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

The June 8 meeting of the New York City Rent Guidelines Board (RGB) began with some 40 tenants in attendance, scattered amid dozens of empty chairs in the auditorium at Hostos Community College. By the time the first hour ended, the room had filled with advocates wearing matching T-shirts emblazoned with the logos of various pro-tenant groups, holding up hand-drawn posters and a banner that was eventually unfurled to demand a rent freeze.

They were a familiar sight at RGB meetings, as were their complaints. Tenants spoke about their financial hardships, exacerbated by skyrocketing rents, and fumed about the disrepair in their buildings. They spoke of mold, rats, lack of heating, front doors that won’t lock, and stolen packages.

As is typical of these meetings, a few landlords took the microphone, and a landlord calling for a rent hike was met with a chorus of boos as he testified that he was facing rising expenses and needed to raise rents just to break even.

Organizers knocked on the doors of hundreds of rent-stabilized buildings and collected signatures from over 20,000 tenants last year in an effort to elect Zohran Mamdani and secure a four-year rent freeze. In February, to fulfill that campaign promise, Mayor Mamdani appointed six new members to the nine-member RGB. They include new Board Chair Chantella Mitchell, a program director with the New York Community Trust; Sina Sinai, former data director for the Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign; Lauren Melodia, an economist at the New School’s Center for New York City Affairs; and Brandon Mancilla, a labor leader with the United Auto Workers.

With a rent freeze now closer to becoming a political reality, the question of what effect, if any, it will have on the conditions of rent-stabilized buildings is coming into focus. While landlords often cite the distress of rent-stabilized buildings as the main reason for calling for rent increases, recent reports have complicated the narrative that most buildings in the rent-stabilized stock lack operating funds.

UPDATE: On Thursday, June 25, the Rent Guidelines Board voted to adopt a rent freeze on one- and two-year leases for the city’s rent-stabilized apartments, beginning in October. The freeze is a major victory for New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who pushed for the freeze during his election campaign.

Assessing the distress narrative

There are about one million rent-stabilized apartments across New York City. Because rent-stabilized units have been deregulated for decades, most buildings with rent-stabilized housing units also have market rate units in the mix.

About 47% of all rent-stabilized units are in buildings built before 1974 where at least 90% of units are regulated, according to the NYU Furman Center. The organization identifies these buildings as more vulnerable. Many landlords purchased rent-stabilized buildings before reforms passed in 2019 that made it more difficult to deregulate rent-stabilized units. Banks provided inflated loans to predatory owners that could only be paid back if the units were deregulated. Some of these landlords now hold substantial debt that can’t be repaid through current rents. Yet recent research suggests most of the city’s rent-stabilized housing stock is healthier than landlord lobbies have suggested. A February report from the Community Service Society of New York found that distress in city buildings was more closely associated with renters’ income than with rent stabilization.

The report found that both market-rate and rent-stabilized tenants frequently reached out to the city for repairs, but rent-stabilized tenants were more likely to seek help, “likely because rent regulation offers tenants greater security of tenure.” Market-rate tenants were more likely to face retaliation for seeking help, the report said.

The report also found that 63% of “low-income market tenants reported that their most pressing issues were not addressed quickly or at all by their landlords,” compared with about half of low-income rent-stabilized tenants.

“Overall, tenants in regulated and market-rate apartments reported the same level of repair needs,” the report found.

A report from the credit rating agency Moody’s found that a five-year rent freeze would only cause about 6% of multifamily loans across the city to be at risk of default by 2030.

Landlords often argue that rent stabilization forces them to jack up rents in market rate units. Yet in all the scenarios Moody’s examined for this set of loans, landlords raised market-rate rents in their units by only 3%. For context, the average year over year rent growth in NYC was 4.4% in May 2026, according to CRE Daily.

The Moody’s report examined whether net operating income would fall below debt payments for those loans. Buildings in which more than 90% of units are rent-stabilized were the most at risk.

In May, the city’s Independent Budget Office released a report titled Demystifying Distress, which found, “The majority of rent stabilized buildings do not show poor conditions generally, or notably worse conditions on average when compared to non-stabilized building conditions.”

In rent-stabilized buildings—especially those built after the 1974 rent stabilization law—conditions were the same or better than in non-stabilized buildings.

The report also found that while distressed buildings were concentrated in the Bronx and Upper Manhattan and had lower rents, the level of distress was comparable to that of the non-stabilized housing stock. In fact, about 66% of rent-stabilized buildings have fewer hazardous violations per unit than non-stabilized buildings. Non-stabilized buildings were more likely to have at least five hazardous violations per apartment than stabilized buildings.

Buildings built before 1974 in the Bronx, Upper Manhattan and Brooklyn were much more likely to be included in the city’s enforcement plan for emergency repairs than non-stabilized buildings.

Some analysts are less optimistic about the outlook for rent-stabilized buildings.

Mark Willis, senior policy fellow at the NYU Furman Center, says the math does not work out for a rent freeze because of landlords’ operating costs.

In an email, Willis says when rents don’t increase in proportion to inflation or operating costs, “Owners who are not ready to give up ownership of the building have no choice but to first cover property taxes and any mortgage obligations, even if it means having to skimp on maintenance.” He says a rent freeze would lead owners to abandon rent-stabilized units, which would decrease the city’s affordable housing stock, a subject of constant debate in recent years.

But deregulation has been the main driver of lost affordability: More than 300,000 rent-stabilized units in the city have been deregulated between 1994 and 2019, according to a report from the Association for Neighborhood & Housing Development (ANHD), an organization representing nonprofit housing developers. The number is comparable to the total number of housing units built in the city in the last 15 years.

“It’s a much smaller subset of units and buildings that are in distress, and where we should be looking at meaningful interventions,” Peter Estes, one of the report’s authors, tells Next City/Shelterforce.

ANHD analyzed the subset of rent-stabilized buildings most at risk of default: pre-1974 buildings without tax exemptions in which 75% or more of the units are stabilized. It found that nearly half of apartment units within this subset show some sign of “speculation or irresponsible ownership.”

Estes says he and his co-author found buildings where the purchase price was much higher than what could be recouped in rents. Some had been included on the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) speculation watch list.

According to ANHD, a wave of predatory landlords bought rent-stabilized buildings in the years leading up to and during the 2008 financial crisis, leading to a spike in deregulations. According to the report, these developers “made splashy, risky purchases. Spending far more on buildings than current rents would justify, they scooped up buildings with plans to kick out tenants and raise rents.” In 2009 alone, 18,500 units were deregulated, the report found. Landlords got rid of tenants through “the denial of services, frivolous eviction cases, construction that made units unlivable with noise, dust,” and other forms of harassment, researchers wrote.

“While a subset of rent stabilized properties likely face genuine distress, many appear to be doing just fine. And a large number of those in trouble have landed in that predicament precisely because they gambled on a speculative strategy and lost,” according to the report.

It’s a narrative that tenant advocates have been amplifying at RGB hearings.

Marcelo Lopez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America who said he is a lifelong rent-stabilized tenant, also questioned the risky loans corporate owners have taken out.

“[Landlords] have nothing to say, as many people have mentioned, about Signature Bank or about Pinnacle Realty, who put bets … on the fact that they could displace people faster than the law would be able to catch up with them.”

Tenant advocates have aggressively criticized Signature Bank’s lending for years, and when the bank collapsed in 2023, they pointed to its risky loans made to predatory landlords as one cause. Similarly, when LLCs associated with Pinnacle CEO Joel Weiner filed for bankruptcy in 2025, tenants pointed to the prominent New York real estate company’s history of predatory financing and deregulation.

“Landlords continue to push for a blanket rent hike, but tenants refuse to reward them for long-term neglect or bail out their bad bets,” New York State Tenant Bloc Executive Director Sumathy Kumar said in a press release from the organization.

But more than in prior years, some tenants seemed to acknowledge that some buildings may be underwater financially. They attributed this not to rent stabilization but to landlords taking out loans at high interest rates in hopes of evicting tenants—what one tenant called a gamble.

“Landlords made investments that were risky—in other words, a gamble. The gamble failed, and you know what happens to us working-class folk when we make a bad gamble? We eat the loss,” said William Alicea, co-chair of the Bronx Working Families Party. Alicea said he is a Mott Haven tenant and that his mother is disabled, lives on a fixed income in rent-stabilized housing, and faces annual rent increases.

He asked the RGB to go even further than a rent freeze:

“A rent rollback would help stabilize so many families that already have to worry about rising utilities, food, childcare, healthcare, and gas prices.”

Proposals for protecting rent-stabilized buildings

How can New York help landlords of distressed buildings without abandoning the case for a rent freeze? City officials and housing developers have proposed a range of solutions.

ANHD recommends that the city “robustly” fund the Neighborhood Pillars program and relaunch the Third Party Transfer program, which is meant to take properties with unpaid fines from owners’ hands and sell them to nonprofits. It also suggests exploring “reductions or exemptions from water and sewer taxes” for some rent-stabilized buildings.

The Adams administration relaunched the Neighborhood Pillars program in 2025, which offered up to $380,000 per apartment unit in low-interest loans to mission-driven for-profit owners, nonprofit owners or minority and women-owned businesses to rehabilitate distressed buildings.

In 2023, the Adams administration introduced “Unlocking Doors,” a pilot program that offered up to $25,000 per unit in reimbursements to rehabilitate 400 rent-stabilized units. The program later provided up to $50,000. Landlords participating in the program would be required to rent the units to low-income tenants with CityFHEPS vouchers, which are used by people exiting homelessness.

According to Gothamist, only one landlord had applied for the program as of September 2025, but then opted not to take the money. Landlords who spoke to the publication cited the program’s requirement to rent to voucher holders and the requirement that they pay for repairs up front and be reimbursed later.

ANHD has recommended improving the program by providing money upfront instead. But Estes says there isn’t much of a push from the landlord lobby to do this.

“The current narrative from the landlord lobby is that it’s impossible, it can’t be done, it’s not worth it … rather than a spirit of partnership,” Estes says.

The housing trade group New York Housing Conference suggested in a November 2025 report that any rent freeze include a “$1 billion financing program for projects at risk of default to restructure debt.” It also suggested reducing water bills, renewing the J-51 tax abatement program (one of the few mechanisms the city has to create new rent-stabilized apartments), and exempting “preservation financing programs from any new labor requirements,” a proposal at odds with Mamdani’s approach.

The city and advocacy groups are also becoming more serious about other rising costs, such as insurance. Insurance costs for buildings with rent-stabilized apartments have increased by more than 10% in just the past year.

As one solution, ANHD suggests funding Milford Street Captive Insurance, an affordable insurance company created by affordable housing providers. In May, Gov. Kathy Hochul provided a $2 million loan to the insurance company. In Mamdani’s recently released Block by Block plan, the city pledged to invest $100 million in a low-cost insurance program that will cover 100,000 homes by 2030.

Assuming that a percentage of the housing stock has debt coverage from speculative loans that is a greater burden on landlords than operating costs and maintenance, there is another option the city can pursue: buying the buildings.

Among tenants and housing advocates, this solution is increasingly being pushed as an alternative to rewarding predatory landlords who engaged in speculation.

“We have to really think about transparency and holding bad landlords accountable for past actions and ensuring that we’re not just throwing public money at these actors who have harassed tenants, displaced tenants to raise rents, and who have a broader financial cushion,” Estes says.

Two months before Mamdani appointed her to lead the Office to Protect Tenants, Cea Weaver proposed such a solution to rampant speculation. “Thanks to its scale, its lack of a profit motive, and its taxing power, the City can intervene to stabilize volatile markets,” Weaver wrote.

In the Block by Block proposal, the Mamdani administration specifically referenced rent-stabilized buildings “at risk of financial and physical distress,” and said it would “work with vetted, responsible landlords who can immediately stabilize and improve portfolios under new ownership.” An important tool for implementing this is the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA). Adams vetoed COPA during his final days in office, but it has been reintroduced in the city council. With a supportive mayor and 27 cosponsors, it is likely to pass. But the relatively small subset of buildings in extreme distress require immediate help, and acquisitions, whether through bankruptcies or the landlord selling the property, take some time to pull off.

In an email to Next City/Shelterforce, a spokesperson for Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) said that the agency can support buildings in disrepair with real estate tax exemptions and with subsidies. The spokesperson said buildings transferred to new owners through the Third Party Transfer program and any future COPA law would only be eligible for funding after the new owner takes over.

In Block by Block, the Mamdani administration also said it would “aggressively” use the 7A Program, which puts buildings in the hands of a court receiver that accepts rent and makes repairs. The program has been underutilized in recent years, advocates say. HPD tells Next City/Shelterforce that there are 27 buildings in the program with another 14 pending as of June.

Nancy Espino, a Bronx tenant who attended the June 8 RGB hearing, tells Next City/Shelterforce that she recently moved into a rent-stabilized studio apartment after living in the Parkchester neighborhood. Her landlord was charging her more than $1,200 in rent, but after reviewing her rent history, Espino realized she should only be charged $978. So she requested a rollback from the state government. She is still waiting for a written confirmation that her rent will be reduced. She says many people in her building have told her similar stories of being overcharged.

She’s skeptical that the landlord of her large building needs the rent to cover operating costs. She says other tenants told her he has been skimping on repairs for 20 years.

Speaking before the RGB, Espino said, “If a landlord is refusing to make the tenants whole while receiving rent from us, why should they be entitled to rent increases?”

“Thank you, and appreciate your time, but the Bronx is still burning,” Espino said.

A recent op-ed in Next City, written by retired law enforcement officers Dimitrios Mastoras and Mick Urwin, argued that U.S. nighttime economy offices must evolve to prioritize preventing violence in nightlife environments rather than adopting a more expansive role focused on economic development, planning, small-business support, and advocacy for nightlife culture.

Our fundamental concern and disagreement with this op-ed is that the authors reduce the nighttime economy to primarily nightlife and entertainment districts with a high concentration of bars and clubs, presumably with a focus on bar-hopping and high-volume alcohol sales. Based on this reductive idea of the nighttime economy, they conclude that the nighttime economy manager’s primary role must be to address the “issues of violence and alcohol-related harm occurring in nightlife and entertainment districts.”

To arrive at this conclusion, the authors compare and contrast the European and U.S. models for this role.

They argue that because the police aren’t sufficiently focused on alcohol-related offenses in the U.S., and because there is more violent crime in nightlife districts in the U.S., nighttime economy managers should be primarily focused on public safety, violence, and alcohol-related harm in nightlife districts. They claim that the European model’s focus on mediation, cultural advocacy, and advocacy for nightlife-sector jobs and economic growth doesn’t translate to the U.S.

Read more: Trading Vibes For Strategy: The Necessary Evolution of the U.S. “Night Mayor”

Further still, the authors say, if the role focuses on things like economic development, planning, small business support, and advocating for nightlife culture, it is a “symbolic figurehead” position and lacks legitimacy.

We fundamentally disagree with that framing, premise, and conclusion.

While the nighttime economy certainly takes place in nightlife and entertainment districts, and districts with a high concentration of bars and clubs exist in many, if not most cities, this is only a small portion of what comprises the nighttime economy in cities.

Independent music venues, neighborhood bars, theaters, LGBTQIA+ spaces, comedy clubs, third spaces, cocktail bars, art galleries, dive bars, and other creative and innovative spaces are located throughout a city. It is in these spaces where a city’s unique nightlife culture is created and fostered.

In addition, the nighttime economy encompasses more than just nightlife; it includes the broader “life at night” ecosystem. This ecosystem involves sectors such as health care, the service industry, third-shift workers, and other industries that operate during nighttime and overnight hours. We believe that a key role of the nighttime economy manager is to support businesses, strengthen communities, promote nightlife culture, and improve the city government’s effectiveness during nighttime hours.

Public safety is undeniably important, and so is the enforcement of city regulations. However, reducing the role of nighttime economy offices to merely addressing alcohol-related violence misrepresents their broader purpose. The most effective nighttime economy offices do not replace public safety agencies; instead, they act as collaborative partners.

Nighttime economy management is an emerging field, and there is no single definition of a nighttime economy manager. Each city must tailor the role to its unique needs and culture. At the U.S. Nighttime Economy Culture and Policy Alliance (NITE-CAP), we have established a broad definition.

A nighttime economy manager:

• Works within a local government agency or business improvement district

• Advances policies and programs that improve the delivery of city services to support a vibrant nighttime economy

• Advocates for a vibrant nighttime economy within local government

• Serves as a liaison between nighttime stakeholders and government agencies

While for most nighttime economy managers public safety and violence prevention in nightlife settings is a focus area, this emphasis is not a strict requirement of the role.

The value and legitimacy of nighttime economy managers should not be measured solely by their effectiveness in preventing alcohol-related offenses and violence in nightlife districts.

Instead, their value should be measured by how effectively they address a wide range of issues, support local businesses, strengthen communities, promote nightlife culture, and improve the overall functioning of city government during evening hours.

The dust is just settling in Atlanta. Over the past nine months, the city has fought a huge battle over whether to extend the city’s Tax-Allocation Districts, or TADs.

After Mayor Andre Dickens’ initial proposal to extend this controversial public financing tool last fall drew a groundswell of pushback, the city went back to the drawing board. Over the last few months, the city worked with community leaders to develop new transparency and accountability mechanisms, expand funding options for community development beyond TAD, and put anti-displacement measures at the plan’s forefront.

“It definitely has been a journey,” says Nathaniel Smith, founder and chief equity officer at the Atlanta-based Partnership for Southern Equity, which worked with the city to develop Atlanta’s new anti-displacement framework. “Any type of public finance strategy, I compare it to a scalpel. In the hands of a surgeon it can heal, but in the hands of Jack the Ripper it can do a lot of damage.”

TAD – known as Tax-Increment Financing and other names, depending on the state – allows local governments to divert future property tax revenue from a designated area and use it to subsidize development projects within that area for a set period of time, typically 25 or 30 years. Atlanta currently has eight TADs, all set to expire over the next few years.

On one side of the battle these past nine months were those who believed TAD property tax revenues should go back to the public school system, the county, and the city’s general property tax rolls. They’re not happy with schools shuttering and teachers being underpaid while TADs subsidize projects they don’t feel have provided sufficient benefits to existing community members. Many argue that these developments have raised rents and property taxes, pushing long-term residents and legacy businesses out. In other words, they believe that they’ve been subsidizing their own displacement.

On the other side was a city government feeling the squeeze of a federal regime with a pattern of cutting or sabotaging once-reliable funding sources for community and economic development. Mayor Dickens and his allies see TAD dollars as one of the last and best ways for the city to influence real estate development by generating resources for the city to help draw investment in Atlanta’s most vulnerable neighborhoods.

With Monday’s 13-2 vote in Atlanta City Council, both sides can claim some kind of victory. Dubbed the “Neighborhood Reinvestment Initiative,” the legislation re-authorizes six of Atlanta’s eight TADs, which will now expire at the end of 2056. The new law also contains new accountability measures, a slew of anti-displacement provisions, and a mandate to impose a new framework for planning, monitoring, and evaluating all future TAD spending in Atlanta using an anti-displacement lens. Both Fulton County and Atlanta Public Schools must still pass separate measures to forego property tax payments as part of any extended TAD.

While there will still be many devils in the details to work out over the coming months and years, experts say it’s one of the country’s most ambitious and promising anti-displacement plans.

“There are increasing numbers of municipalities that have anti-displacement plans, and some of them have preambles that suggest that public dollars can have disparate impacts,” says Willow Lung, professor of urban studies and planning at the University of Maryland and director of the national Small Business Anti-Displacement Network. “The straightforward nature of the language, combined with this framework that is created around that language, I think is one of the best and clearest that I’ve seen articulated.”

Jack the Ripper lands in Atlanta

The story of tax increment financing, or TIF, begins in 1951. That’s when California became the first state to pass legislation giving its local governments the power to create TIF districts. Local governments then had wanted the TIF dollars to access matching funds from federal “slum clearance” programs, later known as “urban renewal” programs.

Many of the earliest TIF-backed projects in California directly displaced Black families from neighborhoods where they’d settled as part of the Great Migration. In 1956, Oakland combined TIF and federal slum clearance dollars to bulldoze the 34-acre Acorn neighborhood, home to around 500 primarily low-income Black and Mexican American families. San Francisco combined TIF and federal dollars to decimate the Fillmore, which was a thriving Black cultural enclave in the 1960s. When author James Baldwin re-dubbed urban renewal as “negro removal,” he was talking about what happened to the Fillmore.

Since proliferating across the country, TIF goes by many names, including TIRZ in Texas and CRA in Florida. Often, instead of waiting for future property tax revenues to come into the TIF district, the local government or its designated authority issue tax-exempt bonds to raise lump sums of money up front that depend on future TIF revenues for repayment.

Atlanta’s first TIF district was the Techwood Park TAD, designated in 1992 to help redevelop land downtown in preparation for the city hosting the 1996 Olympics. The park was later renamed Centennial Olympic Park. In 1998, Atlanta renamed and expanded that TAD into the Westside TAD, including portions of downtown as well as the English Avenue and Vine City neighborhoods just west of downtown. In 2001, Atlanta issued its first TAD-backed bonds, raising $15 million to support six downtown projects. Atlanta has since issued more than $1 billion in TAD-backed bonds.

In 2005, Atlanta created the Beltline TAD, named after the world-famous 22-mile loop of linear parks and trails snaking around the core of the city and connecting 45 neighborhoods. Covering 10.1 square miles of land along the Beltline’s route, the Beltline TAD is nearly three times larger than the next largest TAD. Since its creation, the Beltline TAD has collected more than $864 million in property taxes, more than twice the amount of the second most lucrative TAD (the Westside TAD, with $317 million collected since inception).

The Beltline TAD came to exemplify the frustrations with how Atlanta has used TAD financing. It originally had a mandate to support 5,600 units of affordable housing along the Beltline route by 2030. By 2016, only 560 of the 5,600 were built, and planned transit investments along the route had yet to materialize — despite millions invested in the trail and parks infrastructure along the route on the eastern side of the city.

Developers quickly started capitalizing on the trail and parks infrastructure by building mostly new market-rate housing and new high-end commercial projects like Ponce City Market along the Beltline’s route — often redeveloping large former industrial buildings and lots along what were once freight train routes around the city. Some used TAD financing to do so. The lack of transit and affordable housing investment prompted the Beltline’s original designer, Ryan Gravel, to resign from the board of a nonprofit created to support the iconic park and investments along its route.

Atlanta soon vaulted to the top ranks of cities affected by gentrification and displacement. The city’s Old Fourth Ward neighborhood — home to Ponce City Market — became the poster child for Beltline-driven displacement. Once a predominantly Black neighborhood, the Old Fourth Ward happened to be adjacent to some of the first completed Beltline segments. Skyrocketing property values and rents pushed out most of what remained of its Black population while wealthier, predominantly white new residents moved in.

Out of $864 million in Beltline TAD revenues, just $42 million has gone to any kind of residential development, Atlanta Civic Circle reported (prior to the publication’s sudden folding earlier this month). Those dollars have supported a mix of both market-rate and affordable housing units.

For many years, TAD financing in Atlanta supported affordable housing reserved for households up to 120% of HUD-defined Area Median Income — which Atlanta residents have argued is far from truly affordable.

Deciding who decides

The problem goes beyond simply how the funds are generated. It’s also about how decisions get made over those funds, what their priorities are, and how they are held accountable.

Atlanta delegates the authority to administer its TADs to Invest Atlanta, the city’s economic development arm, whose nine-member board (of which Mayor Dickens is board chair) ultimately has the final vote over how to spend TAD dollars. But in between the dollars coming in and the board votes to send them out, there are layers upon layers of agreements, rules, program guidelines, and bureaucracy. In short, many decisions are made behind closed doors.

“The failure of the Beltline to deliver its promise has little to do with how we pay for it and everything to do with decisions about how that money is spent,” Gravel, the Beltline’s original designer, tells Next City. “How public funds are spent reflect who they are spent for. Trails and parks add value, but few solutions for equity. From the beginning, transit has been central to ensuring the Beltline is for everyone, yet not a single mile is complete. We can’t expect to achieve the Beltline’s full promise for everyone if we are only building the easy parts.”

Mayor Andre Dickens first unveiled his proposal to extend all eight of Atlanta’s existing TADs last September as part of what he dubbed the “Neighborhood Reinvestment Initiative,” igniting the citywide battle over the future of TADs.

The full Neighborhood Reinvestment Initiative goes beyond TADs. It includes a broader set of eight priority areas across the southern and western portions of the city — areas with lower incomes, higher poverty rates, higher unemployment, and higher Black populations than the rest of the city.

The plan will require more funding than just the TADs, but the TADs remain the largest single source of funding available for Invest Atlanta to implement the $5.5 billion initiative.

Although each of Atlanta’s TADs came about separately, Mayor Dickens requested to extend all eight in one fell swoop. That didn’t sit well with longtime critics of TADs and of Invest Atlanta, nor with city council, which was on the way to electing a bevy of new members in the upcoming November general election.

Following the backlash and the general election, Mayor Dickens came to an agreement with city council to table the proposal until after newly-elected council members took office in January.

After the new city council was sworn in, Atlanta City Council created a Neighborhood Reinvestment Initiative Commission, chaired by two city council members, along with representatives from prominent Atlanta nonprofits and foundations, Invest Atlanta, Fulton County and Atlanta Public Schools.

The commission spent the next few months in deep conversations about the pros and cons of extending the TADs and — regardless of whether the TADs were extended — how Invest Atlanta could operate differently to break the pattern of catalyzing and subsidizing the market-driven, speculative investment that had displaced legacy Atlanta residents and businesses.

The Neighborhood Reinvestment Initiative Commission released its final report and recommendations at the end of March 2026, setting the table for a vastly different Neighborhood Reinvestment Initiative than the one first proposed last September.

In a concession to calls for increased funding of public schools and basic government services, the newly-passed Neighborhood Reinvestment Initiative package will allow the Beltline TAD and the Perry-Bolton TAD to expire at their current termination dates of 2030 and 2027, respectively. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

“The bill that was voted on this week is very different from what was proposed initially,” says newly-elected council member Kelsea Bond, whose district includes the Old Fourth Ward.

After elections in November, Bond quickly emerged as the most vocal opponent of extending the TADs. They remained one of two votes against the Neighborhood Reinvestment Initiative, still convinced TADs are not a suitable funding mechanism. Bond, who also voted against the legislation in a committee vote last week, says they would have preferred a separate vote just on the anti-displacement pieces of the legislation.

“Cramming all this language into one giant piece of legislation, you feel like you have to compromise your values and principles,” Bond says.

Behind the changes

To create a new TAD in Georgia, the city must create a redevelopment plan that justifies the TAD’s existence and sets investment goals and priorities. Each plan requires a public hearing before being put to a final vote by city council. These TAD redevelopment plans are the foundation for any TAD-backed bonds that cities may issue to raise funds to fund projects within each TAD.

“A major issue with the TADs in the past in Atlanta is that the equity language was not in the bond agreements,” says Smith, from Partnership for Southern Equity. “The TAD redevelopment plans are the key pieces around accountability and embedding clawbacks in the policies if developers don’t do what they’re supposed to do — and to ensure that community voices are in the beginning, middle, and end of the decision making process, and that we not only focus on the displacement of people, but also legacy commercial business owners.”

Back in 2012, the City Auditor of Atlanta published a scathing audit that found Invest Atlanta was not systematically tracking progress toward any of the goals set in each TAD’s redevelopment plan.

In an updated audit released earlier this month, the City Auditor credited the city with updating its service agreement with Invest Atlanta to require third-party assessments every three years on progress toward each TAD’s redevelopment plan. However, “the goals established in the redevelopment plans are unclear, making assessment of completion difficult,” the updated audit adds.

“Invest Atlanta’s reports to City Council do not provide a cohesive, goal-oriented view of how district funds are planned and used, or how they relate to redevelopment outcomes,” the audit goes on. “This reduces transparency and accountability, weakens oversight, and limits stakeholders’ ability to understand district progress relative to redevelopment plans.”

Those original TAD redevelopment plans have yet to be updated since they were created at least two decades ago. The lack of transparency and accountability around TAD dollars has left many Atlantans feeling like Invest Atlanta has been given carte blanche to fund whatever its board — dominated by members with connections to large corporations and the real estate industry — wishes with TAD dollars.

Smith isn’t surprised why everyone else feels like their priorities have been left out — or trampled over — when it comes to the projects Invest Atlanta has supported, especially using TAD dollars. His organization, where Gravel is a board member, published its own 2023 report on the failures of Atlanta’s TADs.

“When communities have been traumatized, it’s hard to trust anybody in a powerful position, particularly the private sector in Atlanta and other key leaders,” Smith says. “The trauma from the past decisions that have been made around development in the city, the ghost of those decisions, has made it a challenge.”

But something out of the ordinary happened during the Neighborhood Reinvestment Initiative Commission meetings. Partnership for Southern Equity emerged as one of the more influential voices in the room, providing examples of anti-displacement practices and policies across the country, from community land trusts and real estate cooperatives, to “Community Opportunity to Purchase” policies and no-net loss commercial square footage policies.

“It was very important for us to … expand the consciousness of decision-makers around what is happening on the ground and [how] to ensure that what happened with the Beltline doesn’t happen with this,” Smith says. “There were some real conversations about some of the innovative things that we wanted to do, and then it came to a point where people were second-guessing the audacity to do some of the things that we’re trying to do with this. I had to stop the conversation and remind them that sometimes, you have to be the best practice.”

The legislation passed this week includes significant new guardrails around TAD spending as well as all Invest Atlanta activity under the Neighborhood Reinvestment Initiative. It bars Invest Atlanta from issuing new TAD-backed bonds until two conditions are met. First, at least one of either Fulton County or Atlanta Public Schools must agree to participate in the extended TAD backing a bond; second, city council must have a chance to vote on a new project-specific redevelopment plan for each of the six extended TADs.

The newly-passed legislation also directs Invest Atlanta to initiate a more transparent process to draft updated TAD redevelopment plans with more concrete goals around three “sequential and mutually reinforcing pillars” of anti-displacement, neighborhood stabilization, and wealth creation.

The new legislation maintains the requirement for an independent third-party analysis every three years to measure each TAD’s investments against new redevelopment plans and soon-to-be redefined outcomes. It also requires bi-annual reports from Invest Atlanta to city council and any other participating jurisdictions on spending decisions and their adherence to outcomes.

The legislation also calls for a new public dashboard that reports spending, project status, and progress toward stated outcomes and impacts, to be created by Partnership for Southern Equity.

“The changes are a product of pushback from council members and from community members,” Bond says. “Concerns about displacement are a centerpiece of what concerns me. It’s sad to me it takes the mayor trying to pass something to fund his own initiative to fix something we’ve already known has been a problem for a really long time.”

The elephant in the city

In addition to the new anti-displacement framework and accountability pieces, the newly-passed Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative contains nearly two dozen specific anti-displacement provisions that read like a wishlist from tenant organizers and small business advocates in cities across the country.

There’s $3.6 million in authorized funding for the Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers Foundation to establish “Neighborhood Tenant Advocate Hubs” providing legal support, eviction prevention assistance, tenant education, emergency rental assistance, and housing stabilization services to tenants in high-eviction neighborhoods, with a focus on Atlanta Public Schools families in areas of high student mobility.

There’s a new mandate for the city to require developers using local financial incentives or federal low-income housing tax credits to waive their right to terminate affordable housing restrictions before the end of the standard 30-year maximum period. On new applications for local financial incentives, any track record of early termination of affordability restrictions will count against the developer.

The legislation includes a mild version of a Community Opportunity to Purchase Act, or COPA. It directs Invest Atlanta to require all applicants receiving tax exempt bond financing or applying for awards through the federal low-income housing tax credit program to submit a plan for resident ownership at the end of the 30-year compliance period or commit to provide a right of first refusal to a qualified nonprofit organization or a local housing authority if the owner elects to transfer an interest in the property during the 30 years.

The legislation also directs Atlanta’s Department of City Planning to work with the Mayor’s office on establishing Neighborhood Median Income standards by district, tailoring Area Median Income measurements to neighborhood need, and to maintain up-to-date Neighborhood Median Income data for policymakers, updated at least annually.

There are provisions to establish a new tax foreclosure avoidance pilot program, to partner with academic institutions on the creation of a new heirs property legal clinic, and $200,000 in funding for a new program to provide rehabilitation funding and property management support for vacant heirs-owned properties to be used as affordable housing.

There’s even a request for Invest Atlanta “to prioritize funding support for organizations and projects that provide community ownership opportunities through shared equity housing models, including but not limited to Community Land Trusts and Shared Equity Cooperatives.”

Several provisions also deal specifically with commercial displacement. There’s $800,000 to support Atlanta’s Legacy Business Program created in 2024, along with a request for Invest Atlanta to expand the legacy business program to include commercial tenant rental assistance. There’s a request for Invest Atlanta to establish a “No Net Loss Commercial Space Incentive,” providing additional incentives to developers along commercial corridors in Neighborhood Reinvestment Initiative areas if they reserve an equivalent portion of new commercial space for local neighborhood-serving businesses at affordable or stabilized lease terms when development displaces occupied commercial space.

There’s also a directive for Atlanta’s Chief Financial Officer to conduct a commercial vacancy tax study with a deadline of 180 days. The anti-displacement dashboard will cover commercial as well as residential anti-displacement metrics.

“What I love about this legislation is how much it focuses on the anti-displacement lens, which is so clear in the legislation and the framework that they build out, and how much of the anti-displacement focuses on commercial,” says Lung, who heads the national Small Business Anti-Displacement Network. “The comprehensive nature of the commercial aspect is really unique.”

It’s a lot of change to ask of Invest Atlanta, an agency with a lot of trust it still needs to earn back from many across the city. Mayor Dickens is proud to point out that under his administration 74% of TAD financing has gone to affordable housing, and much of the rest has gone to things like the city’s first municipally-owned grocery store.

But, speaking with Next City, Mayor Dickens admits that change can’t simply be subject to the whims of whoever happens to be in power as mayor or on the board of Invest Atlanta. Unusual for any city, Mayor Dickens is also board chair of Invest Atlanta, recently voted in by the rest of the board to serve another two-year term.

With the new anti-displacement framework around his new Neighborhood Reinvestment Initiative, Mayor Dickens expects it will change how Invest Atlanta’s typical developer partners work, and it may even change who it typically works with — particularly on the smaller lots in the initiative’s handful of targeted neighborhoods and commercial corridors.

“You can’t guarantee that over the 25 years of a TAD or a TIF, which is six different mayoral administrations, that you’re going to always get it right with somebody that’s going to use it for affordability and accountability and anti-displacement,” Dickens tells Next City. “We have to have community-scale actions, not just large developers looking to save a few dollars or make a little more out of a project.”

Smith, too, says he is confident Invest Atlanta can continue building on the changes it has started making over the past few years. The updated audit released earlier this month credits Invest Atlanta with changing its project guidelines and creating new TAD-financed programs to support many smaller projects with smaller developers and small businesses. The agency’s most recent operating budget, approved in May, includes $1 million in additional funding for the next fiscal year as part of implementing the Neighborhood Reinvestment Initiative.

“Accountability and skepticism is a good thing in my opinion when it comes down to making sure that vulnerable communities and Black communities in Atlanta, in particular, are protected,” Smith says. “We’ve also worked really hard to engage Invest Atlanta about ensuring that there are people at Invest Atlanta and its partners that actually understand neighborhood revitalization, that are not just looking at it from the lens of expanding the tax base, which is usually the primary responsibility of a development authority.”

The future is collective

One recent example shows just how far Invest Atlanta can go to embody the spirit of the work that went into crafting this newly-passed Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative legislation.

The first community-controlled mixed-use real estate project in Atlanta is on the verge of opening its doors at 918 Dill Avenue, in the predominantly-Black Capitol View neighborhood of southwest Atlanta. What was once a single-story commercial property at the southwest corner of Dill Avenue and Sylvan Road now has two additional stories containing 18 permanently-affordable apartments for households earning between 60%-80% of area median income. The first floor will re-open as a neighborhood grocery store with three commercial kitchen spaces and a community event space that also houses the offices of The Guild, the worker-owned cooperative real estate firm that re-developed the property.

Read more: An Atlanta Neighborhood Will Finally Own Property as a Community

The Guild raised $11.5 million for the 918 Dill project, which involved drilling interior steel columns as deep as 90 feet into the ground beneath the structure to support the additional two floors. While the first floor exterior is not landmarked, members of the surrounding community expressed a strong desire to keep it intact during early design talks with The Guild. The structure still had great meaning to legacy residents who used to shop there when it housed a record store or any of its other former tenants since it was built in 1930. The leafy residential neighborhood surrounding the intersection belies how busy it actually is.

In March, The Guild transferred 918 Dill into the Southwest Atlanta Stewardship Trust, a newly-formed community stewardship trust created as an ownership vehicle for residents and business owners in the same 30310 ZIP code.

Residents who have been previously displaced from the 30310 may also invest in the trust. Eligible investors can buy-in for as little as $10 a month or a one-time $120 investment, which gets them a vote for who sits on the trust’s governing body and a potential share in dividends from the property if the investors vote to pay dividends.

More than 50 investors have bought into the trust since it opened for investment in May.

One thing the new Southwest Atlanta Stewardship Trust cannot do, according to its bylaws, is sell the property. The point is to keep the property in the hands of the community that lives near it and is supposed to benefit from its use.

Even with 918 Dill’s unorthodox community control purpose and ownership structure, Invest Atlanta provided $930,000 for the project in the form of a 35-year loan at 1% interest. The property is not in a TAD, however. The source of those dollars was a tax-exempt bond Invest Atlanta issued to raise funds for affordable housing. The new Neighborhood Reinvestment Initiative also requires funding beyond TADs, and the legislation directs city agencies to explore several different possible avenues.

“It’s been really helpful for the project to buy down the overall percentage on the construction financing,” says Nikishka Iyengar, founder and CEO at The Guild. “The Invest Atlanta board voted on this several years ago — the project has taken time based on early financing and construction issues — but they’ve been good partners through it all.”

This story was originally published by Canary Media.

This story was produced as part of Next City’s joint Equitable Cities Reporting Fellowship for Rural-Urban Issues with Kentucky’s CivicLex.

For Morehead State University students Allison ‘Al’ Belter and Madi Reffitt, residents of the university dorms aren’t just students: As people who pay a property owner to inhabit a residence, they’re tenants, too.

With tenant unionization picking up steam in Kentucky and around the country, students organizing through Kentucky Tenants’ MSU chapter are calling on the university to provide better living conditions for their tenants.

The student organization is bringing its demands to Morehead State’s Board of Regents this summer, after months of preparing their campaign. They’re specifically asking for the administration to hire more maintenance workers, in an effort to address what MSU Kentucky Tenants describe as “persistent mold growth,” rodent and insect sightings, and inadequate sanitation.

“Our goal is to bring students together and use the fact that there are several thousand of us on campus, and only a couple hundred administration people throughout, including all of the faculty,” says Belter, the former MSU Kentucky Tenants president. The university’s dorms house more than 2,700 students residing on campus across 15 buildings, per MSU data.

“We have a lot of power, and we want to remind other students that we can use that. We don’t have to just suck it up for two to four years in bad housing conditions.”

Their campaign illustrates the growth of tenant organizing in Appalachia and across America’s rural regions, as well as of student tenant unionization across the country.

Organizing in the Bluegrass State

The Commonwealth of Kentucky has a long history of labor unions, largely in response to poor working conditions on coal mining sites.

Tenants’ unions, a more recent development in Kentucky, build upon the labor movement’s legacy. Instead of wage theft or dangerous working conditions, a tenant union uses collective bargaining power to pressure property owners into addressing mold, infestations, rent hikes, illegal evictions, and other concerns.

“You’ve got a workers’ union, a bunch of people who work in the same place and work together to use their collective power against their employer,” Belter explains. “The tenants’ union would be a bunch of people who have the same landlord, who are working together to make asks of that landlord to improve their housing situation.”

MSU Kentucky Tenants is one of three Kentucky Tenants chapters, including a separate one for Morehead-area renters who do not live in campus dorms. Neither chapter has formed a building- or landlord-specific union, but they engage in housing advocacy across the small town of about 7,000 permanent residents in the Appalachian foothills.

Lexington’s chapter, meanwhile, successfully created the city’s first recognized majority tenant’s union last year. In 2024, the group also advocated for Lexington’s city-county government to successfully pass an ordinance banning income or waiver-based discrimination by landlords. Their victory was short-lived, however, as state legislators passed a bill nullifying these measures just a month later.

Watch Next City’s webinar featuring KY Tenants: Organizing for Housing Justice

Kentucky’s largest city, Louisville, is also home to a separate organization called the Kentucky Tenant Union (formerly Louisville Tenant Union). Organizers have secured big wins in their home city and across the state, effectively organizing and retaliating against individual landlords, including one who owns Kentucky property but lives in New York. Kentucky Tenant Union has even expanded rurally, empowering residents of Meade County and Flemingsburg last summer to organize tenant-majority unions.

The City of Morehead chapter of Kentucky Tenants first launched in early 2023, and the MSU chapter was created in early 2024, reflecting a recent rise in tenants unionization across rural areas.

As a regional university, MSU enrolls thousands of students from even more rural areas. According to the university’s institutional data, as of last year, about 85% of their Kentuckian alumni were from outside of Lexington or Louisville.

“You have to be really in tune with what it’s like to live in a rural area in order to understand the way that we choose to organize. It’s different than a lot of people in bigger areas work with one another,” says Madi Reffitt, who recently took the mantle as MSU Kentucky Tenant’s president. She is a graduating senior from the even smaller Kentucky town of Stanton. Now having lived both on- and off-campus, she knows the ins and outs of Morehead.

“A big inspiration for me was how much I do love it here, and seeing how much housing has been a determinant of whether or not people choose to stay. It’s kind of disheartening because we’re so much more and we’re so much bigger than that,” Reffitt says.

“Rural voices have always kind of been stomped on – but on the flip side of that, we are in a really open-minded little mountain town.”

The growth of student tenants unions

The precise definition of a “tenant” is debatable, but Kasey McNaughton with the New York City-based Youth Alliance for Housing argues that it’s not just someone renting an apartment from a landlord.

“We believe that a tenant is anyone who does not have complete control over their own housing,” she explains. “This includes people who are couch surfing; this includes unhoused neighbors and includes mortgage holders, who are tenants of the bank.”

College students fall in that category, too. But they can face challenges in large-scale union negotiations: a housing contract isn’t quite the same as a lease.

“Universities in this country are some of the largest property owners and some of the most violent landlords that we’ve seen,” says McNaughton. “[School housing contracts] do establish a tenant-landlord relationship between students and their school, but yet they’re not, and students are not provided any type of protection.”

“Universities in this country are some of the largest property owners and some of the most violent landlords that we’ve seen … students are not provided any type of protection.”

This means little protection from poor living conditions or even from being kicked out of their dorms for participating in political protests, she notes. McNaughton says they’ve witnessed many of these “evictions” in their organizing work at the Youth Alliance for Housing.

“We’ve seen students from many universities across the country be indicted for their work on asking for their universities to divest from stock markets, divest from weapons manufacturing,” McNaughton says. “And we’ve seen students who are thrown out onto the street from universities. They claim that they are not responsible for housing you, yet they offer housing on campus.”

The student union movement was first created to fight for political and social change. One example is the University of Washington’s Black Student Union, formed in the late ‘60s to improve conditions for Black and other minority students.

“Student unions [were] popping up across the country to address tensions with the university, address tensions with classes in which racism [occurred], with the interconnectedness of the two for decades,” McNaughton explains. “It’s not that all of them are refusing to talk about tenant issues; a lot of them are talking about the issues that are very prevalent to them right now.”

Tenant unions began to spring up around the same time, even on the national level. But student tenant unions are much newer.

Many student tenant unions — like the Georgetown Student Tenant Association, founded in 2013 in Washington, D.C. – specifically target students who rent from private landlords off-campus. Dorm residents at the University of Missouri Kansas City released wide-ranging demands in 2022 to improve on-campus housing, including pressure to “provide a formal lease agreement for all on-campus students living in UMKC student housing that defines on-campus students as tenants.” (No updates have been made public since the initial demands in 2022.)

Students at the University of Texas at Austin launched their own student tenant union on their West Campus, which contains both dormitories and non-university apartments. They successfully advocated for the Austin City Council to pass a resolution banning windowless student housing units in 2023.

Students have also organized against university housing conditions without formally unionizing. Howard University students raised alarms for mold and rat infestations in the dorms back in 2021, occupying the student center, creating an encampment, and publicly documenting conditions.

Last year, in the rural Appalachian town of Sewanee, Tennessee, current and former students filed a $35 million lawsuit against the University of the South, alleging that administration had ignored complaints that toxic black mold in a freshman dorm had made them sick.

Belter says MSU Kentucky Tenants is not formally a union. Technically, it’s a registered on-campus club/organization. “We’re not isolated to a specific building or specific landlord,” Belter says. “We’re people from all different areas.”

McNaughton notes that the distinction between a tenants organization and tenant union can be a soft one. “Whatever terminology allows you to stay fully committed to the work, whether it’s calling yourselves an organization, university tenants, or a tenant union,” she says.

In the Youth Alliance for Housing’s own student tenants rights campaign, encompassing students across New York City, these groups are often called communions. All these groups push for the same goal: better living conditions and representation for students in vulnerable housing conditions.

They also share the difficulties inherent in organizing students, including in keeping members engaged and developing leadership skills despite rapid turnover.

“You don’t get anybody for more than three or four years because even a lot of our seniors … are preparing to go to grad school or just really overwhelmed by other things, so they can’t be as active,” says Belter, who joined the organization soon after it launched in early 2024.

“So we’ve got to be very efficient in [recruiting] new people and growing them as leaders, getting them comfortable with different roles and responsibilities so that we can keep being active.”

Last year, the group worked with the student alumni association to collect food and hygiene products. They’ve hosted an event to make blankets for Morehead’s homeless community and others who needs it

But perhaps their most important work has been in making sure students have an outlet to express their concerns about their living conditions.

“For a lot of people, this is their first time being heard by somebody else,” Belter explains. “When we’re tabling [at events], we often get people who we ask, ‘have you had any housing issues?’ They just go on big, long stories, and we’re like, ‘alright, so that’s a new one.’ And we write it down.”

What Morehead students want

Without a clear template to follow, MSU Kentucky Tenants leaders have tried to be thoughtful about defining the organization’s scope. This month, after more than two years of building its foundations, the group took its first actionable step toward improving housing conditions for dorm residents by issuing a proposal and petition to the Board of Regents and.

When MSU Kentucky Tenants formed, its first platform was mold removal, a longstanding issue at the university and a recurring talking point among members. It’s an issue that has plagued several Kentucky universities for years; in 2018, hundreds of Western Kentucky University students were relocated from their dorm due to mold, and multiple students at different institutions reported becoming sick from mold.

But MSUI organizers soon learned mold removal is much easier said than done. “[Mold] is something we hear a lot of, but we realized that’s something that’s really difficult to fix,” Belter says. “We need a little bit more focus than that, so we’ve been doing research.”

By nature of their mission, the Kentucky Tenants officers hear a lot of anecdotes. They say they were able to corroborate at least some reports, including broken washers and dryers, inaccessible handicap entrances, and dorm floods, by inspecting the site themselves.

“A couple of our members live in Andrews, the newest dorm building.” Belter says. A room in Andrews Hall costs between $3,430-$3,690 per semester, making it the most expensive non-apartment dorm.

“[Water] kept leaking into their room onto their floor, pouring this whole puddle that then molded over. It took weeks of them asking, ‘we need to get this fixed,’ for it to get fixed. And even then, housing still tried to charge them for damage.”

The university and Board of Regents did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

Members ultimately decided to ask for more maintenance staff to ensure timely repairs. It’s a compromise to deal with any future mold issues alongside other maintenance issues reported by students.

Reffitt says the school is moving in the right direction by constructing new residence halls but that new construction is not the final answer.

“If you build new housing and then don’t have the proper guard rails to make sure that housing doesn’t slowly deteriorate as it has been in the past, we’re just going to end up right back at square one and then tear another one down and build another one again.”

Disclosure: The reporter is a graduate of Morehead State University and a part-time employee at Morehead State Public Radio, which is governed by the Board of Regents at Morehead State University. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect her own.

This story was made possible with support from the Knight Foundation.

Every public servant knows the feeling of doing too much with too few people. From engineers to building inspectors and HR analysts, critical roles across city governments sit vacant for months at a time, delaying promises and leaving essential services in the balance. Retirement-age workers now outnumber younger employees two to one across the public sector.

Many agencies are staring down a talent cliff, and the people still on the job are absorbing the impact – as are residents.

Chattanooga for years has struggled to maintain adequate staffing levels everywhere, from permitting to the police department, from wastewater to public works, eroding the city’s ability to serve the public well and the public’s faith in our government’s ability to solve their problems.

At the heart of the problem is something cities don’t talk about enough: government has a brand problem. Local government hasn’t done a great job telling people why its work matters or what makes public service worth pursuing. Within the broader culture, the TV sitcom Parks & Rec is often the only representation of local government, and it isn’t flattering.

As such, job seekers, especially early-career talent, don’t always see City Hall as a place to build a career or make an impact. And when cities do recruit, they often revert to generic platitudes about public service, rather than articulating what makes serving a particular place and community unique.

The private sector figured this out decades ago. Companies learned that people show up, stay, and do their best work when they feel a sense of purpose, pride, and community. To communicate that, they use a tool called an Employee Value Proposition, or EVP, a clear, honest articulation of what it means to work somewhere and why it matters. An EVP is grounded in real employee experience, specific to a particular place, and built to guide everything from job postings to onboarding to how managers talk about their teams.

For cities, an EVP answers the questions candidates are truly asking: not just why public service, but why here and why now?

To solve its hiring challenges, Chattanooga has now put that idea to work. The City recently partnered with Work for America to launch a new employment website built around a clear answer. The site is the public-facing piece of a deeper effort to rethink how the city recruits, hires, and tells its story to prospective employees.

To kick off the effort, Work for America brought together employees from across departments and job functions — from public works to planning to HR — to surface what makes working for the City of Chattanooga distinctive. The goal was to listen for the language employees already use about their work, and to build on those values.

What emerged was specific to Chattanooga: a city transformed by connection and grounded in a people-first culture, where employees described a workplace that runs on interdependence and colleagues who feel more like family than coworkers. What struck us most was how often One Chattanooga, the city’s strategic plan, came up unprompted, revealing a workforce not just proud to serve their city, but also moving towards a single north star.

That sense of shared direction runs through the city itself. Chattanooga was the first city in the nation to roll out citywide high-speed internet (Gig City, as locals know it), and that spirit of building something unique shows up across departments.

Chattanooga is also increasingly a city people choose. The trails, the riverfront, the food scene, the quality of life that makes a Tuesday evening feel like a small vacation – newcomers tend to settle in fast. The result is a workforce that builds a city worth moving to and a career worth staying for.

And that story is now embedded across how the city recruits, from job descriptions to onboarding to outreach to candidates on Civic Match, Work for America’s national talent platform. The point is to give the right candidates a real reason to apply and to give current employees the language to describe what they already feel.

Most cities post jobs, wait, and hope. That is what Chattanooga did until recently.

Meanwhile, residents are counting on us to build housing, repave streets, help small businesses, answer 311 calls, and be there for them in their hour of need. We knew something had to change.

The cities that figure out how to tell their story will be the ones still delivering for years to come. You can have the best plan in the world for housing, public safety, or climate resilience, but it doesn’t matter if you can’t staff it.

Every city can start where we did. Ask your workforce three questions:

• Why should someone work here and not somewhere else?

• Outside of pay and benefits, what’s the best part about working here?

• How do we help our people do their best work and grow?

The answers are already inside your buildings. The most surprising thing about this work was what we learned about the people already here. They know exactly why this work matters, and they’ve been telling that story for years. Our job now is to make sure the rest of the country can hear it.

This article was originally published by The Conversation.

With the 2026 FIFA World Cup kicking off, millions of soccer fans around the world will be following the tournament taking place across 16 host cities in Canada, Mexico and the United States.

Like other mega sporting events, the World Cup requires major public investment and regulatory changes. To meet FIFA’s requirements, Toronto, Vancouver and other North American cities have spent hundreds of millions of dollars, suspended bylaws and reorganized infrastructure to stage just a handful of matches each.

Municipal governments are often slow to act on changes residents demand. However, hosting mega-events like the World Cup reveals that it is not always financial and legal constraints that cause municipal inaction, and that the reasons cities routinely cite are often political choices.

It turns out that when municipal governments want to act, they can move quickly.

Bylaw changes

Hosting the World Cup is expensive. Toronto has committed $178.6 million, while Vancouver has committed more than $320 million. Both figures come directly from municipal budgets.

Across all levels of Canadian government, public spending works out to over $1 billion, or roughly $82 million per match. These figures, of course, do not include potential cost overruns.

These financial commitments are matched by sweeping bylaw changes. Toronto City Council has authorized temporary exemptions to its plastic water bottle ban, and extended permitted noise hours at Nathan Phillips Square. Vancouver passed a special World Cup bylaw to streamline approvals for temporary structures like tents and shipping containers.

In both cities, municipal bylaw officers will enforce FIFA’s commercial trademark protections, including the temporary renaming of BMO Field as Toronto Stadium.

None of this means that hosting the World Cup is inherently problematic. The stated rationale for these changes, be it tourism, public safety or cultural prestige, reflects legitimate civic goals. Attending the World Cup is a dream for many soccer fans and a draw for many local businesses.

The tangible economic benefits, however, tend to be overhyped. The 2015 Women’s World Cup, co-hosted by six Canadian cities, did boost national interest in women’s soccer. But a post-event economic analysis found that it largely reshuffled existing tourism spending rather than generating substantial new activity.

Political choices

Whether the trade-offs cities make are ultimately worthwhile is for voters to decide. Still, the host cities’ displays of governance agility stand in sharp contrast to the usual rhetoric that municipalities cannot address other civic needs with comparable urgency.

Municipalities regularly cite budgetary constraints and limited legal powers as reasons for failing to act on pressing societal problems.

For years, Toronto has pointed to its budgetary and legal constraints to justify its inability to build shelters or expand its transit network. Yet to satisfy FIFA’s demands, City Hall found the political will to draw millions from city coffers and temporarily reverse its own environmental bylaws.

Vancouver exemplifies the same pattern. City leaders have long cited a $500-million annual infrastructure deficit to justify scaling back its response to the housing and opioid crises. Yet to satisfy FIFA’s demands, Vancouver partnered with the provincial government to introduce a special 2.5 per cent hotel tax hike, projected to generate millions in new funding over seven years.

Regulatory flexibility is not normally extended to smaller cultural events. In Toronto, the Little Jamaica Festival was reportedly cancelled after the city declined to issue a permit. In Vancouver, the African Descent Festival was also blocked due to permitting issues. Ordinary festivals are often required to navigate rigid rules, while FIFA benefits from bespoke bylaws.

These World Cup measures show that municipal rigidity is not an unavoidable straitjacket. It is a choice.

A pattern, not an exception

Scholars have long described this kind of municipal selectivity as an urban “state of exception.” When global sports leagues, tech companies or multinational developers come knocking, cities act with speed and flexibility. They suspend ordinary rules, fast-track approvals and bypass normal channels of public scrutiny.

Corporations are accommodated in ways not typically available to local residents. This pattern is not unique to sports.

A notable example is the Amazon HQ2 competition, in which 238 North American cities spent months assembling packages of tax breaks, zoning concessions and extensive data disclosures to attract one company. More recently, the same dynamic has appeared around artificial intelligence, with corporations seeking to build massive data centres.

Municipal regulatory processes that move slowly for affordable housing, infrastructure projects or transit somehow suddenly accelerate when a major corporation promises investment.

The result is that regulatory flexibility and fiscal creativity are not treated as general municipal capacities. Instead, they are tools selectively deployed to attract investment. What this pattern exposes is not inability, but choice.

If cities can move quickly for FIFA, they should be able to move quickly and fairly for their residents too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lessons from Orlando’s pedestrian safety success

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

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

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

These changes include:

• Increasing the number of crossings

• Ensuring all crosswalks have markers and signals

• Improving visibility and lighting

• Drawing driver attention to activity outside of their own lanes

• Prioritizing projects near schools and known speed-concern areas

• Using data strategically to identify where to deploy resources first

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump Delivers Even More Funding For Immigration Crackdown

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

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

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

Local News Deserts Are Costing Local Governments and Taxpayers Financially

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

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

Increasing Eviction Rates Boosts Gun Violence, Study Finds

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

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

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

More Data Center Bans and Pauses Pass from Coast to Coast

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

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

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

World’s Largest Banks Increase Fossil Fuel Financing in 2025

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

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

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

MORE NEWS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OPPORTUNITIES & RESOURCES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The legacy of a deceased tent city resident

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hostile architecture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An anti-homelessness law, and a possible counterweight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bigger picture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Los Angeles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Atlanta

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New York/New Jersey

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boston

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

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

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

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

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

Houston and Dallas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kansas City

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Working toward EDA funding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A comprehensive plan for the Bronx

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The new best practices

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A major milestone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A new era for community ownership in NYC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This story was originally published by Stateline.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Olympics are also expected to impact traffic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where the sidewalk data ends

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where control of the sidewalk ends

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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