This op-ed 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.

The data center boom is often described as inevitable. Artificial intelligence use is suddenly ubiquitous. Cloud computing is growing. Streaming, e-commerce, and digital services need somewhere to live. So when a developer arrives with another massive, windowless facility, local officials are told to move quickly: approve the zoning, extend the infrastructure, grant the tax break, and be grateful the future chose their town.

That story leaves something important out.

Data centers may be part of the future, but they are not optional for Big Tech. The AI and cloud business models require more computing capacity near power, fiber, land, and major markets. Like Amazon warehouses when the company moved to rapid delivery, data centers are coming many places fast — and that gives public officials far more bargaining power than developers want them to believe.

Localities should start acting like it.

This is an argument for public officials trapped in a broken site-selection game — and for the community groups and unions that can help them break it. City leaders should not have to negotiate in a “prisoners’ dilemma” created by nondisclosure agreements, consultant-driven urgency, and threats that the project will go elsewhere. But they rarely rewrite the rules alone. Outside pressure (a.k.a. “civic engagement”) is how transparency, job standards, and community benefits become deal terms.

Too often, economic development deals begin from the opposite assumption: that local governments must compete for Big Tech’s favor by offering secrecy, speed and subsidies. A company hiding behind an LLC quietly approaches officials. The project gets a code name. Residents are kept in the dark. By the time the public learns what is happening, the site has been selected, utilities lined up, zoning nearly settled, and tax abatements already moving.

At that point, the public’s leverage has been spent before the public knew it could have any.

Public officials need to stop treating Big Tech projects as prizes to be won and start treating them as transactions to be governed. Too much economic development policy chases famous corporate names with large subsidy packages, when the better strategy is investing in public goods that help many employers: schools, infrastructure, workforce training, small businesses, and local industry capacity.

The issue is not whether every data center should be opposed. Communities need digital infrastructure. Construction workers need work. Cities need property tax revenues (if they don’t abate them). The question is whether some of the richest corporations in the world should get to use public assets on private terms.

The scale of Big Tech’s own spending makes the subsidy argument weaker. Just five companies — Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Meta/Facebook, Microsoft, and Oracle — have announced more than $710 billion in AI capital expenditures in 2026. The rush has been compared to the construction of the U.S. Interstate Highway system. Companies in that kind of buildout are not waiting for a county tax abatement to decide whether the AI economy needs servers. They need them. The public should negotiate from that fact.

Good Jobs First has long warned that data centers are not ordinary economic development projects. Hyperscale facilities can consume hundreds of acres, require enormous amounts of electricity and water, generate noise and air pollution, and receive large tax abatements. That scale of public burden should change the scale of public demands.

Start with the money. Tax abatements are not free. They are public spending through the tax code. When a city, county, or school district gives up revenue, that money is no longer available for classrooms, safety, libraries, parks, roads, housing, public health or basic services. When a state exempts data center equipment, building materials, or power purchases from sales and taxes, local governments usually lose revenue too, and with no say.

Worse, in many places the public cannot even see the bill.

Good Jobs First reports that 14 states and scores of localities fail to disclose how much revenue they lose to data center tax abatements. In states that do report, losses are soaring: Georgia, Virginia and Texas each lose $1 billion or more per year. That is not economic development strategy. It is spending without a budget.

The first reform is simple: Disclose the cost. Every state and locality that loses revenue of any kind to a data center tax abatement should report that loss in its Annual Comprehensive Financial Report.

The second reform is simpler: Stop subsidizing data centers.

Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple, and other tech giants are not deciding whether they need data centers. They are racing to site them – in lots of places. Tax incentives are for industries that need help: These facilities are core infrastructure for companies worth trillions of dollars, not fragile start-ups or mature companies struggling to modernize. The best incentive policy is to repeal the tax breaks and require companies to pay their full freight.

That means full taxes. It also means fair energy prices and no utility tax abatements. Before communities even talk about “community benefits,” data center companies need to pay sales and property taxes and be placed in separate utility rate classes so households and small businesses are not forced to subsidize new power capacity built for hyperscale demand.

Good Jobs First made the same point about Amazon warehouses: When a corporation is coming because its business model requires it, governments should not pay it to arrive. They should turn the tables. Amazon needed warehouses near customers. Today, Big Tech needs data centers near land, energy, fiber, and markets. In both cases, the question is the same: why should taxpayers subsidize what the company already needs to do?

Public officials need to look at the world the way AI executives do, not the way site-selection consultants want them to. The companies know they must build. They know power, land, water, fiber and public approvals are increasingly scarce. With polls showing that 69% of Americans don’t want a data center near them, the companies also know they have fewer and fewer options. That is why communities should not give away leverage at the front door.

Process reforms come first. Communities cannot negotiate benefits for a project they are not allowed to understand. That means no nondisclosure agreements. No project code names. No mystery end users hidden behind LLCs. No rushed votes before residents know how much electricity and water the project will use, how many polluting backup generators it will need, what subsidies are requested, what infrastructure upgrades are required, and what jobs will actually be created.

For activists, unions, and neighborhood groups, these process reforms should be the opening demand. For public officials, they should be the minimum condition for taking any proposal seriously.

Then come the benefits — real ones, not corporate-washing. Community Benefits Agreements can be powerful tools. But they can also become a donation here, a STEM photo op there, a few charitable checks used to distract from a bad deal.

A real community benefit agreement cannot be a side letter attached to a subsidy giveaway. It must be enforceable, negotiated early, and tied to the actual costs of the project: infrastructure impact fees, energy and water protections, noise and pollution mitigation, public reporting and clawbacks if companies fail to deliver.

Then come job quality standards. Data centers can involve huge capital investments and major construction work, but they often create relatively few permanent jobs. That makes the construction phase the central employment impact of the project.

If public resources are involved, agreements should require project labor agreements, prevailing wages, local hiring, jobsite safety standards, and participation in state-certified apprenticeships. Permanent jobs should also carry job-quality standards: good wages, benefits, direct employment where possible, and first source hiring access for local residents.

This is not anti-growth. It is how communities build capacity for growth.

Data centers do not exist in a separate labor market. When they draw from the same pool of electricians, pipefitters, and other skilled workers without investing in training, they worsen skills shortages for everyone else. Responsible deals should grow the workforce, not simply consume it.

The AI economy is not inevitable in the form currently being offered. Communities don’t have to be roadkill. The question is not whether cities can afford to demand more from data centers. The question is whether they can afford not to.

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

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

In a city like Boston with deep history, Black and Brown communities have long been excluded from the stories and the systems that generate economic stability.

“There is this idea that the winners write the story,” says Cierra Peters, director of communications, culture and enfranchisement for Boston Ujima Project. “If you grew up in America, there’s this understanding that power is always exercised or conferred through the stories of the wealthy and the powerful.”

Rooted in Kwanzaa’s principle of Ujima — collective work and responsibility — the Boston Ujima Project is changing the power dynamic through community-led approaches to economic development, narrative change and creative production.

The organization’s work has been amplified by an award from The Culture & Community Power Fund, a funders’ collaborative that invests in organizations building community power through cultural practices with unrestricted awards, ecosystem funding and regional and national networking support.

For the Boston Ujima Project, this means more of what it always does: making strategic investments through democratic participation, ultimately demonstrating how economic justice can be built from the ground up.

“We were really thoughtful with the funding and decided to spread it out across areas of work that we already had deep relationships with, and were in support of,” says James Vamboi, Ujima’s chief of staff for community and culture.

Funds were distributed across several initiatives, including a one-year guaranteed-income pilot that supported movement leaders who seed community-sustaining work in Greater Boston. They are now working to establish a legal fund to support peers in the alternative lending space subject to hostile litigation, procure support for creative entrepreneurs and member initiatives, and develop a community collectors program and coalitions fund.

In addition to sending funds to local partner organizations working on their own community-driven economic models, Boston Ujima Project invests in a peer-to-peer fund that supports organizations in other locations, such as the Kensington Corridor Trust and its model of community ownership in Philadelphia. Allies include Urbane, The Guild in Atlanta, and East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative in Oakland.

“For the Boston Ujima Project to be successful, they recognize that community-driven economic models need to be successful in other places, too,” says Erik Takeshita, director of C&CPF.

Excavating History Through Community Storytelling

To build a cooperative economic system, Boston Ujima Project first develops a vision that is meaningful and resonant with its community. Culture and storytelling are inextricably linked with the way they gain buy-in from the community, so the organization works to “excavate” the histories of those who have been ignored or excluded.

To get the community’s buy-in and commitment, the stories that Boston Ujima Project tells must center its membership, as opposed to its funders and investors.

“We are our own audience,” says Nia Evans, executive director for Boston Ujima Project.

Evans says real change gives people a voice in the work. This happens via a process called “everyday democracy,” which offers avenues for decision-making beyond scheduled voting by Ujima’s membership. This can look like inviting member teams to practice daily governance and enroll new community members in programs like the Community Wealth Fund.

“We think — as much as possible — about how to take the abstract and make it concrete,” sats Evans.

Recognizing Creative Labor

To shape the community narrative, Boston Ujima Project insists artists must be recognized as workers. This aligns with the work of thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois and groups like the NAACP that have always centered art in their organizing.

For economic justice to function, communities need to envision a future when it does work. Art builds urgency and a “collective imagination,” says Peters.

If artists are central to movement building, says Evans, they must be supported as laborers.

“Artists are workers who experience interesting perceptions and existence in our society as kind of people with, you know, magical gifts, who don’t need to be sustained necessarily,” says Evans.

Speaking From Inside the Circle

Ujima has also helped unify community development work locally. At one point, Boston had more nonprofits per capita than anywhere, which meant competition for resources.

In the spirit of its name, Boston Ujima Project looks for ways the ecosystem of organizations can work collectively toward solutions that meet the needs of the community. One hope of the organization, for example, is to open a public bank.

“I think that speaks to what success would look like,” says Evans. “We don’t have to fight each other for resources.”

They want a future in which independence and representation create an environment where community members can “speak from inside the circle,” while also prompting questions about what it would be like to widen the circle further. Peters says the organization is well on its way.

“I have experienced a magic about Ujima. I think this is where we really shine,” says Peters. “I want all of our decisions to be shaped by those who live with consequences. And that’s my wish for the world.”

This story first appeared in Bolts, a nonprofit newsroom covering the nuts and bolts of power and political change, from the local up. It has been republished here with permission.

On Christmas Eve, residents of Roxbury, New Jersey, a township 50 miles west of Manhattan, learned from a Washington Post article that the Department of Homeland Security had plans to purchase a vacant warehouse on the outskirts of town and convert it into an ICE detention facility. The news was part of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s larger plan to buy up warehouses across the country to house 92,600 new detention beds for expediting deportations, a scheme acting ICE director Todd Lyons likened to “[Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”

By mid-January, Roxbury’s Township Council, an elected body of seven people, all Republicans, passed a resolution affirming that it “unequivocally opposes” modifying town warehouses for ICE use. Roxbury Mayor Shawn Potillo, who forms part of the council, stated during the vote that his approval of the resolution did not mean that he opposes the country’s immigration laws.

The resolution was merely symbolic; it wouldn’t actually stop ICE from buying the warehouse in town and turning it into a detention center. In February, it was announced that DHS had purchased the warehouse for $129 million, double its assessed value. The federal government plans to retrofit it into a processing facility for detainees who will stay three to seven days before being transported to detention centers elsewhere or removed from the country. The federal government initially claimed they intended for the warehouse to hold up to 1,500 detainees but have scaled that estimate back to 542 following public opposition.

“We must reiterate in the strongest possible terms that this property is not an appropriate location for a facility of this nature in a suburban community,” Potillo and the council wrote in a press release after the feds announced they were moving forward with the plan.

Roxbury’s reasons for opposing the facility are varied. For one thing, the council estimated that losing the warehouse to ICE would cost the city $85 million in tax revenue over 30 years. Local leaders have also raised concerns about what it will mean for the environment, traffic, and property values. One resident who spoke at the January meeting said she was worried the facility would affect her ability to sell her home.

Last month, New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport joined with Roxbury township to sue to stop the warehouse conversion. They alleged in a federal lawsuit that DHS had ignored federal policies requiring the government to engage with state and local governments and consider their positions, as well as provide proof that a project won’t harm the environment before moving forward. They also said that the agency’s plans require creating additional capacity for water and sewage, which could hurt a protected region of New Jersey where Roxbury is located. That region provides drinking water to 70 percent of the state’s residents and is subject to strict development standards.

The fight against the facility has brought together an unlikely coalition of immigrant rights advocates and town leadership who have said they support the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda but do not want to host an ICE facility. Small towns across the U.S. caught in clashes with DHS over warehouse conversions have turned to similar arguments in a bid to stop the projects.

“The town council is unsurprisingly caught in a very difficult position, because they are having to fight efforts from the Trump administration, despite them being very supportive in general, of Donald Trump and the Republicans in power,” William Angus, the co-founder of immigrant advocacy organization Project No Ice North Jersey Alliance, or Project NINJA, told Bolts.

On Feb. 28, members of Project NINJA organized a public protest against the Roxbury ICE facility in coordination with 22 other cities around the country where similar facilities are being proposed. Still, Angus says, the group’s concerns don’t resonate with everyone in town.

“I can very vigorously argue about the humanitarian side of why this is wrong … but with some people, that argument has no sway,” says Angus. “So we have to focus on the issues that will speak to those people, because at the end of the day, there are many good reasons—from the environmental to the water and the sewer—that make this a bad fit for the town, regardless of where one sits on the political spectrum.”

Potillo did not respond to a request for comment.

The warehouse is located in New Jersey’s Highlands region, a bucolic 1,300-square-mile stretch in the northern part of the state that spans from the Delaware River in the west, all the way to the New York border. The area is protected under 2004 legislation that created rules for water and wastewater usage in the area and limited development. Despite this, DHS in a January letter to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP), described extensive plans to transform the warehouse, including upgrading existing water and sewage systems or installing new ones.

The region is overseen by the New Jersey Highlands Water Protection and Planning Council, a body in charge of reviewing development applications for compliance with the legislation. Ben Spinelli, executive director of the council, tells Bolts that the warehouse should have never been built in the first place because of its proximity to vernal pools and forest that are key to maintaining the quality and quantity of water that feeds into the state’s drinking water supply.

“Because this is a site that contains significant, important natural resources, that should have kept it from ever being developed anything close to the warehouse level, let alone a place where you’re going to house [people]—we have a number of towns in the region that don’t have 1,500 people living in them,” says Spinelli.

The warehouse’s previous owner, the Texas-based real estate investment firm Dalfen Industrial, bought the building in 2023 as a “last-mile” delivery site, but it has remained vacant since.

The facility has just four toilets and is approved to supply 12,000 gallons of water each day. But increasing the capacity for 1,500 people would require roughly 187,500 gallons each day and add more than fifteen times the amount of sewage currently processed by the facility, according to the lawsuit. Despite DHS needing approval from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and the Highlands Council to complete the project, Spinelli says that the agency has not filed plans for changing the water system. The review of the site could happen quickly, he explained, but there would likely be new legal challenges to the final decision filed by the losing side that would stretch on for years.

“It’s not as easy as just signing off on a permit,” Spinelli tells Bolts. “It’s a very complex multi- input system that you’re dealing with here.”

The lawsuit faults DHS for not getting the necessary approvals from the Highlands Council and NJDEP, as well as for violating the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA), which requires federal agencies to work with state and local governments to ensure a project doesn’t harm the environment. That can include an extensive environmental impact report or a shorter assessment. DHS has done neither, according to the lawsuit.

Roxbury and New Jersey also claim that the Trump administration violated the Intergovernmental Cooperation Act, which stipulates that the federal government consult with state and local leaders about its plans. According to the suit, “DHS accounted for none of these views here, declining to discuss its plans with state and local officials before making its final decision, and failing to affirmatively solicit their views.”

In response to the lawsuit, the US Department of Justice, which represents DHS, said that it didn’t need to follow such approval policies because the project will have such minimal impact on the area that it qualifies for an exemption.They argue the increase in capacity could possibly require upgrades to the wastewater system but it’s too early to tell whether that will be the case and they’re not legally required to disclose those determinations at this point. DHS did not return requests for comment from Bolts.

DHS also has to contend with New Jersey laws aimed at preserving endangered species and the water supply that either prohibit development altogether or require a mitigation plan and public comment before approval.

According to a DHS memo on its warehouse conversion plan, the agency intends to open all of the new facilities nationwide by November 30, 2026. The Roxbury warehouse could be converted as early as June, according to the suit, though the lawsuit itself could delay things—on April 7, New Jersey and the town filed a motion for a preliminary injunction to stop work on the site. A hearing on the motion is set for May 12.

Though Roxbury has pointed to environmental concerns in its arguments against the warehouse conversion, local leadership has continued to support the Trump administration’s ramp up of immigration enforcement. Township Attorney Anthony Bucco, also a state senator, has sponsored the New Jersey Laken Riley Act, which would allow undocumented immigrants charged with crimes such as theft to be detained without bail. Advocates unsuccessfully called for Bucco’s removal as township attorney because of conflict of interest issues related to his support for pro-ICE legislation.

Representative Tom Kean Jr., a Republican representing Roxbury in Congress, has faced criticism from town leadership for his inaction on the project. Kean “did not engage to the level we had hoped to provide the advocacy our residents deserved,” the town wrote in its February press release announcing the DHS purchase. Since then, Kean has introduced The Local Taxpayer Protection Act, which would create a federal grant program for towns that lose property tax income or experience increased utility costs because of a DHS detention facility.

Earlier this month, Kean wrote a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin imploring him to “take a deeper look” at the department’s plans for Roxbury. Potillo also extended an invitation to the DHS secretary but had not heard back as of publication.

Kean in 2022 defeated Democratic incumbent Tom Malinowski for the seat and is up for re-election in the swing district in November. His Democratic opponents have seized on his inaction, with one calling his sponsored legislation, which has not moved, a “bullsh*t bill.”

Roxbury’s fight against the warehouse mirrors similar battles state and local governments are engaging in as ICE attempts to carry out its plans to convert warehouses across the country into mega prisons. In many areas, local leaders have resorted to novel methods centered around environmental preservation to try to stymie construction.

In Social City, Georgia, a small town outside of Atlanta where ICE planned to incarcerate up to 10,000 detainees, residents put a lock on the water meter because the federal agency did not provide information about how water and sewage usage would impact the community.

Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown in February sued over plans to create a processing facility in a Williamsport warehouse, citing similar concerns expressed in Roxbury about the facility’s effects on the local environment. Court filings showed the federal government’s environmental review, which determined that any adverse impact would be “minor,” took just a single day to conduct. A judge granted a request for a preliminary injunction earlier this month, ruling that the expedited review violated NEPA and ordering the federal government to conduct a more comprehensive environmental assessment.

Michigan also filed a lawsuit alleging that DHS ignored federal guidelines as it plans to build an ICE detention facility in the small city of Romulus, a suburb of Detroit—which local leaders similarly argue would harm the local water supply, economy, and public safety. Federal officials also completed a one-day environmental review there, finding that the property qualified for a streamlined analysis applicable to projects that “normally do not significantly affect the quality of the human environment.” They claim the detention center wouldn’t increase infrastructure needs, even as they note that it may need to expand the sewer system. The Michigan attorney general filed for a preliminary injunction in late March, with a hearing set for May 18.

“We’re seeing a lot of different uses—whether it’s through public pressure, economic pressure—the use of local government ordinances to say, ‘this is not the type of thing that’s going to be helpful to our communities,’” says Shayna Kessler, director of the Advancing Universal Representation Initiative at the criminal justice reform organization Vera Institute of Justice.

In New Jersey, advocates are now pushing for nearby towns to pass ordinances restricting future warehouse conversions if ICE’s efforts in Roxbury fail and the agency chooses to build there instead.

Project NINJA, the immigrant advocacy group opposing the warehouse, has compiled a list of 280 similar warehouses or vacant industrial buildings in the area for sale. The town of Sparta, about 12 miles north of Roxbury, unanimously passed an ordinance in March prohibiting the development of detention facilities. Sparta Mayor Dean Blumetti told Bolts in an email, “I will pass on the opportunity to discuss further. I will just state that we, the governing body, are always proud to have the opportunity to take action that reflects the wishes of our residents.”

Angus of Project NINJA says it’s been difficult to convince North Jersey Republicans to be proactive about stopping future ICE development in the area.

“There are things that they can do to protect their residents… but that has not found a very receptive audience, and it’s mainly because Republicans don’t want to criticize the Trump administration,” he says. “They’d rather stay out of it.”

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.

Supreme Court Guts Voting Rights Act

A Wednesday Supreme Court ruling guts a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, The Guardian reports. The 6-3 ruling weakens Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which allows for race to be considered when fixing racist redistricting. But a decision handed down by the conservative majority creates a nearly impossible rubric for this to happen, saying that redistricting to empower Black and minority voters can only happen when racial discrimination is explicitly stated as a goal of previous redistricting.

The Supreme Court’s rationale appeared to be that racism had diminished in the American South, so the Act’s protections were not needed: “Vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South, which have made great strides in ending entrenched racial discrimination,” the court’s majority wrote. State Senator Raumesh Akhbari of Tennessee disputed this, saying this view was “misguided and incorrect,” and calling the Supreme Court “completely out of touch with the average American,” according to the New York Times. States in the south are already eager to test the limits of the weakened Voting Rights Act, and Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves said he would call a special session to redraw the state’s lines.

Editor’s note: You may appreciate this commentary from Jamelle Bouie, a columnist for the New York Times who covers history and politics.

Government Shutdown Ends

Congress voted to end a 75-day government shutdown, the longest in history, with agreements to fund the Department of Homeland Security with the exception of ICE and Customs and Border Protection, The Guardian reports. Democrats refused to fund ICE and CBP without restrictions on immigration enforcement, which Republicans wouldn’t agree to. Republicans instead plan to pass a separate funding bill for immigration enforcement through the reconciliation process, having agreed to a blueprint on Wednesday, the New York Times reports. Reconciliation will allow Republicans, who currently hold 53 seats in the Senate, to push through an additional $70 billion in funding for ICE and CBP with just 51 votes instead of 60, shutting out Democrats.

More than 200 Members of Gaza Aid Flotilla Kidnapped

Zeteo reports that 22 boats in the Global Sumud Flotilla, a fleet attempting to break Israel’s illegal maritime blockade of Gaza, were seized in international waters. Over 400 people from 70 nations on board were abducted and eventually turned over to the Greek government, according to the outlet. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese wrote on X: “How on earth is possible [sic] that Israel is allowed to assault and seize vessels in international waters just off Greece/Europe?” The incident drew condemnation from the governments of Italy, Spain, and Turkey, whose foreign ministry referred to the abduction as an act of piracy. Israel abducted several hundred people on an aid flotilla to Gaza last October, including activist Greta Thunberg.

Water Rights for Tribal Nations

Two bills introduced in Congress would address water shortages impacting tribal nations in the Western United States, Tribal Business News reports. The Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians Water Rights Settlement Act would reserve water rights to 20,000 acre-feet of water a year to the titular nation in order to settle a years-old lawsuit. It also includes a $500 million trust fund to improve water infrastructure and sets aside 2,700 acres of Bureau of Land Management land into a trust for the tribe. The Western Tribal Water Act adds $60 million annually for fiscal years 2027 and 2028 for water infrastructure in the Upper Colorado River Basin for regions not prioritized by the Indian Reservation Drinking Water Program.

NCUA Shuts Down People Trust Community Federal Credit Union

The National Credit Union Administration liquidated People Trust Community Federal Credit Union on Thursday. The decision comes after a months-long dispute. The NCUA said it determined the credit union was “insolvent and in violation of numerous provisions of the Federal Credit Union Act and NCUA regulations,” CU Today reports. Next City recently reported on People Trust, detailing its challenges with its core processor, the gap it was filling as the first new credit union chartered in Arkansas since 1996, and NCUA’s decision to place it into conservatorship.

MORE NEWS

• Indigenous peoples bear the brunt of climate change — and get almost none of the money to fight it. Grist

• NDN Collective launches Landback Action Network to coordinate land return efforts. Tribal Business News

• Here’s which NYC neighborhoods will be hit hardest as key federal rental program ends. Gothamist

• Report finds new homebuyers in some cities pay double the property taxes of their neighbors. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy

• Virginia’s new law blocks counties from banning solar. Canary Media

• Cities sue EPA for failing to uphold soot standard. Smart Cities Dive

• New York nears prohibition on renting jail space to ICE. Gothamist

• USDA seeks to increase meatpacking line speeds, threatening workers, and consumers. Food & Power

• Land trust transfers 308 acres to California tribe. Tribal Business News

• NYC affordable housing preferences for artists? A bill auditions in Albany. Gothamist

OPPORTUNITIES & RESOURCES

• [DEADLINE TODAY] The National Trust for Historic Preservation is funding preservation projects in small communities (with populations of 10,000 or less) across the United States. Apply by May 1.

• [DEADLINE TODAY] The RRF Foundation for Aging is accepting grant applications from national or Illinois-based nonprofits working to improve quality of life for older adults, including through advocacy, professional education, and workforce training. Submit letters of inquiry by May 1.

• The UCLA Luskin Institute published a report about debtor organizing and the fight for climate repair. Download it here.

• Next City is looking for its next cohort of rising urban leaders to join this year’s Vanguard gathering in Chicago, planned for Sept. 15-18. Our network of 600-plus Vanguards includes planners, community developers, nonprofit leaders, artists, designers, local officials, and more. Apply by May 14.

• Wells Fargo and Enterprise are launching a new cycle of their Housing Affordability Breakthrough Challenge, a $2 million grant opportunity for scalable housing innovations in design, construction, finance, service delivery, and programs. Apply by May 15.

• The Sparkplug Foundation is offering grants to support early-stage programs that focus on music programs, community organizing, and education. Apply by May 22.

• Hispanics in Philanthropy’s Líderes Fellowship is accepting applications from mid-career Latine, Afrolatines, and Native leaders working in philanthropy and nonprofits in the American Southwest. Apply by May 31.

It’s long past time to confront the harms of extractive research. Historically, researchers, nonprofits, government agencies, philanthropic organizations, universities, and policymakers have used data to impose policies on communities of color. Indeed, some of the research frames the community itself as a problem to be solved or an object to be studied rather than as an impacted group of humans with key insights into their own lives.

Think of the infamous Tuskegee Experiment: Beginning in 1932, white medical researchers who wanted to understand the impact of the sexually transmitted disease syphilis enlisted Black men in their study, saying it was a public health project. The researchers tracked the men and their families for years without telling them whether they were infected with syphilis. Hundreds of men, women, and children were left without treatment over the forty-year course of the study.

More recently, in 2010, the Zuckerberg Foundation attempted to bring a bold reform plan to Newark, New Jersey’s school system, which was, like many other urban school districts, struggling to serve its students well and falling well behind suburban districts in graduation rates and test scores. The foundation’s staff compiled research on education, created a plan with experts, and approached the governor and mayor to create a partnership to implement it. These were “data-driven solutions” that the foundation felt were best for the community. And when did the community hear about them? When the mayor, governor, and Zuckerberg appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show to announce their ambitious partnership to reform Newark schools. As Melody Barnes and Charles Schmitz recount in their analysis of this effort, the top-down approach to evidence-based social change backfired:

Even in the highly charged realm of education reform the Newark initiative stands out for the high level of tension that it created. Instead of generating excitement among Newark residents about an opportunity to improve results for their kids, the reform plan… sparked a massive public outcry… Instead of unifying Newark residents behind a shared goal, the initiative polarized the city.

When powerful institutions and the researchers who work for them don’t view communities as central and crucial to the knowledge-and solution-building process, everyone loses the opportunity to find better pathways to real change. Just as education is a complex, controversial issue in desperate need of change, so, too, is environmental justice. However, a recent review of community engagement dynamics in philanthropies that do conservation work found that few foundations involved in marine conservation efforts “meaningfully engaged communities, despite mounting evidence that such engagement can lead to positive social and ecological outcomes.” The result of this extractive and often dehumanizing form of research is a deepening level of mistrust, disillusionment, and despair in the communities that these entities aim to serve. Whether exploiting those communities as research “subjects” or investigating disparities suffered by communities of color, rarely do they treat those folks as holders of valuable expertise who can apply their knowledge to create better solutions.

This doesn’t mean that data aren’t valuable; it means we need to reimagine how, why, and when we collect data if we want to identify and solve big social problems instead of sticking to the dominant model of research. Let’s say a foundation wants to launch a new “evidence-based” reform program for public schools. Here’s what the process usually looks like:

1. The funder decides on the research topics and question within the institution.

2. The funder launches a request for proposals aimed at academics and/or private research consultants.

3. The funder hires research professionals to pursue the question.

4. The research professionals draw on existing data about the community, such as census data, or parachute into the community to gather data, then leave as soon as they feel they have the data they need.

5. They analyze the data outside the community, using predetermined theoretical concepts.

6. They present and publish the findings within the sponsoring institution and the community. They may or may not invite the community to give feedback on the results.

7. The funder announces which, if any, solutions will be pursued or funded.

In short, traditional institutions typically show up in the community for a small window of time to quickly establish a transactional relationship with a limited number of community members who are not compensated for their time or contributions. They seek input via surveys or focus groups and maybe ask a token representative to review documents that were already written. Community knowledge or opinions are seen as necessary only when the researcher extracts the information, based on predetermined questions and theories of change. Throughout this process, the community is treated like an object to be acted upon—not as a partner with ideas, knowledge, and self-determination for creating positive, effective change. This is not a recipe for a reciprocal, respectful partnership.

LEARN MORE: Dr. Brittany Lewis will be joining us for a conversation on May 6 at 1 p.m. Eastern. Register for the virtual event here!

The gap between communities and researchers is thus wide and deep. The tradition of maintaining separation between researchers and community members as “subjects” in the name of “objectivity” creates an environment where organizations, despite their best intentions, don’t understand the people they serve. Paula Wolff, director of the Illinois Justice Project, explained that when people in powerful institutions are so far removed from the people they study, it may lead to research that dehumanizes rather than bringing clarity and understanding: “For our own kids, we understand the context of their lives, their trajectory over time, and what ‘safe’ and ‘happy’ and ‘realizing potential’ look like… But for kids in social services, we typically create some limited data set of how they interacted with one specific service at some specific point in time… and then we claim we are ‘evidence-based.’”

Governmental organizations, nonprofits, and people-centered businesses often fail to realize that their default mode for relating to communities of color was formed in a patriarchal, profit-centered, white supremacy system that underwrites their power to set research and policy agendas. That system affects their history, programming, staff composition, internal culture, marketing, and fundraising. Typically, these organizations do not support inclusive processes, direct collaboration, or productive feedback loops. Although they may think that they’re working with community, they usually have only a go-to community representative with whom they are comfortable and very few relationships on the ground beyond that one representative. They limit their definition of key stakeholders to their existing leadership team, their employees, and donors. They often have few staff who come from the communities they serve. They value professional credentials over the lived experience of the people and communities they profess to serve. They solicit little community feedback.

Is it any wonder that such an arrangement often fails to move the needle?

It’s time to go beyond producing individual research products in the service of institution-set goals. Instead, we can develop research-driven, community-centered solutions to generate substantive, positive change. This includes building trust between organizations and the communities they serve by supporting long-term partnerships and by putting community members in leadership roles that guide what questions we ask in our research.

I established my company, Research in Action (RIA), in 2019 to foster research practices centered in these authentic community partnerships. RIA’s Equity in Action (EIA) model counters the power imbalances and thought distortions created by white supremacy. White supremacy is the belief that white people are superior to all other peoples of the earth. Though most people do not actively express this belief, in a range of subtle and overt ways, white supremacy has set norms within what bell hooks calls “dominator culture.” The legacy of dominator culture can be seen in normalized harmful behaviors and attitudes that impact multiple facets of our daily lives. These behaviors include paternalism, power hoarding, perfectionism, extreme individualism, avoidance of conflict, and binary thinking. Dominator culture is at the root of the belief that a researcher with an academic credential should have more authority to speak about someone’s situation than that person themself or that a professional expert who has dedicated their life’s work to a particular subject should have the final say on which strategy or approach to take to resolve a problem.

At RIA, we recalibrate the relationships that organizations have with community members so they can see those communities as coproducers of knowledge and as equal partners in critical decision-making. Our partner organizations create ongoing relationships with community members who help them name the problem, identify research questions, and chart the best course of action moving forward. They build trust with community members through shared values, shared goals, and a shared understanding of the problem. When we rewire these relationships and processes using the EIA model, the result is a breakthrough in positive outcomes.

This is an excerpt from Building a New Table: A Community-Centered Handbook for Transformative Social Change. It is published here with permission from the University of Minnesota Press.

This story was originally published by Fresnoland, a nonprofit news organization covering the central San Joaquin Valley, in February 2026.

Responding to overwhelming criticism in the fall of 2024 that their new anti-encampment law would criminalize the homeless, Fresno leaders called a news conference to introduce a “creative solution” that they said would create a streamlined system to prevent the criminalization of the local homeless population.

They called it the “Treatment First Program.”

City leaders pledged to Fresno’s unhoused population, virtually the only demographic targeted by the anti-camping ordinance, a way out of their criminal camping arrests if they committed themselves to drug or alcohol treatment provided by a trio of local faith-based service providers.

“If they choose that approach,” Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer said at the Sept. 23, 2024, news conference, “the police report would be held in advance, and if they completed a program as determined by the treatment provider, that report would be disposed of.”

Now about 16 months later, City Hall can’t say whether anyone has completed any such program.

Fresno City Councilmember Miguel Arias, who since 2024 has emerged as the most staunch defender of the law and who was present at the Treatment First Program’s rollout, told Fresnoland that “I wouldn’t call it a ‘program.’”

There are few numbers or success metrics tied to Fresno’s Treatment First Program.

And, more than a year later, nobody can agree on what these numbers mean — if anything.

Between September 2024, and the end of January this year, Fresno police say a total of 826 arrests or citations were issued under the city’s anti-camping law.

Of the hundreds of bookings, just 18 alleged campers opted into the city’s Treatment First program.

What happened next to those 18 people is unclear, and city leaders gave contradictory answers.

Arias told Fresnoland that it was his understanding all 18 people had successfully completed a treatment program and, subsequently, had their arrest records expunged. But, he acknowledged he had no proof.

On Jan. 29, a Dyer spokesperson, in an emailed statement to Fresnoland, said they “have not been advised that any of the 18 individuals referred by (Fresno police) have completed the Treatment First Program.”

Of the treatment providers that spoke to Fresnoland, none could say whether they even received anybody from the city’s new program.

On top of hard-to-spot success stories for the Treatment First Program, the city initiative never led to any specific service agreements between the city and treatment providers.

Kevin Little is a Fresno attorney who has successfully defended homeless individuals against the anti-camping ordinance. He expressed frustration with both the paltry results from the program, and the city’s decision to not seriously implement any metrics for success.

“If you really are interested in learning how efficacious your solutions are, you would have some tracking,” Little said. “It sounds like all the city knows is that 18, a desultory number when you’re talking a total of about 850…18 people have been referred to for services…we don’t know anything more than that 18 people were dropped off at a location. We don’t know what happened to those folks.”

‘I cannot safely, confidently walk into my business’

Cities and counties across the country gained the ability to criminalize camping following the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Grants Pass case in 2024 — a trial that the federal judicial branch heard at least in part following pressure from some of the country’s leaders like California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

In 2024, Dyer, Arias and other local politicians and business leaders hailed their new legislative powers as a critical new tool to help the city’s beleaguered shop owners, many of whom faced daily challenges from unhoused or encampment residents interfering with business one way or another.

That, they said, was among the problems this ordinance would fix.

Nobody likes arresting the unhoused, city officials and business leaders noted at the time, especially when there’s no place for them to safely go. The Supreme Court, notably, said cities and counties are no longer obligated to provide beds or shelter for the homeless.

There are not enough supportive services for local homeless residents nationwide.

But too many of the city’s business owners were upset, moving to Clovis or closing up altogether. And, six months after the law passed, business owners told Fresnoland that the law, while not popular, was changing things for the better.

“I don’t have people camped out here in the morning,” one business owner told Fresnoland last spring. “I can go days without cleaning up.”

In a Jan. 29 email, the mayor’s office told Fresnoland that, “Business owners have communicated appreciation for the ways the City is responding to their needs. While homelessness, mental illness, and addiction are complex issues, the business community recognizes that the City is supporting them more than ever.”

Not everyone agrees.

Cameron Phillips, a 33-year-old tattoo artist and business owner of Line and Shade Tattoo near Herndon and Polk Avenues in northwest Fresno, said he’s so fed up that he’s closing his shop and moving his family to the coast.

“I cannot safely, confidently walk into my business without worrying about being approached by somebody who has a weapon, and then putting myself in a position where I may have to draw my concealed firearm and take someone’s life, potentially,” Phillips said in a Feb. 2 interview with Fresnoland. “I don’t want to be in that position.”

Phillips said that, in no uncertain terms, the anti-encampment law has been useless in protecting his business.

And, he said, he’s even considering suing the city for lost wages for what he described as “severe emotional distress” for its failure to address the public safety issues he reported to authorities repeatedly, when unhoused residents at a nearby encampment clashed with his customers.

“I’m working with an attorney because of their inadequacy to properly deal with this problem and respond to it.”

The failed attempts to prosecute the unhoused

Fresno also has had little success prosecuting the unhoused residents who refuse treatment.

Its two highest profile attempts at prosecuting the unhoused who refuse treatment have embarrassed Fresno City Hall. In both cases, the unhoused residents walked out of court without accepting either treatment or a criminal conviction.

In the first case, city prosecutors tried to force news reporters to testify in court — aiming to beef up their evidence before a judge ultimately threw it out for violating an unhoused person’s Fourth Amendment right to a speedy trial.

The City Attorney’s Office also lost its first jury trial late last year, and, in a statement to The Fresno Bee, blamed “jury nullification,” when jurors refused to enforce a law they say is unjust.

City Hall will face another legal challenge to its anti-encampment law from Little, the city rights attorney, who filed federal civil rights lawsuit in December. He was the defense lawyer in the city’s first major defeat.

Little is looking to end the city’s enforcement of the law entirely. He said the city should look to invest money toward the other means of homelessness support, rather than what he calls criminalization.

“And so when you create this criminalization machine, it comes at a cost,” Little told Fresnoland. “It comes at a cost where those funds could be diverted to services, could be diverted to shelters, could be diverted to more advocates out there in the field, could be given to nonprofits for people who are already out there dealing with our unhoused community.”

Better than nothing?

Of all the original advocates of the city’s Treatment First approach, only Arias is still willing to discuss it in 2026.

Dyer’s office provided some information, but declined an interview. Councilmember Tyler Maxwell, who co-sponsored the city’s anti-camping law with Arias, refused to respond to numerous requests for comment dating back to late last year.

When Arias was asked how he would respond to people who see the data and come away feeling that the only thing the city and county’s anti-encampment ordinances have done is criminalize homelessness, he didn’t disagree.

He said he believed people would come away either thinking the program should be left as is, expanded, or done away with altogether.

“They’re all right,” Arias said, before adding that he believed one of the few things those groups might have in common is that “they all call us the very next day asking us to clear the encampment in their neighborhood.”

But, he said, he stands by the program and says it’s too soon to call it a failure. He said the city does not invest any significant money into it, as it’s just an added task for Fresno police officers interacting with unhoused people.

Arias also argued that 18 unhoused people completing drug and alcohol treatment — if true — is not nothing.

Treatment programs still out of reach for many

Two of the three local homeless supportive services that partnered with the city for the program —the Fresno Mission and the Salvation Army — said their programs and services work and they have the receipts to show it. Their services largely operate independent of the city, and are not directly connected to the ordinance or even Treatment First.

“There’s nothing that’s been tailored specifically for the camping ordinance,” Dildine said of the Mission’s treatment options.

The Poverello House, the biggest treatment service provider of the three, did not respond to multiple requests for comment dating back to last year.

Major David Pierce, an administrator of donor development with the Fresno Salvation Army, said the organization offers six-month programs that offer housing, food and other faith-based supportive services.

The Fresno Mission offers even more services to residents — from warming centers to 12-month programs that include six months of transitional housing.

The Mission’s CEO, Matt Dildine, told Fresnoland the 12-month program, which is the highest tier of recovery they offer, helps people prepare to reintegrate into the community.

“Every single person that leaves that program, leaves with a job, their GED and a place to live,” Dildine said. “It’s produced incredible results.”

Pierce told Fresnoland that the success rate for the Salvation Army’s program hovers slightly below 50%. Dildine said that the 12-month program has a success rate “in excess of 80%” for individuals who stay past the first three months.

The only catch?

There’s typically no room available in any local programs, with lengthy waiting lists and no additional funding to expand services in the wake of the city’s crackdown on camping.

The mayor’s office told Fresnoland in an email on Jan. 29 that there was an understanding between City Hall and the three service providers that the latter group had the capacity to take on Treatment First enrollees in spite of no additional funding.

The Fresno Mission held a fundraiser over this winter to help keep their warming centers running.

Dildine told Fresnoland on Jan.26 that the Fresno Mission’s crisis housing for families has a waitlist of about 150, down from about 200 he said.

The Salvation Army’s rehabilitative program capacity tops out at a little over 100, Pierce told Fresnoland, though enrollment is on a rolling basis.

Also, neither group could say whether any of the 18 referrals even made it to one of their programs. There is no indication that they’re tracking that data, either.

‘A myopic view of a very complex problem’

What would it take to make it work — or at least work better — in Fresno?

Arias, who will term out as a councilmember in just under a year, said complaints about the policy are valid, but he argued that the policy is not the real problem.

Arias suggested that at least part of the problem is the fact that local governments can only incentivize — not force — people to accept treatment services.

“But it’s voluntary,” Arias said. “I don’t know how to force people to do things that are in their interest when it’s voluntary.”

The state passed the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act in 1967, a landmark policy that established strict guidelines to force people into treatment. Efforts to force individuals into treatment have been met with stiff opposition from advocates for patients with disabilities.

California’s CARE Court system, launched at the same time as Fresno’s anti-camping law with a similar approach, slightly relaxed some rules for treatment enforcement, but the state’s program hasn’t fared much better than Fresno’s policy.

Deputy Secretary for the California Health And Human Services Agency Stephanie Welch distanced the state’s program from the city’s.

“CARE Court has no relationship to Fresno’s anti-camping law and is separate from the Lanterman Petris Short Act,” the secretary said in an emailed statement to Fresnoland. “Established in every California County, the CARE Act creates a new pathway to stability for Californians living with debilitating psychotic disorders. The CARE Act has connected more than 7,500 people with the most severe, untreated mental illness to the resources they need to stabilize and heal.”

Arias said he remains open to suggestions – either from City Hall or local advocates — and encouraged more public debate. But he also said he’s not hopeful that a more elegant solution could emerge.

“What I will tell you is,” Arias said, “once they understand that it’s voluntary, and that we cannot mandate it under state law, it really removes our ability to make a difference.”

Little has long argued that the city’s approach toward unhoused residents is, at best, unsophisticated and indifferent. Focusing only on substance abuse treatment, Little said, addresses just a small fraction of the unhoused community.

“It reflects a myopic view of a very complex problem,” Little told Fresnoland.

He said the city’s paltry stats and disorganized approach to treatment are only further evidence that the law doesn’t work and the city isn’t interested in making it work. If City Hall wanted the laws to be effective, Little said, “you would have some tracking.”

“We don’t know anything more than that 18 people were dropped off at a location,” the attorney reiterated. “We don’t know what happened to those folks.”

Meanwhile, Phillips, the westside tattoo shop owner, says he can’t wait around any longer just hoping the city might one day make the lives of small business owners easier.

“Those numbers tell the whole story,” said Phillips.

Dildine, the Mission’s CEO, said accepting treatment, ultimately, will always be up to the individual’s frame of mind, regardless of the carrots and sticks government officials try to manufacture to force the issue.

“I think when you have somebody that’s in a tent, they’re not going to move, and their only other option is to be arrested, there’s a good chance that person isn’t just simply ready for treatment,” Dildine said. “To choose that option, you have to be ready for it.”

What would you do with $4 million in free money? You’d have to give it back in three years, but what could you do with it in the meantime?

Based in Rochester, New York, the $47 million Genesee Co-op Federal Credit Union used $4 million in free money to make loans for residential solar installations and energy efficiency improvements for low- and moderate-income homeowners in historically underserved communities.

That free money came through the 0% Development Advance program from the Federal Home Loan Bank of New York, one of 11 regional wholesale banks created by Congress nearly a century ago to support housing and community development across the country. The program offers zero-interest loans — known as advances — to private lenders for making eligible loans in one of five categories: small business, climate resilience or energy efficiency, infrastructure, housing, or tribal development.

Since the Federal Home Loan Bank of New York created its 0% Development Advance Program in 2022, it’s supported $460 million in eligible loans made by more than 47 institutions across its footprint, which includes New York, New Jersey, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The 0% Development Advance Program is one of dozens of similar targeted lending programs across all eleven regional Federal Home Loan Banks. The programs support low-cost financing for a mix of homeownership projects, rental housing projects, and community or economic development projects. According to the most recently available report from the Federal Housing Finance Agency, in 2024, these various targeted lending programs supported nearly $8 billion in loans across the country.

The true impact of these various targeted lending programs is hard to say without closer scrutiny. But in terms of overall scale, these Federal Home Loan Bank targeted lending programs cumulatively rival or even dwarf other more widely-known programs like the Federal Community Development Block Grants at $3 billion a year, the New Markets Tax Credit, which allocates $5 billion a year, Low-Income Housing Tax Credits at $15 billion a year, Historic Tax Credit investments coming in at $6 billion a year, or the average $12 billion in investments each year for the Opportunity Zone tax break.

And yet these Federal Home Loan Bank incentive programs are not much known at all outside of the banking industry. How these programs come about and how they evolve aren’t very widely understood, even inside the banking industry.

History and Impact

The 11 Federal Home Loan Banks are member-owned cooperatives whose members currently include more than 6,300 banks, credit unions, insurance companies and community development lenders across the country. Each regional bank’s board of directors, elected by its membership, oversees and helps shape each bank’s activities, including its various targeted lending and grant programs. The Federal Housing Finance Agency regulates the Federal Home Loan Banks along with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

In the midst of the Great Depression, thousands of local savings and loan associations across the country faced surging demand for home financing, but the tough economy limited deposits on hand to fund new loans. With the passage of the Federal Home Loan Bank Act of 1932, Congress created the regional wholesale banks as a new source of funding for those local lenders. Originally, there were 12 regional Federal Home Loan Banks, reflecting the 12 regional banks of the Federal Reserve system. The Federal Home Loan Bank of Seattle was merged into its Des Moines counterpart in 2015.

The primary function of each Federal Home Loan Bank is the same today as it was when they were created — providing liquidity in the form of advances to its members. The advances can be in terms of less than a year and as long as 30 years. The advances were meant to serve as a source of funding for savings and loan associations to continue lending when demand for loans exceeded what they could fund through their depositors.

To raise funds for making advances to their members, the Federal Home Loan Banks sell bonds to investors on global capital markets, where their status as government-sponsored enterprises gives them access to some of the lowest interest rates anyone can get, allowing them to turn around and make advances to member institutions at very low rates. The Federal Home Loan Banks receive no annual funding from Congress, although they are themselves tax-exempt. Virtually all of their income comes from the interest payments on the advances they make to members.

Critics argue that the Federal Home Loan Banks have drifted away from their original mission. Back when they were first created, Federal Home Loan Bank membership was restricted to savings and loan associations — which were mostly restricted to housing and some commercial real estate finance — as well as certain insurance companies that engaged in mortgage lending. Today, any bank or credit union can become a member, and existing members are not required to use Federal Home Loan Bank advances to fund residential mortgages.

The savings and loan crisis of the 1980s decimated the Federal Home Loan Bank’s original core membership, as thousands of institutions across the country folded or merged into other institutions. Congress responded by expanding their membership. Since they could join the system starting in 1989, commercial banks have become the largest member category, making up 55% of its 6,388 members. Commercial banks are also by far the largest borrowers of the system, accounting for just under 50% of the $677 billion in advances outstanding. To become a member, institutions must show that at least 10% of their assets are in residential mortgage lending.

The second largest borrower from the system, however, is Apollo Global Management — a private equity firm that acquired an insurance company that already happened to be a member of the Federal Home Loan Bank system. An investigation published last year by The Lever found Apollo Global Management was ramping up its Federal Home Loan Bank borrowing at the same time it was acquiring thousands of rental housing units as investment assets, and other private equity firms were starting to copy the same playbook.

A March 2026 Urban Institute report, funded by the Council of Federal Home Loan Banks, found that the system still boosts lending by at least $75.6 billion a year. Dollar-for-dollar, the boost was larger among smaller banks. That finding is consistent with another recent report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which found that Federal Home Loan Bank advances increased lending volume among banks with less than $10 billion, but had no effect on banks above that threshold. In other words, larger institutions seem to be using low-cost Federal Home Loan Bank advances to make other investments in stocks, bonds, or other assets instead of using the advances to boost their lending.

According to another recent study, the Federal Home Loan Banks help maintain local competition among lenders, lowering the cost of borrowing while increasing nationwide mortgage volume by as much as $50 billion a year, all without increasing risk to the financial system overall.

Zeroing-in

The same 1989 law that opened Federal Home Loan Bank membership to commercial banks and credit unions also codified two new requirements for each Federal Home Loan Bank: one, to create an affordable housing program providing grants funded by a set aside of each bank’s annual profits; and two, to create targeted lending programs offering discounted advances in support of “community-oriented lending” by members.

Each Federal Home Loan Bank’s affordable housing program and targeted lending programs look a little bit different, and can also change from year to year, all based on ongoing conversations between members, regional bank staff and each regional bank’s board. The banks’ affordable housing programs generally offer per-unit subsidies for the construction of single-family or multi-family residences, but the amounts vary widely. Larger subsidies can help create more deeply affordable units at the cost of fewer units subsidized overall. The Federal Home Loan Banks of Pittsburgh and Boston both give bonus points for subsidy applications that include a community land trust as part of the project ownership structure.

But, as critics like the Consumer Federation of America have pointed out for years, the Federal Home Loan Banks often spend more on staff salaries every year than they do on their affordable housing grant programs.

Targeted lending programs can support community and economic development in addition to affordable housing. Low-cost advances can help member institutions lower the cost of construction financing or long-term financing for all kinds of deals as long as the projects serve low- to moderate-income communities or certain other eligible areas like Empowerment Zones or “Champion Communities” designated by the Department of Housing and Urban Development or the Department of Agriculture, respectively. On an annual basis, each Federal Home Loan Bank publishes a “Targeted Community Lending Plan” that outlines the various specifics for the targeted lending programs it plans to offer over the following year.

In 2021, the Federal Home Loan Bank of New York heard from members that there were certain small business loans they were looking to make, but deals just weren’t quite working out. Conventional loan interest rates were a bit too high to make sense for certain borrowers. Loan guarantees from the Small Business Administration can lower interest rates by giving lenders some protection against the risk that a business fails, but the deals just weren’t quite a good fit for that program. Other policy tools or levers were available for other deals but not this set of small business loans that would really only work if the bank had a source of funds at a low enough cost that it could turn around and pass that low cost onto the borrower.

The Federal Home Loan Bank of New York experimented with a few 0% advances to members in 2021, and the next year it formalized the program, which supported $25.7 million in low-cost small business loans in 2022. Based on additional conversations with members, the program expanded in 2023 to include support for loans made to finance infrastructure improvements, climate investments, and housing or economic development projects on tribal lands — although so far there have been no 0% Development Advances made to support loans for tribal development. In 2025, the 0% Development Advance Program added housing loans.

Out of the $460 million in 0% Development Advances that the Federal Home Loan Bank of New York has made since 2022, $322 million has been for small business loans. The next largest amount has been $71 million for infrastructure, which includes purchases of municipal bonds supporting infrastructure development or economic development projects benefiting low- and moderate-income communities. In the first year of o% Development Advances for housing, the program supported $9.8 million in loans for acquisition or pre-development work on affordable housing, including third-party fees, demolition and environmental review or abatement, feasibility studies, site surveys, or pre-development activities.

There is an annual cap on 0% Development Advances based on interest rates. Each year, the Federal Home Loan Bank of New York announces a specific amount of subsidy available to cover the interest payments that members would pay on advances. If prevailing market interest rates go up, that subsidy amount will support fewer loans; if interest rates go down, it can support more. In 2025, $10.2 million in interest rate subsidies supported $147 million in zero-interest advances. The subsidies are available on a first-come, first-served basis, making for a bit of a scramble each year when the Federal Home Loan Bank of New York opens the application window. However, there is also a per-institution subsidy cap of $250,000, which ensures that smaller institutions like the $47 million Genesee Co-op Federal Credit Union get a shot at getting at least some zero-interest advances.

The 0% Development Advance Program is an example of a voluntary targeted lending program that the Federal Home Loan Bank of New York created in response to its members. Each Federal Home Loan Bank is also required to offer an uncapped community lending program that provides discounted advances to members to support affordable housing, community development or economic development projects. The New York regional version of that program supported another $214 million in loans for affordable housing and community development projects.

Reaching the Limit

One of the factors affecting the reach of each Federal Home Loan Bank’s targeted lending programs is the number of smaller institutions in each regional bank’s footprint, as well as the ownership and leadership of those smaller institutions.

Community banks — loosely defined as banks that make loans and take deposits from a specific geographic area, such as a single metropolitan area or state — are still outsized lenders in key sectors. While community banks represent just 11% of assets among federally insured banks, they represent 31% of commercial real estate mortgages, 32% of small business loans, and 33%of construction loans. Meanwhile, the largest four banks combined (Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citi) represent 42% of assets among federally insured banks, but account for just 11% of commercial real estate mortgages, 18% of small business loans, and 11% of all construction loans among banks.

But the number of community banks overall has dropped from more than 15,700 in 1984 to just over 3,900 in 2026. And community bank mergers increased in 2025, according to recent research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. Losing community banks means losing lenders that typically rely heavily on local knowledge and relationships to manage the risks of lending for construction, commercial real estate, and small business. For all that Federal Home Loan Banks can still do to support community banks and credit unions, their overall reach suffers as community banks continue to dwindle in number.

All that said, community banks as a group are the least likely to serve majority-minority neighborhoods, according to research from the National Bankers Association, a trade group for minority depository institutions.

It’s the minority depository institutions that are the most likely to make loans in majority-minority neighborhoods. But out of 3,909 community banks nationwide, only 130 are minority-designated by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Minority designation means the bank’s ownership, or the majority of its board and its primary markets come from the designated racial or ethnic group.

Board member connections to a community are a crucial component of safe and sound lending by community banks, but lack of diversity among community bank ownership and leadership means many communities of color just don’t have the same level of access to community bank lending — supported by Federal Home Loan Banks — as white communities.

Federally-certification for Community Development Financial Institutions, or CDFIs, was created in large part to address continued racial disparities in access to capital — although CDFIs have also turned out to benefit disinvested rural areas with predominantly white populations. In 2008, Federal Home Loan Bank membership was expanded to include non-depository lenders that are CDFIs. Banks or credit unions carrying CDFI certification were already eligible for membership based on their bank or credit union status.

Since 2008, 83 non-depository CDFIs have become Federal Home Loan Bank members, 43 of which had $437 million in advances outstanding at the end of 2025.

The fight over tech infrastructure in our cities didn’t start with ChatGPT, and it won’t end with it, either.

For decades, technology companies have been arriving in cities and communities with grand promises of jobs, efficiency, and automated utopias, but ultimately extracting far more than they delivered: land, water, public subsidies, data, democratic control over local decisions. The tools and the scale have changed; the pattern hasn’t.

As part of our series In the Shadow of the Server, we’re sharing a selection of books that trace that pattern to help city builders and community leaders understand what is happening, why it’s happening, and what might actually be done about it.

Some are reported dispatches from specific fights — a Toronto waterfront, an Amazon warehouse town, the welfare offices of Allegheny County. Others build the frameworks that help explain why these fights keep happening and who keeps losing them. Together, they form the essential context for the moment we’re in: communities across the country organizing against a new wave of tech infrastructure that is arriving faster, demanding more, and disclosing less than anything that came before.

Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy

Josh O’Kane (2022): A reporter at The Globe and Mail, Canada’s largest national newspaper, offers a blow-by-blow account of how Google’s urban tech subsidiary Sidewalk Labs tried to build a data-harvesting “smart neighborhood” on Toronto’s waterfront and got beaten back by a coalition of residents, privacy advocates, and local officials. This is the template: a tech giant, a secretive deal, community organizing, and a fight over who controls the city’s future. Read an excerpt at Next City.

Dracula Urbanism and Smart City Mania

David Wilson and Elvin Wyly (2024): Two geography professors use Bram Stoker’s vampire as a framework for understanding how smart city development actually works: seductive, parasitic, targeting those who are already vulnerable. The authors argue that today’s “smart city” development practices are aimed at creating opportunities to attract wealth and resources to cities, but the consequences are similar: punishing the poor, working class, recent immigrants, and homeless populations.

Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor

Virginia Eubanks (2018): A political scientist traces how automated decision-making systems in welfare, child protective services, and public housing systematically harm low-income communities and communities of color. Today’s fixation on bringing AI into urban governance risks the same dystopian results, if implemented without care. As Frank Pasquale, author of The Blackbox Society, put it: “Everyone should read this book to learn how modern governance, all too often shrouded behind impenetrable legal and computer code, actually works.”

The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future

Ben Green (2019): A sharp, readable takedown of smart city utopianism. An MIT researcher argues that technology isn’t inherently progressive, that it reflects and amplifies existing power structures, and that cities need civic capacity and political will more than sensors and apps.

World Eaters: How Venture Capital Is Cannibalizing the Economy

Catherine Bracy (2025): A civic technologist who formerly led Code for America shows how VC’s extractive practices are bleeding into all industries, undermining the labor and housing markets, and posing unique dangers to the economy at large.

A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences

Shannon Mattern (2021): Three years ago, when tech publication The Verge asked readers for their all-time favorite books on technology, they pointed to A City Is Not a Computer. It’s a remarkable achievement for an academic-press book about urbanism and epistemology. A New York City-based anthropologist argues that the “city-as-computer” metaphor reduces place-based knowledge to information processing, and that cities encompass myriad forms of local and indigenous intelligence that algorithms can’t capture and data dashboards can’t see. It’s also worth checking out Mattern’s 2017 book Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media.

Grounding the Cloud

Ali Fard (July 2026): Since the ‘90s, technologists have promoted a vision of the “cloud” as a shapeless and intangible entity. In this forthcoming book, an architecture professor peers through this hazy façade to reveal the earthly material foundations of global computing and data extraction: mines extracting rare earth minerals, fiber-optic cables on the ocean floor, data centers on the edges of cities. Read an excerpt at Next City, which offers another take on the Sidewalk Labs story.

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

Visitors walking into Manhattan’s Fridman Gallery are instantly met with Arleene Correa Valencia’s four-by-five-foot acrylic and textile composition depicting six figures outlined in thread and fabric. They’re riding in the back of a red pickup truck, and their faces are blank. Toward the back of the space, her 16-foot-long En El Cielo No Hay Fronteras / There Are No Borders In The Sky (2025) portrays people being people — embracing, riding bikes and scooters, skateboarding, doing cartwheels. Taking in the massive piece is like tracing a plane or a star in the sky. In the center, outlined in thread and then painted, is a red swing set that represents the border between the United States and Mexico.

The Bay Area artist’s first solo exhibition in New York, CÓDICE •• SOBREVIVIENDO A LA PERSECUCIÓN, up through May 2, is an unflinching response to the violence against immigrants perpetrated by the Trump administration. Valencia, a DACA recipient, was born nearly 30 years ago in western Mexico, some 2,000 miles away from where she would eventually call home. In the 1990s, her parents chose — as much as choice can be made between death and living — to migrate her and her family from a small town in the mountains of Michoacán, Mexico, to Napa Valley, known as a community rich with jobs for undocumented people.

In place of canvas, Valencia uses amate, a soft-toned, sand-like bark paper whose origins date back to Mesoamerican times. Her pieces are created in collaboration with Jose Daniel Santos de la Puerta, who handcrafts the amate paper in Puebla, Mexico; her father, who does the primary painting; and her mother-in-law, who helps Valencia with embroidery.

“We search for love, and we want to know that we are loved. And I knew that from the day that I was three years old. My parents crossed the world for me … Not everybody has that,” Valencia says in an interview.

Valencia worked hard from a young age. She went to school, cleaned houses with her mother, and became a nanny at 14. Eventually, the racist cruelty she experienced in high school led her to finish her studies at home. She wanted to attend community college to study art, a dream she’d been harboring since she was a small child. “At a very young age, I knew that I wanted to become an artist. But everything around me told me that I could not,” Valencia says.

Valencia applied for the California Nonresident Tuition Exemption, or AB 540, a California law that allowed her to apply for community college and pay in-state tuition. Her boyfriend, who is now her husband, was eligible for scholarships, FAFSA aid, grants, and more; he could consider schools in California, in other states, and even abroad. These opportunities were not because of higher academic achievement, but because he had a Social Security number and she did not. This truth haunted her. Growing up, Valencia’s parents had alluded to her immigration status. While she didn’t fully understand what her lack of citizenship meant, it hung over her like a dark cloud.

Valencia spent four years at a two-year community college, taking every art class they offered. When one of her professors, Fain Hancock, asked Valencia about her prolonged coursework, she broke down. For the first time in her life, she told someone the truth about her immigration status — that she could not transfer to another school, leave Napa, or receive scholarships. She would never be able to afford any more training than what she had already received.

Hancock responded by calling California College of the Arts (CCA) and convincing a representative to visit Napa Valley and see Valencia’s work. If she applied for and was granted DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), the representative explained, Valencia could receive the scholarship and attend the CCA’s four-year program.

DACA is an immigration policy established in June 2012 that provides children of migrants born outside the US with lawful presence status, which can be renewed every two years. It offers protection from deportation and a work permit. The Trump administration is implementing new barriers for DACA recipients, making it easier to deport immigrants who were once protected by the program.

“If it wasn’t for Fain or for my work ethic that my parents instilled in me, of just showing up and not knowing how the door was going to open, but knocking on that door every single day, then I wouldn’t have ever stepped foot into San Francisco and moved there for school,” Valencia says.

“I remember the White professors saying, ‘It’s okay for anyone to tell any story.’ And I thought to myself, ‘No, it’s not.’ That’s how you take people’s agency away,” Valencia remembered. “As an undocumented person, I told myself nobody would be able to talk about the hardships of being undocumented and the joy and the love that exists.” She chose oil painting as a medium through which to tell her people’s story.

In 2020, the pandemic lockdowns took Valencia from painting in her studio nearly every day to suddenly being told she could no longer enter the space. Her mother-in-law suggested she consider making art with her sewing machine. Valencia was offended. She was a formally trained oil painter, not a seamstress.

Around the same time, Valencia learned that she was BRCA1 positive, and her doctors found tumors in her breasts. She decided to undergo a double mastectomy, a 14-hour surgery that deconstructed her body. A football-sized portion of her stomach skin was used to reconstruct her breasts.

Forced to be still by her recovery and lack of studio access, Valencia reconsidered her mother-in-law’s suggestion. She asked her to teach her how to use a sewing machine.

Slowly, Valencia began to question why she’d pushed away this practice and considered it less than. She wondered if it was the result of internalizing a hierarchy of artmaking that was steeped in white supremacy, which excludes practices that are inherently more domestic, like sewing and embroidery.

“I was so mesmerized by the way that you can create a line and make a drawing on the sewing machine,” she says. “And that really shifted the way I was thinking about drawing and painting.”

Valencia was also inspired by her mother-in-law’s life. She survived the civil war in El Salvador and lived in an all-girls convent, where they made their own clothes and napkins, which they sold to feed themselves.

“Embroidery was her lifeline, and she’s teaching me this practice that to her is so traumatic,” Valencia says. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is art school.’” The ethos of her work, she discovered, was not in the medium of oil on canvas, but within the ancestral history of all the ways her people had been creating art long before she was told that painting was the way.

The artist incorporates glow-in-the-dark thread and reflective material, and when the lights are off, the negative of the image is visible instead — an approach that evokes ideas of visibility and its role in her life as a DACA recipient. In her portraits, parents hold their children, much as her own parents carried her to a better life. Outlined in glow-in-the-dark thread, the children only become visible in the darkness, physically separating them from their parents.

The exhibition journeys through the reality immigrants are facing today, as well as the kindness that binds them, and us, together. Valencia recalls that just this month, while going to pick up groceries at the Latin supermarket, she realized she could make herself vulnerable to being “picked up” by immigration. She says that while most of her family group chats consist of sharing jokes, they check in on each other every night to make sure they’ve made it home.

“We’re checking in to make sure that we’re alive and here. That is not fair,” Valencia says. “The show had to be a reflection of that. It had to be this extreme, violent state that is also showing the love and the joy.”

This story was updated to note that CÓDICE •• SOBREVIVIENDO A LA PERSECUCIÓN is not Valencia’s first solo exhibition, but it is her first in New York.

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

This essay 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.

2026 has started out very cyberpunk. The occupation of Minneapolis, immigration officials’ surveillance network, the Epstein files and the AI-driven bombing of the Middle East reveal a web of deep, violent entanglements between Silicon Valley, state violence and surveillance. The kinds of high-tech repression long present in Palestine and the U.S.-Mexico border are manifesting on the streets of American cities.

Technofascism has crossed our doorstep, and it poses the same question to us that is posed to every protagonist in that genre: Who owns the tech and controls the flow of data? If our movements don’t take this question seriously, we may yet see surveillance capitalism on a scale that will make us nostalgic for Blade Runner.

The consolidation of power within the tech industry has reshaped urban life, expanding precarious gig work, and placing essential services, systems and public spaces behind monopolies and paywalls. Cities now face a widening gap between public needs and privately controlled digital systems.

Now, cities must rethink how our technologies are owned, governed and deployed. Municipal broadband, public-interest data governance, and publicly accountable cooperative and nonprofit platforms can strengthen civic capacity while reducing dependence on private firms with questionable ties.

To succeed, municipal socialism must confront tech privatization

Cyberpunk may be known for its harsh tech-forward aesthetics and gritty cityscapes, but the genre is less a critique of tech than of oligarchy. Its heroes are certainly pessimistic about the state of technology in their worlds, but they set their sights on the power structures behind the hi-tech facade, not just the effects of that power.

Underpinning the cyberpunk critique is an understanding that technology is never just a matter of bits and circuitry. It is always entangled with the social conditions of its creation and use — hence the term “sociotechnical,” coined to study the ways society and technology co-create each other. Since much of our tech has been developed by firms run by billionaires in the Epstein Files, it is no wonder many cities feel dystopian.

But cyberpunk is not inevitable nor eternal. Even as the idea that “there is no alternative” to Big Tech may seem to consign us to a dystopian fate, we are still only in the middle of the novel. While Big Tech enables repression and cruelty at scale, the technology itself is still a battlefield that we can bend toward resistance, survival and transformation.

Right now, organizers are building a tech ecosystem for mapping ICE, tracking vehicles, documenting abductions, alerting communities and organizing rapid response. Networks of attorneys, journalists and families rely on this ecosystem to locate loved ones, coordinate legal defense, and practice civil resistance. At the same time, workers at Big Tech companies are pushing back on their employers’ complicity in state violence.

We must remember that tech workers, not tech companies, make the tech. It is primarily within the design and labor process that the struggle for just futures emerges. The way tech work, freed from the profit at any cost model, is being used to create an alternative high-tech web of solidarity is the fight of the hour. It shows in no uncertain terms the importance of democratizing our labor in ways that enable solidarity.

The rise of the tech workers movement, the resurgence of the labor and democracy movements, and the renewal of municipal socialism present a hard fork toward a technoprogressive future.

Here in New York, the election of Mayor Zohran Mamdani marks the opening of a new urban era. But the truth is that municipal socialism can only succeed if it confronts privatization with the seriousness it brings to housing since tech firms presently own most of the city’s digital infrastructure.

The municipalist worldbuilding at the heart of the democratic socialist movement that got Mamdani elected — which included many tech workers — requires the freeing of that infrastructure from the handles of forces hostile to democracy and human-centered urbanism. Mamdani’s win is an opportunity to transform these sociotechnical foundations and inspire a global technoprogressive wave.

The technoprogressive city already exists*

Models for democratizing urban tech already exist, both in the United States and around the globe. None are perfect, or even close, but they show a way forward for cities looking to build equity and resilience. To understand what they share, it helps to start with a case that reveals what they are not.

Amsterdam has pioneered one of the most rigorous algorithmic governance frameworks in the world. Its Algorithm Register requires that automated systems used by the city be documented, auditable and publicly accessible — making automated power legible, contestable and subject to democratic oversight.

These are exactly the right principles. Yet when the city applied them to “Smart Check,” a welfare fraud detection system, it ran headlong into a problem no governance framework could solve. Smart Check followed every principle in the responsible AI playbook: explainable models, bias testing, community consultation, published source code. It still reproduced the same harms as the analog system, often at higher rates and with less accountability behind the alleged objectivity of automation.

The failure generated a familiar debate. Ethical AI consultant Jiahao Chen asks: “Why do we hold AI systems to a higher standard than human agents?” Digital rights advocate Hans de Zwart answers that this misses the point, that Smart Check was a fundamentally bad idea, no matter how fair the algorithm.

Both are partly right, but together they create a dichotomy between humans and machines that obscures a deeper question raised by the journalists who exposed the system’s flaws in the MIT Technology Review, Lighthouse Reports, and the Dutch newspaper Trouw: not how to administer welfare fraud detection more fairly, but whether the system being administered was worth building at all.

The “toothbrush counters” investigating Albine Grumböck in 1984 and the Smart Check algorithm in 2023 were instruments of the same logic — that welfare recipients are suspects, and that a complex disciplinary apparatus is the appropriate response to poverty. As Virginia Eubanks documents in Automating Inequality and Ruha Benjamin in Race After Technology, this logic runs through automated systems for sentencing, housing assistance, food aid, and child custody: high-stakes, life-altering decisions built on punitive premises that no algorithm can truly make fair.

There is no technical consensus on what bias or discrimination even mean, because there is no political consensus. There cannot be, so long as systems are designed to stigmatize users rather than meet real needs. The National Welfare Rights Organization understood this decades ago, arguing that means-testing regimes were designed less to distribute aid than to ensure its receipt would be experienced as shame. A universal basic income — in which means-testing occurs on the back end through progressive taxation, so that no one who needs support is ever without it — points toward the kind of reorientation that data democracy ultimately requires: systems designed around abundance and access, not scarcity and surveillance.

Smart Check is not an indictment of the Algorithm Register. It is an indictment of the premise Smart Check was built to serve. Good governance tools applied to bad problems produce bad outcomes. The question the technoprogressive city must ask first is not how to make a system fair, but whether the system deserves to exist.

Barcelona asked the right questions. Its Digital Transformation Plan treated data, software, and digital infrastructure as public systems subject to participatory democracy, through a Municipal Data Office that consolidated departmental data, dismantled information silos, and built a unified public data infrastructure — City OS — allowing public agencies to analyze and govern data internally rather than outsourcing to private firms.

The Barcelona Data Commons redefined data ownership as social democratic infrastructure: Residents retain rights over the data they generate, while the city governs collection, access and reuse through binding ethical protocols centered on privacy, equity and public benefit. Procurement rules mandate open standards, interoperability and open-source software, with contracts favoring small local firms, nonprofits and worker cooperatives. Public spending generates public assets. Digital infrastructure underpins social reproduction and democratic life.

Here in the U.S., we also see movement — and the clearest examples share Barcelona’s premise that infrastructure should serve people, not surveil them.

In Chattanooga, the publicly-owned EPB Fiber Optics treats the internet as a public utility, delivering faster service, lower prices and universal access. It’s become a national model for what happens when connectivity is decoupled from profit.

In Philadelphia, BenePhilly uses open-source technology and community-based enrollment sites to connect residents to over 20 different benefit programs in a single visit — using data not to investigate people but to find them, and ensure they receive what they are already entitled to. It is, in miniature, exactly the reorientation de Zwart calls for: a system designed around access, not suspicion.

And in New York City, the Big Apple Connect program has extended free high-speed broadband to over 100,000 households in public housing, treating connectivity not as a market offering but as a right of urban citizenship.

New York already possesses the broader powers needed to go further: data governance authority, procurement control, regulatory reach, and substantial technical capacity through agencies like the Office of Technology and Innovation. It has a dense ecosystem of tech, service and gig workers who can remake the city’s technosphere from below, if given the chance by lifting the crushing weight of Big Tech, as well as a financial industry headquartered in the middle of a democratic socialist experiment.

Building on these foundations, New York should consider forming a municipal bank and enabling a network of municipally-backed credit unions to provide capital for cooperatives, civic platforms, municipal software development and public broadband. At the same time, simplifying the process of forming worker-owned cooperatives would transform procurement into a tool for building a democratic digital economy rooted in labor and community power.

Amsterdam’s Algorithm Register still points in the right direction. Transparency, auditability and democratic oversight of automated systems are foundational to any technoprogressive city. De Zwart put the alternative simply: Instead of detecting fraud, build a system that finds people entitled to support who aren’t receiving it.

The lesson of Smart Check is to demand exactly that reorientation — principles of transparency and auditability applied to systems built to connect rather than surveil, to govern data in the public interest rather than mine it for discipline or profit. The technoprogressive city is defined not by the sophistication of its monitoring apparatus, but by its answer to an essential question: Whose needs does this serve?

Such interventions can allow cities everywhere to build alternatives that anchor digital infrastructure in public ownership, democratic governance and worker control – a technoprogressive city capable of meeting human needs in the 21st century.

Angelines’s daily life used to be like that of many other housewives: looking after the children at home, taking the eldest to school, then shopping, cooking and tidying the house while looking after her youngest. The first time she saw an eviction being stopped was on television, although it was happening in the very district she lived in, Usera in Madrid.

“Lots of people were talking about it, because the police got quite violent with the people who are now my compas,” she remembers. “But back then, I watched and thought: How can they be throwing people around like that?”

Angelines soon got involved in the housing movement. When her grandmother died, she went to live in her flat — a council house from the Madrid Regional Government — and eventually managed to be officially recognized as a tenant. The difference was that her grandma paid €90 a month, and she paid €500. When the crisis came, Angelines was no longer able to pay the rent, and the authorities threatened to evict her over her debt.

Another mother at her daughter’s school told her about the Usera housing assembly and that led her to Plataforma de Afectadas por la Vivienda Pública y Social (PAVPS Madrid). She’s still at the flat and pays €140 per month, covering the rent and the debt she’s paying off as part of an affordable repayment plan.

Her life looks very different these days. “I’ve changed a lot. It’s no longer ‘drop the kid at school, shop, then go home…’ it’s, ‘take the kid to school, do a sit in at some administrative building, stop an eviction, meet with the housing councilor or the manager of wherever,” she explains. Her youngest was two when his mother began to get involved in right-to-housing activism. One day, the child was asked at school what his parents did and he said that his dad was a builder and his mum worked stopping evictions. “My son has experienced it as a job, because every day I left them at school, I had something to do.”

Founded in 2009 in response to the mortgage scam taking place in Spain, the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca, or PAH) has become a nationwide civil movement with more than 200 local chapters. After 17 years, our new book Yes, It’s Possible!: A Handbook for Building Power from Below shares everything we’ve learned with anyone who might be inspired by it. Here, we’ve shared some of our key insights on how to effectively organize an assembly-based movement.

Structuring a national platform

Most PAH chapters don’t stop at weekly or fortnightly assemblies but maintain a feverish level of activity all week, which requires a lot of organization. Each local PAH group is autonomous and can decide how it organizes and operates depending on its local context and resources.

But some basic standards are in place. The main one is that the organization must be horizontal to promote collective decision-making, sharing and disseminating information, and sharing tasks and responsibilities. At a PAH, decisions are made at weekly or fortnightly assemblies that are open to all. Operating parallel to that are committees or work groups (which are also open) allowing specific issues to be tackled in greater depth on a more regular basis. These groups are dependent on the assembly and are only authorized to make decisions on certain matters.

At a large PAH like Barcelona, there can be up to 20 committees at any given time, although the overall structure of the organization changes constantly. The committees handle issues as diverse as organizing protest actions, selling merchandise to raise money, speaking at meetings the PAH has been invited to, chairing and mediating assemblies, providing information through social media and the press, developing new strategic proposals, and organizing celebrations.

The problem is that there’s not always enough organizational muscle to keep up with such diverse activities. For instance, Jesús explains that at PAH Berriozar, there used to be several committees, but now that fewer people are involved on a daily basis, most issues are dealt with directly at the assemblies.

Boosting horizontality

For the horizontal approach to work, it’s very important for the assemblies to be properly mediated. This can take very different forms, from sharing the agenda in advance to creating an environment that allows all opinions to be heard. In 2014, the Catalan PAHs produced a facilitation manual based on platform training workshops with help from external collaborators.

“There’s a coordination team inside our PAH that takes responsibility for preparing some of the structure of the assembly so that when it happens, we have the agenda to keep us on track,” explains Rosa from PAH Altea. Saskia from PAH Torrevieja explains that they put the agenda together in a WhatsApp group: “Everyone talks a bit about the issues they want to deal with and then these are addressed when the assembly begins.”

Some PAHs, like Bages and Sabadell, opt for not having a coordination committee in order to decentralize the work. Others, including Barcelona, do have a coordination committee but also have a specific committee for assembly facilitation. Proposals for topics are sent by email so that the committee can send out the agenda — also by email — before the assembly. Some flexibility is allowed so that the final meeting agenda can be adapted to the needs raised by participants and items can be added to the list.

For the meeting to function properly, it’s important for everyone to know which item they’re covering and how long it will last. To help out with this, it’s a good idea to have all of the agenda items written on a board. “We used to find that we would finish Sunday’s assembly at 11 p.m. Considering that we get up at 7 a.m. on Mondays to work, that had to change. And when we put a 9 p.m. limit on the assembly, it still worked,” explains Àlex from PAHC Bages.

“Although it’s hard to grasp it all the first time you come — the committees and ways of doing things — being clear about the structure and repeating it at each assembly allows everyone to get used to it.”

Time slots are also useful for dividing the different parts of the assembly. “We agree to stop at exactly 8 p.m. to deal with actions and evictions, so there are things that have to be left for the following week,” says Edu from PAH Barcelona.

“One of the positives of the PAH is its organizational complexity. Everything is very structured and although it’s hard to grasp it all the first time you come — the committees and ways of doing things — being clear about the structure and repeating it at each assembly allows everyone to get used to it. And over the years, people have been able to explain things they’ve heard before, adapting and passing ideas on,” adds Edu. It’s also very important to take minutes of all the discussions at the assembly and make them available for consultation.

The facilitator’s role is not easy. They must be alert and make sure that everything proceeds according to the plan, while ensuring that everyone can express their opinion. Edu is grateful that his whole assembly shares a kind of sign language.

“As a facilitator, it’s difficult for me to ask people to stop but the signing helps, because if someone gesticulates to show that the person is going on and on or has gone off on a tangent, I can ask them to get back to the point. Sometimes, when the issue provokes a lot of discussion or leads us into a different discussion altogether, we suggest parking the topic and putting it on the agenda for a future assembly.”

Signing also allows the facilitator to take the temperature of the meeting, as the platform aims to avoid votes and seek options with an overall consensus. “The PAH has taught me to respect different opinions because it’s very hard for everyone to agree at a meeting of 60 people. We do what’s decided at the assembly, even if I don’t agree with it,” explains Delia from PAH Barcelona.

“I often say things that go against what everybody else thinks. I don’t hold back, but what I’ve learned is that if people don’t agree, I’m not going to get annoyed,” adds her compa Francisco.

Collective intelligence

The platform aims not only to respect diversity but also to value it. “The main thing that the PAH has shown me, personally, has been the practical potential of collective intelligence,” says Santi from PAH Barcelona.

“It’s astounding how much things can change when it’s not just a handful of people thinking, and things are opened up to everyone. Debates arise and you don’t even remember who contributed what. Sometimes you see an item on the agenda and you think you know exactly how to do it, but then people start talking and you realize that what comes out of the assembly is much stronger than what went in.”

Marcia from PAH Barcelona adds: “The fact that there’s no leadership or coordinator encourages people to get involved and take on a role, especially women, who often facilitate the committees. The platform has a way of boosting our strengths and building something together that empowers women.”

Lucía, who attends the same PAH, adds: “When you come with a housing problem, you have low self-esteem and think you’re worthless and don’t know anything. The assembly makes us feel important and that our viewpoints should be taken seriously, and that’s really special.”

Despite this, it’s a constant challenge to stop hierarchies from emerging. Any organization can produce leaders, and while this is not necessarily negative, it’s important to be aware of their existence so that they don’t distort the horizontal approach to the movement.

“The most empowered people or the ones who dedicate the most time to PAH used to make a group and sit in the same place, next to the board, so we suggested that the same people didn’t always sit there,” says Edu. It’s no good sitting in a circle instead of in lines if all the knowledge seems to come from the same part of the room.

Likewise, Edu suggests that someone with lots of responsibilities, like acting as spokesperson or being involved in several committees, shouldn’t also chair and facilitate meetings. “The assembly has a lot of potential and has worked well but it’s also at risk from polemicists and manipulators, from people who might want to take advantage of PAH’s collective strength for their own gain,” warns Àlex from PAHC Bages. “It’s the assembly itself that draws the line and reacts when someone does weird stuff. But that risk is always there and sometimes it’s self-limiting.”

His compa Bernat explains: “Like it or not, there are people at PAHC who provide a degree of leadership in certain processes, and sometimes they have been asked for a more central role. It’s these very same people who have reminded others that the platform is assembly-based.” Maintaining horizontality is thus an ongoing challenge that groups must remain alert to.

Constantly adapting

PAH is always attentive to any changes required, whether they’re big or small.

“Of course, roles emerge at the assembly, but we don’t have a group of people in charge,” says Santi from PAH Barcelona, who highlights that one of the benefits of collective decision-making is that it’s easier to re-examine decisions made, because nobody feels individually challenged when doing so.

“If the welcome assembly needs to be changed, we do it; if lots of squatting cases start arriving, we look at how to respond to them. We’ve learned how to adapt to different circumstances and I’d say that’s why we’ve lasted so many years,” he goes on.

“Sometimes, issues emerge when we’re having a drink in the bar after the assembly. What we do then is comment on it the following week and suggest a change, and if lots of changes are needed, we call a plenary assembly and spend a whole Saturday thinking how to modify things,” explains Berni from PAHC Bages. Although decisions are made at the assembly, informal meeting spaces are vital for creating bonds and for raising concerns.

Some changes come not from the assembly itself but from external considerations. When indebted people’s flats belong to banks with local headquarters, it’s possible to hold protests, but when they’re owned by global hedge funds, the situation is rather more complicated. Many PAHs now have specific committees to propose longer-term strategies to the assembly. There are also training committees that allow participants to organize workshops to cater to needs that have arisen at the assembly.

Organizing without resources

The ability to adapt is especially important in a movement with minimal resources. Very few PAHs have their own premises, so most have almost no structural expenses. “We operate with very low costs. We tend to work in outside premises, either public facilities or venues belonging to other social collectives,” explains Paco from PAH Murcia.

Expenses include printing posters, making banners and buying megaphones, but, according to Paco, these are paid “from merchandise sales or donations. At our assembly, we keep a money box on the table and each of us makes a contribution within our means. That allows us to operate because there’s nobody who’s paid or any expenses of that kind here. What we have is plenty of willingness among people to give up their time.”

Collective guidance and organizing at assemblies have allowed PAH to operate without paying for professional support. Both mechanisms have been crucial to its survival on minimal funding.

But that doesn’t mean that involving professionals is incompatible with the PAH model. PAH Vallekas, for instance, was able to have an employee for a while thanks to members’ contributions. A few PAHs have at times also received support from human rights and other civil society organizations, which release their teams for part of the working day so that they can actively support the PAH. Other people come to the PAH to do research and get involved as part of the academic work they are paid for.

These examples are few and far between in the movement and tend to be object of internal debate. One thing is clear, though: If someone is able to devote more time to the platform because they’re directly or indirectly paid to do so, they don’t have any more power over decision-making or act as a coordinator: PAH decisions are always taken at the assemblies.

Building a sense of commitment

To keep growing, taking action through disobedience, coming up with new ways to organize and protect members from burnout, one of the PAH’s main challenges is to encourage affected people to get involved with the movement beyond their own case.

“What pushes you to stay is continuing to fight for other families in a similar plight to you, because you remember how much you cried when the letter about your eviction arrived. That makes you want to stay and fight for things to change because you become aware of all the injustice that’s out there,” says Angelines from PAVPS Madrid.

Bonds are often nourished in informal spaces. In Barcelona, for example, there is a Telegram group called PAH Familia (PAH Family). “After people have attended one or two assemblies, we try to incorporate them into the group. It’s a way for everyone to find out about things like evictions and actions, as well as birthdays,” Francisco explains.

It isn’t a decision-making space or an official communication channel because those things already exist; it’s a more informal mechanism involving around 200 people. “I think it works well despite everything, because sometimes you even receive notifications from the group at 1 a.m.!” Francisco says, resignedly.

Maria Antònia from PAH Cardedeu, a municipality of 18,000 inhabitants, thinks it’s easier to build relationships at smaller PAHs: “We have to deal with fewer cases than in a larger PAH and relationships are more personal. You know more about how people feel, what’s happening with their children, whether they have other problems beyond housing…”

Though she values the role of small platforms in helping people feel less alone, she points out that “they have a downside, which is that it’s harder to get people to take on responsibilities for things in small groups.”

“At the beginning, the PAH thought a lot about language, images and clear messages. That helped us reach out to people who had never been involved in any movement and who had very little social relationships, because we’re shut up in our houses and barely even say hello to our neighbors,” says Emma from PAHC Sabadell.

“For many people, PAH was the first time they’d joined an organized mutual aid group where you get to know a lot of people and help each other out. This creates a ‘PAH identity’ where you feel part of a big family that’s always there when you need it.” Very often, it’s that feeling that explains why people still go to assemblies, years after joining the movement.

Some people still feel like part of the movement despite no longer participating. “There are people who haven’t been able to come for four years, for whatever reason, but still feel part of the PAH. Sometimes, they ask us if they can help and I think there are people who’ll never stop feeling the PAH because they’re so grateful, not just for resolving their material issues but because the organization has brought wider change to their lives,” states Jesús from PAH Berriozar.

But he warns: “There are also people who treat the PAH as if it were an investment bank: They never come, but if they need something they turn up.”

Several groups agree that only a small number of the people who come to the PAH end up developing a real bond. But they also share the view that they’d struggle to hold assemblies with thousands of people if everyone who’s come to the advice and support assemblies had stayed.

Another challenge facing the platform has to do with changes in the housing issues it deals with. When most people came with mortgage problems, they were usually caught up in a slower legal process and it was easier to develop bonds in the time that they spent at the assemblies, which was often more than a year. Now that the toughest years of the mortgage crisis have passed, most people affected by housing issues have problems with renting or squatting. Processes in these areas tend to be faster and the PAH must constantly reinvent itself as a result.

How to organize an assembly-based movement

• Make decisions at open assemblies and organize work in committees or working groups that answer to the assemblies.

• Organize the assembly by sharing the agenda in advance, displaying this information at the meeting and establishing a time limit for each item.

• Facilitate discussions to accommodate the full diversity of positions at the assembly while also moving through the agenda, being clear when a discussion is urgent or should be revisited another day.

• Respect dissenting voices and value collective intelligence as a way of reaching more developed conclusions than the positions that any individual could reach alone.

• Promote decision-making by consensus instead of always voting to choose the option with the most support.

• Be careful to avoid and/or counter hierarchical relations that might undermine horizontal decision-making.

• Question the platform’s strategies and organizational methods whenever necessary to tackle emerging problems or challenges.

• Create spaces for people to meet up and interact in to strengthen long-term bonds between members.

Excerpt adapted from Yes, It’s Possible! A Handbook for Building Power by João França and The Platform for People Affected by Mortgages, published by Common Notions. Copyright (c) 2026 Common Notions. All rights reserved.

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.

A New National Strike Fund Plans to Get Money Into Workers’ Hands

A new national strike fund called “Union Now” has begun fundraising, The American Prospect reports. The fund was developed by Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants - CWA International, and launched with a Manhattan rally that featured Sen. Bernie Sanders and Mayor Zohran Mamdani, among others. The fund will operate as a grant source for workers attempting to unionize or negotiate a contract and will be open to applications in the coming months, according to the Prospect. ​​“This all comes from a place of recognizing that our world is screwed up because union density is so low,” Nelson told the outlet.

Alternative Responses to Mental Health Crises Face Funding Problems

More than 40 U.S. cities have implemented alternative responses when responding to a mental health crisis. But for some, there are questions about how to continue paying for them, according to reporting from The Marshall Project. For example, a co-responder program (where mental health professionals and police officers respond to calls together) in Santa Barbara County, California, may be cut back. It costs roughly $1.9 million a year, and “a combination of precarious grant revenue and changes to state funding priorities” has placed it on the chopping block.

Meanwhile, the Marshall Project notes, voters in Columbus, Ohio, will soon consider “a proposal to make the city the first in the country to enshrine a crisis response program in its official charter.”

Eviction Filings Dropped Slightly Last Year

According to Princeton’s Eviction Lab, eviction filings dropped slightly to 1.23 million in 2025, down from the year before (1.25 million) and were 3.2% below the post-pandemic average. In two-thirds of the sites that the Eviction Lab monitored, filings went down. In some parts of the country, however, eviction filings rose. That includes the greater Austin area, where eviction filings rose by 30%.

Evictions also increased in Charleston, South Carolina, and Columbus, Ohio. The report’s authors found that eviction filing rates corresponded more with renter protections than with rent increases: New York City, which has strong renter protections, had one of the lowest eviction filing rates of the sites Eviction Lab studied, despite having high rents and a low vacancy rate.

Backlash to Data Centers Influencing Elections

Nationwide backlash to data centers is already shifting elections, although it’s not clear which party will benefit, NPR reports. Many of the shifts so far are in relatively small local elections. In Edgecombe County, North Carolina, a 69-year-old Vietnam veteran won a primary against an incumbent on the board of commissioners. A March YouGov poll of North Carolina residents found 44% of respondents were opposed to data centers and only 24% supported them.

In a town near St. Louis, four city councilmembers lost their seats for supporting a $6 billion data center. And two council members were voted out for supporting tax breaks for data centers in Independence, Missouri.

More Americans Living In Areas with Poor Air Quality

Forty-four percent of Americans — and 46% of the nation’s children — are living in areas with unhealthy levels of ozone, according to the American Lung Association’s annual State of the Air report. “Infants, children, and teens are especially vulnerable to the health harms of breathing air pollution. Their lungs are still developing, they breathe more air for their body size than adults, and they frequently spend more time outdoors,” the report notes.

ALA also found that while particle pollution had decreased over the decades, ozone pollution was impacting more people. The report attributes the decline in air quality to climate change, which is already reversing some of the successes of the Clean Air Act. The burden falls disproportionately on communities of color, according to the report: “A person of color is more than twice (2.42 times) as likely as a white individual to live in a community with a failing grade for all three pollution measures.”

MORE NEWS

• Seattle’s First Peoples Climate Fund awards $5.5 million from city payroll tax. The Seattle Times

• EQR settles RealPage lawsuit for $56 million. Multifamily Dive

• Final Gaza Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment estimates $71.4 billion for recovery and reconstruction. United Nations Palestine

• With no end in sight to their deployment, National Guard troops roam Washington. Associated Press

• What if cities onboarded residents like employees? National League of Cities

• Maui residents are rebuilding Lahaina for locals, not tourists: ‘In Hawaii, we take care of one another.’ The Guardian

• Montana mobile home park unions push ahead on lease negotiations. Associated Press

• Massachusetts is dumping sewage into waterways. Grassroots organizations are fighting back. Associated Press

• These four Detroit district schools are closing. What will happen to their students? Chalkbeat

OPPORTUNITIES & RESOURCES

• The Agency Fund invites nonprofits, social enterprises, and research teams to apply for funding to scale up solutions that expand human agency. Submit an expression of interest by April 26.

• LiberArte is accepting grant applications from artists creating work rooted in racial, social, and climate justice. Apply by April 30.

• ​​The Knight Foundation’s $5 million Knight Cities Challenge is accepting applications from individuals and organizations across its 26 communities. Apply by April 30.

• The Just Economy Institute fellowship is accepting applications from financial activists leveraging capital as a tool for positive change. Apply by April 30.

• The National Trust for Historic Preservation is funding preservation projects in small communities (with populations of 10,000 or less) across the United States. Apply by May 1.

• The RRF Foundation for Aging is accepting grant applications from national or Illinois-based nonprofits working to improve quality of life for older adults, including through advocacy, professional education, and workforce training. Submit letters of inquiry by May 1.

• Next City is looking for its next cohort of rising urban leaders to join this year’s Vanguard gathering in Chicago, planned for Sept. 15-18. Our network of 600-plus Vanguards includes planners, community developers, nonprofit leaders, artists, designers, local officials, and more. Apply by May 14.

• Wells Fargo and Enterprise are launching a new cycle of their Housing Affordability Breakthrough Challenge, a $2 million grant opportunity for scalable housing innovations in design, construction, finance, service delivery, and programs. Apply by May 15.

• The Sparkplug Foundation is offering grants to support early-stage programs that focus on music programs, community organizing, and education. Apply by May 22.

• Hispanics in Philanthropy’s Líderes Fellowship is accepting applications from mid-career Latine, Afrolatines, and Native leaders working in philanthropy and nonprofits in the American Southwest. Apply by May 31.

This essay is adapted from the forthcoming book Grounding the Cloud: Urbanism in the Shadow of Data by Ali Fard. It’s published 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.

The fall of 2017 was a watershed moment in the evolving relationship between urbanism and technology corporations.

In September, Amazon announced a request for proposals for cities to bid to host its new North American headquarters, Amazon HQ2. In October, a new partnership was announced between Sidewalk Labs — an Alphabet/Google subsidiary — and Waterfront Toronto — a public organization charged with the administration of the redevelopment and revitalization of Toronto’s postindustrial waterfront — to develop an “innovation and development plan” for Quayside, a 12-acre site on the city’s waterfront. The partnership was called “Sidewalk Toronto.”

These two cases and their evolution represent a new and troubling dimension in the increasing dominance of cloud companies within processes of urbanization.

From tech campus to urban enclave

Physically and spatially, the urban projects of tech platforms follow strategies that have been incubated in countless campus development projects. In these projects, resources, talent, and any infrastructural bounty that may come with them are separated from the larger context of the city. This separationist ideal is coded into the physical and urban DNA of tech corporations.

In advancing their neoliberal agendas, the type of urbanism promoted by the cloud seamlessly combines utopian imaginaries, frontier ideologies, and “extrastatecraft” strategies (a la Keller Easterling) to generate enclaves of privilege separated from the larger urban realm. This cloud urbanism carries with it the escapist and separationist ideals coded into the campus morphology.

The core urban strategies of the cloud first take shape in the spatial experimentations of the campuses and headquarters of tech companies. Designed by “starchitects” like Norman Foster (Apple), Frank Gehry (Facebook), or Bjarke Ingels and Thomas Heatherwick (Google), these corporate campuses have become the horizontal monuments of the contemporary information economy.

Coupled with the culturally integrated products they produce and the libertarian ideologies they advance, contemporary technology companies have transformed from corporations to pseudo-cultural institutions. Yet, the environments in which these ideals develop are increasingly inward-looking.

As the architecture and design critic Alexandra Lange maintains, the urbanism of tech campuses — while borrowing from urban and suburban tropes to recreate the idealized image of lively, accessible, green urban environments — produces isolated islands securitized behind fences and corporate badges.

This smoothing of space within tech campuses has extended beyond their walls, where social and political tensions are at their highest in decades. Formed within the relative vacuum of enclaves, the “best practice” models and foundational ideologies of tech campuses are subsequently exported globally and seep into the general psyche, masquerading as innovative and novel spatial forms that produce equally innovative results.

Often packaged as developmental strategies, the continual paraphrasing of the most pronounced urban morphologies of Silicon Valley (such as the campus or the techno-industrial park) in the contested geographies of Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East has produced emerging forms of territorial expansion for tech platforms.

The highly repeatable nature of this enclave urbanism, which is mostly devoid of contextual relationships, and its deployment in multiple contexts with varied cultural, social, and environmental dynamics, effectively generates a capsular geography of information.

Similar to the Disneyfication of suburban environments and the emergence of gated communities in the second half of the 20th century, the capsular urban logic of the informational enclave can be representative of the type of development we can expect over the next few decades at the intersection of data, communication technologies, and urban processes.

This condition places the majority of emphasis on the increasingly interwoven global networks of information, communication, capital, and commerce on the one hand, and the capsular logic of enclaves of high infrastructural and technological accessibility and exclusionary zones of leisure, business, and living on the other hand, leading to a “smoothing” or “pacification” of whatever lies in between.

In this framework, the enclave emerges as less a space of exception and more the norm. The separationist ideals of the enclave are increasingly informing the urban strategies of tech platforms as they radically expand their territorial claim over space and geography.

City as a platform

These ideals were clearly at work in Sidewalk Toronto. Even before any plans were presented, critics and social activists were concerned about the overreach this kind of partnership would entail.

Sidewalk Toronto released its long-awaited Master Innovation and Development Plan in May 2019. On the surface, it would appear that through notions of flexibility, spatial dynamism, and adaptability, mediated through a “digital layer” of sensors and enabled by inexpensive prefabricated materials, Sidewalk was essentially promoting the democratization of urban space.

However, the kind of spatial democratization proposed was more likely to mean freedom from regulatory burdens imposed by zoning and oversight, rather than the democratization of ownership and control. Sidewalk’s strategies tended to follow typical neoliberal trends in privatizing urban spaces and the public realm.

Even though no land may have actually changed hands between Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs, the data extractive apparatus and the mechanisms of control embedded within the “digital layer” of the project would ensure a high level of exclusivity and surveillance for the real-estate investments that would ultimately fund the neighborhood’s technological experimentations in applied behavioral modeling and management.

Even Dan Doctoroff, the then CEO of Sidewalk Labs, had repeatedly said that their Toronto venture was “primarily a real estate play.” Hence, even the underlying business model of Sidewalk’s proposal was essentially based on tried-and-true strategies of neoliberal urbanism, manifested in the extraction of resources (in this case, urban and personal data) and grounding of the dynamism of capital within exclusionary zones of real estate investment

In a sort of cybernetic feedback loop, one ensures and catalyzes the other, securitized by a set of extractive surveillance technologies masquerading as urban services. This was clear in Sidewalk’s plan, which offered to fund many of the infrastructural components of the plan and its expansion into the rest of the Port Lands through the “patient capital” of its parent company, Alphabet.

This would beholden the city and its public infrastructure to a tech company with a proven record of ignoring or downplaying regulatory frames as long as it could generate value from its data extractive operations.

Its corporate structure means that it is ultimately responsible to its shareholders, not the public for which it was planning the city of the future. The funding schemes and the flexible proposals of the development plan, in addition to providing a proving ground for the company to test out the applicability of its products and services, were clearly directed toward market dynamics.

Steeped in neoliberal urbanism, Sidewalk’s spatial frames would “remain flexible over the course of its lifecycle, accommodating a radical mix of uses (such as residential, retail, making, office, hospitality and parking) that can respond quickly to market demand.”

As the writer Evgeny Morozov has observed in The Guardian, in cities around the world, one-dimensional responses to “market demand” have increasingly catalyzed the privatization of public space and have bolstered neoliberal processes of urbanization: “Decisions are no longer taken in the political realm but are delegated to asset managers, private equity groups, and investment banks that flock to real estate and infrastructure searching for stable and decent returns. Google Urbanism would not reverse this trend, it would accelerate it.”

In the face of mounting criticism around the project, Toronto was hesitant to hand over a larger portion of the city’s eastern waterfront to Sidewalk. This, coupled with the dwindling influence of Larry Page on the day-to-day operations of Alphabet after stepping down as CEO at the end of 2019 and the subsequent tightening of the company’s fiscal commitments, meant that Alphabet was less interested in the Quayside project if it couldn’t guarantee a return on its investment through an increasing stake in the development of the Port Lands.

On May 7, 2020, amid the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Quayside project was canceled. At the time, Doctoroff cited the “unprecedented economic uncertainty” of the pandemic as the main reason for their decision not to pursue the project any further. Ironically, this is perhaps the clearest case against this kind of partnership. Sidewalk’s reason for abandoning the project, fiscal uncertainty due to the pandemic, is precisely the type of increasingly common dynamic that makes large, risk-averse tech corporations that are only responsible to their shareholders the worst stewards of the public good and the least trustworthy managers of public urban systems.

As the case of Sidewalk Toronto makes it abundantly clear, the “test-bed urbanism” of tech platforms is extremely one-dimensional. The smooth and frictionless version of urbanism that tech espouses externalizes the multitude of forces that contribute to urban environments.

Instead of embracing friction, tension, difference, transgression, and messiness as constitutive elements of urbanization, in Sidewalk’s plans they are treated as wrinkles in the system that need to be ironed out. In understanding and acting on the city as a platform, the strategies of cloud urbanism perpetuate techno-positivist ideals of technology and the centralized management and control of public assets and systems. Urbanism mediated by the cloud entails uniformity and conformity.

Urban techno-colonization

In various literature and marketing material, and indeed within the development plan, Sidewalk Labs presented the bridging of “the divide between urbanists and technologists” as one of its most radical aims. Here, a selective line of thinking seems to conveniently bypass the various moments in history in which such a merger took place between the ideals of technologists and urbanists.

The disciplinary agency of urban planning was initially formed and then opportunistically sustained at the turn of the 20th century through a similar convergence of interest between technologists and urban thinkers. Often packaged as reformist calls to arms aimed at alleviating the ills of the city, these convergences have effectively left their mark on cities and the practices of urban planning and management, but not always positively.

Rather than a radical new convergence, Sidewalk’s project and other urban projects of tech should be understood as increasingly hostile colonization of urbanization through technology.

Amazon and Google’s urban moves represent a simultaneous evolution of neo-cybernetic urbanism and the dissolution of public city planning, management, and discourse. The agency of the new breed of cloud urbanists manifests in the ultimate privatization, control, and management of cities bit by bit.

Softer at first but increasingly forceful, the centralizing ethos of the cloud inflicts communities, neighborhoods, cities, and regions and reorganizes them through its controlled, exclusionary, and extractive logic. In parallel, the separatist turn in Silicon Valley represents a new wave of ideologically aligned techno-colonizers in search of new frontiers, away from government scrutiny and democratic oversight.

The marriage between these secessionist ideologies and the incentivized urbanism of tech enclaves will likely result in more exclusive zones of “innovation,” further separation from the context they are so dependent upon, and partial freedom from regulatory mechanisms of oversight, taxation, and democratic governance.

From outer space to oceans, the tech elite has formed a renewed interest in the libertarian potential of new colonies outside the reach of the limiting bounds of terrestrial regulatory mechanisms.

While the frontier status of outer space and the largely uninhabited oceans is perhaps clearer, cities and urbanization, now faced with a renewed sense of crisis, are beginning to emerge as frontiers for technological colonization once again.

If the “smart city” represents the discursive translation of the tech’s dream of commanding frictionless urban environments, cloud urbanism represents its ultimate aim. Cloud urbanism, extending on the neoliberal logic of platform capitalism, internalizes notions of enclosure, centralization, and monopolization.

Evolving beyond the initial aims of smart cities, through cloud urbanism, the city — or urbanism in general — is bounded, standardized, packaged, controlled, branded, marketed, and entirely commoditized.

Adapted from Grounding the Cloud: Urbanism in the Shadow of Data by Ali Fard. Published by the University of Minnesota Press. Copyright 2026 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

In an era when the Fair Housing Act is under attack across the country, a nonprofit in Portland, Oregon, has broken ground on a mixed-use development project that will house hundreds of Black Portlanders who were previously displaced by the city’s use of eminent domain.

The $163 million project, on a 2.99-acre site at the intersection of North Russell Street and North Williams Avenue, will eventually be home to former residents and their descendants of Albina. The community in the North and Northeast sections of the city was once home to nearly 80% of Portland’s Black population.

While race-based discrimination is what has led Black people and other communities of color to be more vulnerable to housing instability, race-based affordable housing policy is no longer a reliable option for people because of attacks on programs and projects that seek to address disparities, including fair housing laws that prohibit discrimination based on race, nationality, religion, and other identities. In a recent Next City op-ed, Ryan Curren and Glenn Harris of Race Forward, a racial justice nonprofit, explained how the federal administration’s attempt to establish “color blind” policies is deepening existing disparities in housing assistance.

However, the leaders of Williams and Russell Community Development Corporation believe they’ve discovered an alternative to using fair housing laws to keep people housed, especially those who are most impacted by the current housing crisis.

Azalea Renfield, Ta’Neshia Renae, and Bryson Davis of Williams and Russell are three advocates who have worked exhaustively over the last decade to make this project a reality.

Their theory of change is rooted in reparative development and they’re putting it into practice via Portland’s Northeast Preference Policy. The policy grants eligibility to live in the new community based on a point-based ranking system according to the applicant’s displacement severity. Top priority is given to households that owned property in the Albina neighborhood that was taken via eminent domain by the city government, and to their descendants. All other applicants can receive up to six preference points based on their current or past residence (plus that of a parent/guardian or ancestor) within areas of concentrated urban renewal in North and Northeast Portland.

This place-based policy is not targeting eligible candidates by their race, but instead by their connection to the place of Albina. This program ensures that the most impacted people are the first to be considered for an affordable home, while avoiding all of the mainstream stigma and reproach that comes along with “race-based” policies. More importantly, it makes the ‘place-based’ policy replicable across municipalities.

“What’s so beautiful about reparative development is that there’s still reparations tied to it, but in a way that it can help anybody, any community, any place-based issues that happen to [affect people of color],” says Renfield, CEO of Williams and Russell. “They can use this framework and get reparations in a way that’s kind of covert but it still gets to the message at hand.”

By making the solution place-based, anyone can apply this framework within their own community, making it universal and accessible to any community that has experienced displacement. Renfield believes politicians will be eager to put this policy into practice nationally.

(For more stories about anti-displacement solutions, check out our top stories on the topic here.)

“[Politicians] could say, ‘Well, because it’s place-based, not race-based, I can stand behind this, and I don’t have to feel like I’m getting caught with a target on my back.’ That’s the reason why we’ve been so successful in getting money. Churches and cities are coming to us,” says Renfield, who believes the approach will become part of contemporary policy. “It’s a comprehensive approach that makes sense.”

She’s hoping cities can learn from what she and her colleagues have created.

This policy also means they don’t have to worry about fair housing law violations while systematically bringing longtime Albina residents (and their descendants) back to their community. This place-based policy can be replicated and perhaps used by advocates as an alternative winning solution as the federal administration continues clawing back funding for programs that address racial disparities in higher education, housing, and other sectors.

“When you’re able through something like the preference policy to tie preference to actions that the city did and past harms, you can get those populations that you were targeting because of how racist the policies were from the beginning,” says Davis, president of Williams and Russell.

How They Did It

Renfield and co had zero predecessors when it came to making a project like this happen.

According to Renfield, reparative development is the act of acknowledging and repairing harms that were caused by bad policies like urban renewal. What’s key is letting the people most affected lead the charge, and the way to define those most affected is by the place where the harm was caused, not race.

The organization was able to successfully raise $163 million dollars across private, public, and government dollars for a mixed-use development project that broke ground in February and will ultimately create 20 townhomes, 94 affordable housing units, and commercial space for small businesses.

The down payment assistance will be provided to buyers who qualify under Portland’s Preference Policy, supporting eligible first-time homebuyers and making homeownership attainable.

“We’re looking into this model to be the great equalizer that will help get us away from the ‘us versus them’ mentality. It really is where cities, states, and federal governments and organizations alike are able to put money into a community solution where the solution is presented as place-based, and then the community drives the build,” says Reinfield.

The History

Last year, Next City reported on a historic settlement that returned $8.5 million and land to Black families displaced by a decades-old redevelopment scheme in Portland, which has been historically referred to as the whitest city in America.

In that settlement, 26 families won their suit against the city’s development commission agency, Prosper Portland, for its role in perpetuating the displacement of hundreds of Black residents from Albina, once a predominantly black community in northern Portland.

This land was home to 80% of the Black population in Portland until urban renewal policies of the 1970s forced the community out via eminent domain. Legacy Emanuel Medical Center claimed it needed the space to expand, and yet it never did. Consequently, more than 180 buildings, including homes, businesses, churches, and space for community groups, were demolished. Of those displaced, 74% were Black.

In 2017, before talk of development could even begin, Davis and others formed a working group to demand that Legacy Health give back the stolen land. Later that year, Legacy Health, which owns Legacy Emanuel and other hospitals in the region, acknowledged its wrongdoing and agreed to donate the land back.

By this point, the land was contaminated and would cost several million dollars to clean up. According to Davis, the working group demanded more. They didn’t want just the land back. They wanted their clean land back. In 2024, Prosper Portland agreed to a $10 million forgivable loan that ultimately led to the cleaning and restoration of the lot.

Paul Knauls, a 95-year-old resident who lost his business as a result of the urban renewal-driven displacement, says he was insulted by Legacy Emanuel.

“They gave us no money whatsoever for our displacement but in the atrium of the hospital, they had a list of all the names of the people that they had displaced. Like that’s going to be some type of satisfaction,” Knauls says. “There was ‘Paul Knauls’ hanging right in the atrium on a plaque. You know, no monetary compensation, no discussion…. No one has ever asked me about how I feel.”

“We had a very nice neighborhood. You could get almost everything that you wanted in our neighborhood that you needed to purchase,” he says.

Knauls, who was invited to speak at the grand opening of this development project, is happy that the preference policy is going to allow the grandchildren of his once beloved neighbors to come back to where their ancestors lived. But he does not believe the people pushed out will return because they’re older now and some have already moved “15 miles or 20 miles away.”

“They’re not coming back because their doctors are there, their churches are there, their dentists, their pharmacy. Everything is out there where they live. They’re not coming back,” he says.

Knauls believes that the wealth that was lost by all those families is gone forever.

“What the grandchildren are getting ready to enjoy is the fact that they can live in a high rise that’s not theirs and live in a nice area that’s not theirs, where they could have been living in the house that their great grandparents had bought and paid for,” he says, adding that some of them could be millionaires, if it weren’t for the displacement. “Some of the houses are going [for] $600,000, $700,000 in that neighborhood.”

But that does not mean the groups leading this work aren’t going to try to bring them back.

Renae’, deputy executive director at Williams and Russell, says that in addition to helping former residents and their descendants return to the neighborhood, they’re also trying to bring back a specific culture.

“The difference in the community and the culture is so starkly different after gentrification but when you look at census data, more Black people still live in the northeast area. This is where we are. The culture is just not there,” she says. “That’s what we are also trying to bring back. That’s what’s also very important about our build… We’re thinking about all of those bigger things… It has to be beyond development.”

This story has been updated to correct the acreage of the site and the name of the city’s development commission agency.

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

This op-ed 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.

If one issue is top of mind for cities, it’s the need to build more housing. A shortage of safe and stable homes is driving an unprecedented affordability gap.

America’s housing crisis is the result of decades of underbuilding driven in large part by restrictive zoning and land-use policies, and rising building costs. These constraints have limited housing supply in the places people most want to live, leaving the U.S. short more than 7 million affordable homes. Today, the consequences are clear: A record 22.6 million renters are cost-burdened, struggling to keep up with rising housing costs.

For city leaders, addressing a housing shortage is particularly challenging, as factors such as high interest rates and the rising cost of labor and materials lie outside of their control. Despite these constraints, however, city leaders are being creative about identifying and experimenting with the tools they do have to streamline permitting and regulations, reduce construction costs and boost housing supply.

Increasingly, leading cities are using AI to pick up the pace and improve core operations. To power these efforts, they are using data to assess the gaps in their housing markets, fix pain points in development processes, and measure their progress.

Here are three lessons to keep in mind as you look for new ways to innovate on housing:

Set ambitious but achievable goals and track your progress. Accelerating housing production requires close collaboration among numerous agencies inside City Hall, as well as private-sector and nonprofit stakeholders. Setting a clear goal gives these all-hands-on-deck efforts a common sense of purpose, a benchmark to measure performance against and a tool for holding partners accountable. In Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser set a goal of building 36,000 new housing units by 2025 —which she accomplished five months ahead of schedule. The City was transparent about its targets, including affordable housing goals by neighborhood, and progress was shared through a public dashboard.

Identify what you can influence and drive impact. While local leaders can’t control macro factors like interest rates, they have great influence over how difficult or easy it is to get housing built in their community. They can cut red tape out of permitting processes, strategically rezone land to encourage new development, and make underutilized publicly owned land available for housing development, among other strategies. Small changes can add up to big savings for builders, home buyers, and renters.

For example, in Philadelphia, city leaders used a performance management process to reduce the Zoning Board of Adjustment’s appeal process from a high of 78 days to a low of 12 days over a seven-month period. In Denver, a cross-departmental permitting “tiger team” used data to collaborate on accelerating processes and reducing review times by 30%.

Leverage AI strategically. Amid lean budgets, stretched city staffers can use AI as a force multiplier. AI can help cities streamline housing regulations, identify buildable land, and
answer residents’ questions, and new use cases are emerging all the time.

San José, California – which is positioning itself as an AI leader through improvements in pothole reduction and language access, as well as free AI training for residents through a new AI-focused public education center – is using AI to prescreen permit applications for required documentation. The process shaves days off permitting times and frees up staff to handle other tasks. Pittsburgh is doing something similar with rental housing vouchers, using AI to scan applications for errors and allowing staff to spend more time helping applicants find housing.

While AI has many applications in city hall, its success hinges on a few constants: trustworthy data, clear policies, and active human oversight. As cities invest in these foundations, they can better capture AI’s benefits while managing its risks. Moving forward, leaders should pair optimism with care by setting guidelines, building community feedback loops, and regularly auditing AI use.

No single strategy is going to overcome a housing crisis. However, AI offers the opportunity to streamline processes and fast-track investments. Local governments that do this essential work will reap the rewards, showing residents what’s possible, and the promise of what AI — underpinned by strong data — can do.

This op-ed 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.

Right now, city and state leaders have a unique opportunity. While there’s nothing necessarily new about partnering with local companies for shared prosperity, we’re seeing it at a scale unlike ever before. Technology companies have continued to pop up in places big and small across the country. With the growth of artificial intelligence and the need for additional infrastructure like data centers, this is happening at an unprecedented rate.

For local leaders who want to increase tax revenue and attract local economic opportunity, getting these public-private partnerships right is a huge win-win scenario. But when it comes to the value for local residents, the relationship between corporations and communities has too often been transactional rather than relational.

Companies show up when there’s a need, rather than building consistent, meaningful relationships. As a result, the projected benefits don’t always materialize at the level or scale that was initially communicated. Job creation may fall short of expectations, while demands on local energy grids, water systems, and land use intensify.

For government leaders, this creates risk. When residents experience these projects as being misaligned with local priorities, they become a source of community tension. Episodic engagement only constrains what the partnership can deliver for everyone involved and limits a city or state’s ability to fully capture the value of these investments.

But when local governments treat community engagement as infrastructure, they gain leverage to position the region as a competitive hub in the next phase of the digital economy. At the same time, some companies are beginning to take a more proactive, community-first approach, recognizing that long-term success depends on building trust and shared value from the outset.

A new model for partnership

Throughout my career, I’ve seen how these relationships have been done right. I grew up in metro Atlanta, where I saw firsthand just how much a corporate presence can shape a city.

For example, in 1964, Atlanta was set to host an integrated dinner celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. for his Nobel Peace Prize win. However, invitations were largely ignored by the city’s white business leaders. Mayor Ivan Allen Jr. reached out to The Coca‑Cola Company to drum up support, and CEO J. Paul Austin threatened to move the company’s headquarters out of Atlanta if these leaders refused to honor King. It worked, and the dinner sold out. It was a defining example of a local leader recognizing how interconnected business interests and community progress are, and acting accordingly.

At The Same House, we’ve spent years building relationships with companies like Chick-fil-A and The Home Depot through the Beloved Benefit, an event that brings business, government, and civic leaders together to create shared solutions. In turn, this work became the foundation for what we call Community as a Service, our framework for ensuring residents thrive alongside the corporate investments in their neighborhoods.

Most recently, we worked in collaboration with Microsoft, building on the company’s Datacenter Community Pledge. This effort started with a series of conversations with Microsoft’s community affairs team, building on an existing relationship from the company’s longtime support of the Beloved Benefit. Their team first came to us with a very practical question: How can we support community-based organizations that are making sure residents benefit from the region’s digital transformation? From there, the idea of the Community Circle was born.

Together, we created a plan: Microsoft would identify a series of six local organizations working on the ground to expand access to digital skills and career pathways in neighborhoods that have historically faced barriers to opportunity, and we would support implementation and coordination.

In practical terms, the Community Circle includes three components. First, direct financial support from Microsoft to each organization. Second, access to the company’s existing resources, including AI training programs, subject matter experts, and opportunities for employee engagement. Third, a coordination layer, where organizations can connect with and learn from one another, while receiving communication support to elevate the visibility of their respective missions.

This work has since surfaced a broader opportunity: Other companies have already expressed interest in replicating this model as they think about their own role in supporting local communities.

At the same time, Mayor Andre Dickens’ Atlanta Neighborhood Reinvestment Initiative is mobilizing a multi-billion-dollar, long-term investment in the same historically underserved neighborhoods. This creates a critical bridge between public investment and private sector expansion, where coordinated efforts can translate large-scale development into tangible outcomes for residents.

The reality is that just as companies need communities, communities need companies. The core issue is not whether cities and states should partner with corporations. It is how those partnerships are structured from the outset.

Making relationships a part of the infrastructure

Most cities still approve corporate projects based on financials, compliance, and projected economic impact. Community engagement, if it happens, is often tied to those approvals rather than embedded into the partnership itself.

But instead of treating community investment as something companies figure out later, local leaders can make it a defining component of the deal itself. For example, they might require businesses to outline exactly who is responsible for ongoing community relationships, how local concerns will be addressed, and what kind of engagement will remain after the project is completed. Practically speaking, this could mean tying incentives like tax abatements and land use approvals to ongoing community performance metrics.

Building on existing foundations of trust

Trust is a prerequisite to partnership. In many communities, a new or expanded corporate presence may be met with uncertainty, especially if residents are fearful of how the corresponding changes will intersect with their daily lives. But rather than starting from scratch, local leaders can build on trust that already exists within the community.

In the case of the Community Circle, the model was built around local organizations that residents already know and rely on. Because of this, community members are being educated about opportunities tied to local investment and empowered to act on them, instead of being left behind. Government leaders can take a similar approach by identifying trusted organizations early who can help create that bridge, and building them into the structure of the partnership from the outset.

Moving from input to co-design

Design is not something done to a community, but done with one. This is where governments can move beyond consultation to co-creation. My recommendation is to bring community members and key corporate stakeholders into the same room to ask one question: What does a good outcome look like for everyone involved?

That could include conversations around workforce opportunities, infrastructure strain, neighborhood impact, environmental concerns, or what kind of long-term investment residents want to see remain after the project is complete. The commitments that come out of these conversations should then be documented publicly, built into the project framework, and revisited over time.

The goal is to turn local challenges into opportunities for innovation and collaboration. That takes a shift in how we think about economic development, not as a series of transactions, but as a system of relationships. Cities and states that recognize this will not only attract investment, they will sustain it.

This op-ed 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.

America is in a full-blown energy and affordability crisis, one that is hitting people especially hard at the kitchen table. Foreign wars, inflation, tariffs, and an aggressive effort to fundamentally restructure our democracy and the federal government’s role in our nation’s economy are driving housing, healthcare, food, and transportation costs through the roof. Power bills are soaring, too.

Since January 2025, residential electricity bills have gone up by more than 13% – exceeding the pace of inflation – and they are being pushed even higher by rising energy rates. U.S. utilities asked state public utility commissions for more than $31 billion in rate increases just last year. That’s more than double what they asked for the year prior.

Why is this happening? The reasons are complex and include the impacts of extreme weather on heating and cooling needs, the cost of climate change risks — including wildfires — and the housing crisis across America. At its core, however, the U.S. energy sector has a supply-demand problem. Or, as folks in the industry say, we’re short on power.

A critical need for new energy infrastructure

Depending on which source you consult, U.S. electricity demand is expected to surge by between 35% and 50% by 2040, largely driven by energy demand from AI data centers, reshoring manufacturing, and electrification. Over the next decade, we will have to optimize grid operations and build more new power generation and transmission infrastructure than at any point in our country’s history. That may sound like plenty of time to get things done, but it’s just around the corner for a utility sector that plans in 30- to 50-year increments.

As a new board member of America’s largest public power utility, I witnessed an early indicator of this unfolding crisis. Over Christmas Eve 2022, during Winter Storm Elliott, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) mandated a series of rolling power outages. The system – which covers seven states – didn’t have access to enough power generation to meet demand. It was the first time that had happened in TVA’s 90-year history, and there have been multiple close calls since then.

The impact of AI data center demand has also exposed a massive deferred maintenance problem that’s impacting our electricity grid. Most transmission lines in the U.S. are more than 25 years old and were built to carry less power than we need today. Many are more than 50 years old and well-past their intended useful life. Not only do we need to build an unprecedented level of new energy infrastructure, we also need to fix or replace much of what we have.

A “golden age,” but for whom?

At present, U.S. utilities are planning to invest $1.4 trillion over the next five years in new infrastructure to meet the energy demands of the economy the federal government is building around AI-driven technologies. All that money has to come from somewhere. The lenders and investors that will finance construction expect a return, and revenue from household and business electricity bills will have to pay it all back – including interest and profits. At least that’s how our current energy market is designed to work.

The financialization of the energy sector could drive bills even higher. To quote Larry Fink of BlackRock, infrastructure is “at the beginning of a golden age.” The question, however, is a golden age for whom? Private equity firms have already begun buying up U.S. utilities, and we could be looking at a near-term future when everyday families are paying as much for their power bill as for their mortgage. Building more power plants to generate more energy isn’t helpful if people can’t afford to keep their lights on.

People pay bills, not rates

The picture seems grim, but people pay bills – not rates. It is therefore possible to bring bills down for residential households even if rates continue to rise by viewing households and housing as valuable components of our energy infrastructure that are worthy of investment, not just as “ratepayers” whose value begins and ends at the meter.

Engineers and advocates for energy efficiency and a smart, distributed grid have been talking about this for years. The kilowatt hour you don’t have to use is often the cheapest source of new capacity, and getting new generation and energy storage closer to where it’s used can be more efficient and thereby avoid other infrastructure costs. Up until now, these solutions have been more “vitamin” than “aspirin,” since energy demand has been flat for decades, and the primary driver behind market transformation has been contested climate policies.

That situation, however, has changed. We’re short on power, and energy efficiency and distributed clean power are now the most rapidly deployable and often least costly near-term solutions to create the capacity we need. It also has the potential to be the most fair and equitable – ensuring that our energy system is closing the wealth and opportunity gaps in America rather than increasing them.

We are facing a choice. As we know, utilities are already planning to invest $1.4 trillion into new infrastructure to meet demand. What if that included large-scale investments into home energy infrastructure alongside new power plants? What if it prioritized lower household bills instead of increasing investor profits? What if it began with local partnerships led by cities and pioneered a path other public power utilities could follow?

Bridging the funding gap

Researchers at Rewiring America suggest that 100% of data center energy demand could be realized from household energy upgrades. While the potential is complicated by the massive deferred maintenance issue faced by American homeowners – the cost of which often exceeds energy efficiency measures – their recommendations indicate a good direction.

I see it every day through our work at Groundswell, where we build community power with solar, storage, and home energy efficiency to cut bills and strengthen resilience. Our work in West Georgia is a prime example.

LaGrange, Georgia, is a former textile town served by a municipal utility. I know it well: It’s my hometown and my grandparents worked in its mills their entire lives. While the local community celebrated many economic development wins in the past few decades, the poverty rate remains high, and the availability of affordable housing has been declining.

Groundswell has been serving local residents with low- or moderate-incomes with home repairs and energy efficiency since 2020. We’ve been able to help people cut their energy bills by, on average, more than 30%, but realizing these savings isn’t easy. More than 53% of the homes we enroll need repairs before it’s safe to install even simple weatherization, and about half of those need extensive repairs that cost more than a new HVAC system. In fact, the average investment per home – including efficiency measures and necessary repairs – exceeds $18,000.

Closing the energy and housing gap to meet people’s needs at the kitchen table requires navigating a complex and paperwork-intensive set of regulatory requirements to blend local, state, and federal energy efficiency and repair programs, which each have separate application and performance mandates. Making matters more difficult, many sources of energy efficiency funding specifically cannot be used for housing repairs. That means homes with the greatest potential for energy efficiency and the highest bills – often exceeding $700 per month – can’t be helped at all.

AI data center energy investments can help bridge the energy and housing affordability gap. To that point, LaGrange also has a new data center. Google is moving into an existing site located in the Georgia International Business Park, and as a part of their commitment, they are providing $1 million to the SOUL (Save On Utilities Long-term) home energy efficiency program that Groundswell offers there. As a result, at least 55 local homeowners with low- or moderate incomes will get home-efficiency upgrades and enabling repairs that will cut their electricity bills by hundreds of dollars per year.

For now, these kinds of opportunities are largely a matter of corporate philanthropy, but LaGrange is not the only place where the same corporations that need more energy are investing in their neighbors.

Fair and equitable energy markets

There have been many examples over the past 10 years of neighboring corporations sharing their energy savings with local residents and workers using different models. Walmart helped bring community solar savings to neighboring communities; Etsy shared solar savings with their makers and sellers; and many more leading companies have adopted a contractual framework called “community benefit agreements” to make sure their presence in a community is a net positive.

While approaches such as these are building momentum, they are still the exception, not the rule. Deliberate large-scale pilots, implementation-focused utility partnerships, and community-driven data on program design and performance are all needed to shape the kind of market reforms we need to sustainably make energy more abundant and affordable for people.

Investing in homes and housing as a part of expanding, modernizing, and repairing our energy infrastructure is a critical complement to the much discussed “bring your own clean energy” policies that enable large corporate energy users to build and pay for their own new sources of generation.

While this approach can keep the cost of new power generation and transmission infrastructure off the backs of residential customers, it may also widen the gap between those who can pay for new clean technologies and grid services and those who can’t. So it’s important that business decision-makers and policy leaders pursue both paths.

Towards market transformation

Being short on power, which is largely driven by the energy demand of AI data centers, is driving up rates, which is pushing rising electricity bills even higher. What kind of infrastructure we build to close the energy gap and how and why we do it will determine whether we will enjoy a healthier, more affordable, more economically equitable future – or whether we’ll perpetuate and multiply our problems.

Municipal leaders, especially in cities and towns that operate public power utilities, are on the frontlines – which is the best position to build partnerships, restore affordability, and modernize markets to keep things fair. As economic developers, municipal leaders recruit new prospects and negotiate community benefits like residential energy efficiency. As grid owners and operators, they drive infrastructure investment decisions. And as rate-making regulators, they set the rules of the road for the local energy market.

Municipal utilities, together with rural cooperative utilities, cover more than half of America’s land mass and serve more than a quarter of the U.S. population – so they can drive solutions that could bring relief to millions of families by serving people, sharing power, and reducing bills.

Making things better for everyone starts with helping our neighbors. If your community decides to host a data center – and I mean if, because I believe in local control – please challenge them to help solve the energy affordability crisis through how they purchase the power they need.

This op-ed 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.

As data centers pop up across the country, communities are asking hard questions about their true value: megawatts of electricity used, gallons of water absorbed, tax abatements for developers, and the true number of jobs created.

The current debate positions data centers as a tradeoff between growth and strain, pitting economic development versus environmental and infrastructure impact.

These are important questions. They deserve scrutiny. But they are not the whole picture.

Data centers are nodes in vast, highly-engineered communications networks essential to any community seeking economic competitiveness. Communities that do not view the data center debates through this lens risk making decisions about digital infrastructure without understanding the infrastructure that makes it digital.

Why? Because we are not focused on the complete connectivity picture. For communities — especially in rural areas — who may still be working to install broadband networks, the data center debate is an opportunity for a structured and thoughtful broadband infrastructure transformation.

Bring connectivity providers to the table

While discussions on water and power define where a data center will locate, it is the connectivity that will define what impact it will have on a community.

To create a robust plan for local connectivity, all stakeholders must be involved. That includes broadband providers that lay the fiber and build the infrastructure that connect our businesses, schools, and hospitals to the modern economy. These companies are core stakeholders, not background infrastructure.

However, these providers are often noticeably absent from such conversation. At a recent Columbus City Council hearing about data center development, for example, not a single internet provider or broadband expert was among the presentations. The room was filled, the news was filming, strong opinions were shared – and yet, broadband was not represented.

Not having all stakeholders at the table means that decisions about data centers are being made with incomplete information as to the whole picture of the costs and benefits of development.

People don’t hear about network topology, how data actually moves through a region; latency corridors, the invisible pathways that determine whether a location is viable for certain types of digital workloads; or fiber route diversity, the difference between a resilient system and a vulnerable one.

They’re also not hearing about the opportunities to communities to leverage these networks to enhance local connectivity. Negotiating a public benefit agreement can incorporate community connectivity needs, support workforce development, and boost digital skills programs to meet the needs of a new high-tech industry. Texas has attracted many data centers, and community groups and local leaders in the Rio Grande Valley recently came together to create a regional agreement for development.

Without that knowledge, communities may reject developments that, with the right connectivity strategy, could have delivered more balanced outcomes and achieved community access goals. Elected representatives may offer incentives without fully understanding what kind of digital ecosystem they are or could actually be building.

A plan for community digital ecosystem

Communities should be leveraging data center developments within a greater vision for local connectivity. They can create a “community digital ecosystem” that meets the needs of the community while also meeting the connectivity needs of the data centers, if they choose to welcome them. The infrastructure of these ecosystems will look different in each community, but should help to create widespread access; meet the needs of residents, government and business; and ensure all can afford, utilize, and benefit from area internet.

This requires all stakeholders to understand and engage in the debate around data centers: community groups, economic development groups, hyperscalers (the larger cloud service providers like Amazon or Google that are driving much of the data center development), broadband groups, and anyone with a stake in the future of the community’s connectivity.

Here’s what local municipalities should consider to create a connectivity ecosystem plan that is not just focused on the data center needs, but also moves forward a collective vision for connectivity.

• Citywide fiber for residential use: Who are the populations most affected by a lack of access? What are residents expecting from their internet connectivity, especially as AI adoption spreads?

• Municipal network uses: What’s the leadership’s vision for connectivity? What are the demands of the government for connectivity, such as creating smart power grids or integrating AI into government processes?

• Addressing local education, healthcare, and workforce needs: As AI demands more connectivity, how are schools, hospitals and other employers demanding faster and more reliable internet? What are the barriers to access?

• Strengthening community and economic development: How can increased connectivity bring in and support business growth?

Answering these questions can help governments leverage data center discussions as a forcing mechanism or an inflection point on its overall connectivity vision. Once that vision is in place, communities can then bring all stakeholders in to build a connectivity ecosystem that can work for all and withstand the changing demands of our digital world.

This essay 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.

The Trump administration’s recent standoff with Anthropic is a stark reminder that the government doesn’t just regulate markets but can reshape them overnight. With a single procurement designation, federal officials can sideline a company, redirect billions in spending, and send shockwaves across an entire industry. And while the legal outcome of Anthropic’s case will continue to unfold, the episode highlights a broader dynamic: government procurement decisions can have immediate and far-reaching effects on an entire industry on par with passing major legislation.

That’s because procurement isn’t just a back-office function. It is policy. It determines which technologies scale, which companies survive, and whose vision of AI becomes embedded in the systems people rely on every day.

While the long-term impact of the federal government’s move remains uncertain, it’s clear that these decisions are not neutral. They set standards, shift incentives, and carry real consequences for communities. And while Washington may be using this power to constrain companies, state and local governments have an opportunity to harness it more deliberately to help shape a more accountable and equitable AI ecosystem.

The question is not whether governments will buy large language models (LLMs). They will. The question is how they will buy them, and what values and standards they will demand in return.

Procurement is policy

Across the United States, state and local governments collectively spend $4.5 trillion annuall on goods and services and are projected to spend over $160 billion on technology this year. That purchasing power has historically shaped entire industries. AI will be no different.

We’ve seen this dynamic before. In the early days of computing, the U.S. military and space program were the primary buyers of semiconductors, paying high prices that allowed manufacturers to scale production and drive down costs, ultimately enabling the modern electronics industry.

Decades later, federal cloud procurement helped validate and accelerate the commercial cloud market. Programs like FedRAMP standardized security requirements and created a clear pathway for companies like Amazon Web Services to sell to the government, increasing trust in cloud infrastructure and reshaping how providers competed for both public and private-sector demand.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. government committed billions through Operation Warp Speed to purchase vaccines from companies like Pfizer and Moderna before approval, using advance purchase agreements to reduce financial risk and accelerate development and manufacturing.

We’ve seen city and state governments wield this power, too.

When cities began requiring accessibility standards after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, thousands of businesses were forced to adapt. Curb cuts, once a niche accommodation, became ubiquitous design features. And when states implemented renewable energy standards beginning in the early 2000s, utilities rapidly accelerated investment in wind and solar. By 2023, over 30 states had adopted renewable portfolio standards, helping drive a more than tenfold increase in U.S. wind and solar capacity over two decades. Public purchasing commitments from transit agencies and state fleets helped scale electric vehicle markets in ways that once seemed unthinkable.

City hall’s operating system is being rewritten

Local governments are already experimenting with AI tools in ways that hint at their broader civic potential.

In New York City, agencies have piloted AI-powered chat and translation tools to make public information more accessible to immigrant communities speaking dozens of languages. In Colorado and California, AI-enabled chatbots are helping residents navigate complex benefits systems, reducing wait times and easing pressure on overwhelmed call centers. In Arizona, courts have been using AI avatars to explain legal opinions, while legal service organizations around the country are using AI to generate basic legal documents — an attempt to address the massive access-to-justice gap, where more than 90% of low-income Americans receive inadequate or no legal help for civil issues.

Taken together, these early use cases point to LLMs rapidly becoming public infrastructure. The question for cities and states to answer is whether this infrastructure will serve the public interest in the long term. If deployed intentionally, AI could significantly expand local governments’ capacity to deliver faster, more equitable, and more accessible services at scale.

It can reduce administrative burdens, improve response times, and extend support to populations that have historically been underserved. Instead of requiring residents to navigate fragmented bureaucracies, AI could act as a unified, always-on public interface, helping people understand, access, and move through services in real time.

Imagine a city where a tenant facing eviction receives a proactive alert, triggered by a filed notice, guiding them through their rights, generating a response, and connecting them to legal aid before their court date is even scheduled.

Imagine a state unemployment system that doesn’t just process claims, but anticipates eligibility across programs, automatically enrolling a laid-off worker in healthcare, food assistance, and job training without requiring multiple applications.

Over time, this could lead to more efficient governments, better policy implementation, and improved outcomes in areas like housing, public health, disaster response, and economic mobility. AI could enable governments to do more with the same or fewer resources, while reaching more people in meaningful ways.

How AI companies and local governments could transform one another

While the potential for AI to optimize the delivery of government services to the speed of need, the potential harm of AI infrastructure on local communities is also becoming increasingly worrisome. AI data centers are incurring massive energy and water demands, straining local grids, driving up utility costs, and slowing our efforts to stem climate change.

These dynamics are often compounded by the incentives used to attract these projects in the first place. Tax abatements, subsidized land, and discounted electricity rates are offered in the name of economic development, but the returns are frequently overstated. In effect, communities can end up financing infrastructure that primarily benefits global technology firms, while sacrificing revenue that could have been invested in schools, housing, or local services.

But local governments don’t need to regulate AI companies out of existence to protect the public interest. They simply need to decide what they are willing to buy and what they are not. Done right, procurement standards can directly mitigate nearly every downside of the current AI buildout.

Energy-hungry data centers? Require vendors to meet aggressive renewable energy thresholds or a plan for clean power sourcing.

Water-intensive cooling systems? Condition contracts on water-neutral or low-water infrastructure, especially in drought-prone regions.

Lopsided tax incentives with minimal return? Tie eligibility to measurable community benefits like local hiring, revenue sharing, or reinvestment in public infrastructure.

The cooperative purchasing playbook

Today, most governments are price-takers, negotiating individually with companies that have far greater scale, technical expertise, and leverage. The result is predictable: vendor lock-in, opaque pricing, and limited accountability.

That dynamic changes if governments act collectively.

Imagine a coalition of states and cities coming together not just to buy access to LLMs and enterprise AI solutions, but to define the terms under which those tools can be used in public life. By pooling demand across cities and states, governments can negotiate lower prices for access to large language models – as well as stronger data governance and privacy protections, clear auditability and transparency requirements, and enforceable standards around bias, safety, and performance.

Cooperative purchasing agreements, long used for everything from pharmaceuticals to police vehicles, offer a blueprint for AI purchasing by local governments. Organizations like NASPO ValuePoint and Sourcewell allow thousands of public agencies to purchase everything from fire trucks to cloud software through shared agreements.

There is a long, underappreciated tradition in public procurement that offers a different path. For decades, governments have pooled their purchasing power to negotiate better terms and set shared expectations.

States have joined together to lower the cost of prescription drugs, using collective leverage to extract discounts that no single state could secure on its own. Cities have aggregated demand for electricity through Community Choice Aggregation programs, accelerating the transition to renewable energy while stabilizing prices for residents. Even the most routine functions of government — from school meals to school buses — are often purchased through cooperative agreements that standardize quality and safety across jurisdictions.

These are not just cost-saving mechanisms. They are tools for communicating values, determining long-term goals, and shaping markets. Applied to AI, this approach could be transformative.

The AI race is often framed as a competition to build the most powerful systems. But power alone will not determine the outcome. In practice, the winners will be those who meet the needs of everyday consumers and standards of the world’s largest and most consequential customer: the public sector.

It will be shaped contract by contract, by public officials deciding what is worth paying for and what is not. It’s time for local governments to step up, work together, and demand an AI future that benefits their communities the most.

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.

A small Wisconsin city has just notched a big win in its fight against a proposed data center, thanks to grassroots community organizing and support from a growing statewide coalition. And to help guide other communities facing similar challenges, organizers in Menomonie have helped develop a toolkit for taking on hyperscale data centers.

“It’s like whack-a-mole; you knock out one [data center], and another just pops up,” says Blaine Halverson, an organizer in the city of about 16,800 residents. “We’re trying, in real time and against the clock, to do something to protect our community, and now we’re trying to help other communities do that proactively.”

Local struggles against data center development projects are kicking off across the country as developers descend on unsuspecting residents with plans to build huge, warehouse-like structures that house the computing power driving the increasing use of artificial intelligence in their backyards.

As of last October, there were about 3,000 new data centers being built or planned nationwide. Some experts speculate that global spending on data centers could reach $3 trillion by 2029.

Menomonie’s story is similar to those of other communities in Wisconsin. The state passed a sales and use tax exemption for qualified data centers in 2023, just as the AI boom was accelerating with the release of generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude. Soon, a wave of data center projects was washing over Wisconsin towns.

There are now more than $57 billion worth of proposed data center projects across the state. At least five of those projects are behemoth, hyperscale data centers — including two proposed in Janesville and Kenosha, and three under construction in Beaver Dam, Mount Pleasant, and Port Washington, where voters this month approved a first-of-its-kind referendum restricting future data center developments. Organizers quashed another proposed hyperscale data center in DeForest earlier this year.

“These proposals were coming fast and furious,” says Brittany Keyes, clean air policy manager at Healthy Climate Wisconsin. “Community members were caught off guard, not given much time, and really scrambling to organize, get information, engage their elected officials, and make a difference.”

‘In the dark until the last minute’

News of a $1.6 billion data center project proposed in Menomonie broke in July 2025, after city leadership had already begun holding closed-door meetings with Balloonist, LLC. The development firm proposed the data center but has never disclosed which tech company would operate it.

Menomonie’s city administrator and other officials have also signed nondisclosure agreements with Balloonist. The city administrator signed his in February 2024, about 18 months before the public learned anything about the project. Leaders in other communities have signed similar agreements.

By the time Menomonie residents learned that a secretive development firm planned to build a data center on 320 acres of farmland on the outskirts of town, it was only weeks before the city council voted to annex and rezone the land to move the project forward. Organizers were fighting an uphill battle.

“The playing field isn’t horizontal; it’s almost vertical,” Halverson says. “You’ve got big tech, the for-profit utilities, the legislature, the state economic development corporation, and all that up on the high end, bearing down with all of their power on a community that was kept in the dark until the last minute.”

Residents had serious concerns about the project. While companies often win major tax breaks by promising jobs and economic stimulation, data centers bring few permanent jobs and can drain municipal water resources, drive up electric bills, rob cities of tax revenues, and cause damaging noise, light, and air pollution.

Already, Wisconsin residents have seen some of these impacts at data center sites in Port Washington and Beaver Dam. Residents in Port Washington have complained about the disruption caused by around-the-clock construction at the new data center. Families near the construction in Beaver Dam have reported that their wells have run dry.

“Data center construction is the most cruel thing a city can do to its residents,” says Sarah Zarling, who has been fighting the Beaver Dam project and supporting organizers in Menomonie. “The impacts are just absolutely immense. They’re life changing.”

Building a coalition

Menomonie residents took to social media and the streets to raise the alarm about the data center proposal and organize community members. They met to share information, staged demonstrations, and began attending city council meetings in growing numbers.

By September 2025, there were over 10,000 Menomonie residents and allies in a Stop the Menomonie Data Center Facebook group — more than half the town’s population.

Although the Menomonie City Council voted to annex and rezone the land for the data center in early September, pressure from local campaigners was so great that Mayor Randy Knaack announced at a Sept. 22 city council meeting that he had notified Balloonist that the city would not be moving forward with a development agreement. More good news came in January when the Menomonie City Council voted unanimously to place additional regulations on data center projects.

At the same time, Menomonie organizers were making connections with others in Wisconsin facing similar fights. Those efforts grew into a statewide coalition. “We were able to bring folks together and create a statewide network that is able to support each other wherever they are in facing these proposals,” Keyes says.

Now, when a new data center pops up in Wisconsin’s Big Tech whack-a-mole, organizers have a pool of resources at their disposal to help beat it back.

In February, Zarling was in Menomonie for a community town hall event where she gave a presentation about “community organizing tactics and what it’s like having ground broken and construction happening on the front lines” in Beaver Dam.

At that town hall event, attendees developed a list of 42 recommendations they want Menomonie city councilors to consider and incorporate into future ordinances to better protect the city from proposals like Balloonist’s. The recommendations focus on transparency and community protection, administrative review, infrastructure and fiscal protections, and zoning protections.

To show that support for those recommendations stretches beyond those who attended the town hall, organizers left signature sheets at 11 local businesses. About 500 residents added their names in the first four days; that number has since grown to about 1,000, organizers say. Halverson expects the recommendations will be considered at an upcoming Menomonie City Council meeting.

Statewide action

One of the statewide coalition’s greatest achievements is the Big Tech Unchecked Toolkit. Published in December 2025 by Healthy Climate Wisconsin and other coalition partners, the toolkit includes information on what data centers are, their impacts on communities, and success stories from struggles across Wisconsin, including Menomonie’s. A webinar held in January to introduce the toolkit attracted an audience of almost 200 people.

Thanks to the advocacy of local organizers, Menomonie’s state representative, Republican Clint Moses, has also introduced a bill to prohibit nondisclosure agreements for data center proposals in the state.

Other data center-related bills have also been introduced, although Keyes argues none go far enough. She says what’s needed is a “pause to protect,” meaning a moratorium on data center construction to allow meaningful guardrails to be developed and implemented.

“We are pushing for adequate protection for the environment and community health because right now, we are without protection, without guardrails. It is irresponsible, and we need a common-sense pause.”

Demonstrators from across Wisconsin gathered at the state capitol to show support for a moratorium during a statewide day of action on Feb. 12. Halverson, who was also in Madison to share Menomonie’s story with lawmakers, says that while legislators scramble, the statewide coalition will continue to support communities.

“It’s about proactivity; we need to have a plan for what to do if one of these all of a sudden bubbles to the surface,” Halverson says. “This statewide group is getting pretty adept at getting people organized.”

Zarling agrees: “Organizing swiftly and fiercely and relentlessly is the key.”