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.

This Mayor Launched A New Group To Help U.S. Small Towns Lead the Clean Energy Transition

Towns with populations of less than 30,000 residents are left out of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. That’s a problem, says Mondale Robinson, the first Black mayor of Enfield, North Carolina — a majority-Black town of about 2,000 near the poverty line — because small towns make up 93% of all incorporated municipalities and are home to 60 million Americans. Yet 90% of philanthropy flows to urban areas, and most foundations overlook communities like his.

Canary Media reports that Robinson has big clean energy ambitions for Enfield, including a solar farm to power the entire town and a thermal energy network to cut residents’ electric bills. But with no grant writers or policy staff, the barriers are steep. So Robinson, a longtime political organizer, is launching the National Conference of Small Cities and Rural Mayors to give small towns collective leverage on federal policy, philanthropy, and clean energy investment. He’s recruiting the first 100 founding mayors. “One small town can be ignored,” he said. “Thousands of organized small towns become a national constituency.”

Bay Area Transit On The Line

Could a ballot measure help stop BART’s transit death spiral?

The San Francisco Bay Area could cut 70% of its service and close 30% of its stations due to lack of revenue, Mother Jones reports. The funding gap stems from a cratering of ridership at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, from which the transit system has not fully recuperated. The region’s transit systems are projected to have a combined $800 million deficit by next year.

In November, voters in four Bay Area counties — Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo, and Santa Clara — will decide via a ballot measure whether to use a sales tax to raise an additional $1 billion a year for the transit system.

ICE Shooting Rocks New York City

On Oct. 8, an ICE agent shot 28-year-old Oscar Belgal in the neck in the Marble Hill neighborhood of the Bronx. A plainclothes ICE agent had fired seven rounds into the car Belgal was driving while his five-year-old child was in the backseat. According to a court filing from Belgal’s attorney, he still has a bullet lodged in his neck and is not receiving adequate care at the Manhattan Detention Center. The attorney’s filing said the ICE agent never identified himself and that ICE did not have a valid warrant to arrest Belgal.

A protest on the day of the shooting was violently suppressed by NYPD officers, leading to renewed calls for Mayor Zohran Mamdani to fire police commissioner Jessica Tisch, a request he quickly shot down. Mamdani has been criticized for his apparent lack of control over the NYPD.

Brazilian Elections Lean Right with Amazon on the Line

Flavio Bolsonaro, the son of far-right ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, won the first round of Brazilian presidential elections against incumbent Lula da Silva on Oct. 4, leading to a runoff election on Oct. 25. A win by Bolsonaro would mean nearly all of South America has elected far-right leaders in just a few short years. It could also mean devastation of the Amazon rainforest, climate scientists told Grist.

The younger Bolsonaro has campaigned on a softer version of his father’s deregulatory, agribusiness-friendly agenda. He has pledged to cut “illegal” deforestation but speed up legal deforestation through faster permitting. Carbon emissions doubled in 2019 and 2020 under the elder Bolsonaro, according to Grist.

The Amazon contains 175 billion metric tons of carbon; a 2021 Nature study found the Amazon had gone from an absorber of carbon to a carbon emitter due to deforestation. A climate scientist told Grist that more deforestation could cause Brazil to “reach the danger zone by the middle or end of the 2030s.”

Electric Bills Stabilize Ahead of Midterms

Heatmap reports that the average price of electricity per kilowatt hour decreased from 20 cents to 19.6 cents in the past year, but cautions that this minor shift is the result of California moving its climate credit to subsidize consumers during hotter, more high demand months. Without the credit, average prices across the country would have been flat.

According to Heatmap’s tracker, the average utility bill is up 33% in the past five years. Energy costs, which were trending up and were exacerbated by the Iran war, have been a charged topic ahead of next month’s midterm elections. In New York, where energy bill growth has outpaced the national average, Gov. Kathy Hochul has been blamed by Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman for rising electric costs.

MORE NEWS

• Data center opposition spawns a surge of first-time candidates. Bloomberg Citylab

• What Flock actually costs cities across the country. WIRED

• NYC updates homeless encampment policy. City Limits

• Trump just effectively killed a popular solar energy program for rural America. Grist

• The tenant activist at the center of Mamdani’s housing gamble. Politico

• NYC comptroller walks back pledge to buy Israel bonds. NY 1

• How one Chicago program is diversifying the solar workforce. Canary Media

• New Mexico is finding out that successfully providing universal child care requires giving teachers a living wage. Truthout

OPPORTUNITIES & RESOURCES

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

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

• Max and Victoria Dreyfus Foundation is considering grant requests from community-based nonprofits including museums, cultural and performing arts programs, schools and hospitals, youth, senior, and disability programs, environmental and wildlife protection. Apply by Nov. 10.

• The OpenAI Foundation and The Rockefeller Foundation’s new $50 million Cities Deliver initiative is supporting organizations working with city governments to put AI to work to improve public health, expand economic mobility, strengthen environmental resilience, and strengthen civic engagement. Apply by Nov. 29.

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

This article was originally published on Waging Nonviolence.

Dwight Hua’s roommate knocked on his door at 5:30 a.m. on May 22, saying there was a notice for nearly 50,000 people in their city of Garden Grove, California, to evacuate due to the danger of a deadly chemical explosion at a nearby GKN Aerospace plant. Hua quickly left for a shelter in a neighboring city. But he had a lot of questions.

As the evacuation stretched over five days, advocacy groups VietRISE — where Hua is a youth programs coordinator — the Harbor Institute for Immigrant and Economic Justice, the Palestinian Youth Movement, and Orange County Justice for Palestine formed a coalition to demand “transparency about why a facility tied to global hazardous weapons manufacturing is operating in the middle of working-class immigrant neighborhoods.” Research led by the local chapter of the Palestinian Youth Movement, or PYM, found that the company manufactured parts for military vehicles, including F-35 fighter jets, which are used in Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians.

“No one really knew that this was what we were living close to,” Hua said. “A company that makes money off of violence abroad is not the character of Garden Grove and its residents.”

Many residents who, like Hua, live just blocks away from the facility felt enraged when they found out. The coalition joined the People’s Embargo for Palestine, an international movement to establish an arms embargo on Israel, and began organizing actions to push the city to shut down GKN Aerospace and place a moratorium on military manufacturing in Garden Grove. They have been canvassing, showing up to city council meetings and circulating a petition that has drawn more than 11,000 signatures. Addressed to the mayor and city council, the petition demands “an immediate end to the use of our tax dollars, public land and public infrastructure to manufacture, store or transport the weapons that make this genocide possible.”

While the Garden Grove City Council has canceled meetings and omitted GKN Aerospace from meeting agendas in the months since the evacuation, Hua said, the coalition has kept on growing in size and influence. Members continue to show up to city council meetings, canvass and meet with city officials, some of whom have shown support for the embargo.

The campaign for a weapons embargo is part of a larger international movement to stop global manufacturing and shipment of weapons to Israel. From Türkiye to Italy to the U.S., localized campaigns targeted at Israeli weapons suppliers have emerged, led by community groups and unions, and often supported by PYM chapters. Their goal is to end local complicity in the genocide — and ensure worker and community safety — through bans on weapons shipments through local airports and seaports, as well as shutdowns and moratoriums on weapons manufacturing facilities in residential areas.

Putting communities at risk for Israel

A coalition of community groups is leading an embargo campaign in New York City’s John F. Kennedy Airport, where dangerous explosives and F-35 bomber components bound for Israel have passed through the same runways as passenger flights. The campaign is calling on the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to end arms shipments through public infrastructure. Most of the coalition’s efforts have been geared toward organizing and educating workers, especially unionized workers in warehouses and on planes.

Abdullah Shehadeh, communications co-chair of Break the Chain, the coalition leading the campaign, said that workers were unaware they were handling explosives bound for Israel because they were mislabeled.

“Workers feel very scared about what they’re doing in their day to day, not knowing that complicity like this is even possible for them,” Shehadeh said. “They didn’t sign up to be part of a supply chain of genocide.”

In outreach to workers, volunteers with the coalition also point out the dangers of handling explosives, noting that a munitions plant in Tennessee which manufactured the same explosives experienced a blast last year that destroyed an entire building and killed 16 people.

Organized by New York City’s Democratic Socialists of America chapter, Break the Chain was founded in 2025 by Palestinian liberation organizers in New York who wanted to focus on a tangible campaign to organize labor.

The coalition is advocating for more transparency for workers and the public to know what is passing through their workplaces and communities. Volunteers with the coalition post educational flyers in Queens, New York, where many airport workers live, and hand them out on the air train that workers use to commute. The coalition encourages small businesses in the area to display informational posters and hold events in their spaces. A tool on the coalition website lets workers search for whether their employers are complicit in the genocide.

“It’s their right to know what they’re moving and to not be a part of a war machine that they didn’t sign up for,” Shehadeh said. “They should be moving civilian goods, not military goods or bombs going to a genocide.”

Break the Chain also advocates for labor unions to pass resolutions calling for a ceasefire and end to military aid, to bargain for contract protections for workers who refuse to contribute to the supply chain of Israeli arms, and to work with elected city officials to explore expanding the rights of working-class New Yorkers. After meetings with union leaders and working groups, more than 20 unions have signed the coalition’s resolutions, including the United Auto Workers, Association of Flight Attendants, National Education Association and 1199SEIU.

Shehadeh said the coalition’s activism is “an intersection between labor, Palestine, and community and public safety.” He is concerned that if the explosives are mishandled or improperly stored, there could be a catastrophic explosion threatening the lives of the more than hundred thousand people who pass through JFK every day, as well as nearby communities.

Garden Grove and the area of Queens surrounding JFK are both predominantly immigrant communities. Shehadeh said the transfer of weapons through JFK is an example of how “massive private profit fuels endless conflict, and the environmental health and moral burdens fall on working-class communities here in New York City.”

“A handful of billionaires line their pockets with profits from weapons contracts, while we are seeing crumbling infrastructure in our subways here in New York City; we’re seeing climate change get worse and worse,” Shehadeh said.

Embargo campaigns at the ports

Activists in Texas have called on the Port of Houston to place an arms embargo at their ports, where critical parts for the F-35 fighter jet pass through to Israel. Upon learning from a PYM report that the Houston port was shipping parts for the same weapons used to bomb schools, refugee camps and hospitals, activists came together with PYM and local groups to form the Houston Arms Embargo Campaign in 2024.

The campaign took inspiration from PYM’s global Mask off Maersk campaign, which calls on people to get Maersk to end its contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense and Israeli Ministry of Defense to ship military components to Israel. Under the contracts, the logistics and shipping giant handles everything from tactical vehicles used to transport Palestinian prisoners to parts for armored tanks and aircraft and artillery systems used for slaughter in Gaza and Lebanon. According to a recent report published by PYM and Oxfam, Maersk shipped millions of pounds of cargo to Israeli military manufacturer, Elbit Systems, between October 2023 and July 2025.

PYM organizer Fouad Salah said that localizing the campaign has helped activate constituencies from students and workers to faith communities, and built relationships with 40 national and local organizations, including other Palestinian campaigns, and anti-gentrification, Black and Latino groups.

There are similar campaigns at major ports in California, Louisiana, New Jersey and more. In New Jersey, activists used their own bodies and cars to block a port from delivering weapons to Israel in May.

“So many of the ports in this country are implicated in the transport of military cargo that’s used in an ongoing genocide, and I think this is a really important piece because this is public infrastructure, these are not military ports,” Salah said. “As constituents, we should have a say in what happens with our public infrastructure.”

Like the Break the Chain campaign, the Houston Arms Embargo Campaign has been flyering at community centers, parks, malls, mosques and churches. They have also circulated the Houston Arms Embargo petition, engaging constituents in the idea of an arms embargo and encouraging them to get involved. The campaign has also held free lunches provided by local restaurants for people interested to learn more about their work. In July, they held a picnic at a park to bring the community together for the campaign’s one-year anniversary, which was well-attended despite the Texas heat.

“The power is with the people, but for the people to exercise that power, they need to be educated and conscious of what’s going on, and so a lot of our tactics revolve around getting the average Houstonian aware and agitated about what’s happening at the port,” Salah said.

Many people Salah comes across don’t know much about how the ports near their homes are shipping weapons to Israel; once they find out, he said, they generally support the campaign and want to help. He said many people “have watched Palestinian children limbless crying for their mothers and fathers because of a genocide being committed by weapons manufactured and transported from the United States, and at a certain point, there is an ethical line that a person draws.”

He said that having a localized campaign at the ports gives people a place to feel like they can do something about it.

“We were able to build a campaign that took [people’s general desire] to stop the genocide in Gaza, and hone it in to something that is happening in our city,” Salah said. “I think this gave people a sense of real purpose and real direction. It gave them a real, concrete, tangible thing that they could channel their energy into.”

Similarly, Hua said that having a community-based coalition has empowered residents by giving them a platform for action.

“Having a coalition has really been a space for community members to be able to feel empowered to be involved in shaping their community,” Hua said. “We want to continue to strengthen the community power and not let this get swept under the rug, and so we are continuing to show up to city council meetings and continuing to build that power.”

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In Harlem, transformation is palpable. Where there were once boarded-up storefronts, there is now a cluster of lively businesses that serve as a unique job training program for young people. All of them — a coffee shop, a seafood restaurant, and a multicultural bistro — employ young people and young adults who have been impacted by the criminal legal system.

The change can be attributed to the work of Lead by Example & Reverse The Trend, a New York City-based nonprofit that serves young people through its mentorship and job training program. The organization’s founder, Anthonio Hendrickson, formerly incarcerated himself, started this organization because he wanted to see these young people thrive, and he listened to their desires when partnering with entrepreneurs to launch businesses that would hire them. They wanted places where they were comfortable, businesses that reflect their community, the ability to stay, job training, real skills, and a stake in the neighborhood.

On a passing bus or in a shop window in Philadelphia's Germantown, residents might come across a way to connect with their neighbor — or see themselves — through poetry as public art. 

In this episode, we hear from Germantown Info Hub reporter and Next City Equitable Cities Reporting Fellow Pryce Jamison about his reporting on how poetry as public art can help process the grief of gun violence.

Healing Verse Germantown ran 10 free writing workshops for more than 170 residents. Most had never written a poem, never mind called themselves a poet. Their work now appears on 19 installations across the neighborhood, including a bus wrap, stained glass at a bus stop, a community fridge, T-shirts, plus a 24-hour poetry hotline. 

Trapeta B. Mayson, former Philadelphia Poet Laureate, is a licensed clinical social worker and one of the project's lead artists. She’s attended plenty of community meetings in Philly and says the arts open doors to conversations that are missing.

“I've been to many, and they're all saying the same thing: 'What can the city do to make us safe?’ That's all we want to know. We want to be safe,” says Mason. “But there are other conversations that need to happen. How are we processing trauma?”

Healing Verse Germantown was launched after it won Bloomberg Philanthropies’ 2023 Public Art Challenge, which provides $1 million grants to fund urban arts initiatives addressing crucial civic issues. Stephanie Dockery, who leads the Public Art Challenge, says “artists are pushing the boundaries” and creating public art that heals instead of harms. 

“You know, we think of traditional public art as statues, men and horses on a square,” she says. “We hope that, while the art is temporary, it also builds civic will for more public art and hopefully permanent public art.”

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

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat, a nonprofit news organization covering public education. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters

During her first semester at Chicago’s Malcolm X College, Nikya Harrell had had enough. It was winter, and she was cold. She was bouncing to and from family members’ houses and sometimes could only afford one meal a week.

Harrell came to school overwhelmed and crying. A concerned friend suggested she see the school’s therapist, who connected her with the Dax Program, which offers students at risk of or experiencing homelessness a place to live for up to two years.

Harrell came to Denver for Depaul USA’s Dax Program’s Thursday opening of the city’s first student residence near the Capitol building. Harrell had a message for other students who face challenges finding a place to live that she’s often repeated to herself: “You’re never alone.”

Dax provides students with a safe living space that allows them to focus on getting a college degree without worrying about where they’ll sleep. The program has partnered with Metropolitan State University of Denver and Regis University, but wants to expand services to other local colleges and universities.

The nonprofit provides resources to people experiencing homelessness and operates 11 Dax student housing programs in Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and New York. The program started in 2015 and has housed 494 students in those cities.

The Denver Dax residence, an 1890s brick building that was originally a duplex in North Capitol Hill, is one of the national program’s larger residences and will be able to house up to 15 students.

The Denver building will expand the program’s reach to about 110 students annually, according to a news release. Depaul USA’s website says about 95% of residents find permanent housing after participating in the program, and the Depaul USA news release says about 84% remain in school or graduate.

To live in the house, students must work a minimum of 10 hours per week, be in good academic standing, and pay a reduced-cost monthly rent.

Students in the program also get movie nights, Sunday dinners, and resources such as onsite food pantries, financial literacy workshops, employment assistance, and physical and behavioral health referrals.

“Our program is really designed to transition students towards independence,” said Serita Reels, Depaul USA’s national Dax Program director.

Nationwide, a recent survey of 74,350 students at 91 colleges in 16 states shared that about half of them experience housing insecurity and about 14% are homeless, according to a 2023-24 report from The Hope Center for Student Basic Needs.

MSU Denver’s Abbie Kell, the school’s associate director of basic needs and housing support, said her office helps about 80 to 90 students annually who are experiencing homelessness. Erica Ingalls, Regis’ dean of students, said her school provides aid to four to six students a year who don’t have a place to live.

Both campuses connect students with a list of resources that includes help applying to federal food aid, access to food pantries, and housing assistance. Regis provides two weeks of residence hall housing for homeless students, and MSU Denver offers emergency housing assistance.

But some students might not be eligible for those resources, or the help might not last long enough to help them get on their feet. Students also typically stay away from community shelters, Kell said.

“A lot of students usually live out of their car,” Kell said.

MSU Denver helped a student move into the Dax building before the Thursday ribbon-cutting ceremony, Kell said.

She said the process was respectful of the student’s circumstances. The student interviewed with Dax Program staff, talked about where they would wash clothes, and decided which room they wanted, Kell said.

Harrell said Dax Chicago’s Cecilia house gave her her own living space for the first time. She decorated the walls with “Coraline” and One Direction posters.

She also put affirmations such as “Take a deep breath” and “You might be going through a storm, but the sun is approaching soon” on the walls and in her desk.

Her own space helped her open up. She dove deep into poetry and journaling. She’s participated in her school’s student government. She now lives in an apartment and plans to graduate from DePaul University in 2029 with a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education.

Every society runs on stories it mistakes for facts. In America, those stories shape who gets help, who gets blamed, and who is left out. Not My Narrative is a Next City podcast and essay series that debunks the pervasive myths that have been used to justify neglect, inequity, and the status quo — and elevates the people proving those myths wrong.

This week, in “Birth of a Nation vs. Truth and Reconciliation,” we dig into America’s false origin story. Check out the podcast on Apple and Spotify.

Traditional narratives of the American past tend to ignore difficult histories that are vital to making sense of our present moment, including those of enslavement, migration, and American imperialism. Stories of the communities of color who have helped build the nation are also too often overlooked.

That is in no small part due to the structure of our country’s preservation institutions, such as the National Register of Historic Places, which were designed to prioritize historic sites tied to an Anglo-American retelling of the nation’s past.

Of the more than 96,000 sites on the list in 2021, fewer than 10% “reflect[ed] the diversity of the country’s population,” per a representative of the National Park Service, which oversees the register. Estimates for the percentage of sites reflecting Black, Latino, or Native American histories range from less than 1% to 3% of the total.

“There are so many histories that are undocumented or unknown, and there’s a reason for that,” says Sehila Mota Casper, the inaugural executive director of Latinos in Heritage Conservation, the nation’s foremost Latino historic preservation nonprofit. “There are a lot of structures and systemic inequities that ensure that those stories never get told.”

Federal agencies, which set standards for the field, had begun to address some of those issues in recent years. But since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, those efforts have been rolled back. The administration has also specifically targeted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives across the federal government and issued executive orders to change historical interpretation at national parks and museums, as well as in public schools, to whitewash the nation’s past.

These attacks on the American past are not popular. Instead, polling shows that Americans believe it is important to preserve historical and cultural landmarks that tell the full American story — including its most difficult chapters. Americans want parks and public spaces to do more to reflect shared history and culture, not less.

Educators, museum workers, and community historians and preservationists are answering that call, and their work has the power to change how people see themselves, each other, and the nation. Latinos in Heritage Conservation is on the bleeding edge of this work.

The initiative started in 2014 as a volunteer-led network of heritage practitioners, advocates, and scholars, many of whom had worked for federal institutions and experienced their limitations firsthand.

Since then, the organization has been instrumental to the success of National Historic Landmark designations for Chicano Park, the heart of the oldest Mexican-American neighborhood in San Diego, in 2016, as well as Rio Vista Farm, a former Bracero reception center, in Socorro, Texas, in 2023. It also publishes its own annual list of endangered Latinx landmarks and has a grant program to help communities save their sites.

Read more: A Century-Old Adobe Schoolhouse Is Being Restored as a Community Hub in New Mexico

Next City sat down with Casper to learn more about how the organization identifies and honors American histories that have for too long been overlooked or erased — and what it means to do “preservation not as freezing a moment in time, but preservation as repair,” as she puts it. These responses have been edited for clarity and concision.

How does Latinos in Heritage Conservation challenge the dominant narrative of U.S. history, and the narrative that’s been popular this year that American history began 250 years ago with the adoption of the Declaration of Independence in 1776?

Sehila Mota Casper: As a historian and as a preservationist, I know that the concept of the 250th is just that — it’s a constructed concept. That’s like saying that the nation’s past started 250 years ago, when in reality, we already had inhabitants here.

As a historic preservation organization, we look at this through a critical lens to ensure that the stories of peoples who were here before — Indigenous peoples, and those of us from Indigenous roots in South and Central America — are recognized and celebrated as part of this 250th.

A lot of the work that Latinos in Heritage Conservation is doing is to ensure that the histories that have been purposefully taken out or that have been erased or gone untold are centered because those are stories and contributions that we need to celebrate.

Your organization focuses on Latino histories. Can you give an example of how those histories get overlooked or flattened in traditional retellings of the American past?

First, we really look at Latinidad and the entire Latin American diaspora as a whole and recognize the fact that there is a different experience and a different diaspora for every individual; there is not one cookie-cutter that says, ‘This is a Latino.’” So, we’re doing a lot to ensure that we’re being very intersectional in the way that we look at Latinidad.

We have chosen to go to Chicago, to the Midwest, for Congreso, our bi-annual conference, this year. There’s a common narrative there that Latinos are brand new to the Midwest, but the fact of the matter is that Latinos have been there since at least the 1880s. The history that gets told is more about the Germans and Czechs who migrated there during that period. But at the same time, Latinos were working alongside those individuals in mining or manufacturing. Those are some of the stories we’re excited to tell out of Chicago.

It’s a wonderful thing to be able to uplift these stories that have yet to be recognized, educate the next generations, and ensure that their identities are deeply rooted and that they know that they have long histories.

How do you shift the lens to capture those overlooked histories?

Here in the U.S., historic preservation focuses primarily on the built environment. The way that our historic preservation act was designed, it centers on architecture and what can be physically documented, designated, and protected. That leaves out heritage carried through oral histories, foodways, traditional knowledge, music, language, and memory. But we know that the communities that are overlooked or erased by that model of historic preservation have been preserving their own stories, like Latinos. We’ve been preserving our stories and sites out of necessity and knowing that if we didn’t do that, no one else would.

We can locate those histories by challenging systems to refocus from buildings to people. Often, a building is significant because of the people who inhabited it and the histories, traditions, struggles, and everyday life within its walls. Those lived experiences are what give the building its meaning and historical significance. The place does not make the history significant; the people and their stories make the place significant.

A people-centered approach starts with the community rather than from the top down. Communities identify what matters, what should be remembered, and why, and that knowledge should inform how we understand what is historically and nationally significant. That’s a very different practice than the one that is taught within historic preservation and architectural programs throughout the country.

Some of the histories that get left out of the American story are shameful and can be painful to recount. Because of that, right-wing politicians and commentators, in their attacks on education, have often argued that those histories should not be taught. Why is it important to push back on that and continue to teach those difficult histories?

A lot of these histories are hard to tackle, but we know that they happened and we have to talk about that. We have to expand what stories are being told, whether they’re seen in a positive light or a negative light, because when communities are repeatedly absent from archives, textbooks, and historic designations, that absence can be used to reinforce the idea that they were never here or do not belong here.

For Latino and Indigenous communities, this erasure can feed narratives of them being “aliens” or outsiders, even in places where their histories predate current borders and, in the case of Indigenous peoples, the U.S. itself. Historical erasure is therefore not simply a lack of recognition; it can become a tool for reshaping public memory and determining who is understood as belonging to this land.

Having described some of the shortcomings of our nation’s current approach to historic preservation and the harms of whitewashing the narrative of our nation’s past, I’m interested in hearing about your vision for a way forward. What needs to change?

With this moment of the 250th, we’re being asked to listen, and to correct, and to repair. It’s a great moment for us to look back and reframe how America has been seen, challenge our narratives, and ensure that the occasion opens a new conversation. What does it reveal about what we’ve told? What does it reveal about gaps that we need to address moving forward, whether or not they’re difficult?

We’re at a moment right now where we need to be thinking critically about our practice, and that means all of us need to sit down and question the way that we’re approaching communities. It means examining who has traditionally had the authority to decide what is historically significant, what evidence counts, and whose knowledge is treated as expertise.

Latinos in Heritage Conservation’s vision is for practitioners to work with communities from the beginning, treating residents and culture bearers as partners and knowledge holders whose lived experience directs the research, interpretation, and preservation of their own heritage.

So, we’re not just looking at documents; we’re looking at the lived experience and allowing that to shift the narrative. There is repair and healing in that, and we’re going to get a more truthful history.

Every society runs on stories it mistakes for facts. In America, those stories shape who gets help, who gets blamed, and who is left out. Not My Narrative is a Next City podcast and essay series that debunks the pervasive myths that have been used to justify neglect, inequity, and the status quo — and elevates the people proving those myths wrong.

This week, in “Birth of a Nation vs. Truth and Reconciliation,” we dig into America’s false origin story. Check out the podcast on Apple and Spotify.

I still live in my childhood home located in the Fairmount community in the Great City of Woonsocket, Rhode Island. It’s a working-class, immigrant neighborhood made up of single-family homes, public housing, and three tenement apartment buildings, where residents tend to their backyard gardens, barter vegetables and seafood caught off the coast.

It’s where Lao America families like my own have built trust in place over the last 45 years. It’s where I made my very first friends playing at Dunn Park and attending the local elementary schools, running around and riding our bikes around the neighborhood until it got dark while our parents worked 16-hour days for the minimum wage in the factories that shaped Woonsocket.

Growing up here, I learned about Woonsocket’s history as a poor, struggling, old mill city, with under-resourced schools and decades of disinvestment. And in Rhode Island’s classrooms and lecture halls — from Woonsocket Public Schools, to Providence College, to the University of Rhode Island — I studied American history. But I never learned my own history.

Up until my early 20s, I thought my family’s story belonged to Laos while American history belonged to everyone else. I later learned that those stories were inseparable.

My family came to Rhode Island because of the CIA-backed Secret War in Laos and the refugee resettlement that followed. The Lao American story is not outside American history; it reveals how U.S. military intervention abroad shaped migration, working-class cities, and the communities that refugees built here at home.

I grew up hearing my family casually talk through the details of the deaths of family members in the Mekong River, escaping war, family members being taken to reeducation camps, living in poverty, being separated from their families.

It wasn’t until I was serving as an AmeriCorps VISTA in Chinatown Boston that I realized how important these stories were, and what their absence in public memory had cost society and me personally. This is when I began capturing the oral histories of my family through stories shared by my parents and community members.

Through this journey, I realized that I had been taught American history without the chapter that explained my own family’s life. I thought my family came to America, but I later understood that America had already come to Laos.

Between 1964 and 1973, the United States carried out a covert bombing campaign in Laos that remains one of the least acknowledged tragedies of the 20th century. Driven by the fear of communism and its expansion during the Vietnam War, the U.S. dropped more than two million tons of bombs on Laos. Entire villages disappeared. Farmland that had provided food for families for generations became too dangerous to farm.

Between 1964 and 1973, the United States carried out a covert bombing campaign in Laos that remains one of the least acknowledged tragedies of the 20th century.

By the end of it, hundreds of thousands of people in Laos had been displaced. The bombing campaign was hidden from much of the American public and even Congress, and became known as the “Secret War,” leaving Laos the most heavily bombed country per capita in history.

The bombings may have stopped, but the war didn’t simply end. Hundreds of thousands of people were forced from the places they called home and spent years in refugee camps with the hope that they would be able to rebuild their lives in a new land. Some, like my family, eventually made their way to Rhode Island, as a result of the Refugee Act of 1980 that opened a path for life in the U.S. They carried with them trauma and memories of a war that most Americans had never heard about.

For me, the Secret War is the reason I grew up where I did, why my parents spent years working in the mills and factories, and why there’s a Lao community in a small Rhode Island city.

The impact of war hasn’t disappeared. Many Southeast Asian families that came to the U.S. looking for safety have spent decades building families, small businesses, and communities, and still live with the uncertainty of detention or deportation today. In Rhode Island and across the country, families who once arrived here as refugees have found themselves, once again, fighting for the right to remain in the only home many of them have known.

Learning about my parents’ journey from Laos to Woonsocket, this slice of American history that had rarely been told, led me to create The Heart of Wattayai, an exhibit presented earlier this year at the Museum of Work & Culture in Woonsocket. The museum tells the story of the immigrants who built the city’s mills and neighborhoods.

I know now that Lao refugees belong in that story, too.

The exhibit centered on my grandmother’s extraordinary life, a story that is convenient to forget. But it was more than just her story; it was a story about Lao Americans. It connected the Secret War in Laos, refugee resettlement, mill and factory labor, detention and deportation, and Woonsocket into one continuous American story. When public institutions include all the communities in the places they call home, they tell a more complete story of a place.

Not teaching these histories allows us to believe that refugee migration is about the pursuit of the American Dream or an act of generosity on the American government’s part. It allows us to think that immigrants and refugees are outsiders arriving to America, rather than as people whose lives have already been profoundly shaped by American intervention abroad. It allows us myths like that of the “model minority” to take hold, flattening vastly different histories into a single false picture of success.

The Model Minority Myth is the narrative that all Asian Americans are universally successful and highly educated, suggesting that we do not struggle and therefore don’t need resources or public investments.

But that story only works because communities like mine disappear into a single “Asian” category. It’s a harmful narrative that ignores why many Lao Americans came to the U.S. in the first place: not as highly skilled and educated immigrants, but as refugees displaced by an American war.

The Model Minority Myth only works because communities like mine disappear into a single “Asian” category.

That is why I became an advocate for data disaggregation. Aggregated data tells one story about Asian Americans. Disaggregated data tells another. It reveals that refugee communities often experience higher rates of poverty, lower educational attainment, limited English proficiency, and poorer health outcomes than aggregated data suggest. Without that understanding, policymakers and others in power can’t see who needs resources because the data tells them no problem exists.

When I walk through my neighborhood today, I no longer see only the neighborhood where I grew up. I see a place shaped by American foreign and immigration policy, refugee resettlement, working-class labor, mutual aid, and a community determined to build a home and a place to belong.

Growing up, I thought my family’s story belonged to Laos while American history belonged to everyone else. I now understand they were always the same story.

The Lao American story is not a footnote to American history. It is a story of American war, American migration, American labor, American policy, and American democracy. We are here because America was there.

Telling that truth does not diminish America’s story. A more honest history doesn’t simply broaden who belongs in America’s story. It changes how we understand our obligations to one another. If we recognize that refugee communities exist because of our country’s decisions, then their struggles are not someone else’s story. They are part of our shared civic responsibility.

Every society runs on stories it mistakes for facts. In America, those stories shape who gets help, who gets blamed, and who is left out. Not My Narrative is a Next City podcast and essay series that debunks the pervasive myths that have been used to justify neglect, inequity, and the status quo — and elevates the people proving those myths wrong.

This week, in “Birth of a Nation vs. Truth and Reconciliation,” we dig into America’s false origin story. Check out the podcast on Apple and Spotify.

There’s a version of America’s origin story where the nation was created with a birthright claim to freedom, equality, and greatness. In this version, the Europeans who colonized this place created a land of the free and home of the brave out of thin air and fertile soil.

This is the version that has been taught in American schools for most of the last 250 years.

And then there’s the version that’s been more recently written and taught — where the country’s truest claims to bravery and strength are the formerly enslaved African Americans and immigrants who’ve had to fight to realize America’s greatness by law, rather than bloodline.

But that newer version has been deemed a threat to the older testament that claimed a superior America and white supremacy as one and the same. The question of which version is most accurate has boiled down to a debate over birthright and citizenship – who qualifies to be an American and who doesn’t, and how that debate is immutably colored by race.

It’s a debate that has extended from the nation’s “founding” in 1776 to as recently as July, when the U.S. Supreme Court had to stop a sitting president from upending fundamental citizenship rights by rendering millions of children born here as enemies of the state.

Race can’t be divorced from this debate because of the displacement of Indigenous populations and the enslavement of Africans. These were integral parts of who America was and how it operated.

The idea that America was put on earth to subjugate non-white people was so foundational to white American identity that emancipation and Reconstruction came as an existential threat. By the late 19th century, white men felt they needed a whole new rebrand.

The idea that America was put on earth to subjugate non-white people was so foundational to white American identity that emancipation and Reconstruction came as an existential threat.

Perhaps the most vivid display of this rebrand was D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. Made during what was essentially halftime for America, it helped forge a new narrative for white men who, without slavery, had lost their identity on offense and needed a new defensive plan of attack.

Adapted from Thomas Dixon Jr.’s book The Clansman, the film depicted Reconstruction as a threat to the natural order, where freed African Americans were allowed to walk the same streets and get elected to political offices that were once held exclusively for white men. Even more vulgar, Black men could now sleep with white women.

The Black characters were depicted in ravenous, savage strokes, written as unfit for government and untamed in their sexual desires. White Northerners were depicted as “carpetbaggers” who traitorously caped for undeserving Negroes. The film’s denouement arrives when the Ku Klux Klan, portrayed as noble defenders of America’s true essence, violently restores the white supremacist order.

Life seemed to imitate art, as the violence carried out against Black people in The Birth of a Nation accelerated in real time: Black towns were burned down, Black homes were looted, Black elected officials were removed by brutal force, and Black men were more routinely hunted down after being accused of raping white women.

The 14th Amendment, added to the Constitution in 1866, granted citizenship and equal protection under the law to emancipated Black people born in the United States. This and the other Reconstruction amendments afforded African Americans all the rights and privileges that, by the early 20th century, had made them a danger to white America’s rebrand.

But nothing stood in the way of that rebrand’s white supremacy roots more than the 14th Amendment’s dictum that anybody born on U.S. soil was worthy of citizenship.

Accepting that new principle meant that there was nothing special or uniquely American about being white. It rendered whiteness ordinary.

Same story, different font

On January 20, 2025, one of Donald Trump’s first actions as the newly re-elected president was to sign Executive Order 14160, which attempted to undo the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship clause. Formally titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” the executive order told federal agencies to stop recognizing citizenship for children born in the U.S. to foreign-born parents. It was a gauntlet thrown down to make good on his promise to hostilely rid the nation of undocumented immigrants.

When sued over the executive order, the Trump administration argued that the 14th Amendment didn’t mean what it said in plain language: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Instead, Trump’s legal team argued that this citizenship clause was written exclusively for formerly enslaved Black people, not literally anyone born on U.S. soil.

This argument, of course, would’ve been news to the white men behind America’s earlier Birth of a Nation rebrand. This would’ve included Trump’s early 20th-century White House predecessor Woodrow Wilson, Dixon Jr’s John Hopkins University classmate who granted the film an unprecedented screening at the White House and endorsed its message of illegitimate Black citizenship.

Ironically, the 14th Amendment was drafted in response to the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision, which held that no Black person, free or enslaved, had citizenship rights..

But it’s not clear that the Trump administration believed its own argument that the birthright citizenship clause was meant only for Black people. The many other executive orders and actions taken by Trump to erase Black people from America’s master narrative suggest otherwise.

In 2020, Congress passed a bill to rename nine U.S. Army bases named for Confederate officers, which were renamed for other military pioneers, including African Americans and women. However, in February 2025, Trump reversed this, and got around the new law by naming the bases after other historical figures who shared surnames with the original Confederate namesakes.

On March 27, 2025, Trump signed the “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order, which directed an audit of all federal monuments, statues, markers, and properties for content that “perpetuates a false reconstruction of American history.” It also directed the National Park Service to take down content that “disparages Americans past or living, including persons living in colonial times,” but to instead “focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.”

The net outcome of this was that dozens of commemorations of Black figures throughout history who fought for a more inclusionary America were struck from public sites, including the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

And, of course, there’s the all-out assault on any policy mentioning anything that even reeks of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) across the federal landscape. This has led to millions of dollars lost in jobs, grants, loans, and research used mainly to address racial disparities.

The assault has also led to an erasure of Black patriots and activists from the American story, in service of yet another rebrand of the nation’s fabled origin story, this one called Make America Great Again.

On June 30, the U.S. Supreme Court put an end to Trump’s attempted rewrite of the birthright citizenship clause, ruling in a 5-4 decision against his executive order. The majority leaned heavily on the scholarship of John Hopkins University historian Martha S. Jones, author of Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (affiliate link) for its position.

The fact is that birthright citizenship was not accidentally universal. It was deliberately designed to be universal, precisely because Black activists understood how fragile a narrow, race-specific right would be.

“[Trump’s]’ ‘historical’ account is far worse than middling: it omits, and thus misrepresents, the historical forces that led the Framers to enshrine birthright citizenship in the Fourteenth Amendment,” wrote Jones and Northwestern University historian Kate Masur in their amici brief in the case. “Petitioners insist that the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment served ‘one pervading purpose’: ‘to confer citizenship on the newly freed slaves and their children.’ This claim is fundamentally incorrect.”

While it was a victory for the more expansive and inclusionary version of America’s story, the decision was just one vote away from returning to the exclusionary version. Justice Clarence Thomas accepted the Trump administration’s tortured logic about the 14th Amendment only applying to formerly enslaved Black people and wrote a 91-page dissent in its defense.

But nothing in SCOTUS’s own case history supports that logic. One of the first tests of the birthright citizenship clause was the 1898 U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark case, in which the Supreme Court held that a man born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrant parents was a constitutionally protected citizen by birthright.

The fact is that birthright citizenship was not accidentally universal. It was deliberately designed to be universal, precisely because Black activists understood how fragile a narrow, race-specific right would be. As Justice Ketanji Jackson noted in her concurrence, hundreds of African Americans deliberately strategized around a universalist notion of citizenship for all races and ethnicities during the 19th century Colored Conventions Movement.

Justice Jackson also pointed to the 1866 Civil Rights Act, where Sen. Lyman Trumbull withdrew an early draft that limited its scope to African Americans and instead opted for one that also covered the children of Chinese and Romani immigrants.

President Andrew Johnson vetoed the bill because it affirmed birthright citizenship for “the Chinese of the Pacific States, Indians subject to taxation, the people called gypsies, as well as the entire race designated as blacks.” Congress overrode his veto.

While The Birth of a Nation was just a rebrand, a retelling of an obsolete story in a fancier font, the 14th Amendment was a departure from that story – a reimagining of America, or, if being generous, an establishing factor for the America that the Founding Fathers aspired to on paper.

The rebrand’s authors want to tell a story about America’s greatness that forgets those people whose struggles made citizenship something actually worth fighting for. That erasure is dangerous, but, as Justice Jackson wrote in her concurrence, is not the only danger.

“The distortion of historical facts,” wrote Jackson, “retellings that reimagine and repurpose past events to lend credence to misbegotten aims — may be an even greater threat.”

Sponsored content from The People’s Practice. Sponsored content policy

In 1960, Robert P. Madison designed the Medical Associates Building on Cleveland’s East Side as a space for Black doctors who wanted to serve the community but who’d been excluded from the city’s medical institutions. It was the first multi-story healthcare facility for doctors of color in Ohio, according to its architect — the state’s first licensed Black architect. And it still stands not only as a symbol of the Black community’s roots and resilience, but also as a signpost for future generations who want to build on its legacy.

Today, it houses the ThirdSpace Reading Room, a community gathering space and bookstore that honors that legacy in its mission: “To create the next generation of free thinkers.” The space is owned and operated by ThirdSpace Action Lab, a grassroots solutions studio created to disrupt the cycle of disinvestment and displacement in communities of color.

This storied history of the Medical Associates Building is among the highlighted destinations on the digital and interactive map from Chocolate City Cleveland, a multimedia “time machine” project from ThirdSpace that documents the history of Black Cleveland to “inspire new visions for Cleveland’s Chocolate City Corridor.”

Mordecai Cargill, ThirdSpace’s co-founder and creative officer, enthusiastically shares the project as one of many counterweights against “the Blank Slate” narrative that dominates community development in the area — and indeed in communities of color nationwide.

“The stories we tell ourselves shape how people interact with a place,” says Cargill. “It’s important for us to tell the right story.”

According to the Blank Slate myth, disinvested neighborhoods (predominantly within communities of color) are effectively an empty canvas for outsiders to test new ideas, when in fact these neighborhoods have living histories, community assets, and residents with their own visions for what their neighborhoods need. Blank Slate is one of 11 dominant narratives that uphold structural racism in the sector, according to research from The People’s Practice, an initiative and digital platform powered by ThirdSpace that builds a more equitable future through anti-racist community development practices and collective action.

The People’s Practice’s research takes a keen interest in how narratives shape development strategies specifically because they inform how developers interpret problems—or choose their solutions.

“The more you say a thing,” says Cargill, “the more it can shape our understanding of reality.”

Through the Blank Slate lens, developers can enter communities and “revitalize” them without consideration for what was there before or the consequences of replacing it.

“One of the things that I find really interesting and challenging about the Blank Slate narrative is that you’re making an agreement that there was nothing there to begin with,” says Lex Draper Garcia, director of community engagement and programs at Black Bottom Archives, a project that documents and retells the story of the Black Bottom neighborhood in Detroit that was erased by urban renewal. “That is not the case for many neighborhoods where this narrative is being applied.”

Both Black Bottom Archives and Chocolate City Cleveland offer a direct rebuttal to that narrative by affirming these rich histories and employing them to re-root a place-based perspective.

“If I live in a neighborhood that’s described as dangerous all the time, then perhaps I start to feel less comfortable going outside,” says Cargill. “But if I start to hear my neighborhood described as a place that my grandparents looked forward to moving into, perhaps that changes the way that I walk down the street.”

That shift not only serves to preserve what remains, but also to create space for anti-racist community development to intervene in what ultimately gets built and for whom.

“Perhaps the reason why narrative is so important is that it touches everything,” says Luis Ortega, director and founder of Storytellers for Change. “Narrative is not just a communication strategy; it’s also a policymaking strategy, a grantmaking strategy, also a community engagement strategy.”

With The People’s Practice, Ortega produced an anti-racist community development narratives toolkit structured to guide practitioners through identifying the narratives that operate in their personal lives before connecting them to a systemic level, beginning with their racist origins.

“The toolkit really invites anyone who cares about community development to center the role that stories and historical narratives play in how we think about what it means to engage in the field,” says Ortega. “Can we understand the historical patterns that have led us to the systems and structures that generate predictable inequity, injustice, harm, and trauma? If we don’t see the pattern, how are we going to intervene?”

The work of abandoning these harmful narratives for restorative ones is twofold: For practitioners from outside the communities they serve, the process requires owning up to harm, plus conceding space for communities to inform what comes next.

“If the Blank Slate narrative is what currently dominates how we think about development, particularly in communities of color,” asks Ortega, then, “what would be not only the mirror-opposite of that narrative but the restorative version of it?”

Envisioning these alternatives is difficult work, especially when dominant false narratives limit our imaginations for what’s possible. That also goes for the communities these narratives harmed.

“These communities experiencing displacement or disinvestment are also experiencing extraction and exclusion,” says Ortega. “Asking folks to talk about history — while also asking them to imagine a future together — creates some tension. But I’ve watched folks create some kind of healing by being included.”

That’s ultimately the goal of narrative shifting, says Ortega: Acknowledging the harm — and doing the work of remedying it — generates healing.

“The goal is not difficulty,” he says. “The goal is healing.”

Ultimately, projects like Black Bottom Archives and Chocolate City Cleveland not only preserve the past for the communities, but also use the past as a point of departure to inspire a new vision for the future.

“We have examples that we can remix and use as inspiration,” says Cargill. “It’s not just about community development. It’s really about how we live together as neighbors.”

Learn more about The People’s Practice

The People’s Practice is an initiative and digital platform, powered by ThirdSpace Action Lab, building a more equitable future through anti-racist community development practices and collective action. Explore its research, community stories and tools at thepeoplespractice.org.

There are so many reasons for people to love LA’s Little Tokyo.

There’s the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center, with its famous Japanese garden, and Nisei Week, the annual cultural festival that’s drawn visitors to the neighborhood since 1934.

There’s Little Tokyo’s small businesses, like Fugetsu-Do, a confectionery and bakery famous for its mochi, owned and operated by the same family since 1903. There are the seniors who sit at the same coffee shop together every morning at 7 o’clock.

For about a hundred investors scattered across the Los Angeles area, these are just some of the reasons they decided to pool their savings and form the Little Tokyo Community Impact Fund. Their goal: to begin acquiring commercial real estate to protect their beloved long-time local businesses and third places from the market forces threatening them.

“It’s an ongoing struggle with affordability,” says Midori Mizuhara, an LA-based planner and urban designer who had supported Little Tokyo businesses in her previous work and now sits on the fund’s board. “Developers or outside owners are buying buildings, jacking up the rent, and legacy businesses really are under attack.”

After raising nearly a million dollars through community investments of as little as $1,000, the fund acquired its first building last year — a two-story commercial building on East 1st Street, in the heart of historic Little Tokyo, just a few doors down from Fugetsu-Do.

“If we don’t own our own land, if we don’t own our space, we don’t really have as much say in the future of the community as we would like,” says Kristin Fukushima, executive director at Little Tokyo Community Council.

“Our community just historically has not owned a lot of the neighborhood. And that goes back to everything from the Alien Land Law Act to World War II incarceration, to just all these other things.”

History repeating

It’s not the first time longtime Little Tokyo community organizer Bill Watanabe has led a band of local activists to protect Little Tokyo from outside forces — including the city itself.

In 1980, he worked with Yasuko Sakamoto and Evelyn Yoshimura to found the Little Tokyo Service Center with the aim of providing “linguistically and culturally sensitive social services to the Little Tokyo community and the broader Japanese American community in Southern California.” Watanabe was selected as executive director.

As the decade went by, the trio saw many affordable housing units lost in Little Tokyo, some to clear the way for mere parking lots.

Just north of East 1st Street in Little Tokyo, the three-story San Pedro Firm Building has a celebrated history as a home built by and for Japanese immigrants in the early 20th century. The city ended up acquiring the building in 1974 and, in 1986, the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency announced plans to demolish it as part of a $200 million expansion of the LA Civic Center. But many low-income Japanese American seniors were still living there. Led by the Little Tokyo Service Center, the community fought back, getting a city council resolution passed to preserve the building as low-income housing.

By 1989, Little Tokyo Service Center acquired the San Pedro Firm Building, marking the nonprofit’s first venture into real estate. Since then, the center has amassed a portfolio of more than 1,400 affordable housing units and 130,000 square-feet of commercial or community space across the LA region.

Watanabe retired from the nonprofit back in 2012. But he just can’t stop thinking and talking about how to protect Little Tokyo from forces that would displace so much of what makes it so special in his eyes.

Back in 2018, he recalls to Next City, “There was a small group of us, about seven or eight people, just folks who were active in the community and concerned about gentrification impacting our community and what it looks like. We got together at a condo in Little Tokyo and just started chatting.”

The big ticket item on everyone’s minds at the time was a major new transit station, part of the Regional Connector, that had been in the works for several years. The project was connecting and reconfiguring three major light rail lines into two, while allowing for faster and more frequent service to and through downtown LA and out as far as Pomona, East LA, Santa Monica or Long Beach.

The new station in Little Tokyo was already projected to be the second-busiest transit hub in all of LA County. And it was going to be right on East 1st Street, directly across from the Japanese American National Museum.

“Our concern was once the Regional Connector, Little Tokyo Station opens up, it’s going to raise rents, raise property values, more speculation and all of that,” Watanabe says.

Speculation around the Regional Connector had already started ramping up around when the project broke ground in 2014. It added to existing real estate pressures on the neighborhood, given Little Tokyo’s proximity to the LA Arts District and the rest of Downtown LA.

Cosmos, a beloved local dive bar and karaoke lounge, closed in May 2014 after a battle with its landlord, who wanted to clear it out and renovate the space for another business. Aoi, a popular lunch spot that had been operating at the same location since two sisters from Japan established it in 1976, closed just one month later after its landlord also ordered it to vacate for renovations.

In August 2014, Brunswig Square, ​​a prominent eight-story, 140,000 square-foot office and retail building in Little Tokyo was sold for $33 million. A little over a year later, it sold again for $60 million. In the turmoil around the ownership changes, Yakitori joint Kokekokko lost its lease in Brunswig Square, closing for good in January 2016.

Watanabe and his partners considered whether Little Tokyo Service Center could work toward acquiring more of the smaller historic commercial properties in Little Tokyo, especially along East 1st and East 2nd Streets. It had already acquired several historic properties in the area for use as affordable housing with ground-floor storefronts.

“But their mission was not small business,” Watanabe says. “Their mission was affordable housing and community economic development. So they felt another organization focused on helping the small businesses would be an ally, but not necessarily something Little Tokyo Service Center would want to expand its mission to do.”

Watanabe’s crew could work with Little Tokyo Service Center as their property manager, but the group would have to come up with their own way to raise money and acquire properties.

“We kicked around different ideas,” Watanabe says. “Maybe a land trust or a co-op. Then we came up with this idea of an investment fund, kind of like a REIT.”

Found a lawyer in a hopeful place

Created by federal legislation in 1960, REITs — real estate investment trusts — are tax-advantaged investment vehicles that allow groups of investors to own property together, primarily for the purpose of making a profit. According to the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts, REITs currently own more than 570,000 properties in the U.S.

Some REITs are traded publicly on stock markets, while others are private investment vehicles only open to institutions or individuals with enough personal wealth. Many of these trusts specialize in specific kinds of real estate, like housing, hotels, healthcare, shopping malls, or data centers.

But since the primary purpose of a REIT is to generate profits for investors, they often end up doing things like evicting tenants at higher rates than small landlords, or raising rents at higher rates in certain markets compared to others.

A REIT wasn’t going to be quite the right fit for what Watanabe and his longtime community activist friends were looking to do.

“We would provide a modest return for the investor, but keep some of the money to help the small businesses,” Watanabe says. “We thought there might be enough people who don’t need to get top dollar on their investment, but would feel good about helping the community. So we took that idea to the community.”

They organized three workshops — two in Little Tokyo, one in the nearby city of Gardena, where a significant portion of the population is of Japanese descent. At each workshop, they talked about the gentrification taking hold of Little Tokyo, made their pitch, and collected pledges for investments.

“We pitched a very rough model that we could form the fund, the fund could purchase a building, that building could then be refinanced to purchase a second building and eventually have enough commercial real estate that we could have an impact on gentrification,” Watanabe says. “The response was pretty favorable. Now these are not millionaires, these are not deep-pocketed people. These are normal folks. But I think the key ingredient was that they have a concern and a heart feeling for Little Tokyo. They want to see Little Tokyo survive.”

Fukushima, from Little Tokyo Community Council, invited attorney Brett Heeger to attend one of the workshops in Little Tokyo. At the time Heeger was working at a boutique securities law firm — the kind whose clients include tech startups, TV and film production houses, and real estate syndicates who want to raise capital from family, friends and other private investors. There’s a whole menu of legal mechanisms available to do so.

But Heeger had seen how emerging groups like the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, Oakland Community Land Trust, and E.G. Woode in Chicago were starting to use some of these mechanisms to raise capital from their networks of followers who shared their values and vision for an economy that looked very different from the current mainstream economy.

After hearing the pitch from Watanabe and the crew, Heeger stepped in to offer his expertise.

“I was so naive,” Watanabe says. “I figured, how hard can this be? We’ll just ask people to put in money and buy a property. And so Brett [Heeger] had to tell us the investment field is very highly regulated. It makes sense, I had just never thought of it at the time.”

Protecting purpose

From a legal perspective, one of the big questions was choosing the right legal entity to incorporate.

Conventional REITs or other trusts are typically set up to prioritize profits above all else. REIT board members or managers can be held liable for making decisions that lead to lower returns. A building could be owned by a family for one or more generations, and the family could place it into a trust for tax purposes, but eventually that trust may be forced to sell that property because it’s a conventional trust required to perform its fiduciary duty to maximize profit for the family.

“We considered all the different entity types,” says Heeger, now a partner at Impact Matters Law LLP. “Should this be a nonprofit? Because nonprofits certainly can hold real estate and you can bring in [community] investors through debt.”

In 2010, Maryland became the first state to pass legislation creating a “benefit corporation,” a kind of hybrid legal entity that blends aspects of both for-profit businesses and nonprofits. Over 40 states have since passed legislation creating some kind of hybrid legal entity along these lines. Chicago’s E.G. Woode and all its member businesses are incorporated in the state of Illinois as “low-profit, limited-liability corporations,” or L3Cs. California has the similar “social purpose corporation,” or SPC.

These hybrid entities are different from “Certified B Corporations,” which are for-profit businesses that meet certain “high, verified standards of social and environmental performance” as determined by the nonprofit B Lab. Incorporating or reincorporating as one of these hybrid legal entities is one way companies can satisfy the legal accountability requirement to become a certified B-corp.

Little Tokyo Community Impact Fund eventually incorporated as a social purpose corporation in the state of California. As a social purpose corporation, the fund’s board of directors must consider the fund’s social purpose in addition to shareholder profits when making business decisions.

The primary social purpose of the fund, as stated in its articles of incorporation, is to “contribute to community revitalization and cultural preservation in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, and among the broader Japanese community in southern California.”

“It gives the board the authority to make broader decisions that are not solely profit maximizing and instead take into account this special social purpose feature,” Heeger says.

Being a social purpose corporation means, for example, if presented with an opportunity to sell a building, the board of Little Tokyo Community Impact Fund may decline to do so if it believes selling the property doesn’t support the fund’s social purpose, even if the property could be sold at a profit. If the board does decide to sell a property, it’s under no obligation to distribute the proceeds to investors — it could instead use those proceeds to subsidize rents or to make another acquisition.

And unlike nonprofits, Heeger says, SPCs can issue ownership shares to raise funds from investors. Also known as equity, it’s a more flexible investment offering that comes with the benefit of being perceived more favorably later by a potential bank or other lender.

“The ability to offer people equity compared to only debt is really meaningful,” Heeger says. “It’s patient in a way that debt is not. Especially when you’re in the real estate world, being able to not have debt on your books can give you a pathway to other resources.”

The perfect buy

To help ensure it would be a multi-generational effort, Little Tokyo Community Impact Fund opened up its offering in 2019 to two classes of investors: Class B shareholders, targeting older generations with years of retirement savings already piled up, and Class A shareholders, targeting younger professionals and activists who are still saving up for retirement. The minimum investment for Class B was $10,000, while Class A had a minimum investment of just $1,000. Only California residents were eligible to invest.

And then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

“It put the kibosh on all of our outreach, our gatherings,” Watanabe says. “You can do a Zoom meeting with potential investors, but it’s really hard to get them to cut a check after the Zoom meeting ends.”

Little Tokyo Community Impact Fund started actively selling shares again in 2022, eventually raising almost a million dollars from nearly 100 investors.

That doesn’t sound like much, but it was enough for Watanabe to start telling brokers and contacts around the neighborhood that Little Tokyo Community Impact Fund was officially in the market for its first acquisition. The first offer they made on a building, they were outbid at the last minute. Other potential opportunities came up, but upon looking into the buildings, there was just too much deferred maintenance for a small, scrappy, all-volunteer group to take on.

In the spring of 2025, a friend of Watanabe’s was offered a building to purchase. She wasn’t interested, but she directed the broker to the impact fund.

The building was one of eleven parcels on the north side of the 300-block of East 1st Street. Nearly all the buildings on that side of the historic street were built between 1896 and 1934. The five western-most buildings — including the one presented for sale to the fund — back up into the San Pedro Firm Building, just around the corner.

If you needed to point to a block that defined Little Tokyo’s most lively era — when Japanese Americans moved south after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and the neighborhood’s population boomed — this is that block. The National Park Service designated this block as part of the Little Tokyo Historic District National Historic Landmark. Over the years, Little Tokyo Service Center had already acquired two of the larger historic buildings along the block, preserving them as affordable housing and storefronts.

It’s the block where the iconic lunch spot Aoi used to be. It’s the block where Fugetsu-Do remains.

The building needed some work, but not a lot. Anxious not to be outbid this time, the board of Little Tokyo Community Impact Fund quickly agreed to make an offer of $3.8 million. That was far more than they had pooled together. To find the rest, Watanabe appealed to a local community foundation, which has chosen to remain anonymous.

“All they can say is no,” Watanabe says. “The community foundation board members are all people who are very familiar with Little Tokyo. And so I pitched the building. … The history and just the idea of not letting an outside buyer come in and snatch it was a strong enough motivation for them to say, ‘we want to help you.’”

The fund closed escrow on the building in August 2025. The foundation put in more than $3 million in the form of a very flexible, very-low interest, very patient loan, also known as a program-related investment. Little Tokyo Community Impact Fund only needed to put in about half the funds it had raised from investors, leaving the rest available for a future acquisition.

What’s next

Little Tokyo Community Impact Fund discloses its structure and purpose to every prospective investor. In addition to being a legal requirement of raising capital in this way, disclosure also helps weed out anyone who might instead be looking for an investment as a way to get rich. The fund’s board members are all elected from and by its investors; per its bylaws, at least a third of the board must be elected from the fund’s Class A shareholders.

Chaired by Watanabe, the board of Little Tokyo Community Impact Fund meets monthly, usually at the offices of Little Tokyo Service Center, on East 3rd Street in Casa Heiwa, one of the nonprofit’s many buildings across the region.

Still, the founders of Little Tokyo Community Impact Fund saw it fit to add an additional layer to help protect its mission. Its board includes a non-voting seat allocated to a nonprofit observer who can attend, observe, and engage in board meetings. Right now, that’s Fukushima from Little Tokyo Community Council.

“It’s to make sure they don’t go off the rails, don’t do things they shouldn’t be doing and then also just make sure there’s like a really clear connection back to Little Tokyo,” Fukushima says. “They really wanted to think about the long term future of the organization, and while everyone involved at the founding were community-based people, they could imagine there could be a time where maybe the folks on the board were less connected to the neighborhood and the community and the history and the mission of why [Little Tokyo Community Impact Fund] exists.”

Mizuhara, the planner and a Class A board member, chairs the fund’s marketing committee. She’s been thinking about how to bring on more investors during the next capital raise. She suspects it will be a little easier than before, since there are now more groups using some kind of community investor model — like LA Más, just a few miles away in Northeast LA.

At the University of Miami, the new Community Ownership Learning & Action Lab has mapped more than 300 examples of community ownership vehicles across the country, holding around $10 billion in real estate.

“When I first invested, I didn’t know as much about land trusts or the impact fund model, and since I joined it’s just proliferated nationally,” Mizuhara says. “I’ve just heard so many more impact funds starting and people pooling their money and land trusts. Even just in LA, there’s so many more groups that are doing this.”

Meanwhile, the board is keeping its ear to the ground for the fund’s next potential acquisition.

“If you think about 1st Street as an example or 2nd street, every single one of those buildings, almost every single one, is owned by a different person,” Fukushima says. “So it’s a different person or a different family or sometimes a company, and they have their own timeline and considerations for when they might decide to put it up on the market, which means it’s pretty hard to predict.”

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.

HUD Investigates Wells Fargo for Pledging To Increase Black Homeownership

In 2012, Wells Fargo reached a deal with the Department of Justice over its practice of offering higher interest rates and fees to Black borrowers and steering them into predatory subprime loans. After more than a decade of programs intended to increase Black homeownership (and improve its public image), the bank is now facing an investigation from Trump’s Department of Housing and Urban Development, led by Scott Turner.

According to Wall Street Journal, in 2017 the bank announced it would commit $60 billion in loans over the next 10 years to Black borrowers. HUD is alleging that Wells Fargo’s attempts to increase Black homeownership were illegal and in violation of the Fair Housing Act.

Supreme Court To Rule on Climate Change Liability

The Supreme Court will rule on a lawsuit brought by the city of Boulder, Colorado, against oil companies Exxon Mobil and Suncor. Boulder is asking for financial compensation from the oil companies for the effects of climate change on the basis that they concealed the impact.

The decision could have an impact on numerous similar climate cases being brought by local governments across the country, Grist reports. Exxon and Suncor attorneys asked the Supreme Court to take up the case, likely because the court’s conservative makeup could work in their favor.

The Supreme Court could send the case back to Colorado to decide, either because the justices determine the case belongs at the state level or because of a split decision; Justice Samuel Alito has recused himself, making a split decision more likely, and SCOTUSblog found the justices’ reactions to lawsuit mixed.

New Bipartisan Permitting Law Would Speed Up Both Fossil Fuels and Clean Energy

On Sept. 30, the Senate introduced the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026, a bill meant to speed up environmental review around large infrastructure projects, which could include both fossil fuel and clean energy plants. The bill would exempt certain projects from environmental review altogether, including pipeline repairs and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers projects with federal investments under $50 million, according to Bipartisan Policy Center.

While the bill was crafted by elected officials on both sides of the aisle, it has raised alarm among some environmentalists, according to The Land Desk. The bill would make it easier and faster to permit data centers as well as the fossil fuels that power them — although “Abundance” advocates believe that the law will mostly lead to a buildout of clean energy to power those data centers.

Hundreds of Thousands of Immigrants Will Be Kicked off Medicaid

The 2025 federal tax law signed by President Trump that cut over $1 trillion from Medicaid and Medicare could lead to hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants being disenrolled as of this month, according to KFF Health News.

The Congressional Budget Office said that 100,000 more immigrants will go without health insurance by 2034 as a result of the law. And even more immigrants will be removed from their Affordable Care Act and Medicare plans next year as a result of the law.

Among other measures, the law implements work requirements that the Congressional Budget Office said would increase the uninsured population by 5 million in 2034. Despite these cuts being framed as austerity, the 2025 federal tax law will add an astonishing $4.2 trillion to the national deficit over the same time span.

MORE NEWS

• Nearly a year in, universal childcare Is reshaping work for moms in New Mexico. The 74 Million

• Chicago’s restaurant industry was struggling. Midway Blitz made it worse. Chicago Reader

• SNAP cuts pose financial threat to NYC’s bodegas. The City Reporter

• How city-funded organizing helped Evanston tenants take on private-equity landlord. Shelterforce

• Trump is gutting the Endangered Species Act. These 10 species show what’s at stake. Grist

• After more than 170 years, Siletz Tribe to reclaim ceded land. Underscore Native News

• Third circuit: AI training of copyrighted material not fair use. Courthouse News Service

• California invests in the local journalists who help communities stay connected. The LA Local

OPPORTUNITIES & RESOURCES

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

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

• Max and Victoria Dreyfus Foundation is considering grant requests from community-based nonprofits including museums, cultural and performing arts programs, schools and hospitals, youth, senior, and disability programs, environmental and wildlife protection. Apply by Nov. 10.

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

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

Candice McFarland used to eat salads every other day. But even though the U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials declared last month that the cyclospora outbreak was over, she still hasn’t eaten lettuce from a grocery store for several months, to avoid potential exposure to the microscopic parasite.

“I kind of resorted to eating more unhealthy foods,” McFarland says. She and her husband, Gordon, opened G&C Meat Market last year on North Galvez Street. The meat market is the only Black-owned corner store in the Upper Ninth Ward to offer healthy groceries for residents.

Designed as a food oasis in an area with few supermarkets, G&C also serves fresh produce, including mustard greens and lettuce. But after the cyclospora outbreak, the couple didn’t know if they should continue selling their popular salad greens.

“There’s a lot of people that are local to the area who walk to the store,” McFarland says. “If those neighbors don’t get something healthy at G&C, they might not get it at all.”

When outbreaks like this occur, the already-scarce fresh fruit and vegetables become most scarce in food deserts, says Shannon Coleman, associate professor and consumer safety specialist at the LSU AgCenter.

The official cyclosporiasis season began on May 1, when public health agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), started tracking an outbreak of cyclospora cases across the United States. Consumers reported exposure after eating iceberg lettuce contaminated by a waterborne parasite. The lettuce was traced back to Taylor Farms de Mexico, which supplies produce to major United States restaurant chains and grocery stores. On July 18, Taylor Farms voluntarily suspended the sale of all iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico.

Several other bacterial pathogen outbreaks have been recorded this year. Brussels sprouts, shell eggs, and jalapeños have been reported to be contaminated with Salmonella, while frozen blueberries and raw dairy have been contaminated with E. coli.

Though some people are still wary of all lettuce, other New Orleanians turned to local produce as a way of eating healthy without the worries of pathogen outbreaks. And the city’s urban gardeners, farmers, and food access advocates have been working to meet the need.

Creating our own regional foods systems

It’s been a rough summer for New Orleans lettuce. First, there was heightened demand for it; no one could grow enough. Then came record summer Louisiana heat. “It was super hot, and [the city] wasn’t getting enough rain,” says Ashley Webb, co-owner of Barcelo Gardens, an Upper 9th Ward community garden. Local lettuce reacted by stopping leaf production and sending up flowers, also known as “bolting.”

Finally, in late September, lettuce was redistributed to the garden through the Agra Aquaculture Center of Excellence, which is operated by the Louisiana Chamber of Commerce and supplies several small local stores, including Barcelo Gardens. Last weekend, Barcelo Gardens announced that it “finally” has lettuce again

When news of the cyclospora outbreak started spreading nationwide, Webb saw increased skepticism from customers who regularly purchased produce from grocery store chains. She and other gardeners and food advisors across New Orleans also saw a spike in interest in what local gardens had to offer.

“People were asking a lot of questions and wanted to learn more about local shopping,” Webb says. She was happy to point people toward the work they’ve done over the past decade to broaden access to fresh produce, through Barcelo Garden itself, its storefront, and through community farmers markets organized with other local vendors — all which have expanded in recent months to meet the needs of New Orleanians across town.

In some ways, it seems like the crisis pushed everyone to think bigger: trading starter plants, starting campaigns to secure farmland, distributing more weekly food boxes, and expanding market locations to traditional food deserts in New Orleans East and the 9th Ward.

“We’re working hard to really build our local food system because regional food systems are one of the best ways to avoid issues like [the cyclospora outbreak],” says Samantha Fleurinor, regional director of the New Orleans Food Policy Council.

Most people are asking for ways to become stronger food policy advocates on a municipal and federal level, Fleurinor says. The council has been working hard to secure more state and federal funding for farmers while nudging constituents to talk to their Congresspeople about funding public health initiatives.

“At a local level, we’re trying to ensure that the urban agriculture program remains strong,” she says.

Four years ago, the NOLA Food Policy Council, alongside Sprout NOLA and the Greater New Orleans Growers Alliance launched the “A Greener New Orleans” (AGNO) campaign, to support local farmers and overall food security across the parish.

A liaison hired by the organizations supported local growers navigating the city’s policies to access farm land. “With an infrastructure that is more supportive to urban agriculture, [farmers] are going to be able to have more options to grow their own food and have access to locally grown food.”

How New Orleans East became a food desert

The McFarlands know the scarcities well. After a day of work in the Upper 9th Ward, they head home to New Orleans East, which is classified as a food desert by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

New Orleans East has only two supermarkets: Rouses at 9701 Chef Menteur Hwy. and Walmart at 6000 Bullard Ave. When fresh food crises hit, neighborhood residents struggled disproportionately, experts say.

Residents in the East that relied on fast food were hit harder by the contaminated iceberg lettuce, which was used in Taco Bell products. Dollar stores and other non-supermarkets were also slower to pull tainted products from shelves, which expanded the window of exposure. And the few local gardeners selling lettuce in the East were almost instantly sold out, leaving many people without access to anything green and fresh.

The history of The East shows how neighborhoods can move in and out of food-desert status, after disasters like Hurricane Katrina in 2005 or because of economic downfalls, like Louisiana’s 1980s oil bust.

Megan Perry vividly remembers the East before Katrina. Perry and her family turned to Schweggmann Brothers Giant Supermarket “for literally everything” before its closing in 1999.

The East was also home to Winn Dixie, Walmart, A&P (Atlantic and Pacific) Supermarket, and several other grocery store options.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, major fast-food chains, including McDonald’s, Popeye’s and Taco Bell, opened in the community, like other American suburbs. In 1980, white people made up the majority of the population in the East, at 54% of roughly 77,000 residents. In 1986, the New Orleans East oil bust exacerbated job loss and halted economic development, reducing the predominately white population.

By a decade later, the East’s population had switched to 61% Black. In response, remaining white residents started migrating to St. Tammany and Jefferson Parish and other areas in southeast Louisiana with fewer Black people. During the 2000s, the East became a mecca for Black middle-class and upper-class residents. The suburban community also had a large Vietnamese population that first migrated to Village de L’Est in 1975, after then-Archbishop of New Orleans Phillip Hannan sponsored 1,000 Vietnamese families to settle there after the Fall of Saigon.

The East’s multiethnic community produced a plethora of local businesses and family-owned grocery stores across the area. Then in 2005, the levees broke, changing the food landscape.

After nearly all of the East flooded in 2005, in the wake of Katrina, many supermarkets and food stores left rather than rebuild. While fast-food restaurants fixed up their properties and stayed, residents were left with far less access to healthier food options.

According to a NewsOne survey in 2011, six years after Katrina, New Orleans was ranked as the number one worst urban food desert in the nation. Pre-Katrina, New Orleans had more than 35 supermarkets. While today’s citywide total is estimated to be between 30 and 40, close to the pre-Katrina numbers, the stores are bunched together into neighborhoods that recovered better from the flooding, with only two staying open in New Orleans East.

Food boxes and farmers markets serve as alternatives

Some community-minded gardens have tried to address post-Katrina healthy-food gaps through food-box delivery. Grow Dat Youth Farm, a nonprofit agricultural program created to empower young people (ages 15 to 21) through growing food, prepares weekly food distribution boxes that can be picked up or delivered to consumers around the City Park area, with 50% discounts offered to SNAP recipients.

Beyond urban agriculture, Grow Dat students take a class called “Market Bill,” which analyzes how race and class affects access to healthy food. As they study the ways that lack of food access overlaps with racial and class oppression, the class starts becoming a life lesson, exploring ways to shape policy, says farm manager Leo Gorman. “Young people are dissecting across their own differences and life experiences and crafting solutions.”

The youth are also working on solutions to Grow Dat’s own processes, he says. For instance, residents from food-insecure areas face hurdles picking up the farm’s food boxes because of a lack of cars and mass transportation. “We’re thinking of new ways to address [those barriers], such as new drop-offs down the road,” Gorman says.

Other residents visit local farmers’ markets to buy pesticide-free goods.

Brian Baskin, director of markets at the nonprofit Crescent City Farmers’ Market, saw a slight uptick in attendance. “There’s an increased interest in fresh greens particularly with the cyclospora outbreak,” he says. The salmonella outbreak resulted in the residents scouting other goods, including eggs and jalapeños, he says.

Some local vendors have faced challenges because some people are nervous about eating any produce, Baskin says. But the Crescent City Farmers Market has a strict farm-to-table policy, where produce and meats must come from small businesses or farms within a 100-mile radius.

Though the Crescent City Farmers Market is now limited to three locations: Uptown, Mid-City and City Park, the market is also hoping to establish more market sites in geographically isolated regions of the city with limited transportation, including New Orleans East and the 9th Ward.

Few buses run regularly to the city from New Orleans East. While the average Orleans Parish resident can reach roughly 33% of the parish’s jobs within an hour using public transportation, that number decreases to 5% in New Orleans East.

The G&C Meat Market was also established with bus riders in mind, because most customers rely on public transit, the McFarlands says. “It was important for us to be located on a bus line,” Candice McFarland says. “For [many] residents, we’re the only place to purchase food.”

Sponsored content from BlueHub Loan Fund. Sponsored content policy

When basketball player-turned-housing-developer Terry Harris met Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, he praised her housing platform. Bass’s very first executive directive enabled Harris to take on his biggest project yet and build workforce housing.

Executive Directive No. 1 (ED-1) — issued in late 2022, revised in 2024, and passed as city code in 2025 — fast-tracks permits and approvals for temporary shelters and 100% affordable housing developments. This means bypassing extra reviews like City Council hearings and neighborhood outreach meetings. The result is a dramatic impact on the time and money projects spend in predevelopment, which can “expand what’s possible” for new affordable housing, says Karen Kelleher, president of BlueHub Loan Fund.

BlueHub Loan Fund is a nonprofit community development financial institution (CDFI) that finances real estate-related projects that benefit low-income people and communities. It backed Harris’s firm, Visionary Developments, with a $10.4 million construction loan and frequently works with emerging developers.

Kelleher calls ED-1 a model for the ways local and state governments can support affordable housing development, especially when federal subsidies are scarce.

ED-1’s expedited process makes the whole deal “much more straightforward, much less costly, much faster,” Kelleher says.

And that reshapes what it takes to become an affordable housing developer.

“It’s allowed a developer like myself to utilize a platform to take a really substantial leap from where I had come from,” says Harris, recounting his conversation with Bass. Harris played in the NBA’s G League, and his brother and business partner, Tobias Harris, plays for the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs, though Harris stressed that he “didn’t come from a generational background of having a father or a grandfather as a developer.”

Terry Harris had been planning a smaller market-rate development in the city when he heard about ED-1. He changed gears to build the Court Residences, his first affordable housing project.

Visionary Developments broke ground on the seven-story Court Residences in August 2025. It will include 189 units of workforce housing in the historic — and increasingly expensive — Echo Park neighborhood.

ED-1 projects have to be fully rent-restricted, though up to a fifth of the units can go to households at 120% of area median income as long as the rest are at 80% or below. Harris plans 80% of Court Residences’s 189 units as rent-restricted to serve households making 80% of the area median income. A small portion will serve 50% AMI, and the rest at 120% AMI. He plans on making use of vouchers to add affordability to about half the units and expects the building to be ready for tenants in August 2027.

Harris has since begun work on two more affordable developments in the area.

“It just made more sense in terms of the needs of Los Angeles, the streamlined approvals, the security of knowing that your plans will be approved,” Harris says.

How ED-1 changes the math

Kelleher estimates that ED-1 saved the Court Residences about 18 months in predevelopment. As a lender for affordable developments including the Court Residences, Kelleher says she’s seen projects take two years and $1 million to get through zoning hearings and permit approvals.

“Affordable housing is a math problem that just doesn’t work,” she says. “So solutions like this are saying ‘we have to do something different.’”

Now Harris and his team can finance construction with no additional subsidies, Kelleher says, like the usual need for the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). Court Residences’ development has been financed so far with senior debt from J.P. Morgan’s Community Development Banking division and loans from BlueHub and the California Municipal Finance Authority. That simplified financing means fewer cooks in the kitchen, says Kelleher.

“For every issue that comes up in a deal, if you have seven different funders, that’s seven people you might need to make an exception for or work out a resolution for,” she says.

Harris says Court Residences’ site at 1540 W Court Street was originally zoned for 48 units, which would have a “drastically” higher cost per door. The efficient zoning process from ED-1, plus tax abatements and density incentives, allowed Visionary Developments to plan more units than otherwise possible and take advantage of economies of scale. Each of the 189 units costs $350,000 or less. Harris says that in itself is an achievement in LA, where he’s seen affordable developments cost $700,000 per unit.

While BlueHub has two more projects using ED-1 in its early pipeline, Court Residences is the first to enter construction and go vertical.

What other cities are trying

New York City has also introduced accelerated approval pathways for affordable housing. In November 2025, voters approved a series of charter amendments that created expedited review procedures, including fast tracks for publicly owned land and lots already zoned for residential use. Under the new rules, eligible projects can bypass lengthy rezoning processes and tricky zoning variances. Beginning in 2027, the city will also introduce a fast-tracked review process with a maximum of 90 days for districts with the lowest rates of affordable housing.

In spring 2026, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration released more ambitious housing initiatives, including the proposed Streamlining Procedures to Expedite Equitable Development (SPEED) platform. The proposed reforms span from the beginning stages of development to move-in, including efforts to shorten land use review from two years to six months, cut permitting timelines by five months, and overhaul the city’s affordable housing lottery system to cut the timeline in half.

Efforts in other cities have shown how zoning reforms lifting restrictions on density and height and scaling back requirements for on-site parking for affordable and market-rate development have helped stabilize housing costs.

Since passing an affordable housing bond in 2018 and a policy that lifts restrictions for affordable housing in 2019, Austin, Texas, has become a leader in building affordable housing. The city’s Affordability Unlocked program eases development restrictions like height and density limits for rental developments that set aside at least half of units for households at or below 60% of median family income (MFI) and ownership developments sold at or below 80% MFI.

Pew Research describes Affordability Unlocked as a part of a series of regulatory changes encouraging density and mixed-use development that have driven down median rents in the city from $1,546 in 2021 to $1,296 in early 2026. Most recently, the city eliminated minimum parking requirements “for virtually every kind of property” in 2023.

The Pew researchers praised Austin for having “taken multiple steps that have helped to unlock large amounts of housing supply in its market and reverse rent growth.”

“Austin’s success serves as an important example of how regulatory barriers to building more housing are often varied and interconnected,” Pew writes. “No single solution can solve a housing shortage.”

This story was co-published as part of “Perfect Storm,” a series focused on how federal funding instability is affecting local communities, produced by City Bureau in partnership with local organizations in the Documenters Network. It looks at how communities across the United States — big and small, rural and urban — are reckoning with slashes to federal budgets, the sunsetting of COVID-era grants, and turbulent legal challenges leaving funding in limbo.

When major events unfold in the Twin Cities, a parallel version often plays out at the Hennepin County Medical Center.

The sprawling facility in downtown Minneapolis spanning six city blocks is the area’s largest safety-net hospital and busiest provider of critical trauma care. HCMC is where measles outbreaks, COVID-19 surges, low-income patients and mass casualty events like last year’s Annunciation school shooting merge, said Jeremy Olson-Ehlert, a 13-year veteran nurse and member of the nurse’s union.

The hospital is so busy on some days, nurses have to shuffle patients in what he described as a “musical beds” arrangement.

“A lot of the issues stem from: People can’t afford healthcare. So where do they go? They go to us,” Olson-Ehlert says.

But despite the demand for services, HCMC has been gripped by fears of aggressive downsizing, or even outright closure. The hospital’s costs for providing care to low-income patients are soaring — and increasingly going uncompensated by the federal government.

When changes to Medicaid eligibility under H.R. 1, known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” take effect Jan. 1, as many as 140,000 low-income Minnesotans could lose healthcare coverage and send safety-net hospitals like HCMC over the brink. Already, financial pressures have pushed HCMC to implement a cap on patients, reducing patient beds by 20%, down to 390.

Minneapolis is among the tens of thousands of cities, counties and towns across the country being squeezed as three financial forces converge: The scheduled end of American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) recovery dollars; the expiration of non-permanent federal grants; and decisions from the Trump administration to cancel, claw back, or drastically restructure federal funding.

Now, the fallout is showing up in programs meant to keep communities safe. Communities that leaned on the historic infusion of ARPA money are confronting the end of that funding, just as the federal government moves to eliminate or shrink critical programs. On the ground, that means scaled-back disease surveillance, hospitals less ready for disasters, reduced violence prevention, and disinvestment in the type of infrastructure that helps communities withstand climate-driven disruption.

Though municipalities have always been vulnerable to policy swings in Washington, the current budget woes also reveal a consistent structural gap where cities, instead of absorbing a program’s costs into their regular budgets, rely on federal money as the financial foundation rather than its scaffold.

Drawing on data from the Documenters Network across 23 communities, we examined how this perfect storm of budget cuts is unfolding around the country.

Understanding the ARPA cliff

At the heart of the expiring pool of federal money is the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, which helped to prop up municipal budgets during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The law injected state and local governments with $350 billion in funding, with a little more than half going to state coffers, and the remaining $130 billion divided between cities and counties to cover expenses such as infrastructure investments, salaries for essential workers and other economic recovery. Once money was granted, municipalities had to allocate the funds by specific deadlines, or lose them entirely.

ARPA ends Dec. 31, the final deadline to spend allocated money before it is lost. There is no successor program in place.

But the looming ARPA sunset is not taking anyone by surprise, says Paula Worthington, an economist who focuses on municipal finance and serves as senior policy adviser at the Civic Federation, a Chicago-based economic research group.

“The funding streams for ARPA were well understood to be temporary — they had a beginning, middle and end,” Worthington says. Some municipalities winding down ARPA-funded programs were already experiencing financial pressure before the 2020 pandemic, Worthington added.

Despite ARPA’s planned end point, what makes it particularly difficult is what couldn’t be predicted back in 2021: the timeline overlapping the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or H.R. 1, which took effect in July 2025 and marks one of the steepest reductions to the U.S. social safety net in decades, Worthington says.

When ARPA ends in December, major changes to Medicaid ordered by the Trump administration will take effect the next day. Changes including work requirements for able-bodied adults, and twice-annual eligibility renewal — along with at least $800 billion estimated federal spending cuts to Medicaid over the next decade — are expected to make the program harder and more expensive for state and local governments to administer, while dramatically reducing free or low-cost coverage for vulnerable people.

“H.R. 1 created significant disruptions to how federal support to states, counties and cities — and even school districts — is going to work,” Worthington says. “There have been a lot of efforts, in various ways, to claw back money that was already sort of agreed upon to go from the federal government to these sub-national governments and agencies — and the waters are choppy.”

Cancelled clinics, lost programs

The funding storm is falling especially hard on safety-net hospitals and public health departments — and with uneven outcomes.

In March 2025, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under Trump quickly cancelled nearly 700 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention grants nationwide. The move evaporated more than $11 billion in grants to awardees including local public health departments to track disease, expand vaccinations and modernize disease detection systems.

In Chicago, which has one of the largest municipal public health departments in the country and one that primarily relies on federal funding, the abrupt grant cuts prompted warnings to residents from local health officials to brace for reductions: fewer immunization clinics, reduced infectious disease monitoring (HIV and COVID-19 among them), decreased lab capacity to test for emerging diseases, and less training to prevent disease spread in places like nursing homes, day cares and shelters.

In San Diego, further contributing to the instability, federal pullback of public health funding coincided with a loss of Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program money due to what county leaders described as a “fluke” in failing to spend use-it-or-lose-it funds. San Diego County consequently had to relinquish $1.6 million in federal money that helped low-income people living with HIV and AIDS receive temporary housing assistance and primary medical care, according to San Diego Documenters at inewsource.

The loss came as San Diego County was grappling with a $40 million pullback of CDC money for its new Public Health Lab meant to bolster the county’s response to transmissible disease, including HIV, according to Fox 5 San Diego.

But the multidimensional funding squeeze has been most severe in safety-net hospitals across the country.

With more healthcare programs losing money and healthcare costs for patients rising, the need for care is funneling into hospital systems like Hennepin County Medical Center in the Twin Cities and Eskenazi Health in Indianapolis. Both hospitals are among nearly 450 safety-net facilities facing heightened risk of closure due to changes to federal Medicaid spending that have reduced reimbursement for uninsured patient care, according to a 2026 analysis by the nonprofit accountability group Public Citizen.

Lisa Harris, CEO of Eskenazi Health, said in May that federal cuts and worsening disinvestment was making healthcare affordability so difficult that in a city where the median household income hovers just above $66,000, even households where income topped $90,000 were struggling to afford healthcare.

Some cuts have been successfully challenged in court or via lobbying. The Trump administration and House Republicans’ attempt to end federal funding of key components of the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program was ultimately reversed by Congress — but the program now faces a year-to-year fight for renewal.

The impact of the fiscal storm has also been shaped by who has fought against it: an analysis by KFF Health News found that while Democrat- and Republican-led states faced equal funding disruption, nearly 80% of grant cuts were restored in blue states, more of which challenged the cuts in federal court.

Cuts squeeze violence prevention

When the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs terminated public safety grants in two waves in spring 2025, community violence intervention programs were among the hardest hit.

In Chicago, domestic violence services faced a 40% cut in the mayor’s proposed 2026 budget after ARPA funds ran out, Chicago Documenters reported. While alders pushed to restore the budget, it still lags behind demand for those services. Following national trends, homicides in cities like Chicago have dropped dramatically in recent years, but not all violence rates have followed that decrease: The proportion of domestic-related homicides rose 13% in 2025 compared to the year before, CBS News reported.

Minneapolis was hard hit by cuts to DHS violence prevention grants related to terrorism and mass shootings. According to Minneapolis Documenters at MinnPost, the area lost $2.7 million in DHS grants and $67,000 for a targeted violence and terrorism prevention program one month before the shooting at a Catholic school in Minneapolis last year — a move that spurred new criticism of how community safety was being negatively affected by federal disinvestment.

When funding cuts hit the Cuyahoga County Office of Violence Prevention in Cleveland, the burden was again shifted to local agencies. Cuyahoga County announced three $15,000 grants to local community groups.

The county Office of Violence Prevention did not respond to multiple requests for comment on how the federal cuts reshaped the program, but its administrator, Myesha Watkins, told Signal Cleveland in July that one-time $15,000 grants would not solve long-term funding needs for anti-violence groups. As an example, Watkins cited her former group, Cleveland Peacemakers, which spent $900,000 in 2024 on work such as mentorship programs, job training and street-level intervention.

Disaster preparedness wanes

For nearly 50 years, money for local disaster preparedness has typically flowed from the federal government to help municipalities train first responders for extreme weather or mass casualty events, build emergency operation centers, and shore up public infrastructure like warning systems, public transit and water treatment facilities.

But in the second Trump administration, the federal government has sharply reduced disaster preparedness and resilience funding as it moved to dramatically restructure the Federal Emergency Management Agency, shifting the responsibility to states.

The budget strain on a state has been exacerbated in places like Illinois when the federal government rejects requests for disaster relief funding. The federal government continues to reject state appeals on behalf of Chicago and Cook County for federal disaster relief for Chicago and Cook County following massive floods in 2025. In response, the Cook County Board absorbed a portion of the costs and approved a $15 million local relief program to help residents repair their homes.

The federal government has been repeatedly sued for withholding and clawing back more than $885 million in active funding for programs that include the Next Generation Warning System, which modernizes public emergency alerts; the Emergency Food and Shelter Program; and infrastructure resilience projects in both urban and rural communities.

But whether state and local governments stepped in with fractional funding to keep projects from collapsing or federal courts ordered the funding restored, the volatility creates ongoing challenges.

The Klickitat Valley Health hospital in rural Goldendale, Washington, experienced a funding roller coaster when FEMA canceled the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities Program (BRIC) in April 2025, jeopardizing the hospital’s $9.8 million plan to build battery storage for renewable energy. Though some states who sued the government saw grants reactivated, the delay made the project more expensive in the long run, says Jonathan Lewis, who directs support services for Klickitat Valley Health.

“Losing that momentum of being ready to roll and now just completely having to start from scratch because of those cost increases — we’re going to have to do a significant amount of redesign work,” Lewis says.

“We were all ready to get that project in place,” he added. “Now, the price of solar modules has gone up. There’s lots of upward or ‘bad’ pressure on solar that has impacted the project enormously, like the cost of labor going up considerably.”

The delays also cost Klickitat Valley Health an investment tax credit of 30% after it expired in 2025. The changes have eaten into the restored budget to the degree that leaders scaled back the project: Initially it was slated to produce about a megawatt of solar energy and two megawatts of battery power. Lewis anticipates the final project will generate about 70% of that.

The difference, Lewis says, was meaningful considering the project’s original goal was grid resiliency in the face of climate disasters like wildfires and intense winter storms.

In larger metros like Detroit, Documenters with Outlier Media noted that proposed cuts are affecting disaster preparedness of a different kind: how well hospitals in major population hubs who rely on federal funding can craft large-scale disaster response plans and test their ability to scale up capacity in an emergency.

Cuts to the Hospital Preparedness Program have funneled down to initiatives such as the Michigan Emergency Drug Delivery Resource Utilization Network (MEDDRUN), which maintains strategic stockpiles of antidotes to cyanide, nerve agents and organo-phosphates throughout Michigan in case of emergencies. Detroit Documenters told WDET last year the affected programs also fund efforts like burn surge planning in the event of a mass casualty or burn situation.

The fate of the funding remains uncertain more than a year after the cut was proposed, leaving communities unsure of how to craft future budgets.

Lewis, of Klickitat Valley Health in Oregon, says his organization plans to double down on grant-writing efforts given the uncertainty of federal funding.

“We saw the federal government as a trusted, reliable partner,” Lewis says. “And a lot of that trust has been broken.”

Documenters assignments from Karmeisha Boyd, Nikebia Brown-Joseph, Ava Grubb, Holland Harmon and Ruth Johnson, Katrina Herring, Zara Norman, Tema Zeldes-Roth (Chicago); Mikayla Coleman (Cleveland); Amy Spring (Columbia Gorge); Larae Baker and Asjah G. Banks, Sarah Galt, Sydnie Kelly, Ebony Williams, (Detroit); Tiffany Baron, Anna Hitz-Bradley (Indianapolis); Matthew Miuccio (San Diego); and Glen Johnson (Twin Cities) were used to help this reporting. Find more meeting coverage at Documenters.org.

Reporting for this article included the use of artificial intelligence to surface examples of funding cuts from City Bureau’s database of Documenters notes. All information included in this article was independently analyzed and verified by the reporter.

Although the political obstacles are daunting, the time is ripe to build a movement for improving and expanding home repairs in the United States.

When thinking about the path forward, there are two basic challenges. First, we need to improve local home repair systems within the present policy regime. Even though existing housing policies have pushed home repairs to the sidelines, local practitioners can do much to improve local home repair systems. Second, we need to think long term about how to enact policies at the federal, state, and local levels to support home repairs. The two levels are mutually supportive: The more we improve local home improvement ecosystems, the easier it will be to make the case for supportive public policies; and the more we enact supportive public policies, the easier it will be to reform local repair systems.

Fragmented home repair policies have helped to entrench local home repair systems that are often inefficient, uncoordinated, and burdensome to applicants. But cities around the country, including Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit, and Saint Louis, are working to reform their systems. Here are some key reforms that cities are implementing.

Simplifying local home repair systems: At present, fragmented local home repair programs are difficult for citizens to understand. Application processes are burdensome. In one chapter of our new book, The Other Housing Crisis, Robin Bartram interviews applicants to a repair program in Chicago, documenting their frustrations with confusing and time-consuming paperwork and unfair requirements to qualify for help. Working together, local governments and nonprofits can make repair programs more user friendly by developing centralized intake processes, a common application across different programs to reduce the administrative burden, and better ways of targeting aid to maximize fairness and efficiency.

Creating an integrated home repair system: Local programs should move away from a siloed approach dictated by separate funding streams and move toward a “whole-home” approach implemented by an integrated home repair system. When assessing repair needs, home repair providers should coordinate with other agencies to ensure that the needs of the whole home are addressed—for example, coordinating basic systems upgrades, such as heating and air conditioning, with weatherization. Recipients of home repairs should receive legal services to ensure clear title to the property and a plan of succession to pass on wealth to the next generation. In another chapter, Karen Black and Woody Rogers examine how home repairs can address the racial wealth gap. Local home repair systems need to provide a spectrum of services that address all needs—from helping residents to repair their homes themselves with aids like tool lending libraries and workshops to facilitating loans from private lenders, to fully subsidizing repairs for those who cannot fund their own repairs.

Scaling up home repairs: Because every home repair project is unique, home repairs are difficult to routinize and scale up. Nevertheless, opportunities exist. Local providers could put out a call for bids on, say, 30 roofs, enabling local contractors to save money with bulk purchases of materials and achieve economies of scale.

Creating neighborhood-focused home repair strategies: Recognizing that it is not just individual homes that deteriorate but whole neighborhoods, local home repair providers should strive to target neighborhoods threatened by decline with visible repairs to shore up market confidence.

Building an ecosystem of capable contractors and trained workers: The weak link in many home repair systems is a shortage of reliable contractors and skilled home repair workers. Home repair providers can work with community colleges, workforce development agencies, and unions to train carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and others in home repair skills. Expanding locally based, minority-owned repair contractors will ensure that expanded home repair expenditures circulate in the local economy, promoting community economic development.

Forming local home repair coalitions: Finally, to achieve the local reforms listed above, it is imperative that home repair advocates form networks of home repair providers, funders, contractors, and owners to coordinate their actions and amplify their voices in the public sphere.

Local reforms can improve home repair systems, but the only way we will make significant progress is by radically reforming housing policy, especially at the federal level. The most important reform needed at the national level is to consolidate some, if not all, of the 15 programs that support home repairs into one whole-home repair block grant, giving local actors the flexibility to enact reforms like those listed above.

We also need programs to address rental housing repairs. Most repair programs are limited to homeowners, and usually to elderly or physically disabled ones. They are widely seen as deserving beneficiaries of public funds, in contrast to landlords, for whom, as often as not, repair assistance is seen as undeserved, and likely leading to higher rents and profit-taking. Most dwellings in need of repair, however, are rental homes. We need new federal repair programs that target rental housing. Three chapters of the book address the special challenge of rental housing repair. Elizabeth Mueller, Ben Martin, and Kathryn Howell show how difficult it is to address rental housing deterioration, even in a prosperous city like Austin, Texas. Eileen Divringi and colleagues show how Philadelphia is pioneering a program to address rental housing deterioration. And Kristian Blackmon and colleagues examine an effort in Saint Louis to organize lower-income tenants to address housing deterioration.

Finally, the highest policy priority must be to expand funding. If the Trump administration and Congress follow through with devastating cuts to federal housing aid, state and local governments will need to step up their investments in affordable housing, including repairs. Investing taxpayer dollars in home repairs makes economic sense. State and local governments can issue general obligation bonds to fund home repairs. Targeting home repairs to middle neighborhoods can help to prevent them from declining and preserve the tax base. Even if local home repairs do not move the market, they are justified by the improvement to health and quality of life for residents of older housing. Finally, there is no reason why the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program could not be reformed to enable some of the proceeds to be invested in home repairs.

Home repair programs should not be framed as charity but as investments with a positive social return for every dollar invested. The economic, public health, and environmental cases for home repairs are compelling. Home repairs, however, are also a matter of justice, or fairness. An older homeowner who received public support to repair her home said in an interview: “The thing is having to pick between do I do home repair [or] do I pay this bill? Do I do a home repair or buy this medicine?” In one of the wealthiest countries in the world, no one should have to choose between life-saving medicine and basic health and safety repairs. Everyone deserves a decent place to live.

The Other Housing Crisis AND Copyright 2026 by Todd Swanstrom, Austin Harrison, and Alan Mallach, published by Princeton University Press and reprinted by permission of Island Press, an imprint of Princeton University Press.

This story originally appeared in Bolts and is republished with permission.

In 2020, when Fernando was shot twice in the street outside the old Portland Meadows Racetrack, where he was working as a construction flagger, it was actually fortuitous that he tore a tendon in his knee while trying to run away. He says that’s the reason he crumpled to the ground, and probably why the rest of the gunshots missed him. Construction workers erecting an Amazon warehouse in the old racetrack’s place called 911 as he lay on the ground, and then he was rushed to Legacy Emanuel Medical Center in northeast Portland.

Fernando’s wife Shauna, their two kids, and other relatives arrived at the emergency room in agony, frantically trying to learn of his condition. Amidst their anxiety, a familiar face came to visit them.

Hiag Brown helps run a community violence intervention program called Healing Hurt People, which sends case workers like him to quickly respond to Portland hospitals when they receive gunshot victims. Before rushing to Legacy Emanuel the day Fernando was shot, Brown had already met Shauna and others in her family because of because of the group’s outreach work during other incidents of gang violence that have affected her family in the past. (The family asked that Bolts only use their first names to protect their privacy.)

After the shooting, Brown and other workers with Healing Hurt People became a near constant presence in the lives of Shauna, Fernando and their two boys. They checked in with the family daily, connected them to support services like counseling and job training, and also helped them cover essentials like utility bills.

Shauna says they became a stabilizing force for her family during that scary and chaotic time, and that the group has even continued to support them in the years since. She says they were especially good at supporting her boys as she was worrying how they might react to their father being a victim of gun violence. She says she had already been concerned about raising them in an area that had seen other shootings and gang violence, even before their dad was shot.

“I’m sure you can just imagine how that could turn a good kid bad,” she told Bolts.

Their youngest son, who was 15 when his father was shot, is now a young adult with a commercial driver’s license, which Shauna says he obtained because of help the family got though Brown and others with the program.

“A lot of time when you’re looking for help or services or anything you have to reach out and, in this instance, we never had to reach out,” Shauna told Bolts. “Hiag consistently checked on us.”

In 2020, when Fernando was shot twice in the street outside the old Portland Meadows Racetrack, where he was working as a construction flagger, it was actually fortuitous that he tore a tendon in his knee while trying to run away. He says that’s the reason he crumpled to the ground, and probably why the rest of the gunshots missed him. Construction workers erecting an Amazon warehouse in the old racetrack’s place called 911 as he lay on the ground, and then he was rushed to Legacy Emanuel Medical Center in northeast Portland.

Fernando’s wife Shauna, their two kids, and other relatives arrived at the emergency room in agony, frantically trying to learn of his condition. Amidst their anxiety, a familiar face came to visit them.

Hiag Brown helps run a community violence intervention program called Healing Hurt People, which sends case workers like him to quickly respond to Portland hospitals when they receive gunshot victims. Before rushing to Legacy Emanuel the day Fernando was shot, Brown had already met Shauna and others in her family because of because of the group’s outreach work during other incidents of gang violence that have affected her family in the past. (The family asked that Bolts only use their first names to protect their privacy.)

After the shooting, Brown and other workers with Healing Hurt People became a near constant presence in the lives of Shauna, Fernando and their two boys. They checked in with the family daily, connected them to support services like counseling and job training, and also helped them cover essentials like utility bills.

Shauna says they became a stabilizing force for her family during that scary and chaotic time, and that the group has even continued to support them in the years since. She says they were especially good at supporting her boys as she was worrying how they might react to their father being a victim of gun violence. She says she had already been concerned about raising them in an area that had seen other shootings and gang violence, even before their dad was shot.

“I’m sure you can just imagine how that could turn a good kid bad,” she told Bolts.

Their youngest son, who was 15 when his father was shot, is now a young adult with a commercial driver’s license, which Shauna says he obtained because of help the family got though Brown and others with the program.

“A lot of time when you’re looking for help or services or anything you have to reach out and, in this instance, we never had to reach out,” Shauna told Bolts. “Hiag consistently checked on us.”

Healing Hurt People is an example of the kind of violence intervention program that some communities have long tried to establish to provide more than just a police response to gun violence. The Portland program, which follows a model pioneered in Philadelphia nearly two decades ago, is one of at least 77 hospital-based violence intervention programs operating across the country.

And like many other violence intervention programs, it has struggled over the years to keep its footing because funding is continually in jeopardy.

Proponents of these kinds of programs say they represent a more comprehensive response to shootings that better supports victims than simply tracking down and potentially prosecuting the perpetrator—an approach that they argue can help prevent retaliation and more violence. For Brown and other caseworkers, that often means helping shooting victims and their loved ones get counseling, housing assistance or job training after meeting them in the hospital and helping them get through those first frightening days.

The research into this kind of community intervention has been limited but mostly promising. Violence interrupter programs like Cure Violence appear to be one of the most studied models and have been associated with reductions in violence in several cities. Hospital-based intervention programs have also been associated with reductions in violence.

Even so, studies have also concluded that the effectiveness of violence interrupter programs can vary depending on a number of different factors like funding, buy-in from “credible messengers” who can reach people at the highest risk of violence, as well as the competence and integrity of people running the programs. Experts also typically caution that a number of other factors can also affect violent crime and make it difficult to know how much of a role any particular intervention may play.

In Portland, Brown told Bolts that he’s witnessed how the approach can help defuse the potential for violence. “You now have somebody that can walk you through that process of helping you disengage from the gangs and walk away, and how you do that in a respectful way to where you don’t become a target because you’ve gotten out of the lifestyle,” he said.

Healing Hurt People launched in the city in 2013 as part of a community mental health care group called Cascadia Behavioral Healthcare, a nonprofit providing services across the region like walk-in crisis centers and supportive housing. But five years later, Cascadia could no longer financially support their work as the service provider struggled to stay afloat.

Brown says he was one of only two outreach workers meeting with shooting victims in the hospital around the time COVID hit, as Portland and other cities across the country saw an uptick in violence. And due to the lack of funding, Brown says he was mostly volunteering his time.

Brown says the group—which has since gone under the wing of the Portland Opportunities Industrialization Center (POIC), the local chapter of a nationwide workforce training organization—has taken major steps in recent years to bolster their work, including by partnering with Portland State University to evaluate and standardize training for its community safety workers.

Soon after launching, Healing Hurt People started sending on-call outreach workers to respond to Legacy Emanuel, a hospital in northeast Portland where shooting victims often end up. Then around 2022, the group also began sending people to the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) hospital in Portland, as part of a partnership with researchers at the school’s Gun Violence Prevention Center to study hospital-based responses to gun violence.

That means the group is now integrated into the care teams at both of Oregon’s top-level trauma centers and quickly gets access to victims’ names and initial information about the shooting, including medical status or even what room they’re in, which often helps them act as an intermediary for loved ones in the community. The group says that hospital access also gives them the opportunity to rapidly connect shooting victims and their families with more support, and helps inform any further outreach in the community to try and prevent future violence.

Kathleen Carlson, director of the OHSU center that’s working with Healing Hurt People, told Bolts that having a program that meets shooting victims in the hospital and stays with them after discharge could help direct more attention to other issues that can have an impact on gun violence. People could get connected to counseling that helps them address other traumas, or they could receive help accessing services that allow them to move out of an unsafe living situation.

“Really it is a humanistic approach,” she said.

In 2022, supporters of these programs scored a major win when Oregon lawmakers earmarked $5 million in state grant funding to help expand their work and grow similar programs outside the Portland metro area. Legislation passed that year also allowed the group to start billing Medicaid for work with shooting victims who are enrolled.

Roy Moore, who was integral in securing Medicaid funding for Healing Hurt People and is now co-director of POIC’s community care team that oversees its work, says the program currently has four hospital-based outreach workers who work full time and who are supported by a host of others on POIC’s community care team.

While they would like to expand this work, funding still always seems precarious. For instance, the Trump administration last year terminated grants aimed at community safety and violence intervention programs nationwide, which Healing Hurt People and its university partners had intended to use to fund more research into their work and improve training for outreach workers.

“Slashing of all the federal funding of programs that didn’t meet the new administration’s priorities really sets us back by years in terms of being able to grow our team and our capacity to do that kind of work,” Carlson told Bolts.

The drying up of federal grant funding also coincided with a city proposal to reduce funding for violence prevention programs this year, as Portland grappled with a $172 million budget deficit.

The budget initially proposed by Mayor Keith Wilson this past spring would have cut future grants the city’s Office of Violence Prevention gives out by $1 million—grants that support POIC’s violence intervention work. It also proposed significant cuts for other police alternatives, including downsizing Portland’s behavioral and mental health crisis response team.

Around the same time, city officials issued a press release praising the city’s Office of Violence Prevention for helping Portland lead the nation in reducing gun violence in recent years. The statement cited a report listing Portland among the cities that have seen the steepest declines in shootings since the height of the pandemic.

After advocacy from the affected groups and a show of support from the community, council members made budget amendments to restore nearly all of the funding the mayor had proposed to cut from the city’s Office of Violence Prevention.

Council member Sameer Kanal, who voted for the budget amendments, said he thinks such programs are a necessary part of the public safety network. “There are types of calls that need an armed police response and types of calls that need a traditional firefight response, but then there are other calls that go to those two responders because we don’t have built out structures that are tailormade for those types of lower acuity calls,” he told Bolts. “We need the right responder available for each call.”

As they support shooting victims, Healing Hurt People outreach workers do sometimes have to coordinate with police. But Brown stresses how they’ve tried to adopt policies that make it clear to both victims and the police bureau that they are not part of, or working for, law enforcement.

This has meant drawing some bright-line rules with police; for example, if police are in the hospital room speaking with a victim, their community safety workers are not. “We are not part of the investigation, so we’ll step out so they can do their job,” Brown told Bolts. “They stay in their lane and we stay in ours,” Brown said. “We collaborate, but we’re not best friends.”

Kolby Ross was 23 when he first met community workers with Healing Hurt People inside a Portland hospital in late July 2022, after a bouncer at a downtown club shot him three times. The bouncer, who was working with an expired gun license, said he was firing at someone else who had shot at him first.

Ross says that the difference between how Healing Hurt People made him feel and how the police and prosecutors treated him after the shooting could not have been more stark. “The police kind of forced themselves into my room and made me give a statement while I was under pain medications,” he told Bolts. He also stressed that the way the Multnomah County DA’s office questioned him while he was in the hospital felt “overwhelming and it re-traumatized me.”

“When you’re vulnerable like that, it’s easy to feel like there’s nobody looking out for you,” Ross told Bolts. “I feel like the DA kind of did a good job of trying to isolate me in that moment so that he could get what he wanted out of me.” After the DA’s office declined to indict the shooter on any charges, Ross says officials never explained to him why.

Ross couldn’t get around on his own after he was shot, let alone work. After he was released from a hospital in a wheelchair, Ross relied on case workers like Isiah Bailey with Healing Hurt People for mobility. Bailey was part of the first cohort of community safety workers who graduated from the training and accreditation program that Portland State University worked with the organization to develop. Prior to his injuries, Ross also didn’t have secure housing that he could return to after leaving the hospital. So Bailey worked to get him set up in an apartment while the group paid for his first month’s rent.

Just as importantly, Ross says that Bailey also helped him figure out how to navigate the intense feelings he was having after the shooting. “Once I started feeling really anxious going out to places, he was really the only person I could come to,” Ross says.

Bailey told Bolts that providing “access to mental health services,” is a big part of the work they do, adding “there’s a lot of stigma, especially in the brown and Black communities, about mental health and how to address mental health,” but sees part of his role as normalizing that access and those conversations.

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

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

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

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

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

Where seniors can serve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The time banking model

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

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

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

Neighborly help doesn’t organize itself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How can cities and institutions help?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to Foxe, the MOU says that Schwartz will bring in someone to discuss pathways to becoming a co-op with the Dukler tenants. Residents will gain the right to ownership of the building when co-op conversion is complete or within 6 years, whichever is sooner. However, Foxe says she feels 75% satisfied with this historic win. She and her neighbors still do not own the building.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bill’s current status is “laid over in committee.” According to Nurse, after a bill is heard in committee, it must go through the aging process, which takes at least a week. Once aged, a bill can be put for a committee vote, and then the full council will vote. The bill was laid over in committee on September 9, meaning it is well past its aging period.

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

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

This article has been updated to correct the date the COPA bill was laid over in committee and clarify the timeline for when tenants will gain the right to own the building.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CDFI Fund Proposal Would Remove Race and Ethnicity as Qualifying Criteria

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

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

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

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

‘Stop the Settlements Act’ Introduced in House

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

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

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

‘Ratepayer Protection’ Bill Shut Down in Senate

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

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

Trump Administration Slashes Fuel Efficiency Standards for Gas Vehicles

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

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

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

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

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

MORE NEWS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OPPORTUNITIES & RESOURCES

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

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

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