ belief in our civic institutions has fallen to just 17% – a reminder that it’s not just you. We’re living through one of the most significant periods of civic disillusionment in our country’s history.

In this context, when Americans withdraw from our political systems, we need to recognize they aren’t doing so out of apathy. They’re demonstrating civic trauma. That kind of trauma requires a different kind of democracy to heal.

Civic trauma refers to the hopelessness that accumulates from repeatedly facing up against a system that actively harms and excludes you. It teaches us to adjust our response, based on what we’ve learned to expect from a system that repeatedly fails us.

People react to this feeling in different ways. For some, civic trauma looks like not voting. For others, it looks like voting as protection – without the belief that your engagement will yield a system that actually serves you.

It’s why – even when our preferred party is in office, less than 40% of Americans trust our civic institutions. It also explains why non-voters are deeply engaged in other civic life – part of faith communities, protests and marches, and active in community discussions – they go where they see their voice having an impact on the outcome.

When the public loses trust in the ability of electoral participation to make their lives better, we need more than a poll-tested message and a mega-watt smile to fix things. We have to invest in rebuilding trust in our civic institutions.

In other words, we cannot just be focused on a different Democratic Party. We need a different form of governance.

Collaborative governance, or co-governance as it is often called, offers us a pathway towards more responsive and accountable institutions. Using public budgeting processes, civic assemblies, and co-designed policy solutions, people harmed by the issues become instrumental to solving them.

This version of democracy demonstrates a different commitment. After community assemblies in Washington, 90% of participants said they felt more confident that they can influence policies impacting their communities. “For the first time in a long time,” said one participant, “my voice really mattered.” Policymaking through direct collaboration builds a different kind of ownership, not just in the idea of democracy, but in who democracy works for.

Nowhere can we see that better right now than in New York City. While many attributed Candidate Mamdani’s meteoric rise to his digital presence and DSA ties, New Yorkers who have never heard of democratic socialism seem just as smitten as his Instagram followers. To them, Mamdani represents a style of leadership laser-focused on making government work for people.

After the Rent Control Board passed a two-year rent freeze recently, he brought a cake to celebrate with tenants, saying: “You all have helped to build this city. You’ve given stability to this city. It’s time this city brings stability to you.”

It’s telling that Kamala Harris — fresh off a campaign that leaned on the old playbook of message discipline and mega-watt smiles — has reportedly reached out to Mamdani in recent days. But if Democratic party leaders seek to borrow popularity rather than adapting to a new governing philosophy, they will miss the point entirely.

There are so many ways to consider how we rebuild trust in government – but it’s important we don’t forget that the work of building trust doesn’t end at the election.

It’s about how we govern – and prove that we are worth voting for.

This op-ed is part of “The Case for Co-Governance,” a narrative series on co-governance and democracy.

While recent research suggests autonomous robotaxis may be safer than the average human driver, a new study suggests these driverless vehicles could spike congestion in New York City while bringing only “limited safety benefits.”

That’s because in a city like New York, robotaxis would actually be replacing yellow cab, Uber, and Lyft drivers. These professional for-hire drivers are already about 14 times safer than the city’s average driver, according to a July 20 report from the Sam Schwartz Transportation Research Program at Hunter College, published with advocacy group Open Plans.

While the autonomous vehicle company Waymo has recently boasted a lower crash rate than human drivers, citing a new analysis by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, researchers suggest New York City needs its own data before autonomous vehicles arrive at scale.

“There’s a mantra going around that autonomous vehicles are more than 90% safer than human driven cars,” said Sam Schwartz, transportation engineer, former NYC traffic commissioner, and founder of the program that bears his name, in a press release. “There is no solid evidence as of yet, to make such a claim compared to the for-hire vehicles already serving this city. We find that NYC taxi and Uber/Lyft drivers may in fact be safer per mile.”

The study found Waymo’s national rate of crashes causing serious injury or death was about 1.5 times higher per mile than New York City’s for-hire fleet, and more than three times higher in the Bay Area specifically.

The authors caution that Waymo’s limited mileage and gaps in available data make it hard to say definitively that robotaxis are more or less safe than professional drivers. But they argued the numbers “warrant significant caution and further scrutiny” rather than validating the safety case robotaxi companies are making.

On congestion, the study calculates a “vehicle miles traveled multiplier,” or total miles driven per mile actually carrying a passenger. Waymo’s is 1.71 in California, compared with 1.49 for New York’s existing high-volume for-hire fleet. That’s a roughly 15% efficiency gap driven by “deadheading,” or empty miles spent waiting for or driving to the next fare.

And this gap could widen further in New York.

In California, Waymos can park during about 58% of that idle time. But the study says that’s unrealistic in a city with New York’s curb-space scarcity. Modeled at just 25% park time instead of 58%, the report estimates roughly 62,000 additional vehicle miles traveled per day.

Waymo pushed back in response to the study. A company spokesperson said that while Waymo can’t say with certainty what its safety record would look like in New York specifically, the data so far makes the company “hopeful” its technology can “help make New York City’s roads safer.”

Is Waymo safer than the average human driver?

Waymo, which is also battling reports of its cars dying in the middle of roads and racking up thousands in fines for illegal parking, has touted a new study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety showing a lower crash rate than human drivers.

The nonprofit insurance research group found Waymo vehicles had a 68% lower crash rate per vehicle mile traveled than human drivers overall, across the four cities where Waymo has operated long enough to study: San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Austin.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety researchers added a caveat to their findings, noting that companies are required to report self-driving car crashes to federal and California regulators. But they don’t have to report the number of miles their cars log or how much of that driving happens in autonomous mode — making it hard to know how common self-driving car crashes actually are. Waymo is the only company that publishes its mileage data, which is why it was the only one studied.

After stripping out duplicate reports and crashes that likely wouldn’t have been reported if a human were driving, researchers found only 22% of the 736 autonomous-vehicle crashes they reviewed were likely “police-reportable” — a small dataset for sweeping safety claims.

“Those are encouraging signs for the future of driverless vehicles,” Eric Teoh, the study’s lead author, said in a press release. He added that data collection needs to improve “so that we can ensure that level of safety continues as these technologies become more prevalent.”

Two crashes this week — one of which left a woman critically injured in Los Angeles, and another which sent a Waymo vehicle up in flames in Atlanta — may seem to discredit Waymo’s safety claims. But the circumstances are more tangled than “Waymo crash” headlines suggest.

In Los Angeles’ Pico-Union neighborhood on July 26, a Waymo was struck by a sedan that had first hit a pedestrian pushing a cart outside a crosswalk, then swerved into oncoming traffic and into the Waymo, according to police and a Waymo spokesperson. A woman was critically injured, but local outlets have not attributed fault to the Waymo’s driving system.

In Atlanta that same night, a Jeep rear-ended a Waymo that was stopped waiting to turn left on Cheshire Bridge Road. The Jeep itself caught fire, which then spread to the Waymo, per Waymo and Atlanta Fire Rescue. No one was riding in the Waymo. Two people in the Jeep were evaluated for injuries, including burns, but declined transport to a hospital. The fire did prompt questions from witnesses and Atlanta Fire Rescue about how riders could exit a burning Waymo, and about whether Waymo needs updated safety training for battery-related emergencies.

Rolling back the robotaxi fervor?

Even as Waymo and other robotaxi competitors plan to expand services to additional markets, from Houston to Munich, Tesla has struck a notably more cautious tone on its robotaxi ambitions during its July 22 earnings call.

A year earlier, CEO Elon Musk had predicted the robotaxi network would expand at a “hyper-exponential rate” and reach half the U.S. population by the end of 2025. On the call, Musk and other executives fielded pointed questions about a rollout that has fallen well short of that timeline.

Since launching a small pilot with safety monitors in Austin in June 2025, Tesla has expanded to only a handful of Texas and Florida cities, often in outlying, less-trafficked areas. The company listed expansions in Dallas, Houston, Miami, Tampa and Orlando.

Musk framed the slower pace as deliberate, saying, “If we injure even one person, it will be worldwide news and regulators will immediately clamp down on our activities.”

Tesla reported 2.5 million paying-customer robotaxi miles to date, including 380,000 without an in-vehicle safety monitor — a fraction of the more than 220 million autonomous miles Waymo had logged through the end of March.

Barclays bank analysts wrote that Tesla “hasn’t met previously laid out targets” and that “more is needed to show that Tesla’s capabilities are inflecting” on robotaxis. The update contributed to a steep Tesla stock selloff the following day.

This story was originally published by Signal Cleveland, a nonprofit news organization covering local government, education, health, economy, and public safety. Sign up for their free newsletters at SignalCleveland.org/subscribe.

When 2025 started, Marthe Marie Vernet was getting by working as a visiting nurse’s aid for veterans and helping to manage the apartment building where she lived with her adult son, Stephon, and their dog, Gorgeous, an exuberant, mostly white husky mix.

A dispute with the property owner over the building’s condition ended that living arrangement. She needed to move but didn’t have enough savings to put down a deposit and first month’s rent on a new place. No relatives could take them in. Shelters were out of the question because she would have to separate from Stephon and give up Gorgeous, probably for good.

Seeing no other options, Vernet bought a tent. They packed up what they could carry, put Gorgeous on a leash and set up camp behind Garrett Morgan High School on Cleveland’s Near West Side. They kept the site clean, even picking up trash dropped by students.

“That’s my little house that God gave me for now. I’ll get a bigger one later,” she told herself at the time.

Vernet set to work solving one problem after another and making friends. She learned where to get meals and showers. A client — she was still working — gave her a propane stove. Teachers at the school provided some supplies. The owner of a house under construction let her use an electrical outlet.

The winter was brutal, but she tells the story now as though she never doubted that they’d be OK.

After high winds damaged the tent, a construction worker brought her a new one. That was especially exciting because it was “big enough to stand in and cook in,” she said, laughing at the memory.

Sometimes the stress was too much, she admits. In those moments she would take Gorgeous for a walk and listen to music on her phone — Janet Jackson, Lisa Lisa, Paula Abdul. “No cursing music!” she adds and laughs again. And she would pray.

“And God listened to my prayers, and they helped me,” she says.

In April, an outreach worker from the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless (NEOCH) arrived, introduced himself and told her about a city program called A Home For Every Neighbor. If she was interested, she and Stephon, and even Gorgeous, could be in a new home in a week or two with rent covered for a year.

It sounded almost too good to be true. But sure enough, the next day someone from the city came by to talk about some options and help her start an application. A little more than a week later, Vernet, Stephon and Gorgeous moved their suitcases and plastic bins into a cozy two-story house on a quiet street in Ohio City.

“Every day I start doing something to make it nice,” she says, seated on the living room couch. “I clean the wood [floors and molding]. I like wood, so I make it shiny. … I try little by little to make it nice.”

She hopes to attach a gate to the existing fence so Gorgeous can run around in the back yard. She’s saving for a car and a down payment on a house that she can truly call her own when her rent subsidy runs out next spring.

Getting people housed ‘like no one else’

Vernet and her son are two of just over 200 people — as of June — to move quickly from the streets to a house or apartment since Cleveland launched A Home For Every Neighbor in 2024. The program focuses on the unsheltered homeless, people who are living outdoors.

By most measures the program has exceeded expectations. There were about 300 people living unsheltered in Cleveland when the project began, and today there are about 100, said program manager Liam Haggerty. Some of the people served had been living on the streets for years, far longer than Vernet, and never accessed any services — at least none that would get their names into the database maintained by the Cuyahoga County Office of Homeless Services.

From a policy perspective, the program’s biggest impact has been to show that it’s possible to rehouse people in less than two weeks.

“They’ve found a way to engage landlords and get people housed like no one else in our system,” said Chris Knestrick, executive director of NEOCH, a program partner. “I think it’s going to rewrite how we do landlord engagement in our community.”

The goal now is “equilibrium,” Haggerty said — identifying and rehousing people in crisis so quickly that they never need to pitch a tent.

Everyone ‘deserves a safe place‘

In Cuyahoga County, EDEN Inc. provides rapid rehousing services for families and survivors of domestic violence. EDEN also provides long-term supportive housing, either in one of its buildings or through a rent voucher, for individuals with disabilities and a history of homelessness. These are federally funded programs.

Adults who don’t qualify for those options can go to one of the men’s or women’s shelters. But a lot of people won’t enter a shelter, or won’t stay, for various reasons.

Some, like Vernet, don’t want to separate from a relative, pet or opposite-sex partner. Some are struggling with mental illness or addiction. Some just don’t feel safe in a shelter. Many end up on the streets, making up the relatively small but more visible segment of the homeless population known as the unsheltered.

In February 2024, Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb announced that the city would fill this gap in services with A Home for Every Neighbor. “Every member of our community deserves a safe place they can call home,” Bibb said. He backed the project with $2 million from the city’s general fund and $2.7 million of federal COVID-era rental assistance funding.

Bibb set a goal of getting at least 150 people off the streets and into homes within 18 months.

The city hired Haggerty from NEOCH and brought in Clutch Consulting Group, a Texas firm specializing in homelessness initiatives. Clutch and city officials invited local providers to a week-long workshop. They studied models in Denver, Houston and Oklahoma City. But the participating service providers ruled out a tool used in many other places, the threat of arrest if someone refused the offer to leave the streets.

The program launched as a special project in the mayor’s office (it has since moved to the Department of Public Health). Partners included NEOCH and Downtown Cleveland Alliance (which handles the rent payments).

Work began in August 2024 with a pilot focused on two camp sites with six people each, one near Canal Basin Park, the other in the parking lot of West Side Catholic Center.

“It took us six weeks to house those 12 people,” Haggerty said. Way too long to meet the goals.

The biggest holdup was finding enough rental units. The program was new, and explaining it to property owners and managers — and overcoming their concerns — took a lot of time. The people whom A Home for Every Neighbor was trying to serve had little or no income, and some had criminal histories and past evictions, all of which can be red flags to landlords. Some landlords just flatly refused to participate.

The team reviewed the pilot and revamped the process for lining up units based on what they had learned about engaging with landlords. When they went back to the streets, they were able to house 40 more people in three weeks. By the end of 2024, they had moved 100 formerly unsheltered people into homes. In April 2025, they hit Bibb’s goal of 150 — almost a year ahead of schedule.

Later that month, City Council unanimously approved another two years of funding at $1.9 million per year. (It’s also supported by $530,000 in donations from Rocket Community Fund, First Presbyterian Church, Nordson Corporation Foundation, Westfield Insurance Foundation and an anonymous benefactor.)

From engagement to keys in less than two weeks

The process begins when the team’s outreach workers approach a camp site with bottles of water and personal items. They tell the people living there about the program and start a list of who is interested — nearly everyone is — and tell them what they need. Do they want to live alone or with someone else? Do they have a pet? Are stairs OK? Etc.

Next, others on the team get to work finding enough suitable rental units to give everyone a few options. This has gotten easier over time as the team has developed relationships with landlords. But the acquisition specialist, Connor Marrott, said he also spends a lot of time searching online and calling new landlords to make the pitch.

When Marrott’s list is complete, Haggerty and others take an iPad to the site to show everyone their options. The team then guides them through the application process and signing the lease. If that goes smoothly, other members of the team work with the faith-based charity I’m In Ministry! to round up furniture, kitchen basics and some clothing and move it all into the house or apartment.

When it’s set up, a case worker picks up the person or people and drives them to their new home. The average time from engagement to handing over keys is about 11 days.

Tears of joy are common, said Knestrick.

“Most programs are like, ‘Here’s your voucher, go find a landlord,’” he explained. That can be a tremendous burden on someone who’s already dealing with the stress of homelessness. Nearly 90% of current and former participants reported a disabling condition, most commonly related to mental health or substance abuse.

NEOCH manages a separate fund to help with unique situations such as paying off outstanding debts with utility companies so the new tenant can get service; sealing a criminal record (with assistance from Legal Aid Society of Cleveland); and obtaining or updating an ID or certification needed for employment.

A case worker visits weekly for the first two months, then twice monthly and eventually monthly. The caseworker helps the new tenant connect with services and develop a plan for moving on when the 12-month subsidy ends. The program extends stays in certain circumstances, such as when the person has secured a voucher for long-term housing but a unit isn’t available yet.

What about the people in shelters?

Council Member Kris Harsh said that when A Home for Every Neighbor moved a few people into rental houses in Old Brooklyn last year, he started getting calls from constituents within days.

One of the new residents invited other homeless people to camp in the vacant lot next door, Harsh said. Another approached his new neighbors as they sat on their porches to ask them for money or a cigarette.

Harsh said that the same attributes that make some people “shelter resistant” — like mental health and substance abuse problems — also make them ill-suited for rapid rehousing with little supervision. The program also subverts the shelter system, which is supposed to be the gateway to whatever services the person needs, he said.

“Why should you ever go into a shelter if just camping with a tent on Superior for a couple of weeks will get you a free apartment for a year?” he asked. A Home for Every Neighbor is “just undercutting [the system] and not solving people’s problems. … The people that should be getting housing within 10 days are the people that went to the shelter.”

Haggerty said that people end up on the street because a shelter was not a solution for them. “So to say the only way they can get housing is to go to shelter is to basically say there isn’t a housing resource for [them],” he said.

Haggerty also pointed out that the county’s strategic plan for homelessness, developed with input from shelter providers, recognizes that the unsheltered have “specific needs” and does not call for coaxing them into the shelter system.

There have been some problems.

“One of the things that I think is kind of uniquely beautiful, but also very difficult to manage, is that some people that get housed want to help their friends,” said Knestrick. “So they’re like, ‘Come live with me.’”

Two or three people have been evicted, Haggerty said, and some landlords have stopped working with the program after what they considered a bad experience. But that’s no more than the number of landlords the program has cut ties with after they failed to live up to the lease agreement or made racist or prejudiced comments about tenants.

Marrott, the unit acquisition specialist, said the team is mindful of Cleveland’s history of segregation and tries to avoid contributing to the concentration of poverty.

“We want participants to be in a neighborhood where they not only feel like they can succeed, but there are opportunities for them to succeed,” he said.

‘No other solutions for chronic homelessness coming’

More than half of the people who have participated in the program were living unsheltered in Cleveland’s downtown or the near west and east side neighborhoods that hug the city center. Those include what is now Ward 7 and Ward 8.

A Home for Every Neighbor “is a step in the right direction,” said Ward 8 Council Member Stephanie Howse-Jones, an early supporter. Cleveland is making up for some of the failings of the state and federal governments, which are “reneging on the deal of supporting the least of us,” she said.

Ward 7 Council Member Austin Davis said that when he was campaigning last year, there were several people living in tents in Ohio City’s Fairview Park. He talked to area residents who wanted to be compassionate but also wanted the green space back.

A Home for Every Neighbor delivered, and continues to, at a relatively low cost, he said.

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

A March progress report showed a mixed bag of outcomes for people who had exited the program to that point. Here are some of them:

• 35 are in permanent supportive housing with a voucher from EDEN Inc.

• 21 were in jail or prison when their leases expired. In some cases, the offense preceded the person’s involvement in the program and they failed to show up in court, resulting in a warrant.

• 18 left at the end of their leases and their whereabouts are unknown, but they have not shown up at a shelter or been seen on the streets by outreach workers

• Eight returned to homelessness

• Six found somewhere else to live without a rent subsidy

• Six died, most of natural causes.

Sometimes an EDEN voucher expires before a new lease can be signed. That’s happened close to 40 times. Haggerty explained that, in many of those instances, landlords delayed the paperwork. In those cases, A Home for Every Neighbor extended the participants’ leases while they reapplied.

Several past participants moved in with relatives, Haggerty said. One man now lives with his sister, who drove from California to Cleveland to pick him up. She knew that he’d been struggling for years, Haggerty said, “but it’s a very different conversation when you’re in an apartment versus living under a bridge.”

‘We’re trying to solve this together’

The Cuyahoga County Office of Homeless Services and its many partners are bracing for expected new restrictions on federal funding for homelessness starting next year. There could be fewer options for people leaving A Home for Every Neighbor. That’s part of the backdrop as Haggerty and the team continue to refine the program.

They’re looking for ways to offer more support to tenants to better set them up for success. They’re also considering adjusting the 12-month subsidy; some people might only need three to six months, others might need 18 or 24.

Haggerty said he meets regularly with the other service providers in the county. “We’re trying to solve this together,” he said.

“We absolutely believe there are lessons to learn from the Home for Every Neighbor program” and its success in rapid rehousing, said Elaine Gimmel, executive director of EDEN. But different service providers ”operate under different structures, funding requirements, and regulations. …Those requirements are important safeguards, but they can add steps to the housing process.”

The biggest challenge is beyond even their collective ability to solve: the lack of affordable housing. Rents in Greater Cleveland are rising at more than twice the national average. A Home for Every Neighbor pays an average of $1,225 in rent per month per unit.

“Without additional affordable housing opportunities, many households remain vulnerable to returning to housing instability despite the progress made through programs like this one,” Gimmel said.

‘You have to make your house your home’

Andrea Reedus stood in the back yard of her house in Lyndhurst and marveled at the silence. It was late afternoon on a sunny Friday and the only sound was a distant lawn mower.

“You could never have told me in a thousand years that I would live in a place like this,” she said.

Reedus has been homeless off and on throughout her adult life. Drugs were at least partly to blame, she said, but she doesn’t like to dwell on it. When she gets a ride downtown to deliver the plates of barbecued chicken and sides that she makes up for people still on the streets, she avoids looking at certain places.

“I just put my head down,” she said, before dropping to a whisper, “because I was there.”

In April she moved into the first floor of a house in the eastern suburb. She is already planning her next step, an EDEN voucher. (She had one before but lost it after the apartment building failed inspection, she said.) But for now, she’s focused on decorating.

One of her daughters visited recently and asked, “Why does it look like you’ve already been here for four years?” Reedus said. She laughed and shrugged and said, “You have to make your house your home.”

This story was originally published by MinnPost. We’re sharing it here as part of In the Shadow of the Server, a Next City series on the fight over urban technology infrastructure — who builds it, who benefits, and how local leaders can push back.

If city leaders and a developer had their way, shovels would be breaking the soil in Pine Island by now.

July was supposed to be the starting month of construction that would transform a sprawling farm field in this southeastern Minnesota town into Google’s next hyperscale data center. Local leaders were fine with the timeframe and ready to push ahead, despite vehement opposition by a citizen group.

The project sits stuck in the mud, however, by order of another authority — a Goodhue County judge who has paused its construction, giving opponents time to plead their legal case against it.

This summer, across Minnesota and the country, concern over data centers has grown into a full-blown movement, capturing the press, focusing alarm at emerging AI technology and becoming a litmus test for political candidates.

But while opponents are channeling much of their energy into turning the court of public opinion against these projects, Pine Island’s case shows that rulings coming out of actual courtrooms can alter the trajectory of developments.

Courts have long been arbiters for major issues in the United States, noted Sam Temple of Faribault. As a candidate for Rice County Board this year, he welcomed a recent ruling slowing down a data center development in the city.

People place hope in the judiciary when they lose it in elected officials, he said. “(The court is) not the ideal tool, but it certainly is a tool, and it’s a tool that is a result of local organizing.”

What are lawsuits alleging, and where have they been filed?

Legal arguments against data center projects vary. Lawsuits allege that cities allowed lax environmental reviews, withheld information from public records requests, and that leaders discussed secret plans in defiance of open meeting laws.

The specifics aren’t always the same, but common frustrations underlie the cases, said an attorney involved in suits against data center projects.

“People are feeling like they don’t have information or a say in these massive projects that seem like they’re moving ahead at lightning speed,” said Luke Norquist of the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy. “As Meta fights Google fights Microsoft to try and become the next AI overlords, that sort of local resistance is happening across the nation.”

The MCEA nonprofit is behind lawsuits challenging local data center regulatory processes. Those include cases in Pine Island, Faribault, Hermantown and Monticello. The first two sites had recent, favorable rulings for data center opponents.

North Mankato was once on the list before MCEA dropped its lawsuit after no project materialized. The city will soon hear residents out on whether to pass a moratorium during an upcoming public hearing.

Citizen groups also brought cases against projects. Stop the Hermantown Data Center has an active case, while the Coalition for Responsible Data Center Development filed a suit in Farmington.

New Orleans is sinking faster than we thought.

A recent study published in the journal Nature Sustainability positions Louisiana as “America’s coastal ground zero,” a place where the future of climate adaptation is already unfolding. The study argues that coastal Louisiana has entered an era of climate-driven depopulation, where land loss, sea-level rise, and repeated storms are inciting relocation. Another recent study in Science Advances affirms this narrative, finding that approximately 98% of New Orleans residents are at high risk of extreme flood damage. The authors of the former study warn of population loss as those who can afford to increasingly relocate from a city beyond “the point of no return.”

But this interpretation of adaptation reads as abandonment. For researchers, policymakers, and outsiders, this reinforces a familiar conclusion: New Orleans is a lost cause.

As a New Orleans native, I reject that conclusion. Black people have always been forced into environments meant to constrain us and have always found ways to live, build, and thrive anyway. The science is clear, but the lack of imagination predetermines the fate of the city.

In Louisiana, maroon communities in swamps and wetlands were formed by formerly enslaved Africans under the constraints of colonial systems. From 1718 to 1863, they adapted to create free, self-sustaining societies in swamp environments, using ecological knowledge to build elevated structures, navigate shifting water, and sustain life in unstable terrain.

Climate change and the housing crisis have only exacerbated the racialized, unfavorable conditions that Black communities have no choice but to adapt to. Structural racism through segregation and disinvestment has long concentrated Black communities in environmentally hazardous areas. This contributes to the climate gap, or the racial disparities in exposure to environmental harm and the capacity to adapt.

When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Black communities and neighborhoods, located at some of the city’s lowest elevations, were the most impacted. In the aftermath, the public housing developments were demolished, displacing thousands of Black residents under the logic of redevelopment instead of return. The message became clear that the problem has never just been water, but also whose lives are worth rebuilding.

So, when experts suggest abandoning New Orleans, we have to ask: Whose city is considered worth saving? What is being framed as inevitability is, in many ways, future-framed environmental racism. But what if we refused that frame?

Though the definition of the climate gap insinuates that Black communities have minimal capacity to adapt, we often have no choice. As an architectural sociologist, part of my work examines Black culture and behavior as systems of adaptive sustainability that reduce resource consumption and embrace the natural environment in ways that formal systems rarely account for. Black ecological scholarship reminds us that sustainability has been racialized, privileging certain forms of knowledge while erasing others. The everyday practices of Black life, often dismissed as necessity or informality, are, in fact, ecological expertise.

From this lineage emerges what I call Afro-solarpunk, a built-environment design framework rooted in Black ecological knowledge that understands survival strategies developed under constraint as blueprints for climate adaptation.

Afro-solarpunk legitimizes Black natural ecological knowledge that originated pre-colonization (such as land stewardship rather than exploitation, and circular economies rather than linear ones), and Black urban ecological knowledge that came from persevering through colonization (such as communal land ownership models rather than private ownership models, and reshaping spaces to meet changing needs rather than treating them as fixed). This is the knowledge that leads to Black households redesigning their homes, from tinting the windows on the west side of the house with foil, to converting offices and dining rooms into bedrooms to accommodate multi-generational living.

Afro-solarpunk is also about the intentional integration of technology into daily life in ways that support Black natural ecological knowledge, optimizing living with nature rather than fighting against it. This is exemplified by the regenerative agriculture practiced within Gullah communities, closed-loop manufacturing in the Nkwere community, and Black households that allow rainy-day air to circulate to cool the house down.

The climate-imposed threat of New Orleans being reclaimed by water begs the question: What becomes possible when we treat Black ways of living as foundations to build from?

Using these strategies and behaviors as a premise, we can begin to imagine energy systems that are shared and decentralized, water systems that adapt rather than resist, and housing that responds to environmental change in real time.

Imagine a New Orleans that is accountable to the communities and natural environment it serves. In the context of maintaining life in a sinking city, we already have versions of water-adaptive Afro-solarpunk across the Black diaspora. In Makoko and Ganvie, communities have built entire systems of life on water. The NLÉ Works Makoko Floating School demonstrates how locally grounded, flood-adaptive design can work with environmental conditions rather than against them.

New Orleans does not lack imagination. The same people who created jazz, second lines, Black Masking Indian traditions, and dishes like gumbo and étouffée have always designed systems of survival and joy under constraint. In fact, as the only city on the World Monuments Fund’s 2026 Irreplaceable America list, its preservation as a cultural site is critical.

What the city does lack, however, is permission to envision technologies and futures that are accountable to its people and its natural landscape. For too long, Black New Orleanians have been conditioned to accept the predicted fate of our city, a fate undetermined by us. Afro-solarpunk is not a supplement to existing climate policy, but a rejection of the premise that adaptation means abandonment and that the future belongs to those with the capital to purchase it; it is a demand that the communities most exposed to climate risk be the ones who design the response.

To researchers, policymakers, and outsiders who suggest abandonment as adaptation: Understand that what you are willing to let go of is a living archive of Black innovation.

And to Black New Orleanians, this is a call to act. We cannot rely on systems that have repeatedly failed to imagine us fully. We must build our own through ecological practices rooted in who we already are. Afro-solarpunk frames this as an opportunity to return to maroon-age as the city returns to water.

New Orleans is sinking. There is no denying that. But we have always known how to live in the places we were never meant to survive. The question is not whether the city can be saved. It is whether we are willing to imagine a future that has already, in many ways, been ours. Solarpunk, or sink?

Next City today announces the class of 41 Vanguards who will convene in Chicago from September 22 through 25. This is Next City’s 18th Vanguard conference, an annual experiential gathering of rising urban leaders who work to improve cities across sectors.

The 2026 Vanguard fellows work in sectors including community organizing, urban planning, policy, economic development, and the arts. They hold positions at influential organizations, including the New York City Department of Transportation, Stanford University, and National Community Investment Fund. Vanguards from Chicago are working with Community Desk Chicago, UnidosUS, Cooperation Racine, the Midwest Environmental Justice Network, and other organizations.

View the entire Vanguard cohort in Next City’s directory of new members and alumni, now numbering more than 700 city-builders.

Programming for this year’s convening has been developed by the Next City team in close partnership with a Chicago-based host committee. It was guided by the theme: “The America that Never Was: In the Pursuit of….” Throughout the convening, we’ll explore the gap between what America has promised for centuries and what communities — particularly Black and Brown ones — have received. We’ll also highlight the ways that communities across Chicago have built models for building community wealth, despite decades of disinvestment.

“Chicago is a city that offers a lot of lessons about what it means to build community power and wealth after decades of disinvestment,” said Next City Editorial Director Deonna Anderson. “I’m looking forward to sharing and learning more about the city’s South, West and North Sides with this newly minted Vanguard cohort.”

Next City, a nonprofit news outlet, launched Vanguard in 2009, aligning with its core value of fostering connections between changemakers. The conference supports its mission to unleash the transformative power of solutions-based journalism, equipping communities and their leaders to reimagine cities as liberated places of economic, environmental, and racial justice. As does all of Next City’s work, the event programming uplifts diverse perspectives and marginalized narratives.

The conference, which is supported by a group of generous sponsors and grantmakers, will unfold as a four-day series of presentations, workshops, and neighborhood tours. The program doesn’t stop there, however; the lessons learned serve as a launchpad for a year-long reporting project focused on housing, in collaboration with two local newsrooms. That work is made possible with support from Press Forward Chicago.

Now meet this year’s Vanguard cohort (in alphabetical order by last name).

Alicia Olushola Ajayi is a designer, strategist, and writer whose Black placemaking practice uncovers and amplifies stories as acts of resistance and joy. Through ola-di studio, she collaborates with communities and cultural institutions to transform their own legacies into catalysts for investment through research, storytelling, and design.

Joy Armstrong, Implementation Manager, City of Boston

Joy Armstrong is a global citizen, Boston-based city planner, and data analyst dedicated to building just cities through policy and co-design. Currently the Implementation Manager for Boston’s Planning Advisory Council, she leverages a life lived across diverse urban systems to translate complex data into community-driven, equitable initiatives.

Rachel is City Bureau’s Chicago Director of Documenters and a proud Chicago native. They blend pastoral leadership, program management, policy advocacy, and community organizing to bring a fresh perspective on civic engagement. Committed to justice, equity, and transparency, Rachel helps equip residents to participate in local government and civic life.

Rebecca Cordes Chan is Executive Director of Friends of the Rail Park, a Philadelphia nonprofit transforming historic rail infrastructure into a three-mile greenway. Previously at LISC, she has a background in placemaking, economic development, and cultural strategy. She holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Illinois.

Serrater Chapman is Director of Applied Research at the Woodstock Institute, where she leads research on lending disparities, consumer financial protections, and equitable access to capital. A lifelong Chicago south sider, she uses data-driven research and community-centered policy strategies to advance financial justice, housing equity, and inclusive economic development.

City Planner, New York City Department of Transportation

Nicole Cheng (she/they) is an artist and designer working to realize a New York City where everything is for everyone. They currently work as an urban planner at the NYC Department of Transportation and are an upcoming board member at the Council of Landscape Architectural Registration Boards.

Chandra Christmas-Rouse is an urban planner, economic mobility strategist, and artist based in Chicago, IL. Chandra is the founding principal of Marie Consulting Group, a firm that works to ensure communities thrive in place and to transform systems to work for all, and the author of Where the Sidewalk Grows.

Community Engagement Strategist, Sidewalk Detroit

Rukiya is a queer abolitionist, organizer, activist, and writer. They allude their love + dedication to fostering intentional community to their lived experience as a lifelong Detroiter, growing through institutional space, obtaining a masters in urban planning, and continuously being challenged by those they remain accountable to in their practice.

Siboney Díaz-Sánchez is a design justice advocate committed to prioritizing community in design and policy processes. She is an architect, facilitator and collaborator. She was a Boston Enterprise Rose Fellow and a PolicyLink Transformative Justice Infrastructure Fellow.

Senior Program Officer, San Antonio Area Foundation

Jesus serves as Senior Program Officer at the Area Foundation, where he advocates for neighborhood placemaking as a cross-sectional intervention. He leads the local Press Forward chapter and oversees the Livable & Resilient Communities grantmaking portfolio. Jesus was raised in rural Mexico and immigrated to the U.S. when he was ten.

Principal, Human Nature, Inc.

Ryan Geismar is a landscape architect at Human Nature in Cincinnati. His practice centers on civic space, community engagement, and context-sensitive design — from parks and plazas to vacant land reclamation and green infrastructure — with a belief that public space is a vehicle for equity, belonging, and community health.

Anthena Gore is a social-environmental strategist and community-centered design practitioner. Her work focuses on translating community wisdom and insight into policy action and equitable systems change. For 15 years, she has worked across community planning, design research, federal and participatory grantmaking, and program design at local and national levels.

Megan Grable is an Urban Planner with Fort Wayne’s Department of Neighborhoods, using data-driven strategies and deep community relationships to deliver transformative urban solutions. She leads the award-winning CPTED Pilot, revitalizes neighborhood associations, and applies global perspectives to advance evidence-based approaches that reshape how cities design for safety and impact.

Chloé Greene is a liberation historian, love practitioner, and system transformation leader guiding just organizational and community culture change. She is the founder of Sowing Love, supporting people and communities to return to love as a freedom practice. She believes when we center love, we heal past and future generations.

Barry Greene Jr., creator of “Density Dad,” writes about family life, housing, transportation, and equitable growth through the lens of everyday urbanism. His work and advocacy have been featured in Streetsblog USA, Better Bike Share, and others, focusing on how cities can better serve working families, renters, and future generations.

Jasmine Gunn is an urban planning professional with over 10 years of experience advancing equitable development in Chicago. As a supervising planner with the Chicago Department of Planning and Development, she leads transformative housing and economic development initiatives while also teaching metropolitan housing planning at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Alexia Guzmán is the Economic Empowerment Center Director at Rogers Park Business Alliance, a Chicago nonprofit. She devotes her work to economic development in the diverse Rogers Park community by leading bilingual entrepreneurial training and small business support programs, specifically empowering immigrant and multicultural entrepreneurs through education and essential resources.

Ellie is a Minneapolis-based arts professional and bicycle advocate who is currently the Cultural Policy Fellow at the Metropolitan Council. There she spearheads the Art + Policy initiative to bring more artists into city planning. She also organizes community-based rides through Perennial Cycle and is a Knight Emerging Cities Champion.

Julia Jannon-Shields (she/her) is a community planner advancing equitable, culturally-responsive futures. She works to center lived experience and reparation in urban policy, planning, and governance. Julia collaboratively leads across sectors through her roles at the Seattle Department of Transportation; Homestead Community Land Trust; and the Puget Sound Regional Council.

Timi Koyejo is a housing policy researcher working at the intersection of social housing and the green transition, partnering with progressive movements and policymakers across the U.S. Currently, he is the Housing & Communities Policy Manager at the Climate and Community Institute. His background in urbanism informs his work.

Joseph Kunkel is a community designer and educator based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation, he serves as a Principal at MASS Design Group, where he leads the Sustainable Native Communities Design Lab, advancing Indigenous-led housing, planning, and community development projects across North America.

Janae is a policy leader serving as an Assistant Director of Community Development, leading initiatives focused on affordable housing, equitable development, and economic mobility. Her work includes housing preservation and transformative redevelopment projects supporting underserved communities. She previously worked at the Urban Institute and the U.S. House Financial Services Committee.

Dani from the Bronx is a recovering former bureaucrat turned civic technologist building human-centered digital infrastructure for the social safety net. Dani is currently Co-Executive Director of Beneficial Computing, a civic tech nonprofit building AI tools for federal disability benefits (SSI/SSDI) centering + advocating for the human services sector.

Sherina McKinley is Co-CEO of Uptima Entrepreneur Cooperative, where she supports entrepreneurs through operations, ownership transition, and community finance strategies. Her work focuses on entrepreneurship ecosystems, non-extractive capital, and equitable economic development. She is passionate about creating pathways to ownership that help communities build long-term stability and economic agency.

Equitable Reinvestment Policy Associate, Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development

Steven Molina (he/him) is ANHD’s equitable reinvestment policy associate, focusing on CRA, fair lending, and financial access. He holds degrees from SUNY Plattsburgh and CUNY SLU. With 15+ years across sectors, he centers cross-sector collaboration. In his free time, he enjoys reading and exploring history.

Danielle Mulligan is the Associate Director of the Boston University Initiative on Cities, where she engages urban leaders, policymakers, researchers, and students to advance sustainable, just, and inclusive cities. Danielle draws on her experiences at the Scholars Strategy Network and master’s in Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning from Tufts.

Jay Patel is a community development finance professional in Chicago, where he manages and monitors CDFI and MDI portfolios. He has also built 22 open-source Python tools that put federal fair lending and CDFI Fund data within reach of practitioners without enterprise data budgets.

Vice President of Planning, Far South Community Development Corporation

Katanya Raby is an urban planner, artist, and activist dedicated to equitable planning in Chicago. Founder of the Al Raby Foundation and Our Urban Dreams, she led Chicago DOH’s Brookings-recognized REIA and co-developed the city’s ETOD Policy Plan. She serves on multiple civic boards and lectures at UIC.

Business Development Specialist, City of Madison, Wisconsin - Economic Development Division

George Reistad currently serves as a Business Development Specialist for the City of Madison. Originally appointed as the City’s Food Policy Director in August 2016, Reistad has been one of the primary architects of the City’s initiatives to improve food entrepreneurship, access, security, and equity. He is a UW-Madison alumnus.

Deputy Executive Director, Williams & Russell CDC

Ta’ Neshia Renae is Deputy Executive Director of Williams & Russell CDC, leading operations, programs, and partnerships for a pioneering reparative development project. A military veteran, she brings experience in housing advocacy, community engagement, and systems building, advancing equitable development through cross-sector collaboration, strategic execution, and long-term community stability initiatives.

Trails and Active Mobility Director, New Jersey Bike & Walk Coalition

Tiffany R. Robinson is Trails and Active Mobility Director at the New Jersey Bike & Walk Coalition, where she leads the North Jersey Trail Network. With more than 20 years across public, private, and nonprofit planning, her work focuses on how walking, biking, and public space shape people’s everyday lives.

Creative Consultant and Brand Strategist

Nic Roc is a San Diego-based consultant and strategist, and a believer that artists are essential drivers of thriving cities. Her work bridges creative economy development, solidarity economics, and community ownership — building infrastructure for a tomorrow where we all belong and thrive.

Executive Director, Muncie Arts and Culture Council

Tania Said is Executive Director of the Muncie Arts and Culture Council in Muncie, Indiana, where she leads and champions arts experiences, public art, and a thriving community of artists and allies. With a background in museum leadership and arts administration, she believes in our power of arts and culture.

Director of Community Development, United Way of Metro Chicago

With a background in nonprofit leadership and economic development, including CDFIs, government programs, and corporate investment, Smoak is experienced in developing sustainable and community-driven strategies and building relationships across a variety of industries. He is currently the Director of Community Development at United Way of Metro Chicago, leading its economic development initiatives.

Cultural Policy Fellow, Stanford University

Benny Starr is a hip-hop artist, filmmaker, and creative and cultural strategist whose work lives at the intersection of Black Southern culture, civic infrastructure, and the arts. He currently serves as a U.S. Cultural Policy Fellow at Stanford University.

Founder and Principal, Civic Repair Lab

Juell Stewart is an urban planner, policy strategist, and founder of Civic Repair Lab. Her work explores spatial repair—the practice of addressing historical inequities through place-based policy, civic engagement, and equitable development. She has led community economic development initiatives spanning food justice, cannabis equity and reparations.

Sarah Tang is the director for programs at Coalition for a Better Chinese American Community in Chicago’s Chinatown, and oversees youth empowerment, small business, and community planning programs. In her tenure, she has pioneered commercial corridor activation strategies, the fight against a stadium next to Chinatown, and immigrant justice work.

Adrean Vargas, a Chicago native, is a workforce development director at UnidosUS, the queer son of immigrant parents, and an advocate for equitable opportunity. Drawing from his lived experience, he advances career pathways for Latino communities through digital inclusion, economic mobility, and relationship-centered strategies that empower historically underserved communities.

Senior Director for Wealth Building Strategies, Community Desk Chicago

Ryan Wilson is the Senior Director of Wealth Building Strategies with Community Desk Chicago, where he focuses on shared ownership models to build community wealth. He has nearly 10 years of experience in community real estate development. Outside of work, you can find him on the Chicago lakefront.

Andrea Yarbrough is a multi-disciplinary artist born and raised on the South Side of Chicago. She stewards the collaborative placekeeping initiative, in c/o: Black women, and is a worker-owner at Cooperation Racine. Andrea earned an MA in Museum and Exhibition Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

For questions about sponsorship or press inquiries, please contact Events Director Sara Schuenemann by email at sara@nextcity.org or by phone at 267-239-0762.

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

In 2024, Bay Area Rapid Transit was struggling to build back ridership and facing a dramatic loss of fare revenue.

“The Bay Area has embraced remote work at a higher rate than other areas of the country,” explains Alicia Trost, chief communications officer.

The solution? Throw a party. BART was about to officially retire its original rolling stock, its legacy fleet, which first debuted in 1972. But the agency decided to give riders one last chance to say goodbye. The event, called “Ride into History” took place on April 20 with speeches, food trucks, raffles and the chance to ride the legacy fleet for the very last time.

A whopping 4,000 people showed up. More importantly, 4,000 people paid to ride the train.

“This wasn’t a free event, because all of this goes back to funding,” Trost says.

For BART, the funding situation is dire. According to the agency, fares and parking revenue used to cover about 70% of operating costs. As of the 2025 fiscal year, that share has dropped to 30%. Now, the future of BART hinges on a November ballot measure asking voters to approve a new sales tax that could bring in $1 billion to support Bay Area transit.

Transit agencies across the U.S. are facing similar challenges and turning to new strategies to draw ridership, like running more service on off-peak hours. But agencies like BART are also tapping into something more nebulous: In a post-pandemic world facing a loneliness epidemic, people just want to be outside, around other people, doing something fun.

Since that farewell bash, BART has hosted events ranging from speed dating on the train (tickets sold out in seven minutes) to bird watching with Bay Area authors to a BART-themed prom. And it’s not just train nerds who are showing up. Last year, BART hosted a movie night at Concord Station, screening Madagascar.

“There were a lot of grandparents that brought their grandchildren,” says Trost. “It was an affordable thing for them to do with their grandchildren that night, instead of just staying at home.”

Tapping into the power of social media — and viral merch

According to Trost, making events content-creation-friendly is key. Take SweaterFest, first held in 2023. The event capitalizes on the popular BART holiday sweaters, bringing rail fans together for one big holiday photo.

“Even the social media videos that we produce at the events, many of them go viral. People are like, ‘I can’t believe BART did this. I wish I knew about it, next time’ or ‘oh, this was sold out.’”

BART is not alone in capitalizing on the power of a good time. In Los Angeles, Metro recently opened three new stations on the D Line, a subway line running from Downtown to Beverly Hills. As part of the celebrations, the agency committed to activating at least one new station every day for the first 90 days.

Activating stations has included everything from festivals to on-going amenities like coffee carts and weekly farmers markets. And, of course, many Metro riders are showing up in cheeky “Ride the D” T-shirts.

Part of the strategy is rethinking Metro stations as vibrant social hubs. In the future, Metro could consistently activate all of its 144 stations.

“Jane Jacobs — people make spaces feel safer, right?” says Lilly O’Brien, who oversees Metro’s station activation program, referencing the iconic urbanist’s influential idea. “Eyes on the street — when there are lots of people around having fun, that space feels better, safer, more fun and exciting than an empty space.”

To host activations, Metro is tapping into the cultural expertise of small businesses and community organizations. One group, Skate Hunnies, hosted a skate night that began at the new Wilshire Fairfax station and ended at the L.A. County Museum of Art.

“Having access to a public plaza area where they can have music and skate around and even skate dance was so exciting and interesting for them and that is not something that I would immediately come up with in my brain,” says O’Brien. The new stations have also hosted salsa classes, pickleball and basket weaving.

Station activations are not new for Metro; what is new is the sheer number of events. With activations at the new D line stations, World Cup fan zones and other events across the system, Metro is hoping to lure new riders.

“If you want to have fun, if you want to get to the best events, the coolest places, you do that on Metro.”

Is it working?

L.A. Metro has seen a boost in ridership during station activations at the stations being activated.

For BART, tracking a cause-and-effect relationship between a movie night, for example, and someone choosing to ride the system more frequently is more difficult. But Trost says that most events are actually making money. “Some of these events we were selling $10,000-plus — so, large amounts of our BART merchandise would be sold at these events in a very small period of time.”

During the pandemic, the public image of transit suffered as trains, buses and stations were abandoned by everyday riders. Fun events and station activations might be changing that.

While funding for BART might be on the line, the flames of BART fandom are burning bright, something Trost attributes in part to events like BART Prom and SweaterFest.

“The level of where we’re seeing people go out of their way to advocate for BART, to post so vocally about BART, to show up for BART at these events — I do feel that that’s a bit new.”

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.

Toronto Mayor Is Pushing for a Ban on Surveillance Pricing

Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow is pushing the city to explore banning “surveillance pricing” — the AI-driven practice of using a shopper’s personal data to determine how much they might be willing to pay.

Chow called the practice “price gouging” and argued the city has authority to act under a consumer protection clause in Ontario provincial law, The Toronto Star reports. Her motion calls for, “at minimum,” plain-language disclosure to consumers when their personal data is being used to set their grocery bill, and would direct city staff to report back on broader ban options early next year.

Whether Toronto actually has the legal power to restrict a largely digital practice by major international retailers remains an open question — and the move could set up a jurisdictional battle with the province. In Manitoba, the province enacted a similar ban last month, with fines of up to $1 million for retailers found in violation.

Meanwhile in the U.S., Politico reports that New York state legislators are hoping to enact the first statewide ban on surveillance pricing across almost every industry, and both New Jersey and Connecticut recently approved more limited legislation restricting surveillance pricing.

Student Loan Defaults Spike As SAVE Plan Ends

The Associated Press reports that 9.5 million student loan borrowers across the United States — 20% of all federal borrowers — are in default. This means their payments are more than 9 months late and can be garnished from their wages or social security. It’s the highest number since at least 2016 and an increase of more than 4 million since June 2025, 9 months after a Biden-era student loan pause ended.

According to the AP, “Out of $1.7 trillion in federally backed student loans nationwide, $233.3 billion is in default.” After a series of lawsuits, the Biden-era SAVE plan ended this year and has been replaced with the GOP-authored, income-driven Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP), which leaves borrowers with a higher monthly payment. Nearly all of the 15 states with the worst student loan default rates were won by Trump in the 2024 election, per the AP.

More Than 200 Mayors Protest SNAP Cuts

A letter sent to the Senate by the U.S. Conference of Mayors and signed by 210 American mayors raises the alarm about SNAP cuts enacted in 2025. “Rising costs of living, stagnant wages, and reduced federal support are converging to create conditions that municipal governments are increasingly challenged to address on their own,” the mayors wrote. “SNAP remains the nation’s most effective and efficient anti-hunger program.”

The 2025 Republican reconciliation law imposed work requirements for food stamps and shifted financial responsibility to states. As a result the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that 4.5 million people, or 11% of all participants, were kicked off SNAP from July 2025 to April 2026. The letter asks the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Agriciculture, Food Assistance and Forestry to delay the shifting of costs to states, reverse the cuts, and to include Puerto Rico in the SNAP program.

Mamdani Appoints Lina Khan To Lead Economic Development Agency

Following months of concern from economic development advocates across New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has appointed former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan as chairwoman of New York City’s Economic Development Corporation.

As head of the FTC, Khan garnered headlines and raised the ire of billionaire CEOs for ramping up the agency’s long-dormant antitrust enforcement. Khan’s appointment is an unusual one for the EDC, which typically works to produce public-private partnerships that boost the city’s tax base, sometimes through controversial corporate tax abatements. The EDC chair is a non-paying position, but the agency’s board – with the chair at its head — is tasked with approving all of the agency’s projects.

Mamdani also appointed Tony Shorris, a veteran of the Bill de Blasio administration as EDC president. “EDC has enormous capacity to make life materially better for New Yorkers, and to ensure that public resources are being used to build state capacity,” Khan said at a press conference.

Survey: People Don’t Really Like Data Centers

A survey conducted by Politico found more people in opposition to nearby data centers than supporting them; 41% of respondents said they would oppose new data centers within three miles of where they live, while only 24% would support them. Another Politico analysis found more than 200 data centers going up in House districts with competitive elections this November, making them a potential rallying issue in the midterms.

Opinion has changed dramatically since another Politico poll in January, particularly for Democrats. Among people who voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, support for and opposition to data centers were fairly split in January. By July’s poll, 53% of Harris voters were opposed and 22% in support.

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• California takes 5 cities to court over failure to meet housing planning deadlines. Smart Cities Dive

• Mayor Wu, feds unveil plan to tackle sea level rise in Boston. Commonwealth Beacon

• It cost billions to divert a river in Brazil’s outback. So where has all the water gone? The Guardian

OPPORTUNITIES & RESOURCES

• DEADLINE TODAY: Goldman Sachs’ Community Development Grants Program is accepting applications from organizations improving economic mobility and strengthening low- and moderate-income communities across eligible U.S. regions. Apply by July 24.

• Borealis Philanthropy’s new Just Futures Initiative is accepting funding applications on a rolling basis from organizations advancing community safety, reform, justice, and belonging. Fill out an eligibility quiz to receive access to the Letter of Interest form.

• The University of Pennsylvania’s Lipman Family Prize is accepting applications from nonprofits around the world that are showing leadership and innovation in the social sector. Awards range from $150,000 to $300,000. Apply by July 31.

• The Pratt Center for Community Development’s new Community Planning & Research Accelerator will support four community-based organizations working on housing, climate, economic justice, planning, and land use with project funding in technical assistance. Attend an info session July 16 or July 22 and apply by Aug. 31.

When the Kensington Corridor Trust asked residents what their Philadelphia neighborhood needed most, one answer came up again and again.

“One of the things that folks started to tell us in almost every single room that I was in was that people wanted a grocery store,” says executive director Adriana Abizadeh-Barbour, who since 2020 has led the pioneering neighborhood trust’s efforts to revitalize the corridor in partnership with residents.

“Folks talked about the fact that there wasn’t a grocery store on Kensington Avenue, and there hadn’t been for quite some time.”

Now, about six years later, that dream has become a reality through an unusual partnership between the community-controlled real estate entity and a locally-based gourmet food and wine importer, the Kensington Food Company.

Late last month, the Kensington Food Company opened the neighborhood’s first grocery store, with more than 100 locals in attendance. “You felt the love,” owner Thomas Sheridan recalls. “They flooded the store, the questions were great, people were making purchases … That day was amazing.”

Unlike a traditional developer, KCT acquires and stewards commercial properties on behalf of neighborhood residents, keeping rents affordable while allowing the community to shape redevelopment. It’s one of a growing number of community-controlled real estate models gaining momentum across the country, as Next City has reported previously.

The trust had the building; Sheridan had the business. Together, they launched an affordable grocery store with a shared commercial kitchen designed to help other local food entrepreneurs grow.

From food apartheid to affordable artisanal

Sheridan grew up in Kensington. His gourmet food import, production, and wholesale distribution business, founded in 2020, is based in Kensington. He even named it after his community.

“I’m sure the neighborhood isn’t asking for gold medal-winning extra-virgin olive oils, balsamics, and artisan pasta,” Sheridan says. “[But] I do believe once they are initiated to it, they would enjoy it and desire it. They deserve the right to experience it.”

A 2019 report by Philadelphia’s Department of Public Health found that 66% of all Philadelphia food retailers are corner stores, chain convenience stores, gas stations, dollar stores, and newsstands. Only 19% sell produce and healthier food options.

“This is a predominantly Black and Brown low-income neighborhood that, post-industrialization, has just seen continuous decline of investment,” Abizadeh-Barbour explains. “Bringing a grocery store to Kensington Avenue helps to disrupt that.”

But KCT is also thinking about the systemic issues that led to the lack of accessible, fresh, healthy, and affordable foods along this once-bustling corridor.

“There are disinvestments that have been made. There are policies that have been passed. There are efforts that have not been undergone to make sure that Kensington can have what it needs,” Abizadeh-Barbour tells Next City. This is not just across food; it’s across lots of different areas and systems.”

Sheridan’s company also has a vending space at Philly’s iconic Reading Terminal Market, as well as two warehouses; a sauce production facility; a pasta production facility in Delaware County; and a bottling and packaging facility in Kensington. But in bringing fresh food to his own neighborhood, he has focused on affordability.

“I still make sure that my offerings here match what I think the community can handle or desire,” he says. Some of the goods here are priced at 30% less than at his Reading Terminal location, and the store accepts EBT payments. “I try to keep it as low as possible. You’ll find our products here lower than you will anywhere else in the country. If I’m doing this as part of giving back, then I should try my best to make it affordable.”

Meeting residents’ needs

Josh Harris is KCT’s director of capital projects and sustainability. He says the neighborhood trust’s collaboration with Sheridan began in late 2023 when KCT was thinking of a possible operator for a grocery store.

“Believe it or not, magically, Tom [Sheridan] just walked into our office one day and said, ‘Hey, I’m this Kensington kid and want to give back to the community. How can I help?’”

When KCT was founded in 2019, executive director Adriana Abizadeh-Barbour says, its leaders “spent a year in dialogue and conversation with neighbors and other small business owners, just to see what they felt [and] what they felt they wanted the trust to accomplish and achieve on the corridor.”

“One of the things that folks started to tell us in almost every single room that I was in was that people wanted a grocery store,” she says. “Folks talked about the fact that there wasn’t a grocery store on Kensington Avenue, and there hadn’t been for quite some time.”

Sheridan told the team about his vision for opening commercial kitchen space in the area for other small businesses to be able to use. KCT then showed Sheridan the building at 3462 Kensington Avenue, which KCT had acquired in April 2023 for $225,000.

Abizadeh-Barbour told Sheridan that they wanted the project to have a bit more value for the local community, allowing residents to interact more with the space. They told Sheridan about their idea for a grocery store, based on residents’ needs.

At first, he was unsure.

“Why that scared me is because my whole entire career has just been selling things that I import,” Sheridan explains. “But then she said the neighborhood wants it, and I love the neighborhood, so I said, actually, let’s just do it.”

Boosting the neighborhood’s economic future

The store’s grand opening late marked the end of a two-year renovation process. So far, about $800,000 have been invested into the cost of the building and renovations, with Sheridan investing $250,000 for equipment and the Department of Commerce contributing grant funding.

Harris, who spearheaded the renovation process, says that this was “the first full renovation completion since I’ve been [at KCT] — new utilities, new sewage, new electric, that sort of stuff.” He prioritized hiring subcontractors from within the 19134 ZIP code, especially people of color, to bring their vision to life.

They incorporated Sheridan’s original idea by adding a commercial kitchen space in the back of the store and upstairs, allowing local businesses to rent licensed kitchen space and expand food production. The shipping dock at the back of the store, facing Tioga Street, is also open to commercial renters.

The next step of construction is adding solar panels, a green roof, and other energy resilience improvements, funded by a grant from the Green Family Foundation. “[That] will pass on energy savings to both the grocery store and the shared commercial kitchen, further reducing their costs and improving the general carbon output in the neighborhood,” Abizadeh-Barbour says.

It’s all part of KCT’s mission of reactivating the commercial corridor for local businesses and residents, turning vacant properties into community-owned, fully-occupied, affordable storefronts, homes, and other uses. Abizadeh-Barbour says this, in turn, will boost residents’ physical and mental wellbeing.

KCT sees projects like the grocery store as more than economic development. The organization views community ownership of commercial real estate as a way to build wealth — and ultimately political power — for neighborhood residents.

“We’re a systems change model,” she says. “Historically … those who have amassed land, amass wealth. We want to build that same paradigm, right? Let’s amass some land to amass some wealth to amass some power, so we can change policy and change systems as a community — together, collectively.”

This article was originally published in The Conversation.

As homelessness increases around the world, more unhoused people are turning to parks and other urban green spaces to seek shelter. However, these places are also home to animals that live in and around urban areas.

This sets the stage for potentially dangerous interactions between humans and urban wildlife such as coyotes. Unhoused people face the risk of contracting disease from wild animals, while animals can be displaced by human presence.

Recent work by my colleagues and me shows that this issue contributes to human-wildlife conflict, with important ecological and social consequences. To explore conflict between homeless communities and urban wildlife, we focused on coyotes in Edmonton.

One of the most successful carnivores of the Anthropocene, coyotes thrive in cities. They have a remarkable capacity to live alongside humans, as well as an ability to get into trouble with people; conflict includes property damage, disease transmission, attacks on pets and, rarely, people.

Data we examined from the Edmonton Urban Coyote Project showed that the number of coyote conflict reports in the city is increasing. These include interactions in which coyotes intimidated, approached or attacked humans or their pets.

Key to our work were the harsh winter conditions in Edmonton. Consistent snowfall transforms the city into a canvas that records the details of coyote life, which can be read footprint by footprint, telling us what they eat and where they go to find safety.

Cold temperatures also encourage people sleeping outdoors to seek heated spaces, but unoccupied encampments remain highly visible. This combination allowed us to read the stories of human-wildlife interactions in the snow, while respecting human privacy.

Three forms of conflict

When shoppers walk into a grocery store, they expect security cameras. Few expect the store to analyze their faces, eyes, and voices.

Earlier this year, customers entering some Wegmans stores in New York City learned that the retailer was using facial recognition technology in its locations and storing customers’ biometric data. The disclosure, required under a 2021 city ordinance governing biometric collection, initially drew little attention beyond the city.

But when the Buffalo-based Investigative Post asked whether Wegmans was also using the technology in Western New York stores, the company’s lack of response drew concern from local lawmakers.

Now, Erie County has banned private-sector biometric collection outright, becoming the first county in the state and one of the first major counties across the United States to do so.

For Erie County Legislator Lawrence Dupre, who represents Buffalo’s predominantly Black East Side and introduced the legislation on May 26, the unanswered questions raised a larger issue: how much personal information should private companies be allowed to collect from people who simply walk through their doors?.

“That silence [from Wegmans] is what drove my initial response,” Dupre told Next City via email. “My constituents live in neighborhoods where surveillance has become the norm. We are already watched and profiled as we go about our lives. When I learned that the same corporations operating in our neighborhoods might be building biometric databases without telling us, I initially responded with a bill that was modeled on what New York City passed in 2021.”

It took three years for the city to pass its biometric privacy law. What began as a proposal requiring businesses to disclose biometric collection ultimately evolved into one of the nation’s most restrictive local laws regulating commercial facial recognition technology.

The more Dupre studied biometric surveillance, the more he concluded that transparency alone would not solve the problem. A disclosure requirement, he argued, amounted to little more than a permission slip.

“You are telling businesses: go ahead and collect this permanent, irreplaceable data, just put up a sign first. A ban was the right response because the data itself is the danger.”

On May 26, Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz signed the Biometric Transparency and Privacy Act into law. The measure prohibits private businesses from collecting, using, retaining, or selling biometric identifiers, including facial recognition data, in most commercial settings. Violators face fines of up to $5,000 per day.

“You can reset a password. You cannot reset your face,” said Dupre during the press conference announcing the new law.

According to the New York Civil Liberties Union, the new measure is necessary to address the rise of facial recognition technology in businesses in response to evidence that the technology was frequently inaccurate and racially biased, leading to wrongful harassment, removal from establishments, arrests, and even jail time for misidentified individuals.

Wegmans later confirmed that it had deployed facial recognition technology in “a small fraction” of its stores, saying biometric information was not shared with third parties and was retained only as long as necessary for security purposes. The company did not disclose how long data was stored, stating only that its retention practices align with industry standards, nor did it identify how many locations used the technology or where they were located.

Facial recognition technology has rapidly become embedded in everyday life. It unlocks smartphones, verifies identities at airports, and increasingly serves as a security tool for retailers and entertainment venues. Yet privacy advocates argue that regulation has failed to keep pace with adoption.

Fight for the Future, a digital rights organization, has identified numerous retailers that either use or may be using facial recognition technology in stores.

Lia Holland, campaigns and communications director for Fight for the Future, told Next City that the growth of biometric surveillance is occurring largely outside public awareness.

“The retail industry is sensitive to customer outcry, and that is the most effective lever we have found for self-regulation short of passing a law. However, outcry has also gotten less effective over time as the surveillance industry pours millions of PR and marketing dollars into overcoming how unwanted their technology is.”

The United States currently has no comprehensive federal law regulating facial recognition technology.

At the state level, only Illinois, Texas, and Washington currently have laws dedicated to private uses of biometric data. Everywhere else, biometric data is protected either as a category of sensitive data under a general consumer privacy law, or only through data-breach notification rules.

ICE and government use of biometric data

For immigrant communities, another concern looms large: government access to biometric data collected by private entities.

Erie County’s law exempts government agencies acting within their official duties, as well as financial institutions. That exemption means federal immigration authorities are not restricted by the county’s ban when conducting enforcement operations.

“The most urgent harm we see is illustrated by how this data is being fed into the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and it is being used not only to abduct people off the streets, but also to intimidate activists and legal observers who challenge ICE,” Holland says.

Federal immigration agencies have dramatically expanded their use of facial recognition technology in recent years. Critics warn that commercial databases could eventually become valuable sources of information for enforcement agencies seeking to identify and track individuals.

Jillian E. Nowak, managing attorney of the Buffalo Immigration Office for Prisoners’ Legal Services of New York, says that Erie County’s law only offers a potential remedy for surveillance violations committed by private entities but does nothing to address ICE’s own use of the technology.

“We know that ICE uses and continues to develop technology to identify individuals based on facial recognition or iris-scanning technology, particularly in orchestrating widespread community pick-ups,” Nowak says. “ICE also routinely uses GPS monitoring via ankle or wrist devices and monitors social media.”

“Absent intervention from the courts,” she adds, “I am not aware of any meaningful oversight or guardrails of ICE’s use of these surveillance technologies.”

Several immigrant leaders in the city tell Next City that knowledge of facial recognition and its ubiquity in public life remains low within their communities, despite fears about immigration enforcement.

For Dupre, Erie County’s ordinance was never intended to be the final answer. Instead, he sees it as a model that other local governments can adopt while state and federal lawmakers continue debating broader reforms.

“A lot of communities are waiting for the state legislature or Congress to act, and that wait could take years,” Dupre says. “County government is close enough to the people to hear what they need and responsive enough to act on it. Other counties can do the same.”

He says the law draws a distinction between ordinary security measures and biometric surveillance.

“We designed this to change behavior, not generate lawsuits,” Dupre says. “A store can still record video. What it cannot do is run facial recognition software to build a biometric profile of everyone who walks through the door. The line this law draws is between security and surveillance.”

This story has been corrected to reflect that Erie County’s biometric legislation was signed May 26 rather than April 30, which is the date the legislature passed the law.

Although you can find $8 matcha lattes and $25 cocktails there today, Manhattan’s Lower East Side remains a neighborhood covered in both public housing and limited-equity housing cooperatives. Those buildings are home to thousands of low-income residents — largely Hispanic or Asian, often immigrants — who have been quietly investing in their own vision of the neighborhood for decades.

On a warm, muggy Saturday earlier this month, outside the headquarters of the Lower East Side People’s Federal Credit Union on East 3rd Street, those residents gathered for a block party. They were celebrating the 9,000-member, $90 million credit union’s 40th anniversary as the conduit for making those investments in this neighborhood.

Over the past 40 years, Lower East Side People’s Federal Credit Union has made more than $150 million in loans. That includes loans for the housing cooperatives themselves. The credit union is one of the few reliable sources around the city for limited-equity co-op share loans, which low-income households need to buy-in as new co-op members. It also makes larger loans to entire limited-equity co-op buildings to cover maintenance or other needs.

The credit union also makes loans to beloved long-time local business owners, like Patricia Valencia and Chef Ricardo Arias, the wife-and-husband owners of Cantina Cubana — which catered lunch for the block party. The couple started out in 2007 with a small cafe across the street from the credit union, which made them their first business loan about a decade ago. In 2023, the duo moved to a larger, more prominent location around the corner, on the first floor of another limited-equity co-op. After re-opening, the couple took out another business loan from Lower East Side People’s.

“Not too many banks give restaurants business loans, because they’re afraid they might not last and be too hard to pay them back,” Valencia says. “But we have a nice relationship. When we opened here three years ago, there were like six other places that opened the same time we opened, and they’re all gone. If you don’t know the neighborhood, it’s really hard.”

Community organizing roots

Lower East Side People’s Federal Credit Union emerged during an era when it was much more obvious that other banks weren’t interested in serving diverse, low-income neighborhoods like the Lower East Side — alternatively dubbed “Loisaida” by its large Hispanic population.

It was the mid-1980s. The decades-long consolidation of the banking sector was just beginning. Community organizers and neighborhood activists came to see the formation of their own financial institution as part of their broader work to build power in a diverse, low-income neighborhood from the ground up.

In 1984, the Cooper Square Committee left a message on the answering machine at the National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions, then led by Clifford Rosenthal.

The Cooper Square Committee had famously led the charge to stop Robert Moses’ plan for wholesale clearance of the Lower East Side and Chinatown. Those efforts eventually led to the creation of the Cooper Square Community Land Trust, the first such land trust in New York City, which now stewards 23 buildings with 360 permanently affordable housing units.

The Cooper Square Committee was also part of a larger coalition in the neighborhood, called the Joint Planning Council, famous for its fight to build low-income housing at the massive “Seward Park Urban Renewal Area,” a six-acre set of parcels on the south side of Delancey Street that the city condemned, acquired, and demolished in 1967. Local politicians opposed low-income housing at the site. The whole area remained vacant for decades. When ground finally broke on a new redevelopment project for the whole area in 2015, half of the 1,000 housing units slated for construction were designated as permanently affordable housing.

On the answering machine in 1984, Cooper Square Committee left a message about the Joint Planning Council’s campaign against the planned closure of the Manufacturers Hanover Trust bank branch at Avenue B and East 3rd Street. At the time it was the last bank branch within a 100-block area of the Lower East Side. The bank claimed it couldn’t find anyone who might want to take it over. The organizers had heard about credit unions and they wanted to know more.

When he met with the Joint Planning Council, Rosenthal explained how a credit union was a not-for-profit, member-owned financial cooperative. That meant its depositors would elect its all-volunteer board of directors — one member, one vote — who would set its policies and hire its key staff. The structure appealed to the community organizers: It would help ensure they had a captive financial institution that wouldn’t someday threaten to move away or send away profits to distant, faceless shareholders.

Using the bank’s obligations under the Community Reinvestment Act as leverage, the organizers got the Manufacturers Hanover Trust to fund a feasibility study for the credit union. After tense negotiations, the bank paid for badly needed renovations at the Avenue B and East 3rd Street location; agreed to give the new credit union a rent-free lease for three years with an option to buy the building later for $90,000; and even promised to deposit $100,000 for zero interest in the credit union after it opened.

Meanwhile, the Joint Planning Council knocked on doors to scrounge up $900,000 in non-binding pledges of deposits from the Lower East Side community. Rosenthal appealed to local foundations to fund the credit union’s initial startup capital and operations.

All that was left was for the Joint Planning Council to submit an application for a credit union charter to the National Credit Union Administration, the independent federal agency that charters credit unions and insures their deposits. The agency granted the charter on Jan. 16, 1986.

“Lower East Side, particularly over the years, became the proof of concept for us,” Rosenthal says. “It showed that there was interest, that there was demand, that despite the formidable obstacles of not really having substantial equity capital to start up, they were able to make a go of it.”

Community organizing branches

Much has changed in New York City over the past four decades. Bank branches have become much more common even in racially and ethnically diverse, low-income neighborhoods.

But access to bank branches doesn’t necessarily serve as a good proxy for access to credit. In the rollout of the Paycheck Protection Program during the COVID-19 pandemic, many small businesses turned to the big banks where they’d kept their deposits, only to be ignored or placed at the back of the line behind much larger clients. And non-white small business owners are still significantly more likely to be denied on a small business loan application compared to their white peers.

And there’s still the perpetual threat of a big bank closing branches on a whim.

Between 2019 and 2021, seven different banks closed 17 branches across the Bronx. As Next City reported previously, the Bronx already had the fewest bank branches and the most check cashers and pawnshops per household in the state, possibly the country. In response, a set of long-standing community based organizations came together in 2021 to form the Bronx Financial Access Coalition. Having a captive financial institution once again appealed to a new generation of community organizers.

“In the world of community-control, community-driven solutions to issues facing our neighborhoods, credit unions represent this kind of foundational piece of that people-driven economy,” says Greg Jost, a local historian and co-convener of the Bronx Financial Access Coalition. “The vision of many formerly-enslaved people was to have these kinds of cooperative models where it was one member, one vote. Credit unions still have that.”

They might have started their own new credit union in the Bronx. But the Lower East Side People’s Federal Credit Union’s community organizing roots appealed to the Bronx Financial Access Coalition.

“This really came out of neighborhood organizing,” Jost says. “Their origin story really was attractive to us in the Bronx because so many of our organizations came up through that same type of experience – that we’re just people from the neighborhood fighting to save this building, this block.”

The credit union also offered a tried-and-true playbook for figuring out where to open a branch in a new borough. The credit union had opened a Staten Island branch in 2017 after testing out multiple possible locations using a mobile unit inside a van. They could do the same for the Bronx.

Read more: A Mobile Bank On Wheels Reaches Bronx Residents Where They Are

After initiating discussions with Lower East Side People’s Federal Credit Union about a possible Bronx expansion, it also turned out that the credit union already had more than a thousand members in the borough — some probably displaced due to rising rents or a lack of family-sized housing units on the Lower East Side itself.

“One of the first days we drove the mobile unit to a location in the Bronx, somebody was like, ‘I’m a Lower East Side member!’” Jost says.

Lower East Side People’s Federal Credit Union celebrated the opening of its first permanent branch in the Bronx last year, in a storefront on the first floor of a low-income apartment building owned by one of the coalition member organizations. It’s the credit union’s fourth branch. In addition to the Staten Island branch, in 2014, Lower East Side People’s Federal Credit Union merged with another credit union in East Harlem that had its own community organizing origins.

Community organizing flowers

Lower East Side People’s Federal Credit Union has also inspired other neighborhoods across the city to start their own institutions.

At the other end of Manhattan, Neighborhood Trust Federal Credit Union opened its doors in Washington Heights in 1997. Co-founder Mark Levine was on hand for remarks at the Lower East Side credit union’s block party.

Not only was Neighborhood Trust inspired by its Lower East Side counterpart, Levine said, but in its early days he often called on Lower East Side staff and board members with questions about starting up and running a new credit union with a focus on low-income households.

“The community development credit union movement would not exist in New York City without these activists and these leaders,” Levine said. “I am so privileged to be a part of this movement.”

Levine eventually went on to represent Washington Heights in the city council. He took office in January as New York City Comptroller — a position that helps determine where the New York City government holds its bank accounts. He called for changing state laws that currently restrict local governments in New York from placing deposits into credit unions.

“We’re gonna do this if it kills me,” Levine said. “We got $13 billion in cash in New York City, all going to banks. They wouldn’t mind sharing a little bit with Lower East Side [Federal Credit Union] and even if they would mind, we’re gonna make it happen.”

“It is galling to me that we are prohibited from putting the billions of dollars in cash that the city has on hand at any given moment, on deposit, in credit unions,” Levine tells Next City. “It will yield incredible returns for people in the city, people who are being left behind currently.”

Depending on your perspective, $150 million in loans, spread out over 40 years, may or may not seem like very much by way of returns in New York City. The SPURA redevelopment project alone, known as Essex Crossing, is slated to be a $1.9 billion investment once complete.

But Lower East Side People’s Federal Credit Union’s former CEO Linda Levy can point out some of the other material ways that the institution has helped shape today’s Lower East Side.

Levy had just moved to the neighborhood in 1986 when she walked past a building with “Lower East Side People’s Federal Credit Union” spray painted on the outside wall. She thought it looked interesting, so she went inside to check it out. By July, the board had hired her as manager. Rosenthal’s federation, today known as Inclusiv, provided training for Levy learn how to run a credit union.

Three years later, when the time came to buy the building from Manufacturers Hanover Trust, the credit union’s regulators blocked the purchase, apparently seeing it as too much for a new credit union to take on. So instead, the credit union worked with the residents of the six apartments above for them to acquire and convert the building into a low-income housing cooperative.

Most of the co-op units are still home to members of the same families who were there in 1986, Levy says. That’s just one of many limited-equity co-ops that the credit union has helped either start, finance, or preserve over these past 40 years.

Levy retired after her second stint as CEO from 2006 to 2018, though she still serves on the credit union’s board. She’s known many of those co-op residents not only as members of the credit union but also as members of the dozens of community gardens that dot the Lower East Side, where the modern community garden movement was born in the 1970s.

“Those are actual things that wouldn’t be here, if it weren’t for the credit union, if it hadn’t supported co-op residents for all these years,” Levy says.

Earlier this month, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law – but not with a presidential signature. That detail matters: A bill this significant, left unsigned, suggests the executive branch may not rush to carry it out. Implementation is everything here, because the millions of Americans struggling with housing costs right now are counting on this law actually reaching them.

The law contains dozens of provisions meant to make housing cheaper to build, but nearly all of them depend on the federal government acting first. By one independent count, federal agencies must complete 124 separate implementation actions before the law’s benefits reach anyone, and the required federal rulemakings alone could take years. At the same time, budget cuts have reduced HUD’s staff by roughly a quarter to a third, cuts that housing researchers have warned could slow the rollout even further. Families can’t wait for a reluctant Washington to implement the provisions. States, communities, and civil society can take action now using what is already written into the law.

Two categories of action sit entirely within state authority and can move fastest. The first is zoning for factory-built and modular housing. The law removes HUD’s outdated requirement that manufactured homes sit on a permanent chassis and updates financing for modular construction. States don’t need to wait for federal guidelines before acting: They can amend zoning codes now to allow factory-built housing as-of-right where single-family homes are already permitted, one of the cheapest, fastest supply levers available.

The second is permitting. The law directs federal agencies to streamline reviews for HUD-assisted housing applications and to automatically clear low-risk, affordable projects from lengthy environmental review. States can apply that same thinking locally: Set a deadline by which a local agency must approve or deny a permit and exempt straightforward affordable and factory-built projects from redundant review, without touching federal law. The result is faster construction and less red tape, without compromising safety, environmental, or community protections.

Another set of provisions is less about what states regulate and more about who executes on the ground. Nearly all of it assumes a community development financial institution (CDFI), a housing nonprofit, a community bank, or a land bank is doing the work while the federal government eventually sets funding in motion. States don’t need that funding to start building the partnerships these programs will require.

The new law’s Whole-Home Repairs pilot funds grants and forgivable loans for low- and moderate-income homeowners and small landlords, and it is explicitly designed to run through local and tribal implementing organizations rather than the federal government itself. Another pot of funding supports grants to preserve existing manufactured home communities, which are often sold to private buyers as soon as they hit the market. These local partnerships will be crucial once the federal grants open up – and states can identify and prepare organizations and partnerships now. That way, they’ll be ready to apply the day the pilot opens, rather than starting that search after the money is announced.

The same principle applies for vacant buildings and rural housing. A pilot program to convert empty offices, malls, and motels into affordable housing only activates in years when HOME program funding clears a specific threshold, so states with land bank authority can build vacant-building inventories and pre-qualify nonprofit redevelopment partners now rather than wait on the trigger. As the law makes it easier for nonprofits to acquire aging USDA-financed rural rental properties, state agencies can get ahead of it by connecting at-risk properties with preservation buyers before they are lost to market conversion.

The new law shines a light on one of housing’s most overlooked challenges: financing low-cost homes. While the CFPB studies solutions, states can act immediately by working through state housing finance agencies in partnership with community banks and CDFIs to make small-dollar mortgages viable, unlocking affordable housing opportunities that are especially critical in rural and lower-cost markets.

Appraisal reform can also move fast. The law modernizes appraisal standards and requirements. States don’t need to wait on federal guidance to start using that momentum; they can work directly with state appraisal boards to make sure updated, fair valuation practices are actually being applied in every jurisdiction. States and public universities can also help close a real capacity gap by building appraiser training and licensing pipelines, since a shortage of qualified appraisers, especially in rural and lower-cost markets, is itself a barrier to getting these loans made.

States have an incentive to act now – the law directs HUD to publish voluntary best-practice guidelines for state and local zoning reform. States that move first will not be waiting on Washington to define good policy; they will be the model that guidance eventually points to. Much of this costs nothing but political will: adopting zoning amendments, issuing executive guidance, and building a roster of nonprofit, philanthropic, and community finance partners can move through a legislature without a line item. Other pieces, model ordinances, technical assistance for smaller localities, small grants to seed a buyer’s due diligence, are low-cost with outsized returns.

The new housing law’s most powerful tools, from zoning and permitting reform to local partnerships, sit in state capitals. But so do the levers to mobilize capital.

By aligning philanthropic resources, state housing finance agencies, CDFIs, private investors, mayors, and local jurisdictions around a shared affordability agenda, states can begin delivering meaningful relief now while positioning themselves to maximize new federal opportunities. The states that treat this moment as a starting gun rather than a waiting room will not only be better prepared for what comes next in Washington – they will also make housing more affordable for their residents today.

This story is part of In the Shadow of the Server, a Next City series on the fight over urban technology infrastructure — who builds it, who benefits, and how local leaders can push back.

Northern Virginia is the largest data center hub on earth, and it has a water problem. The region is drawing down its aquifers faster than they recharge.

A family-run auto shop in Newport News thinks rainwater harvesting is part of the answer, and spent a decade fighting Virginia’s legislature to prove it.

In 2014, an underground crack in Go Green Auto Care’s concrete slab foundation landed them a whopping $5,000 water bill from the city. The sustainability-focused repair shop inadvertently “wasted over half a million gallons of water” thanks to the leak, according to shop owner Tyrone Jarvis. But since he built a potable rainwater harvesting system on the business’s property — fighting the city to be able to do so — the small business no longer has any water bills, saving the family up to $150 a month for the past decade.

Even as Virginia faces the worst drought it’s seen since 1941, with an estimated 93% of the state under active drought conditions, the system that Jarvis designed and built more than a decade ago at Go Green Auto Care is still going strong.

So after helping regulate potable rainwater harvesting across Virginia, the Jarvis family has put its efforts toward pushing for something bigger — a bill that would require data centers to catch and reuse rainwater, too.

Their advocacy led to the introduction of Senate Bill 521 in the 2026 General Assembly session, which would have mandated rainwater harvesting systems to capture and reuse runoff in new data center developments. The bill has been continued to the 2027 session.

While some data center companies are beginning to experiment with rainwater harvesting and other green technologies on their own, advocates say the region’s water crisis demands more regulation to both quantify and reduce hyperscale developments’ water use.

Environmental activist Ben Verschoor supported the bill as well as other bills to implement a statewide moratorium and energy cost transparency for data centers. He co-founded the Southwest Virginia Data Center Transparency Alliance after learning about Google’s plans to develop a facility in Botetourt County. The Western Virginia Water Authority projected that it would use 8 million gallons of water per day from Carvins Cove, the region’s primary reservoir.

“If we get a severe drought where people are forced to restrict their water use, they’re reassuring us that Google won’t get preferential treatment in that scenario,” Verschoor says. “But if they need all this water in order for their computer equipment to not catch fire, are they really going to tell Google that they just can’t let their servers burn?”

How much water do Virginia’s data centers actually use?

With Northern Virginia comprising 13% of global operational capacity, the region is facing a serious problem of aquifer depletion. The Potomac aquifer has already been overdrawn for decades by residential, agricultural, and industrial demand. But data center water use is projected to quadruple by 2035, according to a new report.

Landon Marston is an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech. He led a 2021 study estimating that one-fifth of data center servers nationally draw water from moderately to highly stressed watersheds such as those in aquifer-depleted Virginia.

Marston’s research found that data centers don’t draw directly from rivers or aquifers themselves. Because they buy from municipal utilities like regular businesses and residential homes, their consumption is invisible in state water records and nearly impossible to track, “embedded in state water withdrawal reports from the utilities.”

“Just like you and me, data centers don’t have to publicly report their water usage,” Marston tells Next City. “The only way to get a data center’s water usage would be directly from the data center or from the utility.”

Marston had to reverse-engineer the industry’s water footprint, tracing electricity back to specific power plants and water utilities using federal databases rather than any data the companies disclosed themselves. It was, as the study notes, the first-ever attempt at a spatially detailed accounting of U.S. data center water use.

That invisibility may soon change, at least in part. Starting in January 2027, the Commonwealth of Virginia will require waterworks operators to break out data center water use separately in their monthly reporting. But the newly-signed law doesn’t require the companies themselves to report use: Regulators will know roughly how much data centers are drawing from a given utility system, but not which building is using what.

Making rainwater harvesting legal in Virginia

The Jarvis family thinks one answer to Virginia’s water woes is already falling from the sky.

Potable rainwater harvesting wasn’t exactly illegal in Virginia, but it wasn’t regulated until Tyrone Jarvis’s project. When Go Green Auto Care sent out press releases announcing their new environmentally conscious water supply project, the city shut them down for months. They weren’t able to fully install their system until April 2015 — more than a year after he received the $5,000 monthly water bill and started the project.

Newport News had a law in Chapter 42 saying that if they weren’t connected to the municipal water supply, the city could condemn their building.

“So we had a choice,” says Leslie Jarvis, the auto shop’s co-founder and Tyrone Jarvis’s wife. “We chose to connect initially back to the municipal water supply, so that we can continue business. But from that point forward, the fight was on.”

Go Green Auto Care’s home-built system inspired the Jarvis family to advocate for the passage of Virginia House Bill 192 in 2018. The legislation directed the Virginia State Board of Health to develop formal regulations on the use of rainwater harvesting and gray water systems, opening the door for broader commercial and environmental applications throughout the Commonwealth.

They also went on to help HB851 pass in 2025 to explicitly prohibit localities from enforcing mandatory connection ordinances against permitted rainwater harvesting system owners.

Last year, their son Alexander founded the nonprofit Society for a Secure and Sustainable Water Future, which is now bringing rainwater harvesting systems to other homes, businesses and organizations. It’s currently working on a residential potable system and partnering with George Mason University for an non-potable installation to water plants in one of their greenhouses.

The campaign to mandate data center rainwater reuse

After helping legalize potable rainwater harvesting in Virginia, the Jarvis family began pushing for something bigger — a bill that would require data centers to catch it too.

Their collective advocacy led to the introduction of Senate Bill 521 by Sen. Creigh Deeds in the 2026 General Assembly session. The legislation proposed requiring “any new or substantially expanded data center” to install a rainwater harvesting system capturing runoff from at least 30% of its roof surface for non-potable uses like cooling and irrigation.

Leslie Jarvis says their nonprofit sent more than 1,000 emails and held months of virtual meetings before Deeds agreed to carry the bill. “I can’t even quantify the amount of time that was put into trying to get somebody to pay attention to that situation and push something forward,” she says.

SB521 didn’t make it to a vote. It was continued to the 2027 session, where a Virginia Department of Environmental Quality and Virginia Department of Health joint study on rainwater harvesting’s effects on the hydrologic cycle will inform its fate.

Leslie Jarvis said in her advocacy, she’s been met with industry claims that rainwater harvesting disrupts the hydrologic cycle. She counters that this is an “outdated and antiquated argument that was valid 50 years ago,” before decades of explosive development turned the county’s permeable fields and soil into hardscape. A 2019 study published in the journal Science of The Total Environment finds that urban development disrupts the hydrologic cycle and suggests rainwater harvesting and other green infrastructure strategies as potential solutions to prevent city contaminants in rainwater runoff from polluting other water sources.

The family is also skeptical of the region’s existing $2 billion centralized answer to aquifer depletion: Hampton Roads Sanitation District’s SWIFT program — injecting highly treated wastewater back into the aquifer.

“I don’t like people to pee in my water and tell me it’s lemonade,” Leslie Jarvis says. “They know that there’s a water issue, they know that our water table is low, they know that they are draining us dry — so they are injecting purified sanitation into the aquifer to try and replenish it. But they think that rain harvesting is bad. I just don’t understand that.”

Is rainwater harvesting actually a viable solution?

Marston’s research complicates the notion that rainwater harvesting would solve the data center water problem. A rooftop harvesting mandate targets only a fraction of where a data center’s water use actually lives, he says.

The majority of a data center’s total water footprint is actually indirect — consumed off-site by the power plants generating the facility’s electricity, not by the cooling towers on its roof.

“While capturing rainwater reduces reliance on local municipal water for on-site cooling, it largely misses the majority of the water use, which is deeply embedded in the facility’s large energy demands,” Marston says.

For a hyperscale facility consuming hundreds of millions of gallons annually, he explains, harvesting from 30% of a roof would offset “a very small fraction” of total water demand.

Shawn Crawford has heard that argument as president of Rainwater Management Solutions, a Virginia-based company that has designed over 200 commercial rainwater systems nationwide. The company writes national water reuse standards through technical committees at the International Association of Plumbing and Mechanical Officials and National Sanitation Foundation.

Crawford says he doesn’t disagree with Marston’s math, but thinks it sets the wrong bar.

“It puts a small dip in a much bigger consumption rate — data centers, there is no way around it,” Crawford says. “No matter what they tell you, or what any developer tells you, a data center is going to consume a lot of electricity and potentially water.”

The distinction, Crawford said, is between what SB521 would require and what a comprehensive on-site water capture system actually does. Companies would need to factor in retention ponds, parking lot storage, and full property collection beyond just the roof.

“Instead of letting water run off, if you store and reuse it on site — you can get anywhere from a 20-60% deficit in your water consumption, annual water consumption,” he said. “And that’s big numbers for water consumption.”

Are developers already adopting rainwater harvesting?

Crawford also points to a practical upside unrelated to conservation: Rainwater is naturally soft, meaning it doesn’t calcify heat exchangers the way treated municipal water does, reducing maintenance costs and improving cooling efficiency. The financial case, he says, is already pulling some of the industry’s largest players toward rainwater reuse on their own.

“The Microsofts and the Amazons and the Metas — they’re not trying to come into these communities and be a resource drain,” Crawford says. “They’re trying to figure out the most efficient methods. But I just don’t think you’re going to do that until you start really regulating it.”

During a state Senate hearing on SB521 in which Tyrone and Leslie Jarvis spoke, a representative of Google opposed the bill.

Nicole Riley with the Data Center Coalition, the member association representing the data center industry, told lawmakers that companies were already taking steps to innovate water consumption mitigation measures like rainwater harvesting and reusing wastewater. Riley said some coalition members have approached localities about rainwater harvesting and have met resistance. “Some of that is because they want the rainwater for themselves to replenish,” she said.

Ultimately, the Data Center Coalition’s request for a workgroup was granted.

“What we feel this bill doesn’t take into account are some of the other options out there or address some challenges,” Riley said during the hearing. “We’re taking as many steps as we can to be innovative in this space and we just think that a better approach would be to look at how all of this coalesces together.”

A Google representative responded to Next City’s requests for comment with, “Nothing to add here.”

Anthony Creech spent six years writing Virginia’s rainwater harvesting regulations as environmental technical programs manager at the Virginia Department of Health, which is leading the study. He thinks adoption is just getting started.

Creech says there have been fewer than 10 Tier 4 (large commercial) permits and fewer than 50 registrations for Tiers 1 to 3, all in spreadsheets not yet in VDH’s database.

“I love the idea of the designers factoring all the different possibilities for stewarding this resource,” Creech tells Next City. “Rainwater is free water from the source, and I see it as one potential solution to water management issues out of several.”

Leslie Jarvis remains hopeful, maintaining the study will shed light on the “major benefits” of rainwater harvesting. Her son has been leading outreach to delegates and senators ahead of the next legislative session as the family seeks to expand the mandate beyond data centers to any building 250,000 square feet or greater.

“My parents have been fighting for this great thing,” Alexander Jarvis says. “Now I’m trying to keep that fight going, but not just for the sake of us. It’s for the sake of everybody else.”

Who is responsible for the sidewalk? And why do we think that the sidewalk is less of a public responsibility than the roadway itself?

I recently read an article about sidewalk ownership and maintenance in Denver, where the city assumed responsibility for maintaining its sidewalks after decades of relinquishing control to private property owners. The story highlights an issue affecting many U.S. cities, particularly newer communities developed at a time when sidewalks were treated as amenities of adjacent private property rather than components of the public right-of-way. The change was prompted by a coalition of neighborhood organizations, public health professionals, and equity and disability advocates.

The story demonstrates that sidewalks are a critical component of the public realm, deserving of collective stewardship led by local government. I would argue it demonstrates something else as well – that community members and researchers are part of a growing movement of citizen urban designers.

Urban design is undergoing a profound transformation. Once defined primarily by the physical design of cities, the practice now operates across policy, public engagement, community development, ecological systems, and social change.

This shift isn’t happening by accident. It reflects the evolving complexity of the challenges cities face. Our housing crisis cannot be separated from the pressures of climate change. Transportation and access shape economic development opportunities. The design of public space influences public health outcomes. Questions of equity, governance, and belonging affect every decision about the built environment. These are not problems that can be solved within the boundaries of a single discipline.

Urban design is uniquely positioned to respond because it has never belonged entirely to one profession. It sits at the intersection of architecture, landscape architecture, planning, engineering, public policy, and the social sciences. Its strength has always been its ability to synthesize perspectives into a shared vision for place.

Our first step requires us to expand our roles as urban designers. We can no longer measure our success solely by the places we design. Increasingly, we are conveners, translators, facilitators, negotiators, and coalition builders. While co-editing The Routledge Handbook of Urban Design Practice (Next City affiliate link), one idea surfaced again and again. Regardless of discipline or geography, contributors argued that urban designers practice across a spectrum: we help frame policy, build partnerships, communicate across differences, mediate decisions, and empower others to shape urban life.

As our role changes, so does our understanding of who practices urban design. As a more inclusionary practice that invites climate scientists, housing advocates, artists, and educators into the design process, we strengthen our collective work and our ability to address the great challenges facing cities. Each collaborator helps to shape urban outcomes. With the right tools and skills, they become urban designers in practice.

Trained urban designers have a responsibility to equip others. That means making our methods more accessible. For example, walking tours offer a dynamic way to develop observational skills. People can be invited to sketch, count benches or trees, observe where people choose to sit, and ask why one public space succeeds while another lacks life. To lower communication barriers, we can introduce urban design vocabulary through collaborative games that encourage participants to draw, describe, and debate design concepts before applying them to their own community. These aren’t just techniques for gathering input. They build urban design literacy, giving more people the confidence and ability to contribute to decisions about the places they know best.

Equipping others also means sharing the practical methods of urban design across disciplines. Public officials can benefit from understanding the design implications of green infrastructure. Public health professionals can contribute to conversations about playspaces. Educators, neighborhood leaders, and developers can learn how design decisions influence the everyday experience of a place. The goal isn’t to make everyone an expert in everything. It’s to broaden the circle of people who can participate thoughtfully in shaping cities.

Urban design practice needs to expand not only our methods or collaborations, but our identity. This is more than claiming “interdisciplinary practice.” It’s about changing who can legitimately say, “I am involved in designing cities.”

The burden isn’t simply on policymakers and artists to think of themselves as designers. There are two parts.

First, I challenge architects, planners, and landscape architects to become better conveners, communicators, and teachers. Your role is to bring more voices to the table to solve the wicked problems — complex issues that resist a definitive solution because they are tangled up with many interdependent factors. To do that, we must nurture our communication skills, cross-cultural fluencies, and ability to teach others.

The second part asks us to widen the lens we use to consider the others at the table as urban designers.

The future of urban design depends on making more urban designers. This is different from simply making more urban design professionals. The future of urban design won’t be determined solely by how many architects, planners, or landscape architects we educate. It will depend on how many people—inside and outside those professions—learn to think, collaborate, and act as urban designers. This isn’t about lowering the bar either. Calling more people urban designers doesn’t diminish professional expertise. It raises the level of design literacy across everyone shaping cities. We must be effective at welcoming and empowering these actors.

Our cities will be shaped not only by those who design sidewalks, but by those who organize around them, advocate for them, and steward them. Trained urban designers remain essential, but one of our greatest responsibilities is to help others develop the skills and confidence to shape their communities alongside us. The future of urban design depends on both: professionals who are willing to share their expertise, and citizen urban designers who are ready to put it into practice.

Molly O’Neill Robinson and her co-editor Allen Penniman will host a book talk in Philadelphia on July 27 at 5:30 p.m. at the Village of Industry & Art. Register here.

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.

Landmark Bipartisan Federal Housing Legislation Passes

The federal ROAD to Housing Act became law on July 11 after President Trump declined to either sign it or veto it. It’s the largest new housing legislation in decades despite including no new funding — the result of a bipartisan focus in recent years on permitting reform to address the housing shortage and affordability crisis.

According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, the law streamlines federal environmental review, creates a $200 million competitive grant program for localities that increase housing supply, and directs HUD to provide guidance on permitting multifamily buildings with single stairwells, meant to conserve space and allow for denser housing.

The law exempts infill housing, or new housing on vacant or underused lots, from certain federal environmental review. It directs HUD to support state and local Whole Home Repair grants programs, and enacts dozens of other reforms and pilot programs.

The law “[c]larifies that no additional funds are authorized to implement the bill,” leaving dangling the largest barrier to new housing construction, which is capital. Still, as Next City’s Oscar Perry Abello notes, the legislation does include notable changes to strengthen community banks and CDFIs, which are a significant source of capital for housing and other economic development.

New York State Declares One-Year Data Center Moratorium

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul says the state will pause environmental permits for large data centers for one year while regulators develop a way to evaluate the environmental and energy costs. It makes the state the first to pause data center construction, after a similar measure passed in Maine was vetoed by Gov. Janet Mills earlier this year.

Hochul said she directed the state Department of Public Service to design a Generic Environmental Impact Statement, a government document describing potential harms of proposed projects. The process will take a year, after which, “the moratorium will be lifted, allowing new data center projects to proceed as long as they follow state, zoning code and other local approvals,” according to the governor’s announcement.

NYC Announces Reforms Tied to “Rental Ripoff” Hearings

This week in New York, the Mamdani administration released a report summarizing findings from its Rental Ripoff Hearings – held in all five boroughs – along with actions it plans to take.

Over the course of the hearings, over 850 residents directly testified to the Mamdani administration officials about their conditions, and another 880 submitted online testimony. “They described how unresolved repairs, from reoccurring leaks to pest infestations, leave them feeling angry and hopeless,” the report said. Pests and mold were the most common complaints. Tenants reported lack of responsiveness from landlords as well as retaliation for complaints.

The mayor’s office announced some solutions and actions, including investigating all heat and hot water complaints instead of just the first complaint from each building; allowing small elevators to be installed in walkup buildings; and implementing an easier process for tenants to schedule inspections. The city is also looking into developing an eviction diversion program, similar to one that has shown results in Philadelphia.

Perhaps the biggest news is that the administration plans to create legal guidance for recognizing tenant associations. With the exception of public housing tenants, NYC’s tenant unions have no guaranteed right to organize without retaliation.

Canadian Wildfire Smoke Is Hurting U.S. Air Quality and Solar Production

With more than 800 wildfires burning in Canada right now, acrid smoke is choking cities from the U.S. Midwest to the East Coast, pushing air quality levels to levels ranging from “unhealthy” and “hazardous” in multiple states.

The gray, yellow, or even orange haze blanketing many states has also impacted output of solar arrays, WBUR reports. ISO New England, the organization that manages New England’s electric grid, says the region’s solar fleet produced 2,500 megawatts less than expected during peak hours: “That’s essentially like losing a resource greater than Millstone Power Plant [a nuclear plant in Connecticut]. It’s a big drop.” But the smoke also lowered temperatures, reducing electricity demand, the organization noted.

States Sue To Block Warner Bros. Paramount Merger

Twelve states, led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, are suing to stop a merger between Paramount, which owns CBS, and Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN, HBO and multiple cable channels.

California, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Washington have joined the lawsuit, along with the Writers Guild of America. The states then asked the court for a temporary restraining order after Skydance, the David Ellison-owned brand that owns Paramount, refused to pause the $111 billion acquisition while the lawsuit goes forward.

The U.S. Department of Justice never intervened in the merger, which some analysts have attributed to Ellison’s friendship with President Trump.

MORE NEWS

• Santa Fe County exploring creation of a publicly owned power utility. Santa Fe New Mexican

• ICE orders an end to vehicle stops after deadly shootings by federal agents. The Intercept

• Social housing in America: Is the nascent movement gaining steam, or running out of track? Tax Credit Advisor

• A $100 million fund could spell more affordable housing in Kansas City. The Beacon News

• How has the World Cup affected Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside? The Tyee

• Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director defends cuts, calls for congressional reforms. HousingWire

• Knicks run boosted NYC hotels as industry crawls back from Covid. Crains New York

• How cops use the Flock camera network to track people, not cars. 404 Media

OPPORTUNITIES & RESOURCES

• DEADLINE TODAY: GreenLight Fund is accepting Expressions of Interest from U.S. nonprofits to be considered for up to $600,000 in unrestricted funding and other strategic support. Submit by July 17.

• DEADLINE TODAY: Smart Growth America is accepting applications for its Community Connectors program from locally-led initiatives to reconnect communities and improve street safety. Apply by July 17.

• Borealis Philanthropy’s new Just Futures Initiative is accepting funding applications on a rolling basis from organizations advancing community safety, reform, justice, and belonging. Fill out an eligibility quiz to receive access to the Letter of Interest form.

• Goldman Sachs’ Community Development Grants Program is accepting applications from organizations improving economic mobility and strengthening low- and moderate-income communities across eligible U.S. regions. Apply by July 24.

• The University of Pennsylvania’s Lipman Family Prize is accepting applications from nonprofits around the world that are showing leadership and innovation in the social sector. Awards range from $150,000 to $300,000. Apply by July 31.

• The Pratt Center for Community Development’s new Community Planning & Research Accelerator will support four community-based organizations working on housing, climate, economic justice, planning, and land use with project funding in technical assistance. Attend an info session July 16 or July 22 and apply by August 31.

This story is part of In the Shadow of the Server, a Next City series on the fight over urban technology infrastructure — who builds it, who benefits, and how local leaders can push back.

With data centers popping up faster than most people can count, it’s hard to keep track of them.

But a recent report from the Pew Research Center shows more than a third of Americans (38%) live within five miles of at least one operational data center.

Historically, data centers have been built in more urban areas, but with the popularization of AI, sources show developers are shifting toward building in more rural communities. According to the Pew Research Center, newer data centers are expected to be predominantly built in rural areas. Places that face water droughts and low water supplies could face the most exponential impact as community members suffer from the high demands of water.

Water plays a large role in maintaining data centers, which are the physical embodiment of the internet. They are giant hard drives that have to stay cool, or else they will fry. The more data centers we have, the more water is needed to keep them cool. Large data centers use up to 5 million gallons of water per day for cooling purposes.

With demand for data centers tripling over the last decade and expected to triple over the next decade, the question becomes whether municipalities where these data centers are being constructed have the means to keep up with demand. While data centers require an immense amount of water, there are no policies requiring them to use more eco-efficient water systems, and they are not currently legally required to report their water consumption. Some local governments have signed NDAs with developers, making it even more difficult to track water usage and impacts.

Just last week, New York introduced the country’s first statewide moratorium on data centers. The moratorium will put a one-year pause on the construction of any new data center so the state can make rules protecting the environmental and energy grid needs. Although New York is the only state offering policy to hold companies that build data centers accountable, there are steps other communities can take to do the same.

Next City put together a list of guides for communities looking to protect themselves from data centers, and an overview their top findings (in case you don’t have time to read them in full).

These guides encourage municipalities to include environmental impact tracking in contracts, create community benefit agreements, know how to spot a data center developer, avoid signing NDAs, and understand how projects will impact the local workforce. They also give tools to community members who want to take action on data centers. Get into them below.

What To Ask When A Data Center Wants To Come To Town

There are many questions communities have when a data center development project comes to town. It can be hard to narrow down which ones are the top priority to get answers to. Good Jobs First, a national policy resource center, put together a guide for public officials and community members on the most important questions to ask, long before approval of a data center.

Some data center projects use LLCs and general language, making it hard to confirm that the development project is in fact a data center. This guide provides step-by-step questions on what to ask the company building the data center proposed in your town. It’s important to know data centers are not currently legally required to report their environmental consumption. To get more information about this, Good Jobs First suggests asking questions like:

1. How much air pollution will the standby power generators for this project generate? How often will the back-up generators be run for testing?

2. What safeguards do we have in place to ensure that residents living near data centers do not have their water supplies spoiled?

Some local governments have signed NDAs with data center developers, making it even more difficult to track water usage/impacts data centers are having. With that in mind, another one of the questions listed is: “Are there any Non-Disclosure Agreements in place? If yes, who signed those NDAs?”

AI Data Centers & Our Communities

The Brockovich AI Data Center Reporting, a community awareness initiative from environmental activist Erin Brockovich, is one of many trackers on data centers. This one stands out because it specifically tracks AI data centers instead of all kinds.

It includes a map of major AI data centers in the U.S. that are operational or under construction, in tandem with locations where community members have emailed in concerns.

The guide also compiles the latest news about data centers and tracks legislation about them.

Data Center Development Guide, from Cuyahoga County, Ohio

Cuyahoga County is home to several dozen of the hundreds of data centers in Ohio. While there isn’t much policy created to hold data center development accountable, this guide shows local actions that can be taken — from the 12 states and counting that are issuing temporary moratoriums on data center infrastructure as a means to slow down development to establishing community benefits agreements (CBA), which are a “legal tool to establish accountability and transparency between developers and community stakeholders.” It also includes a checklist of questions to ask potential data center developers.

The People Say No: Resisting Data Centers

While you have to provide your name and email in order to download this toolkit from MediaJustice, it is worth it. This 49-page toolkit, which is put together by a nonprofit dedicated to holding corporations and governments accountable for their use of media and technology, breaks down facts and falsities surrounding data centers,

The guide has a word glossary, accompanying slides in case you’re looking to present the information, and an action toolkit with step-by-step instructions on how to channel your learned knowledge into action. This toolkit is specifically targeting people looking to organize against data centers who live in Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, and South Carolina.

Rio Grande Valley Broadband Coalition: How Communities Can Negotiate For Local Benefit

Although Meta, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft collectively own 72% of all data centers and are supported by the federal administration’s July 2025 executive order to accelerate data center development, communities still have the ability to shape how these projects affect their neighborhoods and to secure meaningful local benefits.

This guide, based on a gathering with community organizations, local governments, and regional leaders organized by the Rio Grande Valley Broadband Coalition, provides residents and community organizations with a framework for drafting a Public Benefit Agreement (PBA), also known as a CBA. In a time where there are little to no federal protections for communities, this guide shows residents how to create a legally binding agreement to fill the gap left by a lack of government regulations. The guide lays out what a community can ask for related to workforce security for their locality and tax abatements. It shows residents how to ask for environmentally sustainable cooling systems, have authority in zoning parameters, and more. It even has a list of examples of where CBAs have been most helpful.

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.

State and local governments currently have nearly $800 billion deposited in bank accounts across the country. What if more of those deposits were financing things communities actually need, like more housing that most people can actually afford or thriving main streets lined with local businesses?

Congress recently passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which many in the affordable housing and community development sectors are calling the most significant new housing policy in a generation. The legislation, which became federal law on July 11, contains incentives for state and local governments to loosen restrictions on denser housing, reductions in red tape for federally subsidized housing, new restrictions on institutional investor ownership of single-family housing, and more.

There are also a raft of policy changes intended to strengthen community banks, which are a significant source of financing for housing, economic development, and other community needs that often gets taken for granted.

Among these changes are the following reforms:

• Reducing regulatory barriers for community banks to hold more deposits from larger depositors.

• Reforms to encourage the formation of new community banks.

• Increasing the cap on how much each bank can participate in Low Income Housing Tax Credits, New Markets Tax Credits, Opportunity Zones and other targeted programs.

“This important piece of legislation will contribute to alleviating the high cost of housing around the country by expanding lending capacity particularly from local community banks, CDFI banks and Mission-Oriented Financial Institutions,” says Saurabh Narain, CEO at the National Community Investment Fund, a nonprofit that makes investments in mission-oriented community banks. Because such financial institutions “are rooted in the needs of their markets,” he explains, they can “enable highly impactful deployment of that capital

If you’re building new housing, or converting existing office or industrial buildings to residential, or rehabbing older housing that landlords have neglected for decades, you’re almost guaranteed to need a construction loan to do it. It’s more likely that construction loan comes from a community bank versus one of the big four banks — Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, or Citibank.

If you’re revitalizing a downtown or a struggling commercial corridor, the small businesses or local developers that need access to capital to participate in that revitalization are more likely to access credit from a local bank whose credit committee knows the business owner and knows the local market of potential customers.

There’s no single universally accepted definition for a community bank, but generally speaking they’re smaller banks that take deposits and make loans within a single metropolitan region or state. You may not know any of the community banks near you, but there are currently 3,852 of them across the country, under the definition used by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Those community banks do three times more construction lending, three times more commercial real estate lending, and twice as much small business lending compared to the big four banks.

But community banks can run into some additional regulatory barriers based on the amount of deposits they hold from larger, institutional clients like state and local governments as well as mid-sized companies or anchor institutions including hospitals and universities. The new law reduces those barriers, giving community banks the ability to hold more large dollar deposits locally instead of sending clients and their deposits to larger banks.

“These are practical, bipartisan reforms that will strengthen mission-driven and community banks by giving them greater flexibility to attract and retain deposits, support more local lending, and better serve the communities that rely on them,” says Nicole Elam, president and CEO of the National Bankers Association, a trade group for minority depository institutions. “That’s a win for community banks, their customers, and the local economies they help drive.”

At the National Community Investment Fund, Narain says these changes to depository regulations are “key to ensuring that deposits are retained in the community so that these institutions can do what they do best.”

In addition, after a historic drought in new bank formation over the last two decades, the new law also includes reforms meant to encourage the formation of new community banks. Some that have gotten through the process over the past few years have made meaningful progress so far.

Adelphi Bank is the first newly-chartered African American-led bank since 2003. As I reported earlier this year, over its first three years of operation, Adelphi Bank had made $28 million in mortgages, nearly all for commercial real estate in and around its home of Columbus, Ohio. Those mortgages ranged from $30,000 to $2.8 million, at an average of $593,000. Out of the top five ZIP codes by number of Adelphi Bank mortgages, three are majority-Black and a fourth is 43% Black. The top two ZIP codes have median household incomes of $23,527 and $33,912, compared with $66,082 for the Columbus metro area.

The fastest growing bank in the country is another community bank chartered in the last few years: St. Petersburg, Florida-based Climate First Bank, chartered in 2021. I reported on its progress earlier this year.

Taking a community bank approach to its climate-focused lending, Climate First is on the verge of $2 billion in assets. It’s now taking its approach beyond Florida, making $275 million in residential solar loans across 44 states last year. Climate First has already become the second-largest residential solar financing provider across the country, according to EnergySage. It’s also partnering with local or state green banks to make solar financing accessible for low-income residents.

But all of Adelphi Bank’s or Climate First Bank’s progress has only come after each bank raised at least $25 million in required startup capital before opening their doors for business. The new law authorizes regulators to give new community banks up to two years after opening for business to raise the required amount of startup capital as determined by banking regulators — allowing new banks to open and start serving communities sooner instead of having to wait until they finish raising their startup capital.

One more provision in the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act will help clear the way for more community bank and regional bank participation in “Public Welfare Investments,” meaning investments made through programs like federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, New Markets Tax Credits, and tax breaks for Opportunity Zones and other specific investments targeting low-income communities.

Bank regulations cap how much each bank can partake in public welfare investments. The cap is based on a bank’s capital base — the combined amount of capital from a bank’s shareholders and retained profits over the life of the bank. The new law increases the cap from 15% of a bank’s capital base to 20%.

“This is a win for communities,” says Kevin Stein, chief of legal and strategy at Rise Economy, a California statewide coalition of community reinvestment groups.

“We sometimes hear from banks that they cannot do as much of this important work as they and we would want because they are approaching the cap. We look forward to banks using this greater flexibility to increase impactful investments in affordable housing, small businesses and projects that create jobs that pay family sustaining wages.”

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

Ryan Marie Davis moved back to Detroit for love.

At the height of COVID-19, she and her now-husband, Justin Davis, began walking the Dequindre Cut and Detroit’s Riverwalk until being outdoors became a daily habit.

Last year, the couple purchased a sprawling 4,2000-square-foot home with an inground pool, neighboring a park. It was the highest-priced home in Russell Woods in five years. The historic district is one of several northwest Detroit neighborhoods along the planned route of the city’s 29-mile Joe Louis Greenway. The incoming $300 million greenway isn’t the reason the couple bought the house, but they say it’s another benefit to their housing decision.

“The city’s completely changed from when I lived here prior,” says Davis. “[The greenway] is definitely an added perk.”

And that’s what the city hopes to see in the future — economic vitality in the footprint of the greenway. The Joe Louis Greenway is expected to increase mobility and connectivity across Detroit and three municipalities: Hamtramck, Highland Park, and Dearborn. City officials say the project will create opportunities to highlight Detroit culture and artistic influence while increasing economic opportunity through new developments in neighborhoods along its path. But some Detroiters worry that the massive development will change the fabric of the neighborhood and attract businesses that aren’t reflective of the community.

Detroit realtor Heather Dell says she’s worked with several homebuyers in and near Russell Woods who will now be within a stone’s throw of the greenway. She’s watched the home prices climb over the years and the community housing stock has become attractive for both first-time buyers who want to spend under $200,000 and buyers who can afford high-end finishes and historic charm. There’s broad interest, she says, from out-of-state buyers looking for walkable areas and quality square footage and one couple purchased a single-family home in the area “sight unseen.”

“The prices of homes have gone up significantly in that pocket, in that corridor, specifically,” says Dell. “There was a tremendous amount of inventory, and there were a lot of empty homes or vacant homes.”

The project has excited many residents, like Davis, even though it’s not yet fully funded. The northwest segment of the greenway, touching Dexter-Linwood, Davison, Oakman Boulevard, Russell Woods, and Nardin Park (formerly and oratorically known as the Sullivan Area), is currently incomplete. When finished, the project will affect an enclave of Detroit residents who have endured uncertain neighborhood vitality over the years. While the city and other greenway supporters say the project will further the stability of the area, there’s some concern about an influx of big-box stores, niche luxury and pricing out long-term and low-income residents.

Davis and her husband purchased their completely renovated property in 2025 for under the $425,000 asking price, according to real estate platform Redfin.

In the past, the house was listed and sold for much less than this, reflecting the current housing market of the Oakman Boulevard area. In 2015, the house sold for $44,000; it sold for $70,000 in 2017; and in 2024, it sold for $110,000 and again for $162,000.

Davis is aware and concerned of what higher housing prices here and across Detroit may mean for other residents and said it’s disheartening.

“I do not like people being priced out of neighborhoods,” she says of her concerns tied to the greenway development. “On the other side, when cities are revitalized like this, it does benefit some other aspect of the neighborhood as it relates to safety and access and more opportunity. So I just see both sides of it. I’m more for development than stagnation.”

A path to growth

The greenway project was announced in 2017, and construction began that same year. So far, the city has secured $220 million to support the development. City officials anticipate 15 miles of the greenway, which includes existing trails like the Dequindre Cut and the Detroit RiverWalk, to be completed by the end of 2026. The entire Joe Louis Greenway is expected to be complete by 2030.

In a 2021 Joe Louis Greenway Framework Plan, the city described neighborhoods in the northwest corner of the greenway as “challenged” due to declining population, low rents and land values and no planned construction.

According to the city, the neighborhoods saw a 21% decrease in residents since 2010. The median home value was $56,883, and home values depreciated by 38%. Almost 12,300 residents were within the Census tract of the northwest corner, and 94% are Black.

Recent enhancements include federal funding to beautify Dexter Avenue and over $2.5 million in Strategic Neighborhood Fund grants to support park improvements, business pop-ups, cultural murals, and eight front-facing facade improvements for local businesses like Dexter Hardware. An additional $21.5 million through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) was used for the Helen Moore Community Center and the Dexter Streetscape, which included bike lanes, widened sidewalks, and bus shelters.

From the surrounding major roadways, the area looks to be improved. However, within the neighborhoods, vacant and demolished properties remain. Across the three neighborhoods, 52% of the vacant lots are owned by the Detroit Land Bank Authority.

In May, the land bank told BridgeDetroit that it owns 2,323 residential properties in the neighborhoods along the northwest section of the greenway: Dexter-Linwood, Russell Woods, and Nardin Park (Sullivan Area).

When asked if he thought the greenway would affect property values, resident Eddie Respress responds, “It ain’t gonna hurt it,” while sitting on his nephew’s front porch in Dexter-Linwood.

Respress, 74, says he thinks the greenway is the “best thing ever” – specifically for Detroit kids and teens who, Respress says, have few safe and fun places to go.

The family has occupied single-family residences in the Russell Woods and Dexter-Linwood neighborhoods for over 50 years. Respress sits on the porch with his nephew, niece, and a handful of acquaintances, across the street from Zussman Park, which received an $850,000 renovation through Strategic Neighborhood Funding in 2021. At the time, SNF dollars were also used to demolish homes in Russell Woods and Nardin Park.

Respress reminds his family of the importance of generational wealth to be able to hold on to family homes as the city changes.

The elder questions the city’s intent in owning thousands of residential properties across the three neighborhoods and far too many homes have been torn down.

“If you have houses on the spot that can be fixed up, why not put a person in them, instead of paying $10,000 to $15,000 to tear the house down?”

Michelle Flourny, a project manager for the city’s Planning and Development Department, says the city is currently accepting development proposals to bring a mixed-use retail space to the area. Flourny says the city would prefer that developers rehab existing buildings rather than demolish existing structures.

According to the city’s Neighborhood Planning Study Playbook: Northwest, 53% of residents in neighborhoods around the northwest segment of the greenway own their homes while 47% are renting. In the report, the city says there is a priority for multi-family dwellings to maintain affordability and that “the key to long-term affordability of existing neighborhoods is preserving existing buildings.”

The first priority is always to serve the residents who are already in these neighborhoods surrounding the greenway,” Flourny says.

In a 2025 Neighborhood Planning Study, the northwest section of the greenway is described as a “weaker market” that is “fertilized” and in need of housing stabilization programs. The report is based on dozens of community feedback sessions.

The 2021 and 2025 planning studies were developed to better understand the potential impacts of greenway investment on the surrounding neighborhoods. The 2025 study also considers the positive impact of greenways on residents in other metros like Chicago, Indianapolis, and Denver. According to the study, in these cities, property values adjacent to a greenway increased, new housing was developed, and more jobs were created. Atlanta’s Beltline was not included for comparison, even though the City’s General Services Department highlighted a Citizen Advisory Council trip to the Atlanta Beltline specifically for learning purposes during a 2019 Greenway Framework meeting.

Flourny says Detroit is different from Atlanta because the greenway isn’t disrupting an already thriving economic situation.

“But we’ve also seen that Detroit isn’t the same as those metro areas and doesn’t have the same market conditions as some of those other greenways that have been mentioned, especially the Beltline,” says Flourny.

BridgeDetroit contacted the city of Atlanta and reporters at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC), to better understand the conditions of Atlanta’s neighborhoods when the Beltline was introduced to the city. The communications office for Atlanta’s mayor did not respond. The links reporters provided to the original AJC stories are behind a paywall.

The Beltline is a 22-mile loop within Atlanta that connects multiple walk and bike paths on what used to be an abandoned railway. It’s incomplete, with several miles still to be paved, and has yet to reach its funding goal.

In 2019, AJC columnist Bill Torpy reported that Atlanta’s Beltline originated from urban planner Ryan Gravel’s master’s thesis paper in 1999. Gravel, whom Torpy says is now known as “the Beltline Guy,” envisioned creating the loop from Atlanta’s abandoned rail lines. The then-grad student wanted to increase walkability, build up residential properties, and improve access to public transportation through light rail. It wasn’t until 2012, following the Great Recession of 2009, when the housing market bottomed out, that the city opened the first portion of the Beltline.

“Some of the areas were already pretty well-to-do, or gentrified previous to this, and other areas were gutted-out neighborhoods,” Torpy says.

The longtime columnist also documented the change in neighborhoods. In 2014, he wrote about a predominantly Black, previously redlined neighborhood within the Beltline’s path. He described rows of abandoned houses, high rates of poverty, mortgage fraud, and failing schools. Torpy reported that due to the recession, home values in the neighborhood had plummeted to a range of $13,241 to $84,972. But investors heard about the Beltline, and they were shopping.

“Now most of the houses in some of those areas have been scrapped,” Torpy tells BridgeDetroit. “They put up McMansions, but you know it was [originally] that $30,000 property, and if it still existed in some of those areas, it would be [worth], certainly, 10 times more. So it’s become kind of an economic driver.”

The Beltline is hugely popular. The columnist says he walks the path with his adult children and finds it to be a gathering spot for everyone.

“It’s so crowded in some places, people walking, strollers, their dogs with the long leashes, and walking six across, because people just love it, and riding bikes,” Torpy says.

From an economic standpoint, the AJC’s economic development and commercial real estate reporter, Zachary Hansen, says it depends on who you talk to whether the Beltline is beneficial.

“Anywhere that touched the Beltline became way more valuable [in] real estate,” Hansen says. “Neighborhoods where it would be unthinkable to have $700,000 townhomes were getting $700,000 townhomes in anticipation of what was coming.”

The business reporter says that portions of the Beltline that were previously home to forests and abandoned industrial buildings are now trendy, expensive areas with 20-plus-story buildings.

“The first [neighborhoods] that got it are unrecognizable to what they were beforehand,” says Hansen. “It almost created a whole new skyline.”

This positive change hasn’t happened without pain. Housing prices have skyrocketed, property taxes have increased, and the Atlanta Beltline Inc., which maintains planning and development for the Beltline, owns 94 acres around the Beltline.

Hansen says gentrification around the Beltline has become a “thorny issue.” Major businesses like Mailchimp, Microsoft, and BlackRock have brought new jobs and made investments along the Beltline. New modern apartments that rent upwards of $2,200 a month have pushed out residents who previously paid $800.

“Having the east side Beltline pop off the way it did, with that success, likely sped up the other retail investments that came along elsewhere.”

To thwart further displacement, the city created a Tax Allocation District, which allows property owners within a certain radius of the Beltline to invest property tax revenue into the neighborhoods. A public-private partnership is on track to provide 5,600 moderately affordable housing units along the Beltline by the end of 2030. Additionally, a legacy resident program has frozen property taxes for long-term homeowners who, Hansen said, likely wouldn’t be able to “afford the home across the street” today.

“That would have been way more helpful a decade earlier when the Beltline was first starting to develop,” Hansen says.

There’s now a push to put the last part of Gravel’s plan into place: a light rail along the Beltline. A light rail has not been proposed for the Joe Louis Greenway.

A boost to home prices

Melvin Chuney has walked the 32 blocks of Russell Woods for years. Now, he walks his dog, Sassie, a white Pyrenees and standard poodle mix, three times a day at the park across the street from his house.

The retired Detroit Police Officer says he’s watched the neighborhood change from an area in decline with high crime rates and drug use, to a neighborhood that is “growing in every direction.”

“It’s awesome over here,” says Chuney. “These homes are irreplaceable. This is a historic district.”

Chuney is president of the Russell Woods-Sullivan Area Association. The 58-year-old has served four terms as president and was reelected as association president in June.

“I’m just truly thankful and grateful that God has allowed me to serve this way,” he says. “It’s a blessing to me to be able to serve this way.”

Chuney revels in the leadership position. In May, he stacked the agenda for the neighborhood meeting to include voices from residents, nonprofits, entrepreneurs, and city council representatives to share information that may affect the neighborhood. The lengthy meeting outlasted the Boys and Girls Club building’s operating hours for the day. Still, most of the 40-plus people in attendance stayed through the end.

Chuney calls the greenway a blessing. When finished, the path will be two blocks from his primary residence in Russell Woods. He owns five properties in the neighborhood and said the collection of homes was purchased for $35,000. Now, he says they are worth at least $200,000 each.

Chuney says he doesn’t think gentrification is bad. He’s seen an increase in homeownership over the last eight years that he believes is good for the area. He hopes that the greenway will encourage business development.

“This part of the city was written off at one point,” he says. “There was nothing around here and people were just surviving. So just to see this bright light, if you will, it’s welcome.”

Rita Ross, whose family has owned property in the historic district since the 1950s, says she looks forward to the greenway as a way to showcase the city’s rich history. Ross anticipates murals, historical markers, and opportunities to connect through events and community centers to learn about Motown legends, like her sister, Diana Ross.

She imagines the greenway could turn the Russell Woods, Dexter-Linwood, and Nardin Park area into the next Black Bottom of Detroit. Sitting within Harmony Café on Dexter Avenue, Ross said that the greenway could positively influence the economic vitality of the area if the city invests in more than facades, parks, and entrepreneurial pop-ups. A foster parent to many Detroit youth over the years, Ross says the new developments need to be created with current residents in mind. She says the neighborhood needs investments in existing structures, new businesses, and affordable housing that fits the needs of families, rather than catering to single, young professionals.

“We don’t need apartment buildings, we need homes. But maybe they’ll say we need apartments because it’s cheaper,” says Ross.

Ross left Detroit as a young woman to travel and returned years ago. She’s lived in Russell Woods for decades and said their community has enduring relationships where neighbors care for one another. It’s something she wants to see continue as everything around them changes.

Dell, the realtor, supports the greenway and believes it will bring “vibrancy and jobs.” She says that homes are being renovated “for better or for worse,” but overall, she says that homebuyers are encouraged by the potential of future investment.

“The whole idea of that corridor coming back and having retail shops is absolutely a draw,” says Dell. “It is just going to do great things for housing prices, with the hopes that we don’t push people out. We can still continue to develop areas with good, well-priced, first-time homebuyer opportunity homes.”

Community ‘is priceless’

Mark Head, 41, purchased a home in Russell Woods with his wife in 2020. The couple, originally from Downriver, lived in the Midtown neighborhood for nearly a decade before deciding to purchase a home.

Head says the house was vacant for several years after a previous, elderly homeowner died. In the six years that they’ve lived there, he and his wife have gotten to know and appreciate their neighbors.

“My favorite thing about the house is the neighborhood,” he says. “A house is a house. You can let it fall into disrepair and you can improve it, but the people and the community, that’s priceless.”

When the greenway was first announced, Head thought it was “just another Detroit pipe dream,” he says. “But now it’s real, and it’s awesome.”

Like his neighbors, Head says he looks forward to the greenway’s completion so that he can bike from his home to Belle Isle Park. The homeowner says he hopes the project will increase economic activity — as long as it makes sense for the neighborhood. He doesn’t want a major retail area, and laments about luxury shops that are too niche to survive long-term.

“I like the walkability of the area and the thought of mixed-use spaces,” he says. “But if it’s like an Apple Store and some high-end apartments, that’s mixed-use, but you’re not mixing with people who can use it. Bring in a grocery store, bring in a diner, bring in something for the layperson as opposed to luxuries all the time.”

Davis and her husband are also looking forward to the potential of small businesses in the area.

Davis grew up on the east side. She left the city for work and spent over a decade living on the east and west coasts of the country. When she returned, she became a westsider. Davis and her husband lived in a family-inherited home 10 minutes from Russell Woods for the last five years.

When the couple began the house-hunting process, Davis says she looked for a large home to host family gatherings with natural light and access to parks and stores. They decided against taking on renovation projects — which eliminated much of Detroit’s older housing stock. They looked at homes in East English Village, Rosedale Park, and University District, among other historic neighborhoods, before settling on Russell Woods.

When the couple moved in, neighbors began walking by the house and introducing themselves.

“Russell Woods is a hidden gem,” says Davis. “I feel like we won in terms of cost comparison.”

While there is excitement for new developments, Davis says her neighbors are all in agreement: they want to see lessons learned from other city investments, such as decreasing traffic, opportunities for small businesses to flourish and quality, affordable housing options.

“I love being part of a historical neighborhood because I feel like there’s stronger roots and connections to the city,” says Davis. “I love learning about it, and the legends that used to live over here.”