Next City

Examine tenant-led movements and legal strategies to preserve affordability and resist displacement. It could highlight lawsuits like the one in Missouri where tenants fought to keep their homes within the LIHTC program, connecting to broader tenant unionization efforts nationwide.

Examine tenant-led movements and legal strategies to preserve affordability and resist displacement. It could highlight lawsuits like the one in Missouri where tenants fought to keep their homes within the LIHTC program, connecting to broader tenant unionization efforts nationwide.

On a daily basis, thousands of Americans are faced with the choice of whether to seek needed medical care, or stay home untreated to avoid sliding further into debt. But one city in Kentucky has found a way to alleviate the dangerous pressures of medical debt for its residents.

If we want to imagine a better world, artists might be better than anyone for the job.  Today, we are looking at artists-in-residence programs in government.

One new reality many community leaders are dealing with: Federal funding is rocky, to say the least. So today, we're looking at affordable housing solutions that have located sources of funding outside of the federal goverment. We'll visit Pittsburgh, Atlanta, South Texas, and Seattle to learn about four locally-driven funding models for affordable housing.

Across the country, low-income communities face threats of displacement, predatory investment activity and limited wealth-building opportunities. One often-overlooked contributor to these dynamics: a lack of formal estate planning. When a homeowner passes away without an estate plan, their home often becomes an “heirs’ property,” a property with no clear title. Without a clear title, homeowners face immense barriers–they cannot access the equity in the home, sell the home for a fair market price, obtain loans for repairs or purchase insurance, among other challenges. For low-income families, this situation can lead to significant home value depreciation, forced sales and even homelessness. Unfortunately, heirs’ properties are widespread, particularly among low-income communities. A conservative analysis estimates that heirs’ properties nationwide have an assessed value of over $32 billion. If communities nationwide could identify households at risk, help address’ estate planning issues and ensure clear transfers of property title, they could stabilize neighborhoods, reduce home loss and protect immense amounts of wealth for low-income residents. Fortunately, a program in Jacksonville, Florida, is showing the way. Heirs’ properties are widespread in Jacksonville and the surrounding area in Duval County, with an estimated 10,000 heirs’ properties in the region. Emerging from a process of deep community engagement, LISC Jacksonville launched its Heirs’ Property Program in 2020 and has since engaged hundreds of households with estate planning services. In this sponsored episode produced in partnership with Results for America, learn more about the immense impact of addressing heirs’ properties and how the model developed in Jacksonville might inspire your community. Download the complete Results for America toolkit on replicating this model by visiting https://results4america.co/heirs-property

Highlighting our recent coverage on nonprofit and alternative grocery models in Kentucky, this event would look at how communities—from urban Lexington to rural areas—are addressing food insecurity through creative, equitable approaches to food access.

Explore how communities in Altadena are rebuilding after devastating wildfires, with a focus on inclusive, community-led design and architecture. It would spotlight the role of Black architects and collaborations like AfroLA, emphasizing environmental justice and equitable recovery.

Even though housing is a crisis in every American city, we hear over and over that telling the story effectively is a big challenge. Today, we’re taking lessons on how to tell the story from the filmmakers of four different documentaries.

New models of collective power are emerging in neighborhoods where residents have always found ways to support one another, even as economic systems excluded and extracted.  In this sponsored episode with the Center for Cultural Innovation and its AmbitioUS initiative, which commissioned a report by the Urban Institute, local leaders share models from Atlanta and New Orleans that bring financial freedom and self-determination to artists and their communities.  “This work is to provide proof of concept that new worlds are possible, that new economic systems are possible, and that they already exist,” said Christopher Audain, Program Officer at AmbitioUS.  In an example from Atlanta, The Guild founder Nikishka Iyengar describes a hybrid land-trust and community-stewardship model that’s keeping housing and commercial space affordable while allowing residents to invest collectively.  “This is not a stepping stone to become an extractive investor,” said Iyengar. “This is a stepping stone to reorient our relationship to land, to each other, to finance, to all of that.” Meanwhile, Cooperation New Orleans organizers Toya Ex and Tamah Yisrael are part of a network of worker cooperatives formalizing long-standing traditions of mutual aid into a solidarity economy.  “There is a large idea that the capitalist economy is the only way, and time after time history has proven to us that it is not,” said Yisrael, who helped establish Cooperation New Orleans’ loan fund to support small businesses. “People often do a lot of different things to make a way, even when the capitalist system don’t allow us to make a way,” says Ex, who is also the founder of Project Hustle. The report on community ownership and self-determination strategies also includes lessons on democratic investment from Boston Ujima Project and on land stewardship from the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust in Lisjan Territory, showing why shared values and ownership are powerful counters to a disempowering economic system.

After a year marked by the undermining of public resources, community development is adapting by finding ways to make progress more resilient.In this episode, Next City Senior Economic Justice Correspondent Oscar Perry Abello looks back at some of the biggest stories from a turbulent year on his beat and draws on what he heard during a national book tour for “The Banks We Deserve.”It’s not all bad news, as Abello looks for signs of a response to the disruptions.“I think maybe just maybe we are entering an uptick in the wave—the up and down waves of community power in community and economic development,” said Abello.Abello highlights the examples of Philadelphia’s Kensington Corridor Trust, the Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx, and Denver’s Tierra Colectiva, showing how each model for community-led ownership is evolving the sector. Plus, Abello outlines where community development leaders are exploring new sources of funding beyond Washington. nextcity.org Next City’s Top Stories on Economic Justice in 2025 Catch up on this year’s most-read reporting on inclusive finance, community development and economic empowerment. https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/next-citys-top-stories-on-economic-justice-in-2025 nextcity.org The Banks We Deserve Oscar Perry Abello’s new book shows how banks’ money-creation power can be democratized. Helping communities tap into that power could address our climate, housing and economic crises.

Live recording in November in partnership with the Small Business Anti-Displacement Network. Lucas interviews in fireside chat with Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Sponsored Episode with the Culture & Community Power Fund and Kresge Foundation

Residents teamed up with university students to slow the demolition of an affordable housing community and reshape redevelopment in West Philadelphia.

Philadelphians have a history of banding together and organizing when faced by powerful and monied development that has threatened their displacement. From professional sports venues to ever-expanding “eds and meds,” all across Philadelphia, working-class communities of color have pushed back, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, sometimes ending up somewhere in between. In this panel discussion, we’ll hear from neighborhood leaders who share their stories and lessons learned for others when these projects arise.

As rapid development reshapes neighborhoods like Kensington, residents and business owners face displacement and loss of local control. The Kensington Corridor Trust and Women’s Community Revitalization Project offer models of community ownership—using neighborhood and land trusts to preserve affordability, reinvest profits locally, and align development with community priorities. This episode explores how these approaches center equity and empower residents to shape their own futures.

We're revisiting a favorite episode from the archive to celebrate Next City's Winter Film Festival, this year's series: "Power and Place."What happens when a Brooklyn neighborhood takes on deep-pocketed developers? In this episode, we talk to the directors of "Emergent City" and the organizers who fought to preserve Sunset Park’s future.“Emergent City” (emergentcitydoc.com) documents the 10-year saga of how Brooklyn's Sunset Park community came together to fight a rezoning wanted by deep-pocketed developers. Against all odds, residents won. Filmmakers were there from the very beginning, when developers proposed transforming Industry City, a sprawling industrial site on the Brooklyn waterfront, into a high-end retail and office complex – or, as some residents put it, a “mall.” They were there when Sunset Park residents protested that the Industry City complex, if it won rezoning, would accelerate gentrification and displacement in a neighborhood where about 70% of households are renters. They were there for some 200 days of public meetings.

Join Matthew Jordan-Miller Kenyatta and artist Shawn Theodore for PYRAMID CLUB: 1937—2035, a reimagining of the legendary North Philadelphia social club as a blueprint for today’s North Broad renaissance. Together, they’ll explore how Afrofuturist and arts-driven approaches can turn scarcity into abundance while centering Black joy and cultural heritage.

So much depends on your ZIP code, even children’s access to play. But an effort is growing to ensure the playground is where all kids can have fun, learn and heal.“It's where they learn, it's where they build connection, it's where they really establish their identity as a human being in this world,” says Lysa Ratliff, CEO for KABOOM! “And yet, there's extreme disparities in our parks and our schools and our cities and who has access to what.”In this sponsored episode, Ratliff explains how KABOOM! is working in cities such as Baltimore, Oakland and Uvalde in Texas to safeguard a generation’s childhood and sense of belonging.KABOOM! is a national nonprofit known for nearly 30 years of building thousands of playgrounds where they are needed most. Today, the organization is scaling up public-private partnerships to end playspace inequity and close the “nature gap” that leaves millions of kids, especially in communities of color, without access to safe, quality green spaces.Ratliff highlights how data, partnerships and community-led design can end inequity.“We're trying to answer a very big question,” says Ratliff. “How can we make sure that every single kid in this country has a chance to grow up in a world that sees them, that values them, that gives them a sense of freedom and belonging and ultimately protects their childhood by any means?”

Culture is often treated as a niche area but is actually integral to the successful design and adoption of other areas of urban planning and policy. Hear how cities like Atlanta, Boston, Seattle and Baltimore are embedding cultural approaches into planning, policy, and recovery efforts.