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.

Seattle Social Housing Developer Authorizes Purchase of Apartment Building

The Seattle Social Housing Developer, which was created through a ballot referendum and funded by a twice-approved tax on large corporations, has voted to make its first acquisition: the 150-unit Elara at the Market building. The acquisition comes three years after Seattle voters approved the agency and one year after they approved a tax to fund the effort, The Seattle Times reports.

According to a press release, the developer will fill 15 vacancies with tenants at or below 30% of the area median income. The social housing developer says it will be getting rid of the RUBS utility billing system and will implement a two-year rent freeze for existing leases. In a press conference, leadership said they had no intention of evicting existing tenants.

Mamdani Unveils Ambitious Plan To Transform Housing in NYC ‘Block by Block’

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has released “Block By Block,” a comprehensive housing plan that he says will deliver “largest municipal housing transformation this country has ever seen,” largely by creating more housing supply.

The plan’s central promise is the creation of 200,000 new affordable, rent-stabilized homes and preservation of another 200,000 existing homes over the next decade through a $22 billion capital investment, new financing tools, and a sweeping land use agenda, as City & State New York outlines.

To get there, the Mamdani administration has pledged additional investment in NYCHA, the Permanent Affordability Commitment Together program, the Public Housing Preservation Trust, Mitchell-Lama buildings, the city’s ADU program, and office-to-residential conversions, among other strategies.

The plan also promises to facilitate conversion of rental buildings into resident-controlled cooperatives through Our Home, an affordable housing program that will be launched late this year, and to force the city’s most neglectful landlords to sell to “responsible preservation purchasers.”

Hunger Strikers At New Jersey Detention Center Allege “Torture”

Hundreds of immigrant detainees in ICE detention at Delaney Hall in New Jersey have been on hunger strike for a week. A total of 288 immigrants in the facility, including more than 50 women signed an open letter published earlier this month alleging physical and psychological torture as well as rampant spreading of Covid-19 and the flu.

According to the letter, most or all of those in the center turned themselves into authorities upon entering the countries and had been attending regular court check-ins and had passed the “credible fear” requirement for an asylum case, which would mean they lived in the country in accordance with local and international law. Gov. Mikie Sherill visited the facility on Monday, saying that her office had been trying to gain access throughout the weekend. Advocates are calling for immigrants to be freed and the jail to be closed.

Iconic Brooklyn Food Co-op Joins BDS

The Park Slope Food Co-op, a well-known grocery store in one of New York City’s toniest neighborhoods with discounted goods meant for its volunteer-members, voted to boycott about a dozen goods made in Israel and Israeli-occupied Palestine, The Guardian reports.

The boycott, organized by Park Slope Food Co-Op for Palestine, brings one of the largest food cooperatives in the country in line with the Boycott Divest Sanction movement. According to one member of the group’s leadership that has been a member for almost 50 years, this particular boycott measure was first proposed in 2023 and the co-op has a legacy of boycotts, including against Apartheid South Africa and in solidarity with United Farm Workers. Jewish Currents notes that a boycott on Israeli goods was first proposed at the co-op decades ago.

A total of 67% of about 7,000 members who attended a three-hour virtual vote Tuesday were in favor of the boycott. The boycott is meant to last until Israel, which has illegally occupied the West Bank since 1967 and has been engaged in a genocide of Gaza and the West Bank, complies with international law.

Amnesty Report Says AI Systems Rely on Privacy Violations

A new report from Amnesty International surveys generative AI products made by Meta, Google, Open AI and other companies and finds that they require large-scale web-scraping of private data — including browsing data and social media use — by design.

According to “Unlawful By Design,” these practices violate international human rights law. “In our analysis, these design choices are not inevitable to generative AI but are adopted by companies that have chosen to rely on training data based on nonconsensual and massive collection of publicly available data,” the report says.

MORE NEWS

• California Supreme Court puts on the record the best arguments against money bail. Prison Policy Initiative

• Albuquerque officials take steps to curb surge in citations and jail stays related to homelessness. ProPublica

• Lawmakers approved a pied-à-terre tax. Now comes the hard part. Crain’s New York Business

• No one to answer the phone: What a missing $150 million means for domestic violence services. The 19th

• CFPB investigating community lenders targeted by Trump for cuts. Bloomberg Law

• United Way partners with KCATA to offer free, reduced-cost bus passes as fares return. KMBC

• To host the World Cup, Kansas City built a whole new transit system. NPR

• San Francisco immigration court shuts down after purge of judges, leaving asylum cases in chaos. Associated Press

• Trump orders banks to take a closer look at clients’ citizenship in new immigration enforcement move. Associated Press

This essay was originally published by Common Edge, a nonprofit dedicated to reconnecting architecture and design with the public that it’s meant to serve.

In the 1950s, Robert Moses bulldozed a swath of the South Bronx to build the Cross Bronx Expressway, displacing an estimated 60,000 residents and gutting one of the most economically diverse urban neighborhoods in the country. The logic of the time was efficiency: move cars faster. By the time the expressway was completed, the same idea was imposed upon the entire city: rationalize land use and separate urban functions into legible zones. What was lost in the process was harder to quantify: the density of small businesses, the overlapping networks of suppliers and customers, the informal economic relationships that give neighborhoods their vitality.

While Jane Jacobs is widely known for her critique of midcentury urban planning in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she applied a similar analysis to urban economies in her underappreciated second book, The Economy of Cities. She made the case that the hyperfocus on market efficiencies comes at the expense of economic innovation, growth, and shared prosperity.

The neighborhoods that planners considered chaotic were in fact some of the most productive environments human beings had ever devised. The “inefficiencies” planners sought to eliminate were the friction that generated new ideas, new businesses, and new economic sectors. Rationalize the city, Jacobs argued, and you rationalize away its generative capacity.

Today, the consequences have become impossible to ignore, particularly as AI ushers in an unprecedented wave of creative destruction. According to the 2024 McKinsey report Generative AI and the future of New York, “By 2030, as many as 1.1 million occupational shifts may be required in the New York region, and one-third or approximately 380,000 of these shifts are directly attributable to the impact of gen AI” (emphasis added).

By almost any measure—market share, profit, equity value, political influence—a small number of very large companies in technology, pharmaceuticals, and finance now dominate in ways that would have been unimaginable (and even illegal) not that long ago. The middle of the economy has thinned out considerably as new business formation has stagnated.

The number of new business startups per capita in the U.S. fell by nearly half between 1978 and 2012 and has only partially recovered since. The small and medium-sized enterprises that once formed the connective tissue of local economies —manufacturers, independent retailers, specialty service firms—have been squeezed by consolidation, by commercial real estate costs, and by a financing environment that has never been well calibrated to their needs. What’s left is being hoovered up by private equity.

Cities that once had diverse, locally robust industrial bases gave way to a relatively small professional class and a much larger stratum of service workers whose wages have not kept pace with housing costs in any American metropolitan area for at least 20 years. In city after city, what took hold was a theory of economic development that Jacobs would have recognized immediately as the urban renewal mistake in a nicer suit. The logical extreme of efficiency is monopoly.

The attraction-retention trap

Most American cities and states have some version of the same strategy: identify large anchor employers, offer them sufficient tax incentives and infrastructure investment to choose one jurisdiction over another, and then spend the next decade providing more incentives to stay. The logic is efficiency: concentrate resources on the largest possible return, eliminate friction, optimize for the biggest fish. This attraction-retention model has dominated state and local economic development despite the fact that it has a surprisingly weak evidence base.

And yet state and local governments spend $50 billion annually on incentives, with roughly $47 billion directed toward tax breaks and cash subsidies primarily geared toward attracting and retaining firms. Both New York State and New York City are the biggest spenders on this model, peaking at $11 billion during the pandemic, which has not substantially come down since.

Research suggests that these resources could generate significantly greater returns if redirected toward investments in workforce development, infrastructure, and support for existing businesses—areas that more directly shape regional productivity and long-term growth.

Modeling further shows that shifting resources toward customized services for locally rooted small and midsize firms—such as job training partnerships, technical assistance, and infrastructure investments tied to existing industry—can produce substantially larger income gains that accrue disproportionately to lower-income residents compared with the minimal benefits provided by traditional corporate attraction strategies.

What’s more, place-based firms are more likely to recirculate profits within the regional economy, while externally owned firms tend to extract earnings, limiting local spillover effects. Place-based businesses are also more likely to be civically engaged, as the success of each company is tied to the success of the city as a whole.

The process knowledge problem

Jacobs’ critique of the “efficiency” approach was structural, not just tactical. Economies that organize themselves around a small number of very large companies and sectors lose the capacity to innovate. She argued in The Economy of Cities that growth and shared prosperity come about by adding “new work” to “old work.”

Her most potent example is how the Wright Brothers, who started as bicycle mechanics in Dayton, Ohio, invented the first powered airplane by applying bicycle mechanical skills, chain-drive technology, and lightweight construction to aeronautics. She points out that the Wrights succeeded where heavily funded competitors failed because they were part of a flexible and innovative urban environment. Their ability to tinker, pivot, and apply mechanics to aerodynamics was key to their success.

New work emerges from the messy, recombinant activity of many firms of varying sizes, linked by competitive yet shared labor markets, suppliers, and the kind of informal knowledge transfer that happens when a machinist and an engineer and a product designer are all working within proximity of one another.

More recently, these observations have been validated by Dan Wang, a research fellow at the Hoover History Lab at Stanford University. He documents China’s industrial rise in his 2025 book, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. Wang calls it “process knowledge”: the tacit, embodied understanding of how to manufacture things, which accumulates in workforces through years of practice, failure, and iteration.

Process knowledge cannot be written down in a manual or captured in intellectual property filings. It lives in people. And when production moves, that knowledge atrophies and is eventually lost. Much like Jacobs’ observation that “new work” comes from “old work,” Wang argues that process knowledge compounds over time. Success in one generation of technology (consumer electronics) creates the foundational skills for the next (electric vehicles).

Wang’s argument challenges a consensus that took hold in American business and policy circles in the 1970s and ’80s but really accelerated in the 1990s: that the U.S. could offshore manufacturing and retain high-value design, branding, and intellectual property work.

But the ability to improve a material product—to solve the production challenges that only emerge at scale and to develop the next generation of manufacturing processes—is inseparable from production itself. Design without manufacturing ultimately weakens innovation ecosystems that were largely made up of small and midsize firms that pay middle-class wages, not out of virtue, but because they create value by inventing new products and birthing new firms.

A case in point is the stagnation of productivity in the U.S. construction industry, which has been essentially flat since the 1970s. This reflects a broader erosion of process knowledge driven by the separation of design from production and the limited adoption of off-site, factory-based building systems. In contrast to countries that have embraced modular and prefabricated construction—where components are produced in controlled environments that enable repetition, standardization, and continuous improvement—the U.S. has largely remained committed to site-built projects.

The consequences are evident not only in stagnant productivity but also in persistently high costs. U.S. projects are often far more expensive than their international counterparts, reflecting in part the industry’s failure to capture the economies of scale and continuous innovation enabled by modular construction and the design-build process.

Now comes AI, which threatens to do to white-collar employment what automation did to manufacturing employment in the ’80s and ’90s. The jobs most immediately at risk (architectural design, legal research, financial analysis, software development, marketing, medical imaging) are precisely the jobs that anchor middle-class professional life in postindustrial America. Cities that reorganized their economies around the attraction of knowledge workers may soon find themselves without a theory of what comes next.

New York City as a test case

State and local governments need to stop treating economic development as a competition for the same small pool of large employers and start treating it as an ecosystem management problem. The question is not which city can offer the most generous incentives. It is what conditions— physical, financial, regulatory, educational—allow many different kinds of firms to start, survive, and grow in a particular place, generating the density and variety of economic activity that Jacobs identified as the precondition for new work.

No city has more at stake in this rebalancing than New York, and no region has a more complicated relationship with the attraction-retention model. Roughly speaking, New York City provides $2.1 billion in tax breaks, mainly to large companies, but gives only $180 million in direct grants to existing small businesses. While the former is forgone revenue and the latter is direct spending, the gap is nonetheless quite large. New York City and State are consistently the largest spenders on economic development programs in the US, despite an abundance of evidence that the benefits are not widely shared.

Now, under Mayor Zohran Mamdani, New York is testing whether his “economic justice” approach can be scaled into a governing philosophy. Mamdani appointed former U.S. Labor Secretary Julie A. Su as the first ever NYC Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice. What’s more, recent memos indicate that Mamdani wants to provide a new mission for the city’s Economic Development Corporation, elevating economic justice as a core complement to its traditional goals of growth and investment.

Whether this restructuring produces better economic outcomes is an open question. New York still needs to do big things. Reorienting EDC too much in the direction of small and midsize business development risks underinvesting in the generational infrastructure projects and sector-building initiatives that only an agency with EDC’s reach and balance sheet can deliver.

But the tension itself may be productive. If the Mamdani administration can pursue both imperatives, it would represent exactly the kind of rebalancing that Jacobs argued for. The risk, as always, is that the pendulum swings too far. The better outcome is a city that uses its economic development machinery to build the conditions for small businesses to become midsize firms and generate the economic density from which new work can emerge.

This may be a hard needle to thread, especially in an era of budget austerity and high interest rates. But New York, with its concentration of talent, capital, and institutional capacity, is probably better positioned than any other American city to try. If Mamdani hopes to reverse the outmigration of working-class jobs and middle-class families from New York City, he’ll need a more cohesive strategy—and a stronger rationale for it.

Here’s our argument in a nutshell: Economic justice emerges from economic diversity, and that is the origin story of New York City, from New Amsterdam to the present. But it is not a given. Jane Jacobs made this point so eloquently more than 50 years ago: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”

America’s fastest-growing new bank doesn’t specialize in AI or crypto-currency or some exotic investment strategy with little real world value. It specializes in environmental sustainability.

Based in St. Petersburg, Florida, Climate First Bank was chartered in 2021 with a mission to finance environmental sustainability. Five years later, it’s already pushing $1.8 billion in assets. The bank — which describes itself as the nation’s first climate-focused bank — nearly doubled in size over the course of 2025 alone.

While Climate First is financing solar arrays of all sizes, including community solar and utility-scale battery storage systems, its rapid growth is powered mainly by the oldest force in banking: relationships.

The bank raised its startup capital through its founder’s existing network. It hired people who had prior experience lending in its initial target markets in Central Florida. It invested time and resources getting to know the people behind the solar industry and how their projects work, from the simplest residential solar deals to the most complex utility-scale projects. It built technology to support relationship building instead of trying to replace it.

All that starts to snowball. People talk. When one solar project developer has a good experience with a bank, they tell every other solar developer they know. Business cards and emails start flying around. Director of Project Finance Hana Freymiller can’t even keep up.

“I wish there were five of me that could be doing this work,” Freymiller says. “There’s just a tremendous need and also a tremendous opportunity right now in this country to do these types of projects.”

From its residential solar platform to its energy project financing, Climate First Bank’s growth has put it ahead of schedule to meet its goal of reaching $10 billion in assets over its first 10 years.

Much of its success has been in places with green banks — public or quasi-public institutions that provide loan guarantees or use other tools to make green lending less risky for private lenders. “Blue cities in red states happen to be a very interesting growth base for us,” too, says Chief Sustainability Officer Chris Castro.

Now, it’s looking for partners to help it scale up its work beyond the reach of any one institution.

If at first you succeed

It isn’t the first rodeo for Climate First Bank founder Ken LaRoe, who currently serves as chair of the bank’s holding company. It’s his third.

Born and raised in Central Florida, LaRoe first started working in the Florida banking industry back in 1982. By 1999, he’d seen dozens of other community banks acquired by larger banks. It was part of a nationwide shift.

Over the course of the 1980s and early 1990s, state and federal restrictions on banks doing business across state lines gradually went away. Chartering and selling community banks became a money-making model for established community banking executives and their friends. You could charter a new bank, pick off bigger banks’ disgruntled customers, and after five or 10 years of building up a new bank’s balance sheet you could sell the bank and make a profit.

In the late ‘90s, Florida banking regulators only required a minimum of $5 million in startup capital to charter a new bank. LaRoe spotted an opportunity: After raising the necessary startup capital from a few hundred people in his network, he chartered Florida Choice Bank in 1999. It grew to more than $400 million in assets by 2006, when the bank’s shareholders ultimately decided to sell it to a regional bank based in Alabama. Two years later, that regional bank was acquired by Royal Bank of Canada, also known as RBC, Canada’s largest bank and one of the 50 largest banks in the world.

With his share of the proceeds from the sale of Florida Choice Bank, LaRoe set out to kick off his early retirement with an RV tour around the country with his wife. Along the way, LaRoe started reading about the story of Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard and the philosophy that business should be about more than creating profits for shareholders.

Calling on many of the same shareholders who had backed his first bank, LaRoe opened a second institution, First Green Bank, in 2009. This time the bank had a mission to support environmental sustainability. By 2018, First Green Bank had grown to $800 million in assets.

Then its shareholders sold it to another, much larger Florida-based bank. The buyer had courted LaRoe on the idea that he could expand First Green Bank’s green lending work to its much larger branch network across Florida. LaRoe planned to stick around as an internal green lending expert at the larger bank. But it quickly became clear after the merger that was not going to be the case, according to LaRoe. So he quit — and embarked on another cross-country RV trip with his wife.

He came back to Central Florida resolved to charter yet another bank. Starting with the same networks of investors he had built after chartering and selling two other banks, LaRoe raised $44 million in startup capital for Climate First Bank. He hired back some of the staff that had helped him build his previous two banks.

But this time, he told his investors the plan would be to keep the bank independent and focused on its mission. He recruited founding board members devoted to that mission, not just making money — including Chris Castro, who had previously launched an urban farming enterprise and served as director of sustainability and resilience for the City of Orlando.

“The board makeup is the reason why we’re in this current situation,” Castro says. “In order for us to actually create this long-term sustainable institution, we needed to have a board of integrity.”

Building on trust

While Climate First Bank started out with a mission to finance environmental sustainability, it doesn’t exclusively do green lending. Most of its lending has been typical lending for a community bank in 2026: a lot of commercial real estate, a lot of working capital and term loans for businesses of all sizes, and a busy but manageable portfolio of construction and project financing.

These are lending categories that require bank board members and loan committee members with deep knowledge of local markets, local developers, and local business owners — something that larger banks generally don’t have at their board or loan committee level.

That’s why, even though community banks like Climate First represent just 11% of assets among federally insured banks, they represent 31% of commercial real estate mortgages, 32% of small business loans, and 33% of construction loans from banks. Meanwhile, the largest four banks combined (Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citi) represent 42% of assets among federally insured banks, but account for just 11% of commercial real estate mortgages, 18% of small business loans, and 11% of all construction loans among banks.

Among those trusted networks of clients — particularly developers and small business owners — Climate First Bank eventually generated investments in environmental sustainability. It happened largely organically, over the course of conversations with clients. A restaurant owner comes in wanting a loan to buy the building they’ve been renting — how about adding solar panels to the roof and lowering their monthly electric bill? Or installing car chargers in the parking lot that generate a little bit of extra revenue? Maybe the restaurant owner might also want solar installed at their home?

Those early connections also helped the bank better understand the underlying solar industry. Climate First’s healthy residential mortgage portfolio provided an entrée into the residential solar market.

For residential solar, deals typically come through solar company sales reps knocking on individual homeowners’ doors. The sales rep comes in with a tape measure and a laptop, takes some measurements, asks some questions, inputs data into a platform on the laptop, and the platform spits out a whole offer for the homeowner showing how much the installation will allegedly reduce their electric bills, the tax credit or other subsidy amounts that might be available to help pay for the installation, and ultimately how much it will cost the homeowner.

But many of those sales reps present offers with the cost of the installation marked up by 30% or more in dealer fees — funds that come out of homeowners’ pockets and into the hands of investors, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

After understanding how the deals get made, Climate First Bank created an affiliated financial technology platform called OneEthos that solar installation sales reps can take into those meetings and generate offers that are more affordable because they don’t have any dealer fees. The bank also made the platform available to solar installation sales reps across the country.

More than 5,000 solar “consultants” are now actively using OneEthos across the country, according to the bank — resulting in Climate First making $275 million in residential solar loans across 44 states last year. Climate First is now the second-largest residential solar financing provider across the country, according to EnergySage.

Climate First also partners with local entities, like Maryland’s Montgomery County Green Bank, to make residential solar installations using OneEthos affordable to low- and moderate-income households.

Credit culture

At any given moment, Freymiller has about a dozen or so “messy middle” projects on her plate as director of energy project finance. As soon as one wraps up, there’s always at least one more ready to get rolling. A 25-megawatt solar array — enough to power up to 10,000 average homes — or maybe a five-megawatt battery project.

These projects fall in between less complex residential or commercial solar installation loans and the massive $100 million-plus projects that can attract financing from much larger institutions. While Freymiller’s deals tend to hover in the $15-$20 million range, they’re often just as complex as much larger deals. Each one may require layers of federal, state, or local subsidies plus multiple financing partners to make the deal work.

Battery storage is one reason her “messy middle” deals are so valuable — and so hard to close. Throughout the course of a day, the cost of energy changes minute by minute. Utilities have to make sure they are always buying enough power to meet demand. At peak times on peak days of the year — like hot summer afternoons with air conditioners blasting — energy prices spike as utilities start making bids to suppliers in their markets.

With at least some battery storage, utilities can buy extra power at times when power usage (and therefore prices) are lowest, like late at night. Then they can release that power into their grids in the afternoon — helping keep rates down for every home or business connected to that grid.

While battery storage may make sense on paper for any utility, actually building and financing these projects can get hairy. Each deal comes with different state regulatory environments and different legal structures for ownership among utilities as well as suppliers. The cashflow for each battery or solar farm project can look very different, even if the underlying technology is the same.

And because these are largely new kinds of projects, there aren’t many comparable transactions to help demonstrate the likelihood that the battery storage project will deliver. Every deal takes a close examination. Speed also matters, as suppliers and contractors can raise their prices in between giving an estimate and the work taking place.

But Freymiller isn’t alone in evaluating and structuring all her deals. Like all construction lenders at every community bank, her deals need approval from the bank’s loan committee, who work with her every step of the way. The bank’s loan committee members — who include Castro — are continually building their own expertise around all the various ways a deal can go wrong as well as all the policies, incentives, subsidies and other formal or informal mechanisms that can help a deal go right.

“We have a really strong credit culture, a really strong competency at all levels of the bank who understand what energy project finance is and does, which enables me to really work out problems and bring all of the tools of finance to a developer doing a project in a community,” Freymiller says.

Every deal looks a little bit different, but that’s OK. Multiple people across the bank have to sign off for a deal to go through. That’s how community banks ensure safe and sound lending when pure numbers or past performance aren’t enough to assess a deal.

And, like many community banks, Climate First’s loan committee meets weekly to evaluate and approve deals so that projects don’t stall out after waiting around too long for approval. On any given Tuesday afternoon, the bank’s loan committee is reviewing anywhere from five to 12 projects, sometimes more.

“And then it’s really awesome to watch, to monitor the project, to see it get on the grid. And then, often I would say, after a deal you get another one from the same really strong developer.”

Open sourcing

Despite the bank’s rapid growth, there’s only so far that one institution can reach, especially when it depends on a loan committee meeting weekly to evaluate projects. That’s why Climate First also sees it as an imperative to get other community banks in other places involved.

The bank is now recruiting other lenders to utilize its OneEthos platform to generate residential solar loans they can originate through their own trusted networks of solar installation sales reps.

Meanwhile, Freymiller is on the lookout for partners to work with her on the pipeline of deals coming her way. Those deals are often coming from states with green banks and also favorable regulatory environments, such as Virginia, Michigan, and Connecticut.

As each solar developer Freymiller works with for the first time comes back for repeat deals, they eventually approach the borrowing limit every bank has for each of its clients. There can also be moments where Freymiller might be at capacity until some of her current active projects are completed and repay their construction loans (to mitigate risk, each bank only allows a certain percentage of its portfolio to be in active construction loans at any given moment). Freymiller needs relationships with other community banks or regional banks who are willing to take on the additional demand she’s seeing.

“We need partnerships to do this work,” Freymiller says. “I cannot originate everything I want to do even with a single strong developer. I’m capped at a certain concentration level. Those partners also need to have an understanding of the deals to even do a participation or to do a co-lending.”

Freymiller and her colleagues on the bank’s loan committee say they are more than willing to help teach other local or regional lenders the ins and outs of these messy middle deals.

The first thing to understand? Each deal is unique, and that’s not going to change at the speed that communities — not to mention the planet — need the deals done. What they need is more institutions who are comfortable with that.

“People need to like more snowflakes,” Freymiller says. “But every snowflake has the same fundamental chemical structure supporting the differences that come out in its beautiful uniqueness.”

The root causes of American dysfunction are fixable, and “real solutions” are in the works right now, according to a new podcast from UC Berkeley's Othering and Belonging Institute.

In this episode of the Next City podcast, we're joined by the co-hosts of the “Real Solutions” podcast, Eli Moore and Jose Richard Aviles. They outline why this moment of political breakdown is also a chance to advance bold, equitable policy change – and they delve deep into cities that are proving that public campaign financing, wealth taxes, and resident-controlled social housing are all possible.

“There are definitely echoes of alternative futures that are constantly in our present, and it's just how do we lean into them and amplify them to scale,” Aviles says.

The episode includes highlights from episodes of “Real Solutions,” featuring guests from the New York City Council, Fix Democracy First, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, and more. They argue that communities can't afford to spend this moment only on defense. They have to organize for the world they actually want. 

Next City was a partner on the launch of “Real Solutions,” and executive director Lucas Grindley can be heard as a guest on the debut episode. 

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

This story was originally published by The Beacon, an online news outlet in Kansas City focused on local, in-depth journalism in the public interest.

Cameron Seip describes his job as being a connector.

As the executive director of Mo-Kan LECET — the Western Missouri and Kansas Laborers-Employers Cooperation and Education Trust — he tries to make “connections that make sense” among union workers, contractors, developers and governments. All so the union members and contractors he represents are able to create more work opportunities.

Many of the people he deals with in Kansas City are increasingly focused on the area’s lack of affordable housing. Seip has a possible solution in mind.

“The thing I want to focus on — that I feel we can bring opportunity to — is to create the affordable housing that the city keeps talking about,” Seip says. “And do it in a way that we can help people find careers and opportunity that has longevity.”

So for the past couple of years he’s been trying to make a surprising connection that he says may help solve several pieces of the affordable housing puzzle. He’s been trying to introduce Kansas City builders to union pension investors.

“It’s basically to introduce all the various investors that we have for our (union) pensions … to developers and people who want to build projects,” he says. “But do it in a way that we can ensure that the project can be used for workforce development for the community at the same time.”

This has been done in cities across the country for decades, but would be unique in Kansas City. Union pensions can be harnessed to finance hard-to-fund affordable housing projects. A developer or agency owns and oversees the project, the construction crews swinging hammers are trained from within the community and earn union wages. When the building is completed, rents pay back loans or bonds, community members have learned a valuable trade, and the pension — supported by hours worked on projects — is a little healthier than before.

Seip says he’s floated the idea to several parties, but one is known to have shown early interest. The Kansas City Housing Authority has started early discussions exploring a potential partnership to train community members, fund and work on its ambitious 10-year, $2.6 billion housing development plan.

The talks with organized labor were first acknowledged publicly May 1. Mayor-appointed Housing Authority Commissioner Tate Williams — also a community housing banker for the Central Bank of Kansas City — described discussions during a Greater Kansas City Regional Housing Partnership forum.

“The Housing Authority has begun forming a relationship with the laborers union,” Williams says. “It’s a really creative partnership that we’re discussing … possibly even financing through pension investments, some of the projects that the laborers union would then construct. And as part of that, would develop a workforce partnership with the residents of the complex in which they’re working.”

Nothing is set in stone. A handful of preliminary conversations, by Seip’s account, do not add up to a deal. But they do present an intriguing possibility that could address several community needs.

Kansas City needs affordable housing, it needs funding for affordable housing, and it will need more trades workers as construction booms locally.

Pension funds tied to organized labor have helped fill funding gaps — in exchange for union labor working on the projects they fund — for affordable housing in cities like Boston, Chicago and St. Louis. The projects trained locals in the trades, and the workers left with union benefits including higher wages, healthcare and a pension.

Here’s how it might work in Kansas City.

Size of the problem(s)

The local affordable housing need is well documented. The Mid-America Regional Council estimated that the region was short 63,828 affordable rental units in 2023. The Kansas City Housing Authority reported 14,347 applications on its public housing waitlist and 27,523 on its housing voucher waitlist in their 2026 annual plan.

Meanwhile, the money to chip away at that shortage lags well behind the need.

Because financing for affordable housing is difficult to find, Kansas City voters approved an additional $50 million for the city’s Housing Trust Fund in 2022. Since 2021, it has helped finance the construction or preservation of more than 2,000 units — a small fraction of the local shortfall.

At a February Keystone housing forum, Local Initiatives Support Corp. Greater Kansas City Executive Director Geoff Jolley put the gap between that funding and the demand in stark relief. “The city has received over $1 billion dollars in requests for the Housing Trust Fund for $75 million worth of funding,” Jolley said. “The need is out there.”

The question of who would build all that housing is its own problem.

Nate Zier, executive director at the National Institute for Construction Excellence, was blunt about it at a May 1 housing forum put on by the Greater Kansas City Regional Housing Partnership.

“The biggest constraint right now isn’t land. It’s not materials — though the prices of materials are certainly cause for concern at times,” Zier said. “A big part of it, if you ask around, it’s the workforce.”

Citing national data, Zier said about 41% of construction workers are set to retire by 2031. He noted that while there are now some strong programs to bring young workers into the fold, the pipeline of qualified professionals behind those about to retire isn’t keeping pace.

“It’s not just a shortage,” he said. “It’s a mismatch between the skills we need and the pipeline that we’ve built.”

The structure of the housing construction industry also doesn’t help.

Residential construction is fragmented compared to commercial construction. Small businesses, subcontractors and independent crews stitch residential jobs together, which means people doing the work have less stability and less access to things like healthcare, retirement and formal training pathways.

“Workforce development isn’t just about keeping people in or getting people in,” Zier said. “It’s about creating a system where they can stay employed and stay active.”

Seip is pitching the union pension funding solution to address all three challenges — a lack of affordable housing, the need for funding and a high demand for a workforce to build it — at the same time.

How union pension-funded housing works

To understand how Seip’s proposal could work, look at South Boston.

Old Colony, originally built in 1940, was one of the Boston Housing Authority’s largest properties, spanning 16 acres and 22 buildings. When the city went to rebuild it, conventional financing wasn’t enough.

Starting in 2010, the Boston Housing Authority partnered with the state housing finance agency and a private developer to redevelop the site in phases. The financing they leaned on came in large part from the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust. The trust pools portions of union member pensions and public employee retirement plans across the country and invests in housing construction.

The AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust has put more than $240 million into redeveloping hundreds of housing units in the Old Colony project so far. Since the trust began in 1984, it has helped finance 632 projects that produced 248,600 jobs and 217 million hours worked nationwide.

“Cities across our country face an affordability crisis only made worse by the pandemic. In Boston, union capital and union labor are proactively addressing that need,” said AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust Chief Executive Officer Chang Suh in a 2023 release.

The money came with one condition: Every project funded by union pensions had to be built by 100% union labor. Over the course of the project nearly 2.4 million hours of union labor went into the project.

“If our (union pension) money is involved in any way, then part of that agreement is that the work will be done with signatory contractors who participate in our apprenticeship and employ our members,” Seip says.

There are currently 31 projects under construction funded in part by the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust nationwide, totaling just under $1 billion dollars from union pensions. Due east down Interstate 70 in St. Louis, the housing investment trust has invested $614.2 million in 32 projects over 30 years.

Seip tells The Beacon that his group of laborers unions could tap pension funds beyond the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust to fund housing projects in Kansas City. He says there are also the Laborers International Union of North America’s pensions, largely held by Fengate Capital, and a series of smaller diversified funds from varied union trades and regions. He says the exact funding source that could be used would depend on the specific project.

“Imagine the Mississippi, it’s a huge river and that’s the main source but you also have lots of little rivers flowing into it,” Seip says. “We do these things collectively and that’s how we find these opportunities of strength.”

Workforce development engine

Those investments don’t just build housing.

Boston paired the construction with a nonprofit pre-apprenticeship workforce development program that gave Old Colony residents a path into the construction trades. Residents were also given the first crack at the jobs rebuilding their neighborhoods.

The structure of the workforce pipeline associated with a union pension-funded project in Kansas City hasn’t been finalized, but there are options. In addition to other training programs, East High School is expected to have classes mirroring those of the laborers union’s training center starting this fall. Those classes would allow graduates to enter the union’s apprenticeship at a more advanced stage, not too differently than taking college credits while in high school.

While pre-apprenticeship does not have a union requirement, the next step of apprenticeship would require signing on with a union contractor to work on pension-funded projects. Seip says that is partially because training is paid for by signatory contractors based on the number of hours worked. The same is also true for the union’s healthcare and the pension itself.

“If we’re the funding device, we’re priming our own pump,” Seip says. “And there’s good reason for (developers) to be interested in that, because the quality of work, the workforce development we do for the community, the way that we combine with the community, it’s really just a lot of upside.”

The Kansas City International Airport is a glimpse of what that training and support could look like. A three-week pre-apprenticeship training program run with construction trades and paid for by the project’s developer graduated about 200 students across 10 classes. About 65% were people of color and roughly 70% remained in construction after they graduated.

Seip stresses that the union was open to everyone, and they would seek to have as many local residents working on these proposed projects as possible.

“The point of hiring local is so that locals can feel the employment,” Seip says. “When you have people that live here, get their paychecks from contractors here, buy their groceries here, you actually feel it within the economy, you feel it through income taxes, it helps the school system, it helps it all.”

Could a partnership in Kansas City work?

“We’re looking at all relationships everywhere,” Seip says. “If somebody wants to meet with us and learn about what our pension investors need for us to all strike a deal, then I welcome all conversations.”

While they are the first to be tied publicly to the idea — at least in early discussions — the Kansas City Housing Authority did not reply to requests for comment.

A partnership could make sense given the housing authority’s stated goals and desire to find unconventional solutions for the ambitious set of projects.

In November, housing authority commissioners approved a $2.6 billion plan to redevelop all of the city’s existing public housing over 10 years. The multiphase project would result in 7,159 units of new and rehabilitated mixed-income housing. For a project that size, the housing authority’s Executive Director Nona C. Eath said in an interview with LISC in March that it would take some creative partnerships.

“It is going to take everybody. It’s not just a specific group. We anticipate partnering with local, state and federal agencies,” Eath said. “We’re looking at development partners locally, businesses and entrepreneurial groups to see what opportunities exist. We’re talking to resident groups and neighborhoods. We’re talking with financial partners. So, it’s everybody.”

Two other things about the housing authority’s situation make Seip’s pitch line up more closely than it might first appear.

The first is wage law. The housing authority’s federally subsidized projects will almost certainly be bound by the Davis-Bacon act, which requires workers on such projects to be paid prevailing wage. The cost premium often associated with fully union jobsites is negated when prevailing wage is already required by federal law.

Hiring law also points to alignment of ideas. Federally funded projects have mandated hiring preferences for low-income workers and residents of public housing. Seip has described this as key to the union’s mission to invest in the community.

“The idea is to look at the communities within Kansas City, find the ones that would benefit from the most opportunity,” Seip said. “And figuring out a way to inject wages as the opportunity into the community.”

Limitations and unknowns

The first limitation is that the idea is in its infancy in Kansas City, with only conversations and no flagship deals or details just yet.

“This would look like something that we haven’t seen before,” Seip says. “So we have to be ready to pivot in the moment.”

Another challenge is likely to be the 100% union requirement on pension-funded projects. Even setting aside anti-union bias, there is no formal homebuilders’ union in Kansas City. The pool of union signatory contractors in general is also not as deep as in cities like Boston or Chicago. Spreading awareness of the potential opportunity to local contractors and people interested in the trades is a high priority.

“Our membership should have a wide variety of all of the people who are interested in being builders,” Seip says. “We are certainly not gatekeepers. And the only thing that we ask is show up with readiness to join in.”

Political headwinds may also be building as President Donald Trump has proposed a $10.7 billion cut to federal housing programs, including Community Development Block Grants and rental assistance.

What happens next depends on someone, a developer or agency, taking the leap. Seip has a handful of possibilities, but no firm commitments just yet.

For now, the work is focused mostly on introductions — the meetings, the explanations, making the case for a model that has built tens of thousands of homes elsewhere and none in Kansas City. Whether any of it results in concrete and steel will come down to a decision made by a developer or agency.

That choice has not yet been made. But the pieces are in place to make it possible. Pension capital is sitting in trusts that already invest in housing, just not here. A workforce pipeline is being assembled while a housing crisis is deepening by the year. And a man whose job is to make introductions keeps walking into rooms in Kansas City, looking for the person willing to be first.

“To me, it’s the builders of our community trying to solve the problems that we hear everybody talk about, and very few coming to the table with solutions,” Seip said. “The reason that we’re at the table trying to make sure that these projects happen is because everyone benefits when the whole community has the basic needs for what this life requires.”

This story was produced as part of Next City’s joint Equitable Cities Reporting Fellowship with Resolve Philly’s Germantown Info Hub.

When the Rev. James H. Buck opens the second location of his barbecue joint in Philadelphia’s Mt. Airy neighborhood this fall, he already knows where his new hires are coming from.

In early May, he visited a state correctional institution and came home with five pages of names — people scheduled for release by year’s end, many of them with food service experience, all of them needing work. The interviews have already begun.

Inspired by Buck’s grandmother’s recipes and his own past growing up in Mississippi, the eatery’s barbecue and soul food dishes have become a hit in Northwest Philly. And since 2020, Southern Flames BBQ has employed more than 40 formerly incarcerated individuals, as well as at-risk youth and disabled veterans — people “whose backs are against the margins of society,” he says.

The model may seem risky to many, but it’s paying off, he says: “It’s been a good six years. We’ve never run in the red and we’ve always been in a 22% margin of profit.”

Formerly incarcerated Americans are unemployed at a rate of over 27%, according to The Prison Policy Initiative, and people with criminal records are 50% less likely to receive callbacks from employers.

Manny West, who joined Southern Flames as a cook in its first year, knows that firsthand.

“There’s a lot of different businesses, [no] matter what line of work you’re in, that aren’t ex-offender friendly,” West says. “A lot of people just look at you and see what you have done in the past, and never see the person that you are today. Everybody deserves a second chance.”

A growing number of restaurants and small businesses across the city agree. Down North Pizza in North Philly as well as Out West and Black Dragon Take-out in West Philly – all founded within the last six years — all make a point of hiring formerly-incarcerated workers.

Ministry by another name

Buck, who serves as pastor at Grace Baptist Church of Germantown, sees his barbecue restaurant as an extension of his spiritual mission.

“It’s ministry for me,” says Buck. “There’s a lot of things in our community that we need to reintroduce to our people and children to demonstrate a level of resurrection or resuscitation of life. We talk a lot about trying to get jobs, but we lack creating jobs.”

His doctoral research at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School planted the seed of the mission that would soon become his life’s commitment. Buck’s dissertation documented his former church’s efforts to “reduce the revolving door of incarceration” and use “its resources to shift the culture of criminal acceptance in its local community” in North Philadelphia.

“The African American church has a lot to say and contribute when it comes to recreating this idea of economic equity within our communities,” he says. Local churches and institutions, he argues, have a “responsibility and a capability of creating organizations, LLCs, and businesses that would help the marginalized.”

Buck and his wife — Southern Flames BBQ’s co-founder Jennifer Wilson Buck — began thinking of more tangible ways to practice what they preached. Initially, they imagined creating a barbershop where they would train and hire returning citizens and at-risk youth. After some early tests fell flat, they began considering a barbecue concept instead.

In 2019, the same year that he completed his dissertation, the Bucks launched an experiment, selling barbecue out of their Germantown home and hiring neighborhood youth to help. Then word of mouth took over.

Fanning the flames

In 2019, Rev. Buck submitted a proposal to City Council and received a $500 grant from now-Mayor Cherelle Parker. But that wouldn’t get his business far.

“Me and my wife took out all of our savings, which was about $30,000, and we bought up all the big [kitchen] equipment,” Buck says. “We spent our credit cards to the max to start hiring people, and what we ended up doing is using all those resources to get this business started.”

Southern Flames BBQ served food at events around town until June 2020, when it became a vendor at the Market at the Fareway, an indoor farmer’s market in Chestnut Hill. The community support they had built up was visible.

“We had a line all the way out the door,” Buck says. “On our first day, we were very successful, but it came with a lot of learning pains.” He recalls the chaos of his first time running an eatery, with 12 employees working in a small space at once.

That won’t be an issue in their new Mt. Airy location, which will be a larger sit-down restaurant and sports bar with an expanded menu.

“Expansion is necessary,” he says. “Being able to keep those persons gainfully employed, that’s where we need the expansion. That’s where we need to try and raise those grants and funds.”

In 2021, the business was selected to be a part of the Branching Up program from the Lenfest Center for Community Workforce Partnerships at Temple University, which supports businesses that focus on hiring returning citizens. Participants were paid $17.50 an hour to job train and partake in the program, and Southern Flames received a $11,000 grant.

Buck used the funds to install a small computer lab in the restaurant space and to launch his nonprofit A Taste of a Second Chance, where returning citizens can engage in hands-on culinary lessons and job training while learning how to set up bank accounts and manage finances.

“Many of them coming out of the institutions have never had a bank account in their name and they’ve never had debit cards,” Buck says. “In our program, not only do we teach you how to do the cooking, but we teach hard and soft life skills. When we say that we’re willing to take a person on and help them rebuild their lives, we mean this in the fullest capacity.”

Jennifer Watson, who also cooks in the restaurant and provides customer service, says she’s found a home with Southern Flames.

“I was an outsider since I was young — I couldn’t really fit in, and if I did, it wasn’t the right people to hang out with; always getting in trouble and stuff,” Watson says. “I’m glad I found this place. I see myself here in the future. I have a job for the next 15 years.”

Next City is one of 30 news organizations powering the Philadelphia Journalism Collaborative. Follow us at @PHLJournoCollab. This article is part of a national initiative exploring how geography, policy, and local conditions influence access to opportunity. Find more stories at economicopportunitylab.com.

As the federal government's anti-immigrant policies persist, four mission-driven newsrooms are showing what journalism in the service of immigrant communities actually looks like. 

In this episode, leaders from four nonprofit newsrooms in Phoenix, the Bay Area, New York, and Minneapolis discuss publishing in multiple languages and across platforms, delivering actionable information, and running disinformation defense workshops.

The guests are part of the newly-formed Immigrant News Coalition and include Maritza L. Félix, Founder and Director of Conecta Arizona; Madeleine Bair, Founder and Co-Executive Director of El Tímpano in the San Francisco Bay Area; Mazin Sidahmed, Executive Director and Co-Founder of Documented in New York City; and Vanan Murugesan, Executive Director of Sahan Journal in Minneapolis. 

“When people don't have a place to go for trusted information, that's when fear sets in,” Bair says. “That's when people are very vulnerable to misinformation and disinformation.”

“This isn’t a knock on traditional journalism, but oftentimes the content is produced for someone else's awareness and understanding of an issue,” Murugesan says, describing how reporting about minority communities isn’t typically in service to them. “We offer something else different. There's an added layer: What does this actually mean for your life?”

Moderator Eliana Perozo, Next City's Equitable Cities Reporting Fellow for Anti-Displacement Strategies, also shares her reporting on how organizers in Memphis are fighting back against new 287(g) contracts with local governments that effectively deputize police as ICE agents.

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

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.

Hawaiʻi Curbs Corporate Influence in Elections

Hawaiʻi Gov. Josh Green has signed a first-of-its-kind law that bars corporations doing business in the state from engaging in state, local, or federal elections, The American Prospect reports.

The law, SB2471, will go into effect in July 2027 and bars corporations from donating directly to politicians or Super PACs or funding ballot initiatives. Violating the law could result in a loss of legal status. Similar bills have been proposed in 14 other states, according to the Prospect.

The legal theory behind the law posits that corporations only exist according to the charters of the states they operate within. (“The creation and continued existence of a corporation is not a right but a conditional grant of legal status by the State and remains subject to complete withdrawal at any time,” the law states.).

Trump Immigration Crackdown Will Leave Half-Trillion Dollar Hole

The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown could lead to almost half a trillion dollars in lost tax revenue over the course of a decade, The Guardian reports.

This is largely a result of a data-sharing agreement between the IRS and the Department of Homeland Security, which has made undocumented immigrants fearful of filing their taxes. The data-sharing agreement reached in April 2025 was shut down by a federal judge last February, but not before the IRS shared thousands of addresses with DHS.

“Immigrants who are not legally authorized to work in the US are still required to pay taxes, and a longstanding IRS policy assured them that their data would be protected,” The Guardian explains. According to the Institute on Tax and Economic Policy, undocumented immigrants paid close to $100 billion in taxes in 2022. That includes $25.7 billion for Social Security, $6.4 billion for Medicare and $1.8 billion for unemployment insurance — none of which they may access.

Rail Workers Reach Deal with MTA After Three-Day Strike

A Long Island Rail Road strike that lasted three days and impacted 270,000 commuters ended on Tuesday, Gothamist reports. The MTA reached a deal with the five unions representing 3500 LIRR workers that will include wage increases, The City reports, although the parties declined to provide specifics until the deal was finalized.

The National Mediation Board had to intervene on Sunday night when parties couldn’t come to an agreement to end what was the first LIRR strike since 1994. The MTA is currently negotiating a contract for subway conductors, but unlike LIRR workers, they’re not permitted to organize work stoppages.

Southwestern States Join Forces To Boost Geothermal Energy

A new, bipartisan coalition of governors from the Mountain West have launched an initiative that would generate an estimated 200 gigawatts of clean energy, Canary Media reports, increasing America’s ability to produce geothermal electricity by a full 50 times.

Through the Center for Public Enterprise’s new Mountain West Geothermal Consortium, officials from Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah will work together to help overcome the financing risks and permitting challenges that have made scaling geothermal difficult.

“The idea that we can unleash clean, affordable, dispatchable power … that’s kind of the Holy Grail, what we’ve all been chasing. And yet it’s a reality now in ways that it’s never been before,” Utah’s Republican Gov. Spencer Cox said. “If it’s just one state going it alone, that’s great, but you don’t get the attention, the capital, the investment that you need.”

Spanberger Makes Sick Leave Universal in Virginia

Gov. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia has signed paid sick leave legislation that covers more than a million workers who do not have access through their employers, according to a press release.

The law, which requires companies to allot at least one hour of sick leave per 30 days worked for up to at least 5 days a year, takes effect July 2027, WTVR reports. Companies who already provide the minimum allotment of sick leave will not be required to change their policies. The governor’s office said a lack of sick leave is mostly felt by low-wage workers, including those in the fast food and personal care industries.

MORE NEWS

• Portland’s billion-dollar climate fund becomes a blueprint for other cities. OPB

• LA County to end ban on rent gouging, 16 months after fires created rental market chaos. LAist

• Gas prices are rising. So is public transit ridership. Grist

• The unhappy hosts of the World Cup. The Atlantic

• Report: New Yorkers deserve Rent Emergency Stabilization for Tenants Act. Community Service Society

• House overwhelmingly passes amended ROAD to Housing bill. Multifamily Dive

• Trump officials plan to repeal limits on ‘forever chemicals’ in drinking water. The Guardian

• In conservative Utah, some communities are ditching fossil fuel power for clean energy. NPR

• ‘Stop killing us’: New York’s home care providers near hunger strike over wage injustice. The Guardian

• AvalonBay and Equity Residential announce ‘merger of equals.’ Multifamily Dive

OPPORTUNITIES & RESOURCES

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

• New Profit is launching Connected Futures, a Catalyze cohort for organizations that bridge divides and bring people together to solve problems collectively. Selected organizations will receive a one-year $100,000 unrestricted grant, a $10,000 grant for leadership development, and strategic advisory support. Submit a discovery form by May 26.

• Kelly Jin is open to expressions of interest for her $25,000 Catalyst Fund for nonprofits and projects building civic infrastructure and community connectedness. Read more and fill out the interest form by May 27.

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

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

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

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

Most cities today have no shortage of ambition. Across the globe, municipal leaders have stood on stages to announce bold net-zero targets and comprehensive climate action plans. Science-based targets are set, strategies are drafted, and the political intent is — at least on paper — clear. Yet once the cameras leave and the work moves inside the walls of City Hall, the shift from political intent to practical implementation is slow, messy, and full of friction.

In my six years working closely with city administrations, observing the inner workings of climate transition teams and urban planners, I’ve come to realize that we have been misdiagnosing the problem.

For years, we have pointed to the same culprits: political polarization, lack of funding, and a deficit of technical knowledge. These are real challenges, but practitioners and researchers are increasingly pointing toward a more mundane, yet far more pervasive obstacle: internal friction.

This friction is especially acute when it comes to climate action — where the science is uncontested and the targets are clear, but progress gets stuck in the gears of the municipal machine — in mid-sized cities that are too big to rely solely on informal “corridor chats” to get things done, yet too small to have the massive integration machinery of a global metropolis.

Through my work with cities participating in Sweden’s national program for urban climate neutrality, I’ve seen that what cities need isn’t another 200-page process or a new bureaucratic layer. They need a lubricant for their municipal machinery, a system that allows their existing plans to move through the gears of formality and structure.

Working alongside 10 different cities, we developed the Actionable Consensus Framework to help city leaders see what blocks the path from ambition to action and agree on how to get unstuck. It’s a structured, in‑person process that any motivated city leader can use (for free, without any need for consultants) to convene a small group of people who actually hold decision‑making authority.

It works because it is flexible: You can implement it across an entire department to realign a mission, or you can use it yourself as an individual lead to unstick a single, stubborn project.

The framework operates through three core shifts that align with the values of an equitable democracy:

• Quality of life, not carbon. We often start climate discussions with spreadsheets. The Actionable Consensus Framework flips this by starting with humanity; every session begins by focusing on how a project improves the daily lives and dignity of residents. When we frame climate action as a path to a more livable, prosperous city for all, we advance justice. It’s no longer an abstract environmental goal; it’s about overturning systems that make life harder for marginalized communities and instead leading toward collective liberation.

• Openness, not vague visions. Instead of open-ended “visioning” workshops, we use science-based, locally-grounded story templates to depict a day in a climate-neutral city. This is where openness comes in. We value the imagination required to find better solutions, but we ground that imagination in the lived experience of affected communities. By giving everyone in the room the same, specific mental picture of the future, we move past “what” we are doing and get straight to “how.”

• Real people, not roles. A city is a collection of humans. The framework invites participants to bring their real identities, including their professional worries and personal hopes, into the room. By acknowledging who people are and what they fear losing in a transition, trust grows. This is the essence of connection: Creating the space for diverse partners to connect authentically so that an idea doesn’t just pass through many hands, but is carried by them.

If we are to bridge the gap between our boldest climate ambitions and the visible results on our streets, we must look inward with a new perspective.

Cities can succeed when they are humble enough to admit that their own internal structures are often their greatest obstacles. They are honest about the friction, open to imagining different ways of working, and dedicated to the human connections that fuel change.

By moving from informal “favors” to a structured way of building actionable consensus, we ensure that the transition to a net-zero city is not just a technical achievement, but a democratic one that works for everyone. We don’t need a new engine for our cities; we just need to be humble enough to grease the wheels of the one we have.

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.

Nearly two years ago, the Supreme Court ruled in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson that jurisdictions can criminalize sleeping outside, even when there is no adequate shelter. The June 2024 ruling created ripple effects across the country, as state and local governments unleashed increased aggression in tearing down encampments and destroying people’s belongings.

While many democratic elected officials tried to posture as opponents of the ruling, some gloated. California Gov. Gavin Newsom seemed to celebrate the ruling with a photo op in which he destroyed a homeless encampment. In his newly released memoir, he writes that he believes addressing homelessness requires both “the carrot and the stick.”

Experts tell Next City/Shelterforce that the overall trend has been a marked increase in policies increasing the criminalization of public homelessness since the Supreme Court’s ruling. But they also point to some promising interventions that have made headway or are in their early stages.

Some cities and states have introduced bills or passed laws to minimize the decision’s impact by declining to criminalize public camping, revamping public spaces to be less hostile, and addressing the root causes of homelessness.

The Gloria Johnson Act

At the federal level, the National Homelessness Law Center (NHLC) is still trying to get traction for the Housing Not Handcuffs Act, introduced in June 2025. Despite its more than two dozen cosponsors, the bill has still never received a hearing, according to Jesse Rabinowitz, campaign and communications director at NHLC.

The Housing Not Handcuffs Act would protect homeless people from being arrested or otherwise penalized for conducting “life sustaining activities on public land.” The bill defines these activities as “moving, resting, sitting, standing, lying down, sleeping, protecting oneself and personal property from the elements, eating, and drinking.” It would grant the same protections against search and seizure for property stored on public land as belongings stored in a private dwelling.

Under the act, conducting life-sustaining activities on public land would not be permitted if someone has access to “adequate alternative indoor space,” which the law defines as a space that is accessible; free of charge; that does not restrict a person’s rights; and that allows the person to remain with pets, relatives, and partners (regardless of marriage status). It can include so-called tiny homes or similar structures that meet set requirements.

The bill faces long odds. Republicans hold majorities in both the House and Senate, and although many in the party paid lip service to more compassionate policy, multiple Democrats sent amicus briefs asking the Supreme Court to take up Grants Pass.

“While I think it’s a long shot, I don’t think it’s impossible,” Rabinowitz says. “People recognize that the solution to homelessness is housing.”

A similar state- and local-level model legislation—also crafted by NHLC—called the Gloria Johnson Act, is yet to be passed. The legislation is intended for communities that wish to enshrine the status quo as it existed in the 9th Circuit prior to the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass ruling: Criminalization of homelessness would be illegal “in the absence of adequate alternative housing and shelter.”

State and local encampment decriminalization

Other states have taken their own approaches to bills that decriminalize public camping, independent of the Gloria Johnson Act.

In July 2024, one month after the Grants Pass ruling, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors reaffirmed its policy against criminalizing homelessness and using county jails to enforce anti-camping ordinances.

Yet the city of Los Angeles was one of the California jurisdictions that filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to take on Grants Pass. The city has since moved forward with aggressive encampment removals under its CARE+ program and Mayor Bass’ signature Inside Safe program.

Despite his public support for the Grants Pass decision, Gov. Newsom signed legislation in October that prevents the criminalization of people providing aid to homeless people. According to CalMatters, the law comes after the city of Fremont’s brief criminalization of “aiding, abetting or concealing” a homeless encampment. Within a month, the city council gave in to pressure and changed this language.

In Maryland, a bill partially based on the Gloria Johnson model legislation was introduced by State Delegate Jessica Feldmark in February 2025 but stalled after its first reading.

In January 2025, Illinois introduced House Bill 1429, based on the Gloria Johnson Act; it has 31 cosponsors as of May. The bill prohibits the arrest of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness for“engaging in life-sustaining activities” on public property. This is defined in the first version of the bill as “moving, resting, sitting, standing, lying down, sleeping, protecting oneself from the elements, eating, drinking, and storing such personal property as needed to shelter oneself.” It was amended and re-referred to the Rules Committee in April.

Unlike many similar bills, this bill does not explicitly include exceptions to its protections based on available shelter space. But the first version of the bill defines “unsheltered homelessness” as “lack of access to a legally operated indoor shelter or other temporary residence that is appropriate and safe.”

The first version of the bill created a “necessity defense” for people who have been criminalized for conducting “life-sustaining” activities while “experiencing unsheltered homelessness.” If an attorney invoked this defense, the onus would be on the defense to prove the individual is homeless. But the first amendment to the bill removed this provision, according to Claire Sloss, director of strategic and policy communications for the Chicago Coalition to End Homelessness (CCH).

The latest amendment to the bill would also create a subcommittee in the Office to Prevent and End Homelessness to facilitate a plan to remove encampments on state property “if removal is necessary.”

The latest version of the bill was approved by the state House of Representatives in April. “This [new version of the bill] neutralized opposition from the Illinois Parks [and Recreation] Association and [Northwest Municipal Conference], making us more optimistic about the path forward, but we understand that we may need more time in the House,” Sloss told Next City/Shelterforce in an email.

According to CCH, “Before and since the US Supreme Court decision, local governments in Illinois have had the power to make people move from public spaces when necessary, using a variety of local ordinances—this legislation does not change that.” The coalition says Illinois has a shortage of more than 5,300 shelter beds and 10,900 permanent supportive housing units.

In an emailed statement to Next City/Shelterforce, Illinois Rep. Kevin Olickal, who introduced House Bill 1429, said it was a response to the Grants Pass decision. Since the decision was handed down, he said, 40 municipalities across Illinois have introduced measures to increase fines and criminalization of unsheltered homelessness.

“This is not the way to address homelessness, particularly at a time when housing costs and rents are rising sharply, federal funding for homelessness services is being cut, and more people are being pushed into unstable housing situations,” he said. “People experiencing homelessness deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, not penalized for simply trying to survive. We know what works: a Housing First model that prioritizes stable housing and supportive services, not punishment.”

In Pennsylvania, lawmakers announced a plan for legislative action immediately after the Supreme Court’s ruling. In November 2025, they introduced a “Shelter First” approach through two bills, Senate Bill 1089 and House Bill 2028. The bills would make it illegal to enforce public camping bans unless there is “adequate indoor alternative space” that accommodates any disabilities; personal property; and partners (regardless of marriage status), family, and pets.

According to Natasha Cahill, communications director for state Sen. Nikil Saval, who introduced Senate Bill 1089, “there seems to be a real possibility that [House Bill 2028] will come to a full vote on the House floor,” although the timeline is unclear. The Senate version of the bill has been assigned to the judiciary committee and “there are no current plans to bring this bill for consideration” there, Cahill says.

“It’s clear that this is an initiative that people want to see enacted. We know that an effective response to homelessness will take all levels of government, and our hope is that municipalities might use this as a blueprint for their work even as we build political will at the state level,” according to an email from Natasha Cahill.

Following the Grants Pass decision, the city of Pittsburgh initially declined to remove a homeless encampment until credible offers of shelter could be made despite the encampment violating city guidelines requiring six feet of distance from a public right-of-way, according to CBS News. The encampment was eventually removed when encampment residents were moved to either shelter or permanent housing.

Banning hostile architecture

Proposals in multiple states have attempted to ban the practice of “hostile architecture,” or intentional design decisions that make it difficult to sit or lie down outside to dissuade homeless people from sleeping.

A Connecticut law passed in November 2025 as part of a broader comprehensive zoning update is the first to ban hostile architecture in the country, according to the National Housing Law Project, which tracks laws pertaining to homelessness.

The provision bans towns and cities from installing hostile architecture in any publicly owned or accessible building. The bill also includes a pilot program to provide portable showers and laundry facilities to people experiencing homelessness, which requires at least three shower trailers and three laundry trucks.

An earlier version of the proposal, House Bill 5002, would have required towns to submit affordable housing plans, similar to requirements in New Jersey, but was vetoed by Gov. Ned Lamont last year.

According to Jessica Kubicki, chief initiative officer at the Housing Collective, a Connecticut-based nonprofit that advocated for the law, the affordable housing plan requirement was removed after Gov. Lamont received pushback from town and city lawmakers concerned about their “autonomy.” But Kubicki says the veto of that earlier version of the legislation may have led Gov. Lamont to add the ban on hostile architecture as a conciliatory gesture.

“I think it kind of worked in our favor,” Kubicki says.

Connecticut’s annual Point-in-Time count for unsheltered homelessness increased by 45 percent between 2024 and 2025, Kubicki says, which also led to increased pressure to address the issue.

“This felt like a little bit of a small win,” she says. She notes that the state does not have much hostile architecture as it stands, but the law will prevent the trend from taking hold.

According to Partnership for Strong Communities, which advocated for both bills, the law also provides increased rental assistance, first-time homebuyer plans, and grants to encourage housing growth near public transit. Additionally, it allows public housing authorities to use bond funds to develop “middle housing” and permits the state housing finance authority, local housing authorities, or nonprofits to buy homes and keep them in an affordable trust.

A bill banning hostile architecture was introduced in Washington in 2024 but never made it to a vote. A Massachusetts bill that would ban hostile architecture targeting homeless people was introduced in February 2025, but it has not seen motion since December of that year. It is the third such attempt, following similar bills introduced in 2021 and 2023. Like the Connecticut law, it would ban hostile architecture in publicly accessible buildings or property owned or controlled by the municipality.

This piece has been corrected to reflect that Illinois House Bill 1429 would not create a state Office to Prevent and End Homelessness, which is already established. The subcommittee required by the bill would be tasked with a plan to remove encampments only on state property.

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.

When ICE raids and hostile federal policies destabilize entire communities, frontline organizations in cities and rural counties alike are answering with door-knocking, theater, wellness programs, and the slow work of building power from within.

In this sponsored episode with The Culture & Community Power Fund, two Massachusetts organizations respond to the mounting pressures facing immigrant and refugee communities. 

The organizations they support are responding to the moment, says Erik Takeshita, director of The Culture & Community Power Fund. “It was already really hard work, and now it's like you have to add another layer of creativity and ingenuity to really be able to reach out to people,” Takeshita says.

La Colaborativa in Chelsea turns organizing and door-knocking into power in so many ways, including policy wins, arts and wellness programming, and a full continuum of youth services. Norieliz DeJesus is the director of youth programs for La Colaborativa, but she first came to the organization as a teen. Today, she knows many neighbors who went through the program and work as nurses, police officers, and community leaders. She considers them part of “the safety net that this community has created over the years.”

 “It makes it easier for the community to trust when they can see that the person in those seats of power are people who lived and experienced this community,” says DeJesus, who is a member of the city council.

Meanwhile on the other end of the state in Berkshire County, the team at Multicultural BRIDGE—including Gwendolyn VanSant, CEO and founding director, and Dr. Lina Polo, the physician who leads its public health programs—host culturally specific wellness days, support groups, food distribution, and coordinate the county's Community Health Improvement Plan all as ways of addressing isolation, healthcare gaps, and belonging in a predominantly white rural region.

“If you treat the least healthy and the person with the least access, it's going to improve things unseen,” VanSant says on the need for solidarity. 

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

Over the past decade, rates of depression in the United States have climbed steadily, with some of the highest increases among young people. Today’s younger generations are more likely to talk about and report symptoms of anxiety and depression than those who came before them at the same age. Unfortunately, though, more than half of people experiencing depression still do not receive treatment, often because of cost, coverage, stigma, or lack of access.

That combination has serious consequences. Young people are facing higher levels of mental health challenges while navigating a care system that often cannot meet the demand. But they have the potential to change that, as younger generations become a larger share of the electorate.

The decisions shaping mental health care are being made in real time. The question is whether the people most affected by those decisions will have a voice in shaping them.

Culturally, we have never been more open about mental health. As millennials, we have watched the conversation shift in real time, from silence and stigma to group chats, TikToks, and the kind of humor that makes it easier to admit when something is wrong. Somewhere between sharing memes about everything being “fine” and living through frequent instability, our generation has become more comfortable talking openly about stress, burnout, and mental health.

What have not kept up are people’s perceptions of their ability to shape the systems around them. We pay attention to mental health in ways that would have been unthinkable a generation ago, but far fewer of us see a clear connection between that awareness, the systems that determine whether care is actually available, and the ways we can change these systems for the better. This election season is our opportunity to make those connections

Getting mental health care is rarely straightforward. It depends on factors such as whether your insurance covers it, whether there is a provider nearby who is taking new patients, whether you can afford to pay out of pocket, and whether you can take time off work without risking your income. For a lot of people, one of those barriers is enough to stop them. For many, they experience several at once.

We see this in our own communities. People who know they need help but cannot find it. People who finally reach out and end up on waitlists. People who rely on patchwork solutions because the formal system does not meet their needs.

Many people struggling to get care also face barriers participating in the civic processes that shape how care is funded and delivered. When that happens, the systems that emerge tend to reflect who shows up, not who is most affected.

In the course of our own day-to-day work, we hear first-hand how civic participation itself can support well-being. Research has linked activities like voting and community engagement to stronger feelings of connection and a greater sense of agency. Feeling heard and connected in your community can affect how you experience stress and belonging.

Voting is not a substitute for care. But it is part of how people can shape the conditions that determine whether care is available and accessible in the first place.

There is a gap between how much people care about mental health and how much influence they feel they have over the systems that shape it. Closing that gap starts with helping people see how civic participation shapes access to care.

That connection is taking shape across the country. Mental health advocates are fighting tirelessly to ensure people get the help they need, when they need it. Civic organizations are working to make participation more accessible in the communities that have historically been left out. These efforts are not about partisanship — the decision on who to vote for is a personal one. These efforts are instead about making sure that the systems shaping daily life reflect the realities that we all are living.

We can all take the first steps today during Mental Health Awareness Month. Check your voter registration. Learn about how decisionmakers impact the mental health care available in your community. Get ready to participate in the civic process and make your voice heard.

We have made real progress in how we talk about mental health. Now we must make sure people are not just part of the conversation, but part of the decisions shaping mental health care.

“My husband died last year and it took me six months to find an appointment with a therapist for my children.”

That’s what we heard from a Pennsylvania mom who participated in one of series of focus groups we recently organized across battleground states, including Georgia, Michigan, Colorado, and Pennsylvania. Many participants described a worsening mental health care system – what some simply called a “crisis” – plagued by access problems, provider shortages, and long waits for appointments.

One in five Americans experiences a mental health condition each year, and nearly half receive no treatment. Cost, stigma, and insurance barriers are all reasons that people go without treatment, but another major contributing factor is that there simply are not enough providers to meet the demand. In fact, new research shows no U.S. state has enough mental health providers to meet its population’s needs, and 144 million people live in communities without enough providers.

The workforce shortage stems from decades of policy choices that are now catching up with us. And since federal funding is unreliable, it’s up to the states to adopt bipartisan policies to expand the workforce and improve access to care.

Because they are closest to their communities, state policymakers are best equipped to tailor solutions for their constituents’ needs. For example, some states may need to spend more funding on crisis teams, while others may need to prioritize building community hospital infrastructure. Successful state-level policies can then serve as blueprints across the country.

There are several policies that states can adopt to address the workforce shortage, one being to lower financial barriers preventing talented students from entering – and staying in – the profession. Becoming a therapist, counselor, or clinical social worker typically requires graduate education followed by thousands of hours of supervised clinical work, frequently unpaid. And mental health providers are routinely paid less than their medical counterparts, with therapists and psychiatrists often earning 70 cents or less for every dollar earned by a comparable medical clinician.

To mitigate this, states can expand scholarship and loan repayment programs and fund paid training opportunities. Massachusetts created a program that supports paid internships and job-shadowing opportunities for students interested in mental health careers, while Tennessee offers tuition assistance for graduate programs in counseling, psychiatric nursing, social work and psychology. Programs like these strengthen the pipeline of future clinicians while making the profession more accessible.

In order to bolster the workforce, states must attract a wider range of professionals who support mental health care. Psychiatrists and psychologists play essential roles, but they can’t meet the nation’s growing needs alone. Peer support specialists, behavioral health technicians, and other paraprofessionals can help extend the reach of licensed clinicians and provide critical support to patients. And when care centers utilize integrated care teams where peers and paraprofessionals work in tandem with licensed professionals, outcomes actually improve for patients.

A wider range of professionals means a wider geographic range as well. Current outdated licensing systems restrict where clinicians can practice, forcing many mental health professionals to obtain separate licenses in each state where they want to treat patients – even if their qualifications are identical. Interstate licensure compacts, including those for psychologists and social workers, allow clinicians to practice across participating states while maintaining professional standards. These agreements also make it easier to expand telehealth, bringing care to rural communities that may have few local providers.

In addition to attracting new talent, we have to adequately support the talent already there. Mental health clinicians are facing rising burnout as caseloads grow and administrative demands increase. To ensure the health and safety of our providers, states should take a page out of New York’s playbook, where policymakers created dedicated mental health hotlines for frontline workers and have since expanded the initiative to ensure clinicians know how to access help when they need it.

Technology is another way to extend the reach of the existing workforce. Telehealth has already transformed access to mental health care, especially in rural communities, but it depends on reliable broadband infrastructure. That’s why Texas established a statewide fund to expand connectivity and make tele-mental health services more accessible. Leaders can also harness technology like AI to identify areas in which more help is needed and fill in the gaps so mental health providers aren’t left to support the entire system by themselves.

The mental health crisis affecting millions of Americans will not be solved overnight, and the effects of workforce shortages are wide-ranging. By lowering barriers to entering the profession, supporting clinicians already in the field, leveraging technology and modernizing licensing systems, states can begin to close the gap and expand access to quality care.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s recently proposed pieds-à-terre tax is helping to show that making rich people pay an equitable share in taxes is worth the effort. Plus, past tax increases disproved the myth that asking the wealthy to pay their fair share will lead to their exodus from cities across the U.S.

Now, the Local Progress Impact Hub and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy are working to equip local officials across the country with more progressive tax structures they can implement. The groups joined together to create a new resource they’re hoping will act as a toolkit for local electeds on how to tax their wealthiest residents and help their struggling communities survive the increasing daily cost of living. The taxes outlined by the organizations would raise funds to pay for essential public goods like education, affordable housing, and healthcare.

“This toolkit is about making sure that the wealthiest and the most profitable corporations in our communities are paying their fair share,” says Angelo Pis-Dudot, policy counsel at Local Progress Impact Hub and coauthor of the resource.

While the top 1% have had a net worth increase of 120% between 2017 and 2025, the federal government is actively slashing access to the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid, and housing support. These cuts, coupled with tax breaks for the rich, continue to grow the wealth gap and leave local officials scrambling to brainstorm revenue solutions for their residents.

In Queens, New York, for example, residents are facing the second-highest increase in the cost of living, which rose 11.54% over the past year, making the borough 50% more expensive than the average U.S. city.

According to Councilwoman Tiffany Cabán, cities providing services to their trans and immigrant neighbors face further financial strife. “We’ve seen the federal government threaten to cut larger funding because we include those neighbors in our social safety nets, in our public goods, and our social services,” says Cabán.

So what are the issues making it hard for local officials to implement better taxes? Local Progress, a civic organization that works with local elected officials to improve racial and economic justice, and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy break down how electeds face pressure to come up with equitable sources of revenue and run into two major roadblocks.

The first is inheriting decades-old tax policies that have been systematically created to make the rich richer. The second barrier to creating more progressive taxes within local municipalities is the legal principle called preemption, which means state law is the final word on any laws addressing the same topic. If a local elected official puts forward more equitable tax legislation, and if state law doesn’t align with the proposed law, it might not go into effect.

Creating tax-related change for local municipalities requires knowing what type of taxes are best suited for said locality and if the state will allow you to implement them.

Taxes fall under three categories: regressive, proportional, and progressive. Regressive taxes make the middle and low-income households pay a larger share of their income in taxes, whereas upper-income families pay a larger share of their income with progressive taxes. A proportional tax takes the same percentage of income from everyone, no matter their income level.

Put simply, the way to create more equitable taxes is to redesign taxes to be progressive instead of regressive. In fact, according to the toolkit, imposing more progressive taxes isn’t just about equity — it’s the most practical solution to create stronger economies that can survive big financial hits.

Let’s look at property taxes, which are the single largest source of local tax revenue for cities, as an example. In New York City, the Community Service Society of New York has shown how properties worth under $300,000 per unit face an estimated tax rate three times higher than those worth over $1 million. This then leaves predominantly Black neighborhoods in the city to pay higher property tax rates than wealthier, whiter areas like Park Slope and the East Village. This regressive tax, which impacts renters and homeowners alike, ends up penalizing lower-income families in comparison to higher-income families.

One of the most important features of the toolkit is a list of model policies that are working for local municipalities all over the U.S. The goal is for local leaders to learn from one another and see what is working in local municipalities across the U.S. and how to apply it to their own city.

In 2023, Santa Fe, New Mexico, established a 3% progressive real estate transfer tax on homes sold for more than $1 million. The money from those taxes goes into Santa Fe’s affordable housing trust fund, which will now triple in size as a result of this new tax. That revenue will go towards building new homes and lowering housing costs for low-income and middle-income residents.

In Honolulu, a classification system for second homes and short-term rentals is marginal, but it triples in value on properties worth more than $1 million. This means that people who qualify for homeowner exceptions, such as long-term residents and those who cannot afford to own multiple properties, aren’t taxed at the same rate as those who operate rental properties and own second homes.

In 2011, Washington, D.C. established a property tax for vacant and neglected properties at a higher rate than for occupied properties. Consequently, landlords were forced to either rehabilitate old buildings or sell them, which helped stabilize rent costs by offering more housing. By directly targeting empty buildings at a higher rate, the progressive tax incentivized the creation of more housing instead of simply taxing the landlord for all properties. With the latter option, landlords would likely raise rents, forcing tenants to bear the burden of high property taxes.

In addition to providing tangible examples on how to implement progressive tax codes locally, this tool serves as a resource for local officials to resist the long-standing myths about taxing the rich and a guide to implement a progressive tax code that would make them pay taxes more equitably.

“If the way rich people are taxed doesn’t change,” Pis-Dudot says, “people will get sicker, people will die, people will be on the street. Federal policy choices have consequences.”

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.

The recent turmoil around federal behavioral health funding, including proposed cuts and new treatment-focused prerequisites tied to homelessness programs, has exposed tensions that have been building inside public mental health systems for years. The current political backlash did not create these problems. It made them harder to ignore.

Over five decades working in public mental health systems and supportive housing in New York, I have watched promising interventions gradually become responsible for taking on pressures created by failures elsewhere in the system. A model emerges, offers genuine relief, and reaches people who were previously unreachable. Then the populations grow more medically and socially complex, surrounding systems fail to adapt or weaken outright, and the intervention slowly becomes overloaded. Housing First became one of those models.

When it emerged in the ’90s, Housing First represented an important correction to programs that often demanded sobriety, treatment compliance, or psychiatric stability before offering shelter. The model recognized something simple and humane: People living on the street, especially those with serious mental illness or addiction, were far less likely to improve without meeting their need for secure housing.

Early results showed that many people placed into housing without treatment preconditions stayed housed at higher rates than expected. Even modest support indoors was often better than prolonged exposure to homelessness, trauma, emergency rooms, jails, and shelters.

Housing First still helps many people, including some who might never engage in more coercive approaches. But it was never designed to manage the growing complexity and instability that supportive housing programs now confront. As those demands accumulated, the strain on the model became harder to ignore.

Supportive housing was always intended to help residents navigate crises and sustain community recovery. But many programs are now serving populations with various combinations of psychiatric illness, addiction, medical frailty, cognitive impairment, aging-related decline, and long histories of institutional disruption.

Programs originally built to support residents with serious mental illness, addiction, homelessness, and later HIV-related illness gradually became responsible for populations with even broader medical, cognitive, behavioral, and aging-related burdens than many supportive housing models were initially designed to manage. Frontline staff are expected to coordinate across hospitals, outpatient clinics, treatment programs, emergency rooms, criminal justice systems, and public benefits systems while also maintaining housing and community functioning.

At the same time, shrinking psychiatric beds, weakened long-term rehabilitation systems, and inadequate addiction treatment capacity gradually left supportive housing as the default destination for people leaving hospitals, jails, shelters, and emergency rooms. More and more, supportive housing programs were called upon to address needs that other parts of the care infrastructure were less and less equipped to manage, often without funding or service capacity that kept pace with the growing clinical demands.

Frontline workers felt this first. Many were peers or counselors trying to balance resident autonomy, housing supports, psychiatric crises, and neighborhood pressures with too few resources and too little flexibility. Some residents stabilized substantially. Others stabilized only partially and remained highly vulnerable to relapse, victimization, medical deterioration, isolation, or recurrent crisis despite enormous effort by staff and treatment systems.

I still think about a man I admitted early in my career to a state psychiatric center who believed voices of L. Ron Hubbard were calling him to London. Years later, as he saw me pulling into a parking space marked “deputy director,” he quietly said: “Look at you. Look at me.” He was probably safer and more stable than he would have been without treatment, housing, and support. But he also reminded me how difficult long-term stabilization can remain even inside humane and well-intentioned systems.

That is part of what makes the current backlash around Housing First dangerous. Frustration with visible homelessness, untreated psychosis, addiction, and encampments is fueling pressure for more coercive or enforcement-oriented approaches. Utah’s recent attempt to move homeless residents to a mandatory treatment campus collapsed amid concerns about costs, civil liberties, and the absence of any consensus on a clinical plan. It’s a cautionary example of what happens when frustration with one approach produces an underprepared replacement.

But replacing one simplified approach with another will not solve the underlying problem. Housing First did not create severe mental illness, fentanyl-era addiction, cognitive decline, or the collapse of long-term psychiatric infrastructure. It became one of the few remaining systems still trying to absorb them.

Housing remains essential for stabilization. But housing alone cannot fully resolve the broader behavioral, medical, and social burdens that many supportive housing programs now confront. Humane systems can reduce suffering, help many people live safer and more meaningful lives, and improve chances for community recovery. They cannot eliminate every form of chronic instability that exists in human communities.

Supportive housing was never designed to function as the entire behavioral health and social safety infrastructure. If cities continue expecting one model to absorb the weakening of all the others, the cycle of overload, backlash, and disappointment will continue.

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A version of this op-ed was first published in The People’s Practice Issue 10: The Solutions in Our Peripheries. For more stories, research, and resources on anti-racist community development, visit The People’s Practice at www.thepeoplespractice.org.

Last year, the Appalachian Rekindling Project made a big move. We bought 63 acres of former strip mine land in Letcher County, Kentucky. Our $169,000 investment disrupted plans for a $505 million federal prison complex that would have caged over 1,300 people, stopping a cycle of harm that has defined Appalachia for too long. This would have become the fifth federal prison in eastern Kentucky, part of a pattern that treats incarceration as economic development. Data collected in 2021 by The Sentencing Project illustrates that Black and Indigenous people are incarcerated at four to five times the rate of white people for similar offenses.

As co-executive director of the Appalachian Rekindling Project, I’m proud that we saw a different future – one where this land could heal and Indigenous peoples could come home. We acknowledge historical harm, center Indigenous sovereignty, and build true community safety through ecological restoration rather than allow another prison to be built on land that has already been stripped, scarred, and exploited.

Appalachia has always been treated as expendable by those in power – through Indigenous removal, extractive coal mining, a dumping ground for environmental hazards, and now through prison construction. Fighting back against the prison means demanding that Appalachia be seen as a place of value, beauty, and home.

Our immediate plans center on ecological restoration – bringing back native species to land that has been strip-mined and degraded. This isn’t just about conservation; it’s about reversing extraction and returning life to places that have been treated as sacrifice zones. Reintroducing bison, animals that are relatives to many Indigenous peoples and integral to pre-colonial ecosystems, is both practically restorative and symbolically powerful.

Our larger vision: establishing an intertribal Indigenous center on our other piece of land in central Appalachia where Native peoples can physically return to their homelands.

This center will provide space for our Indigenous communities to gather, practice traditional ways of life, and care for our land collectively. This intertribal center will be a free space available to Indigenous people from any tribal community, not a museum or tourist site, but a living place of Indigenous presence and practice. We particularly look forward to welcoming Indigenous peoples who have been forcibly removed from this region back to their ancestral homelands, land that holds their history, culture, and ceremonial sites. Creating these pathways for return allow healing through acknowledging that Indigenous peoples have every right to be here, that this is our home.

We’ve established a voluntary land tax system that creates a meaningful pathway for anyone living in Appalachia to support Indigenous justice and land restoration. Voluntary land taxes recognize access to stolen Indigenous land, in the same way that rent or mortgage payments recognize access to living space. If you want to see Appalachian land be cared for, believe in climate justice, want to prevent further exploitation, or seek reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, this is a concrete way to contribute.

Mitch Whitaker, a neighboring property owner, told reporters that our purchase gives “folks an alternative choice” and is “a much better solution.” His support shows that community members recognize the false choice between prison jobs and poverty.

Our vision is for Appalachia to become known as a place of return. A place where Indigenous peoples return home, where ecosystems return to health, where people return to a right relationship with land. Rural communities have been told to be grateful for prisons because we don’t deserve better economic opportunities. We reject that. We deserve investment in restoration, in Indigenous justice, in healing land and relationships, in meaningful work that doesn’t require us to profit from others’ suffering. Real reconciliation, beyond just words, looks like this – the land, resources, and the material conditions for Indigenous peoples to come home and thrive.

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

Camron Bridgford was eating dinner outside at a Miami restaurant when she saw a strange sight: two sidewalk delivery robots in a standoff, each one blocked by the other.

“One finally had to back out and let the other one through,” says Bridgford, senior principal at Cityfi, who worked on a 2021 landmark sidewalk delivery robot pilot program in four cities.

In the five years since that program, sidewalk bots, dubbed Personal Delivery Devices or PDDs, have gotten smaller and slower as the market consolidates, according to Bridgford. But the PDDs are still far from perfect: Even as they roll into new cities like Vancouver, bots are still smashing into glass bus shelters and getting stuck in snow.

Companies like Coco Robotics, Serve Robotics, Starship Technologies, and Robot.com say that their devices are right-sizing food delivery and offering an alternative to expensive and polluting motor vehicles that clog the streets. Critics counter that they block pedestrians, especially people using wheelchairs or other mobility devices, from using the sidewalk.

That’s on top of existing sidewalk regulation challenges, including questions over who pays for maintenance and repairs.

“You’ll have residents at community engagement events saying, ‘Why are we worried about this when I want my kid to be able to walk to school, and there’s broken sidewalks, and they can’t even get there safely that way?’” Bridgford says. “Tech can come in and want to solve issues. But if you have things like missing sidewalks, you have poor curb ramps, you have maintenance issues — those ultimately were the biggest structural barriers.”

Nor have cities figured out how to manage or price all the competing interests at the curb, including goods delivery, sidewalk bots, and parking, she notes.

As the PDD market consolidates, cities like Washington, D.C. and West Hollywood are working with companies to track sidewalk issues and raise new sources of revenue. Could delivery robot companies sharing data and revenue to help bring about accessibility improvements be the key to good robot-city relations — and to more human-friendly cities?

Sidewalk robots as disability allies?

For all the backlash, complaints about robots are quite rare in Santa Monica, says Trevor Thomas, who manages the city’s PDD program. Coco, the sole operator, deploys 50 to 100 bots.

“Every once in a while, we get a complaint of somebody who has been treated brusquely by a PDD on the sidewalk,” he says. “But it’s honestly pretty infrequent that we see one of those complaints.”

Representatives from different cities have been meeting to talk about PDD policies and how to regulate the public-right-of-way. Top of mind are data-sharing requirements, something that cities are still figuring out. In contrast with autonomous vehicle companies like Waymo, sidewalk robot companies have proven more willing to provide cities with data — including sharing information to help local governments target accessibility issues.

At least two operators, Coco and Robot.com, are investing in tools and partnerships to make sidewalks more accessible for people with disabilities.

Coco recently announced its partnership with GPS app BlindSquare to provide real-time navigation for people who are blind or low-vision. As Coco bots navigate sidewalk hazards like poorly parked e-scooters and cars blocking the sidewalk, they can relay that information to the app. Once the obstacle is gone, BlindSquare users can mark the obstruction as cleared.

“We’re all helping each other navigate the sidewalk space,” says Carl Hansen, head of government relations at Coco. He stresses that the data that robots collect is “completely anonymized.”

The feature started in Helsinki with a grant from the European Union and is live in four U.S. cities: Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, and Jersey City.

Robot.com, formerly known as Kiwibot, is collecting detailed sidewalk obstruction data in D.C. and Arlington, Virginia.

“We have come to understand that sidewalks are sacred,” says co-founder David Rodriguez, who takes a hardline approach to sidewalk accessibility. If a sidewalk is too narrow for a robot to pass someone using a wheelchair, then robots shouldn’t be on that sidewalk: “We don’t think that’s respectful,” he says. Rodriguez declined to specify a minimum width.

The sidewalk mapping program tracks sidewalk issues by type and also rates the severity of each issue. Last year, Robot.com captured about 35,000 total data points, including ADA hazards like dips and heaves in the sidewalks.

D.C. is requiring this information from its only operator, Robot.com, says Rodriguez. Today, more cities require operators to share data using Mobility Data Specification (MDS) to track where robots are operating in the public-right-of-way. So far, cities don’t appear to be using sidewalk data to make accessibility improvements.

One exception: Three curb ramps on bustling Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice, Los Angeles. Coco, which is based in Venice, found that the missing curb ramps turned certain blocks into “islands” for people using wheelchairs, scooters and strollers – and for the company’s robots.

“Rather than prioritize fixing [all the ramps], we could say, ‘Hey, based on our routing technology, if you added one here, here and here, this whole area becomes accessible to wheelchair users and those that need curbs, like Coco,” says Hansen.

The path to repair, however, followed the usual pattern: Coco reached out to the local council district office, who in turn coordinated with city departments to add the curb ramps.

In the future, sidewalk bots could serve as pedestrian guinea pigs, flagging issues to cities or even changing conditions in real-time. In Helinski, Coco is partnering with Swarco, a traffic light company, to track the number of pedestrians waiting at intersections.

“[The robot] can autonomously communicate with the traffic light. And if there’s some threshold of crowd waiting, [it can] add extra time to the pedestrian crossing so that more folks have to have time to get across at that intersection.”

Where robots are paying for curb ramps

Sidewalk data might be valuable, but what about cold, hard cash to repair sidewalks? West Hollywood is implementing what might be the first program of its kind to use fees from robots to improve sidewalks.

When the PDD pilot first began in 2020, the city’s license agreement for operators didn’t include any proverbial “sticks,” explains Paige Portwood, associate planner for West Hollywood. The new contract includes annual fees and penalties for ADA and geofencing violations.

West Hollywood also requires Serve and Coco to share advertising revenue at the rate of $4 per device per day. All advertising revenue, fines, and program fees will go into a special fund for accessibility improvements.

“We’re really excited about that,” says Portwood. “It’s only been three months since we’ve implemented this kind of model.”

It’s still too early to tell how much the new program will raise for sidewalks, but a December report estimates it could generate $40,000 to $80,000 per year.

Meanwhile, companies are counting on ad dollars to make sidewalk delivery competitive with more traditional forms of delivery. Hansen believes that revenue sharing with local governments needs to be “right-sized.”

“If those dollars are linked back with infrastructure improvements and other things in the pedestrian space, that can be very cool,” Hansen says. “We would love to see stuff like that.”

There is currently no mechanism for an operator to directly fund a curb ramp, as cities struggle to come up with money to fix crumbling sidewalks.

Instead, Coco and Robot.com are banking on the value of the data that they share with cities.

What data might robots capture in the future that cities could use to improve the public realm? Cities’ ability to receive and process data is only becoming more sophisticated.

“It’s pretty wild what the devices can do,” says Portwood. “They have sensors, they have cameras.”

At a recent transportation tech summit, someone suggested mounting air quality devices to the robots.

“Cities often have these, but they’re mounted up pretty high,” Hansen says. “They’re like, ‘Man, having this on a Coco as it traveled through the city would be really interesting, because you’re at the same height as a child, breathing in the same air.’”

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.

Lower Speed Limits Aren’t Noticeably Slowing City Traffic, Survey Shows

The prospect of lowering urban speed limits to increase road safety often draws opposition due to fears of traffic congestion. A new analysis of 38 cities across 19 European countries found no overall negative impact on congestion, traffic volume, or journey times due to 30 kilometer-per-hour zones in residential neighborhoods, school zones, and historic centers.

Instead, the Eurocities Pulse survey found that 75% of cities reported fewer road deaths and injuries after reducing speeds and 91% saw at least one broader positive impact on urban life, including fewer accidents, less noise pollution, cleaner air, and increases in walking and cycling.

Crucially, the survey also found that political and public opposition to these measures dropped significantly following their implementation, as did legal and regulatory difficulties.

Louisiana Republicans Move To Remove Black Districts

Following the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act and in particular its protections against diluting Black voting power, Louisiana is moving forward with a plan to get rid of two congressional seats in majority-Black districts, the Associated Press reports. The governor has also said he will move to redraw district lines before the 2028 election cycle.

Tennessee has made similar moves since April’s Supreme Court ruling. In Alabama, the Supreme Court ruled this week that a lower court-mandated congressional map that gave the state a second Black representative could be voided. In Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp is using the Supreme Court decision to propose an election overhaul that could make it harder for Democrats to maintain power in Atlanta.

Private Utilities’ Dark Money Funds Opposition to Public Power

The Guardian reports that private utilities are funding astroturf “grassroots” groups to shut down campaigns to switch municipalities to public utilities amid increased interest in public power. Public utilities generally have lower costs than private companies, which typically function as regional monopolies.

One private utility company in Ann Arbor called DTE Energy runs an astroturf group claiming that public utilities will lead to higher taxes. An industry consultant linked to the DTE campaign is also behind other campaigns, including the successful defeat of a public power ballot referendum in Maine.

In some cases, private utility consultants had trouble finding people to advocate for private utilities and,“the industry allegedly recruited some of their canvassers from the parking lots of plasma centers where people donate plasma for money,” according to The Guardian.

New Fed Chair Confirmed

Former top Fed official and multi-millionaire Kevin Warsh was confirmed as the new chairman of the Federal Reserve, which sets federal interest rates and is tasked with reducing inflation, the Associated Press reports.

The Fed has a 2% inflation target which has been surpassed for five years; the inflation rate is currently at 3.8%, partly due to the Trump administration’s war with Iran, which has spiked gas prices. The previous Fed chair, Jerome Powell, was hesitant to lower interest rates too quickly and faced a retaliatory investigation from the Trump administration after the president sought faster rate cuts.

Members of the board serve 14-year terms and consist of Obama, Biden, and Trump appointees, so the chair will not be able to unilaterally raise or lower interest rates, but his views carry significant influence with the body.

Kentucky Rolls Out Free Childcare Pilot

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear is planning to pilot Pre-K For All in two of the state’s counties, according to WEKU.

Beshear, a Democrat, proposed universal Pre-K for the state’s four-year-olds in the 2025 budget but the plan was shot down by the state’s Republican-controlled General Assembly. Beshear will instead launch the pilots through an executive order, choosing two smaller counties whose combined enrollment is around 3,000 students.

“I’ve seen that students who have the opportunity to attend preschool, they have much more success in school, they’re much more likely to graduate from high school, and they are much better prepared to enter the workforce,” one county superintendent said when the plan was announced.

MORE NEWS

• New study highlights importance of home repair assistance programs. VPM

• Texas county pauses data center construction in rural areas for a year. Texas Tribune

• California’s plastic recycling rules please no one. CalMatters

• What life is like near booming warehouse hubs outside Chicago. The New York Times

• Riverside Church divests from Vanguard managed funds following SPLC decision. The Riverside Church

• Twin Cities tenant unions say “evict ICE, not us.” PE Stakeholder

• If World Cup hotel reservations are low, does that mean soccer fans plan to camp around Kansas City? The Beacon News

• After a year of challenges, a community food network faces a new one: Spiking fuel prices. The Beacon News

• Congressman Frost introduces bill to defend manufactured home communities from Wall Street. PE Stakeholder

OPPORTUNITIES & RESOURCES

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

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

• New Profit is launching Connected Futures, a Catalyze cohort for organizations that bridge divides and bring people together to solve problems collectively. Selected organizations will receive a one-year $100,000 unrestricted grant, a $10,000 grant for leadership development, and strategic advisory support. Submit a discovery form by May 26.

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

• Arbor Rising is seeking to support nonprofits that are focused on building pathways out of poverty. Grantees will receive $125,000 in unrestricted funds and 200-300 hours of capacity-building consulting. Apply by June 9.

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

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

Zoning is having a moment. Americans are increasingly aware that zoning helps create and perpetuate disparities in wealth, income, and opportunity, and segregation of neighborhoods by race and class. Whether this is or was the intent of those who operate zoning systems, the results are clear: Zoning is a very effective tool to exclude what we do not want in a particular location, and we have overused that tool in damaging ways.

Many analyses have shown that changes to zoning use controls and development standards – especially those that allow wider varieties of housing – could promote greater affordability and equity. Much less has been written about the key important role that zoning procedures play in creating more equitable zoning outcomes for historically disadvantaged communities.

But my 40 years of experience revising zoning systems throughout the U.S. has taught me that those procedures are just as important as the rules governing what can be built and where.

When the importance of zoning procedures is discussed, it is often limited to calls for broader public notice to make sure that “everyone affected is in the room” when zoning decisions are made. But there is much more we need to do, as outlined in the American Planning Association’s 2023 Equity in Zoning Policy Guide and detailed in my recent book, An Even Better Way to Zone.

Better, more inclusive notice is an important first step. Cities as diverse as San Diego and Detroit now notify renters as well as property owners for most zoning decisions, and many other cities are following suit.

But biases in zoning procedures run deeper than that. Even when everyone is invited (and understands the invitation), those with better English skills, a better understanding of local government decision-making, and greater ability to attend hearings are often more successful at defending their neighborhoods from changes that are needed in the community as a whole.

To counteract those biases, a second important, but often controversial, change is required: We need to remove public hearing requirements and discretionary reviews for projects that comply with objective zoning and subdivision regulations. I call these “late-in-the-game hearings,” because in most cases they are intended to review the details of a project that already meets zoning requirements.

That’s right. Fewer public hearings can lead to more equitable zoning outcomes and a fairer distribution of housing and employment opportunities. That’s because fewer public hearings means fewer opportunities for subjective decision-making about projects that already reflect what the zoning rules say we want to see happen.

Originally, zoning policy offered few opportunities for discretionary decisions on development approval after rezonings have been approved. But since World War II, we have multiplied the opportunities for subjective decision-making, and that is a major source of zoning inequity. Examples include discretionary site plan and building form and design reviews based on subjective criteria. Albany, New York, has removed its public hearing requirement for Minor Development Plan Reviews, and Colorado Springs, Colorado, has done the same for its Development Plan Approvals.

But removing late-in-the-game public hearings requires that two types of hard work happen first. The first is to ensure that substantive zoning regulations reflect key citywide and neighborhood planning goals. If the zoning rules accurately reflect what will promote “public health safety and welfare” as embodied in the adopted comprehensive plan, then there is no need for a separate discussion of whether individual projects that comply with those rules will promote those same goals.

The second key is to ensure that criteria used in rezoning, subdivision, and other development decisions are clear and objective rather than vague and subjective. That means removing words like “harmonious,” “appropriate,” “character,” “contextual,” “compatible,” and “consistent” from the criteria used to make development approval decisions and replacing them with objective statements as to what is acceptable in different areas and situations.

The use of vague terms often leads to arguments as to what they mean and whether the proposed project complies. Some residents have a lot more time, money, and ability to engage in those arguments, particularly when needed types of development are unwanted in their neighborhoods.

But the harm embedded in vague zoning criteria is even deeper than that. The prospect of having to argue about whether a proposed development complies with subjective criteria can discourage smaller and less well-financed builders from pursuing a needed project. Many firms owned by disadvantaged populations, women, and veterans fall into this category.

It is far better to debate how to replace subjective with objective terms once than to debate compliance over and over again for each project. Bloomington, Indiana’s General Compliance Criteria and Rochester, Minnesota’s criteria for General Development Plan approval do a good job of avoiding those vague criteria.

A third way to make zoning procedure fairer is to limit appeals of late-in-the-game zoning decisions. While an appeal process is clearly needed because people make mistakes, in recent years there has been a rise in the use of appeal procedures to delay needed projects and get “a second bite at the apple” – i.e., a chance for a second decisionmaker to make a different decision based on the same facts.

Obviously, vague and subjective appeal criteria feed this problem, because reasonable decisionmakers can easily disagree about what vague terms mean. Appeals should only be accepted if the appellant cites a specific objective rule or requirement in the zoning regulations that has been ignored or misapplied by staff. Prince George’s County, Virginia’s criteria for review appeals by the Board of Appeals is consistent with this approach.

In addition, the appeal should be “on the record” — based on a review of the same information that was available to the original decisionmaker. Appeals are not intended to be opportunities to introduce new evidence.

Finally, if at all possible, the appeal should go to a hearing officer or someone experienced in making decisions based on evidence in the record, rather than to elected officials who may be more subject to public pressure. Denver, Colorado, has long followed this approach.

It’s no secret that zoning and development approval procedures perpetuate major gaps in opportunity, income, health, and wealth for historically disadvantaged communities. But cities and community leaders should also know that simple, behind-the-scenes procedural reforms like these can make a real difference in outcomes.