Next City

In this special episode, Next City’s editorial leaders share what they’re hearing from readers and listeners about resisting setbacks at the federal level and driving changes locally.The days following the U.S. presidential have been defined by an overwhelming sense of uncertainty, despair and even fear from urban changemakers working in local government, non-profit organizations, philanthrophy, grassroots advocacy and organizing, and beyond. While their work will be more important than ever, many are saying, it seems like it will also be more difficult than ever.In this week's episode, we're joined by Next City's editorial director, Deonna Anderson; our managing editor, Aysha Khan; and our senior economic justice correspondent, Oscar Perry Abello. They're discussing the results of a few recent ballot initiatives across the country; what concerns and responses they're hearing from readers and sources; and what gives them hope that local change is still possible regardless of the election results.“City officials, mayors, local governments, state governments – they have a lot of levers that they can be pushing that will make their residents lives better in tangible ways, where they can enshrine protections of their vulnerable communities,” Khan says. “The systemic issues at a federal level have to be addressed. But there are also systemic issues at a local level that can be addressed and literally transform people's lives.”

“There's that R-word that wants to come up that I despise – resilience,” says Tiffany Sturdivant, executive director of Appalshop, a media, arts and community economic development organization that's been operating in the Kentucky mountains for more than five decades.“People are so strong….I think that's probably a testament to mountain people, right, or people anywhere who are disenfranchised and are just working with what they have. Use what you have until you can get more.”When you think about climate issues, your mind might go first to the coasts and rising sea levels. But climate issues in the middle of the country are also urgent – and the solutions being forged offer lessons for all of us, urban and rural alike. Appalachia reminds us that no matter where we’re from, our futures are linked—and we’re better when we work together to solve shared challenges.That's a critical lesson we took away at this year’s Vanguard conference in Kentucky, where we brought together 40 emerging leaders in urban Lexington and rural Berea to learn from the region's innovators and gain fresh perspectives. Today's episode features Kelsey Cloonan of Community Farm Alliance; Chris Woolery from the Mountain Association; Sturdivant from Appalshop; Baylen Campbell with Invest Appalachia; and Jeff Fugate, Associate Professor at the University of Kentucky, who works closely with communities on urban planning and development. Together, they unpack the ways communities here are addressing the impacts of climate change, while also honoring Appalachian values and strengths.This episode is part of the series we're bringing you from this year's Vanguard conference in Lexington, Kentucky, where our theme was exploring the dynamics of urban-rural interconnection.

In today's episode, we're bringing you highlights from our conversations at this year's Vanguard conference in Lexington, Kentucky, where our theme was exploring the dynamics of urban-rural interconnection – not urban-rural divisions.We will explore how communities are stronger when we stand in solidarity, and when we learn from each other's experiences.We'll hear from Mandy Higgins, Executive Director at the Lexington History Museum; Mark Lenn Johnson, president of Art Inc. Kentucky; as well as Jim Gray, the former two-term Mayor of Lexington and Kentucky's current Secretary of Transportation, who went from living in a small town to leading the growth of one of the state's largest cities. With a population of over 320,000, Lexington is a model for how urban and rural can coexist, collaborate and thrive.

This week, we’re revisiting an episode we released earlier this year, all about Lexington, Kentucky — a city where collaboration and creativity are transforming challenges into opportunities. In this episode, we highlighted how Lexington’s leaders are finding ways to foster nonpartisanship, boost civic engagement, and narrow the racial wealth gap.We’re bringing this episode back now because it offers a window into the themes we explored in even greater depth during our Vanguard conference, held in Lexington just last month. Over the next couple of weeks on this podcast, we’ll be sharing special episodes that bring you along with Next City to the conference. 

In Newark and across Essex County, New Jersey, urban farms do more than grow food — they're strengthening a community. But advocates say that convincing the state and local governments that these farms are worth investing in has not been easy.“At a local level, most urban farms, they don't own their land. It's borrowed from the city's adopt-a-lot program,” says Kimberly Izar, Next City's Equitable Cities Reporting Fellow for Segregation, who has reported for us on urban farming in the region. “At any point, that means that the city can take away the land in favor of, let's say, like a luxury developer. Another thing is that the vast majority of New Jersey municipalities don't have zoning laws specifically for urban farms, which makes it really hard for your average urban farmer to carry out their operations.”To combat these challenges, Newark-based urban farming advocate Fallon Davis – who founded the education nonprofit STEAM Urban and its urban farming progam, and who heads the Black and Brown Indigenous Immigrant Farmers United – is working on a critical new set of policy recommendations for uplifting local urban farmers of color.“For black farmers, we don't have a right to farm in New Jersey. We're not even covered and protected” by the USDA's Right to Farm Act, which only covers farms with more than five acres, Davis argues. “And that is extremely discriminatory.”Read Izar's original reporting, published in collaboration with The Jersey Bee as part of our series on segregation in Essex County, here.

The pandemic hollowed out our cities, leaving empty downtowns and office buildings in its wake. With galleries and art venues closed and disposable income at a low, the arts sector took a major hit.What if we killed two birds with one stone by using our cities' vacant commercial space as affordable artist studios and galleries? That's the idea behind Zero Empty Spaces. Since its launch in June 2019, the Florida-based organization has placed more than 600 artists in 10 commercial buildings in 10 cities. Most are in the group's home state of Florida but they've extended as far as Little Rock, Arkansas and Boston.“We now have what we believe to be the first art studio in the world in a former Burberry store – located next to a Louis Vuitton in the Natick Mall in Massachusetts, the largest mall in New England,” Evan Snow, co-founder of Zero Empty Spaces tells Next City. “Somebody is walking out of a Louis Vuitton store, spending tens of thousands of dollars and saying, 'Oh, what's this artist in the window doing here?' And we've had people buy artwork after leaving the Louis store.”Read the original Next City article, by Cinnamon Janzer, here.

American roads are dangerous. The Department of Transportation reports that in 2021, nearly 43,000 people were killed in motor vehicle crashes. Of those, 7,388 were pedestrians. On Philadelphia's Roosevelt Boulevard, reckless driving and speeding in pedestrian zones have led the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to try a pilot program that allows speed cameras.On this episode of the podcast, we speak to Erick Guerra, associate professor of city and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania, the lead researcher for a study looking into whether automated traffic enforcement has any effect on safety and on our traffic behavior. Based on the Roosevelt Boulevard pilot, the study concluded that the economic benefits of reduced crashes substantially exceed the total fines paid by violators.Not only has Philadelphia's program increased traffic safety while avoiding the disadvantages of increased police enforcement, revenue from the fines is also routed back into other traffic and pedestian safety projects; in 2021, the fines generated $22 million for such efforts.Speed cameras, like so many measures that inconvenience drivers, can be controversial in America. So the results of this pilot – and finding that speed cameras are actually making our city streets safer – is crucial to understand.“When people see things like, traffic fine violations, parking tickets, things like that, it can be frustrating – and particularly the idea that a city … is collecting revenue off of these violations, off of these fines,” Guerra says. “It's important to document that the benefits to society are much larger than those fines, in terms of the effects on collisions, injuries, fatalities.”Read the original article, by Next City reporting fellow Maylin Tu, here.

When Hurricane Ian made landfall in Florida in 2022, it was the third-costliest weather disaster on record worldwide. Damages totaled over $100 billion dollars. So you can imagine what that looks like, because we've all seen the images of communities across Florida and the Carolinas left grappling with the aftermath of climate disasters like this one—damaged homes, displaced families, and an unclear road to recovery.The wait for aid can stretch on for months. And that's where predatory lendors come in, offering loan terms with sky-high interest rates that mean risking your home and property as collateral.But the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund means new federal money is incoming to help support community development financial institutions, or CDFIs, fill in that gap and help vulnerable low- and middle-income people facing climate emergencies.In this episode of the Next City podcast, part of our CDFI Futures series in collaboration with Partners for the Common Good, we hear from the Solar Energy Loan Fund's Ann Vanek-Dasovich about how the fund allowed familites to start rebuilding immediately by offering them loans with zero-interest and no collateral; Beneficial State Bank's Jae Easterbrooks about how environmentally-conscious banking can help America's response to climate change; and Partners for the Common Good CEO Jeannine Jakokes about how CDFIs might be able to scale these solutions with new federal dollars on the way.

Whether a person has access to banking directly changes their life. That's why advocates for racial justice have for a long time talked about the importance of an anti-redlining statute called the Community Reinvestment Act.If you want to ensure that everyone everywhere, including in middle and low- income neighborhoods, is on a level playing field when it comes to starting a business or owning a home, then you need to know how this 1997 law works – and what's changing in the newest regulations, the first revamp since to the law since 1995.“What this act attempts to do is hold financial institutions, banks specifically, accountable for meeting the credit needs of the places where they do business,” explains Next City's senior economic justice correspondent Oscar Perry Abello. And it does have enforcement power, though critics say it's not used enough. “The teeth of the CRA come from the fact that it gives the regulators the ability to deny certain applications – like applications to merge with another bank or open up a new branch or close down a branch … if they believe a bank is not meeting its obligations under the Community Reinvestment Act.”

Once upon a time, 14% of farmers in the United States were Black. That was in 1910. But that number has dwindled. Today, Black farmers comprise less than 2% of all growers across the country. On this week’s episode, our host Lucas Grindley notes: “That's more than 14 million acres of lost land.”This loss, along with the discrimination and violence perpetrated against African-American farmers and the current movement of more Black people returning to agriculture and land stewardship, is the subject of the documentary “Farming While Black,” which was released in 2023. Mark Decena, the writer and director of the documentary, describes it as a Venn diagram of social justice, climate justice and food sovereignty.“It was very dangerous to be a landowner in the deep South post-Civil War, except for the eight years of Reconstruction where land ownership was at its peak. And Leah [Penniman, cofounder of Soul Fire Farm, who was one of the characters in the documentary] definitely points that out,” Decena says. While it might not be as dangerous to own land in this South in 2024, there are still a lot of challenges to reverse decades of land dispossession. To explore that and the solutions Black and other marginalized people are implementing as they return to the soil, listen to this episode, and subscribe to follow the show.

Property taxes are how most people pay for their local government. These taxes fund a range of local services, from our public schools to our fire departments.But those property tax systems overburden some – and undercharge others. And when mapped out, these disparities looks suspiciously like another pattern of disparities that you should be familiar with by now: redlining.It seems counterintuitive, as our senior economic justice correspondent Oscar Perry Abello explains. You've seen the headlines about Black homeowners swapping out their family photos with their white friends' family photos and receiving a higher home appraisal because the appraiser assumes it's owned by a white person. But in property tax assessments, he says, we see the opposite: Local public officials often don't believe Black homeowners' should be valued at the price that it's valued by the market, so they increase amount they charge in taxes. Meanwhile, on the whiter and wealther side of town, the property tax assessor believes that white family's home is definitely not worth that much – and they shouldn't be charged as much in taxes.In today's episode, we speak with Joe Minicozzi, an urban designer and founder of Urban3, a firm with a mission to explain, visualize, and improve market dynamics created by tax and land use policies. He's working to prove these disparities in land valuation actually exist – that we are in fact subsidizing wealthier, whiter neighborhoods at the expense of historically redlined neighborhoods. Watch our recent, in-depth webinar with Minicozzi to learn more about his findings.Minicozzi mentions this article: The New York Times : "How Lower-Income Americans Get Cheated on Property Taxes"

Cognitive dissonance. That's what David Abel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who's spent a decade reporting on climate change for The Boston Globe, saw in his city.At the same time that he was covering the increasingly dire projections about sea level rise in Boston Harbor, Abel tells Next City, “we were watching this entirely new urban district being built at sea level, on landfill, hard on the coast, and in the bullseye of rising seas in a city that has more climate scientists per capita than probably any other city on the planet.”His documentary film “Inundation District” examines the impact of rising sea levels and strengthening storms on Boston's Seaport — and questions the city's decision to spend more than $20 billion building a new coastal Innovation District at sea level.On this episode of the podcast, we speak to Abel about how to cope with climate anxiety, the growing threat of rising sea levels in urban coasts around the world, and how cities can better prepare for these looming crises.

Climate change can be scary, but the documentary “How to Power City” focuses on solutions. One solution often touted for addressing climate change is switching to renewable energy. And people want to make that switch but many don’t know how to get started. The feature-length film follows people in six different U.S. cities who are leading various types of renewable energy projects, from as small as a few streetlights to innovating an entire utility.In this episode, we hear from writer and director Melanie LaRosa, who outlines what she found while working on the documentary and why she chose to focus on solutions.LaRosa wanted audiences to feel empowered and curious when watching her film. While she was working on it, LaRosa learned about the Solutions Journalism Network and decided to adopt their approach to storytelling, which includes highlighting solutions to problems and also where they fall short. (Because no solution is perfect.)“When you make a film, you have this opportunity to bring to light new aspects [of a story],” she says, noting that people are already inundated with news that features the problem of climate change. “If I’m going to spend this much time on a film like this, I want to make it something I can feel good about.”To learn more about  “How to Power City” and what LaRosa learned while working on the film, listen to this episode and subscribe.

Just over a year ago, we delved into a groundbreaking initiative by a foundation in Vancouver. Their question was: What if we gave people experiencing homelessness a lump sum of cash, no strings attached? The results were nothing short of remarkable — though they probably shouldn’t be surprising. Now, two years after that experiment ended, the idea is spreading to cities across the United States. So let’s revisit that initial episode — when we asked, what really happens when you give money to people experiencing homelessness?

In this episode, we dive deep into success stories emerging from Lexington, Kentucky, a “big town” taking on big challenges – breaking down partisanship, reinventing the ways the community engages with its leaders, creating new ways to close the racial wealth gap – by actively cultivating collaboration and experimentation.“Our politics set the tone for the city,” says Christian Motley, the Vice President of Partnerships and Community Impact at the nonprofit Results for America. “If you look at our council, our mayor, you might see a different coalition on one day than you do on the next. There's something about not having permanent enemies that I think is really important, and it flows into community. I might be upset with you about housing on Monday, but by Wednesday we might be able to connect on parks.”That's helped by the city's governance structure as a nonpartisan, unified city-county government that cuts out excess bureacracy and political tribalism. And over the past decade, local leaders explain, the city has seen a generational shift in its local power structures, breaking down “old-boy networks” while maintaining the relational proximity that characterizes many midsized cities.“We have a second-term Republican mayor in a very blue city, because people didn't vote for an R or a D, they voted for a person,” says Dan Wu, Vice Mayor of Lexington. And while the city council is largely left-leaning at the moment, he adds, “I would challenge people in Lexington to guess the party affiliation of all 15 of us. I guarantee you'll get a few of them wrong, and I love that.”The conversation is based on Next City's recent panel at Big Towns, a summit celebrating mid-sized American cities, and offers a taste of the urban solutions we'll be exploring at Vanguard, our annual experiential gathering for rising urban leaders, held in Lexington this fall.

If you're in the world of urban planning and transit systems, there's a good chance you're familiar with veteran transportation planner Jarrett Walker and his classic book 2011, “Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives.”We recently published an excerpt from the newly updated edition of the book – catch that here. And back in February, we hosted a popular webinar with Walker, in conversation with Steven Higashide, the director of the Union of Concerned Scientists' Clean Transportation program.In this episode of the Next City podcast, we talk to Walker and Higashide about how our individualistic culture – driven both by the elite class as well as American notions of freedom more broadly – in turns breeds a pernicious car culture, and how we can turn that on its head to achieve successful public transit systems that will enrich our communities.

In Los Angeles, there’s a transportation experiment underway. In this episode, Maylin Tu, Next City's Equitable Cities Reporting Fellow for Social Impact Design who lives in LA describes the stress of owning a car there coupled with the difficulty of navigating the city without a car. But in a sprawling city like LA, people have to have some way to get around.Last May, the LA Department of Transportation and LA Metro launched its “mobility wallet,” the biggest Universal Basic Mobility experiment ever attempted in the U.S. Tu reported that in the first phase of the pilot, the agencies gave 1,000 South Los Angeles residents a debit card that comes with $150 per month to spend on transportation. The funds can be used to take the bus, ride the train, rent a shared e-scooter, take micro-transit, rent a car-share, take an Uber or Lyft, or purchase an e-bike. “I think the big thing that this project is transportation affordability. It’s actually something that we don’t talk about a lot. We talk about housing affordability,” says Madeline Brozen, deputy director of the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies. “We use a lot of the tools of giving people income supports in other industries but we don’t think about it in transportation.” To learn more about lessons learned from the pilot so far and how cities and transit agencies can launch their own UBM programs, listen to this episode and subscribe to Next City.

From San Francisco to Montreal, there are around 50 Chinatown neighborhoods still around in North America. They've had to survive a tremendous number of existential threats. To keep these neighborhoods around for generations to come, leaders of Chinatowns around the U.S. and Canada are turning to community land trusts.In today's episode, we hear from Chiyi Tam, a board member of the Toronto Chinatown Land Trust, and Lydia Lowe, the executive director of the Boston Chinatown Community Land Trust, about how they're preserving their neighborhoods and residents' stability amid an uphill battle against property taxes, speculative investors and displacement.“It feels like for as long as Chinatowns have existed, there has been a movement to save Chinatown,” Tam says. With more and more emergent CLTs popping up and gaining ground in other neighbourhoods around downtown Toronto, local Chinatown organizers began to wonder if it might be a tool to take control in their generations-long battle. “When fighting and fighting and fighting is extremely eroding to your spirit, isn't regenerative to your relationship to place, what could we build instead?”To hear more about how Chinatown CLTs are learning from one another and achieving wins large and small, listen to this episode and subscribe to the Next City podcast. And be sure to watch our full webinar with Chinatown community land trusts from across North America.This episode is part of our series, CDFI Futures, which explores the community development finance industry through the lenses of equity, public policy and inclusive community development. The series is generously supported by Partners for the Common Good. Sign up for PCG’s CapNexus newsletter at capnexus.org. 

Today, we will hear from multiple Chinatown organizers who are fighting to ensure their neighborhoods remain for generations to come.

Cities too often respond to a person experiencing a mental health crisis with carceral systems. Toronto’s Gerstein Crisis Centre provides an alternative and proves that when people have access to care, they’ll reach out when they need help. Increased access can lead to more opportunities for problem-solving and less crises and punishment.Next City Reporter Maylin Tu first reported this story and says that the center is doing things differently by respecting people’s autonomy and acknowledging the power dynamics at play when responding to people’s needs. Tu adds that, in some ways, the programs offered at Gerstein act as an intervention that helps to reduce people experiencing crises.In this episode, we also hear from Susan Davis, the center’s executive director, and Olivia Ensign, senior advocate and researcher for the U.S. program at Human Rights Watch, which published a case study that outlined the success of the Gerstein Centre’s work. Upon publication, HRW noted that it hopes the document “inspires action among and across mental health service providers, service users, policymakers, and human rights and mental health advocates on providing community-based and rights-respecting support to people experiencing mental health crises.”What the Gerstein Centre is doing provides a model for what’s possible. Davis says that one of the most essential cores of what they do is listen.“Unfortunately, right now, when people are reaching out for mental health care, they cannot access the services that they need, either in a timely fashion or the correct services that they need,” Davis says. “One of the things that is important about that is that people need to be trusted about what it is that’s going on for them. And when they reach out for care, they need to be believed.”To learn more about the Gerstein Crisis Centre’s non-coercive, person-centered approach to addressing mental health, listen to this episode and subscribe to Next City.