We’re off this week for Thanksgiving, but we’ll be back next Wednesday with more inspiring and workable ideas that move our society toward justice and equity. If you can’t wait for the next story, head to NextCity.org for the latest coverage. As always, we’d love to hear any feedback from our listeners. Please feel free to email us at [email protected]. And if you haven’t already, subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, Goodpods or anywhere you listen to your podcasts. We’ll see you next week. 

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.

In light of the Academy Awards ceremony, we're re-highlighting our episode featuring Arlo Washington, the Black barber-turned-visionary behind People Trust Community Federal Credit Union and the central figure of the Oscar-nominated short documentary, "The Barber of Little Rock." When neighbors started coming to his Little Rock barbershop to borrow money, Arlo Washington went a step further and chartered Arkansas’ newest credit union.

In this episode of the podcast, civil engineer and transportation researcher Veronica O. Davis talks about her new book, “Inclusive Transportation: A Manifesto for Repairing Divided Communities,” how choices made in the 1950s and '60s have left neighbors effectively cut off from public transportation, and what it means for cities to give their citizens the right to connection.Davis, a city planner based in Houston, says American have an unhealthy love affair with cars – but this dependency is destroying American urban life.It begins with advertising, she says, but there's a bigger problem.“We have set up our cities in a way that you need a car,” she says. “It's one of those self-fulfilling prophecies, as well. So even if someone wants to opt to be car-lite or car-free, we don't make it easy for them.” In part, Davis argues, that's linked to a long history of racism in city planning that is shackling our cities environmentally and economically. For more, read more in our excerpt from “Inclusive Transportation.”We're also joined by Next City's managing editor Aysha Khan, who's got some experience with car-free living in addition to covering the growing movement for pedestrianized public spaces. The problem, she says, is less with cars and car ownership and more with the “overwhelming” assumption in American urban planning that cars are and will always be the primary mode of transportation.“Anything other than car travel is less than and isn't a priority to enable, let alone support and promote,” Khan says. “We see cars prioritized in transportation spending, in maintenance, in other sorts of infrastructure investment – rather than public transportation solutions, even walking, biking, rolling by other means.”While all of these solutions are more efficient and go a long way to help cities achieve public health, economic equity and climate change mitigation goals, they are neglected in favor of entrenching car-centric development and culture, she argues. That's slowly beginning to change with the adoption of open streets, car-free streets and pedestrian-friendly public spaces, a movement accelerated by the pandemic.To learn more about how cities can develop equitable transportation systems and repair the harm done through decades of racist and car-centric planning, listen to this episode and subscribe to Next City.

When Baltimore built a new sewer system a century ago, it tried to control nature by diverting the city’s waterways, like many other American cities in the 19th and 20th century. In many cases, cities turned these rivers into part of the underground sewer system by turning them into underground pipes and concrete culverts. Through a recently launched public art installation, “Ghost Rivers,” many residents of Baltimore Remington neighborhood are visualizing for the first time the waterways buried below their feet.But with millions of miles of streams, rivers and creeks buried in asphalt across the country, often to build highways, houses, factories, roads and real estate development, it's inevitable that these waterways are increasingly disrupting our urban ecologies.As University of Michigan professor Jacob Napieralski explains, these “ghost rivers” are disproportionately affecting formerly redlined neighborhoods, a significant but often forgotten contributor to urban flooding. “Flood risk is very intricately linked to history, and by ignoring history we may be missing some clues that help us move forward,” he explains.Now, cities around the U.S. – and, indeed, the world – are working toward “daylighting” these buried bodies of water.To learn more about the impact of waterway burial on low-income neighborhoods and how cities are now responding through “daylighting” them, listen to this episode and subscribe to Next City. 

Take a guess. Which of these banks is making more small-business loans in Brooklyn: Citibank, Wells Fargo, Bank of America or Brooklyn Cooperative Federal Credit Union, a small financial institution that has only about $50 million in assets?That's a mere rounding error compared to the major players, or even many other community banks. But, as our economic justice correspondent Oscar Perry Abello explored a two-part series late last year, Brooklyn Coop punches above its weight through lending to Brooklyn's Black and Brown small business owners.“This one tiny credit union has done more SBA loans in Brooklyn than Citi, Wells Fargo and Bank of America combined over the past 10 years, he says. Their strategy? While other highly-ranked Small Business Administration-guaranteed lenders are making loans that average about $120,000 in size. But Brooklyn Coop's average loans sit at around $24,000.In this episode, we chat with Brooklyn Coop CEO Samira Rajan about its human approach to lending – and why getting megabanks to fund more Black and Brown communities and small businesses isn't the answer to powering our economy.“I think banks are designed to say no,” Rajan says. But Brooklyn Coop and other community development financial institutions, or CDFIs, have another approach. “Throw open the gates. It's OK if these people get access to bank accounts. It's OK if they get credits. We'll all be better off in the long run.”To learn more about Brooklyn Coop and its alternative model for small business lending, listen to this episode and subscribe to Next City. And for more stories about financial institutions focused on serving minority communities, check out our ongoing CDFI Futures series where we're exploring the community development finance industry through the lenses of equity, public policy and inclusive community development. 

Rising temperatures have ripple effects on our health, our economy and more. So to deal with the problem of extreme heat, we need to bust out of our silos and embrace collaboration.And as high as the stakes are, we know the solutions to address the problems. Nature-based solutions, solar reflective surfaces and shade, among other lessons we can glean from the communities that have long dealt with heat, are all on the table.“We have most of these tools available to us now,” says Kurt Shickman, the director of Extreme Heat Initiatives at the Adrienne Arsht Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center and former executive director of the Global Cool Cities Alliance. “We're not in a challenge of innovation here. We're in a challenge of access.”On this episode of the podcast, we explore the evidence-based solutions to curbing extreme heat, the reasons why these haven't been implemented at scale, and what's at stake for our cities' most vulnerable communities.

Six years after Hurricane Maria battered Puerto Rico, killing almost 3,000 people and causing $139 billion worth of damages, the island is still rebuilding. To support these vital restoration and climate resilience efforts, residents turned to a local mutual aid model known as cooperativas. When Puerto Ricans were completely isolated, with no power, communications or banking system, cooperatives opened within two days and began creating workarounds to support residents.Today, these co-ops are undergoing an important transformation: Many are gaining recognition from the U.S. government as community development financial institutions, or CDFIs. And with that comes some important perks, namely access major new funding and grant opportunities.“Arising from the ashes is actually a flourishing CDFI sector, and these CDFIs are actually helping bolster the island's financial system and helping the poor people prepare for other natural disasters,” says reporter Christopher Williams, who covered this movement last year. Before Maria hit, there were eight CDFIs on the island. Now, there are close to 100 institutions, serving about a third of the population.That growth is in large part thanks to the work of Inclusiv, a New York City-based CDFI that provides access to financial tools to low-income Puerto Ricans. To support those people who had long relied on the island's cooperativas, they're helping cooperativas become certified as CDFIs with the U.S. Treasury Department.“The way that Puerto Ricans do cooperatives and do the credit union movement is a bit different from how it's done in the U.S.,” says Rene Vargas Martinez, the director of Inclusiv's Puerto Rico Network. “It really replicates us as a people. Our culture is a culture of solidarity. We help each other when there are crises.”To learn more about Puerto Rico's financial cooperative movement and its growing CDFI network, listen to this episode below and subscribe to Next City. And for more such stories, check out our ongoing CDFI Futures series where we're exploring the community development finance industry through the lenses of equity, public policy and inclusive community development. 

At Next City, we've covered a lot of community land trusts: CLTs developing disaster-resilient housing, CLTs helping recruit Black public school teachers through housing opportunities, CLTs helping house Indigenous foster youth aging out of the system. They're a potent and increasingly popular tool for creating permanently affordable housing amid – but CLTs also have some drawbacks.Yet some of those pain points can be mitigated when paired with another powerful vehicle for affordable housing development: land banks. When the Next City team visited Richmond, Virginia for our annual Vanguard gathering last year, one of the most striking solutions for urban change that we encountered was the country's first combined community land trust and land bank.The Maggie Walker Land Trust – named after a local icon who was the first woman of color to establish a bank in America, among other historic titles –  expects to make its 100th home sale soon, less than a decade after its founding.“One of MWCLT’s goals is expanding equitable access to homeownership, and we have made great strides to increase Black homeownership in our programs,” the organization's executive director, Lark Washington, told Next City earlier this year.To learn more about community land trusts, land banks, and the impact of combining these tools, listen to this episode and subscribe to Next City.

In Richmond, Virginia access to quality food can be a challenge, particularly in marginalized communities. But mutual aid, community building, and collaboration among people working in the food justice space have made a difference in the city. Intergenerational collaboration has also been key to addressing food insecurity and promoting food sovereignty.Barry Greene Jr., Next City’s Equitable Cities Fellows for Reparations Narratives who lives in Richmond, describes the city’s food accessibility. “Depending on what side of the river you live on, your access to grocery stores or fresh food differs. And while we have community gardens, they sometimes have issues with general maintenance and upkeep,” he says, noting that the Southside has less access.  One of the people making sure people are fed in Richmond is Taylor Scott, founder of RVA Community Fridges, one of numerous community fridge efforts that have cropped up across the country (and the world) in recent years. We hear from Scott in this episode when she spoke on a panel during Next City’s Vanguard Richmond conference in September 2023. Scott shared about what it took to get started, getting connected with people already doing similar work, and the intention of doing mutual aid work — not charity work.“A big difference for us in charity and nonprofit is a lot of people when they do charity work, they never go back,” she says. “For us, a big part of the mutual aid work is the fact that you come back again and you get integrated into the community and actually start to be a part of that community.”To hear more about the importance of collaboration in food justice work and the ongoing mutual aid of community fridges, listen to the full episode and subscribe to Next City.

Next City is turning 20! And our journalists are publishing a special 20th-anniversary edition of our annual Solutions of the Year magazine in which we’re talking about the solutions we want to see expand in cities over the next 20 years.As part of the celebration, we’re re-airing some of the stories that we’ve covered here on the podcast. Today, two community organizers in Atlanta who won legal protections for themselves and other who were formerly incarcerated.

Next City is turning 20! And our journalists are publishing a special 20th-anniversary edition of our annual Solutions of the Year magazine in which we’re talking about the solutions we want to see expand in cities over the next 20 years.As part of the celebration, we’re re-airing some of the stories that we’ve covered here on the podcast. Today, how community-owned real estate in East Boston is keeping rents affordable.

Next City is turning 20! And our journalists are publishing a special 20th-anniversary edition of our annual Solutions of the Year magazine in which we’re talking about the solutions we want to see expand in cities over the next 20 years.As part of the celebration, we’re re-airing some of the stories that we’ve covered here on the podcast. Today, how a Kentucky non-profit increased participation in Lexington’s local government.

Next City is turning 20! And our journalists are publishing a special 20th-anniversary edition of our annual Solutions of the Year magazine in which we’re talking about the solutions we want to see expand in cities over the next 20 years. As part of the celebration, we’re re-airing some of the stories that we’ve covered here on the podcast. Today, the Black barber whose work inspired him to launch a credit union to help his clients and neighbors in Arkansas.

The number of Latino-owned businesses in the U.S. grew by 34% between 2007 and 2019. And now these entrepreneurs have an ally — a loan fund that caters to Latino and immigrant entrepreneurs.

More than giving back, the NFL acknowledges it makes money by depending on Black athletes, and its new investments are considering the communities where its athletes come from.

Today, we’re partnering with ThirdSpace Action Lab on this sponsored episode about The Anti-Racist Community Development research project, which has documented the range of ways that structural racism still shows up in community development and the many ways that people are trying to make community development anti-racist.

The so-called Death Star law was passed in Texas. Luckily, a lawsuit was filed by the city of Houston, joined by San Antonio and El Paso, and supported by dozens of large and small municipalities in Texas - they formed an Alliance, if you will.

Through organizations like Chicago TREND and with the help of new and federally regulated fintech platforms, community members and people of color who were excluded from ownership now have an opportunity not only to own a piece of a shopping mall or other commercial space, but also to see a return on their investment.Reporting for this story was made possible with funding from the Mastercard Impact Fund in partnership with the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth.

A new report surveyed nonprofits and what it discovered has activists calling for a new way of funding arts and culture. Can they change the way things have always been done?

In Oakland, a nonprofit is giving entrepreneurs of color the chance to use vacant storefronts to try out their own businesses. The first step? Convert building ground floor into a public park.Reporting for this story was made possible with funding from the Mastercard Impact Fund in partnership with the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth.

Today we talk about a solution to the lack of housing access that is within reach for many local Public Housing Authorities.

Housing vouchers are a federally-funded payment system. They’re used by low-income people to rent a home — any home. Or at least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. While the Fair Housing Act of 1968 offered legal protections against discrimination based on race, religion, sex, and disability, there is nothing in it that says you can’t discriminate against someone based on how the source of their income.

Whether it’s medical care, addiction treatment, counseling — or whatever the issue might be that individual case-work would reveal — many people experiencing homelessness need more than stable housing. But there’s evidence that without first offering someone a stable home, all those other issues can’t be properly addressed. That is a concept called “Housing First.”

An East Boston tenant had been fighting her eviction for eight years when the city established a new neighborhood trust and bought her building — plus, 35 others.

Today we’re learning about a solution in Lexington, Kentucky, where a non-profit called CivicLex is changing things up. We’re speaking with the founder of CivicLex about how they’re getting folks informed and involved in local decisions big and small.

The first Black-owned bank to open in the last 20 years is in Columbus, Ohio.

In this episode of Next City, Lucas Grindley explores the history of LGBTQ neighborhoods, or "Gayborhoods," and how they've been affected by skyrocketing housing prices. Developers are trying to spark the birth of a new queer neighborhood in Cleveland. But can a massive real estate development even succeed as LGBTQ-focused? This ambitious 300,000-square-foot complex called Studio West 117 will include sports, dining, entertainment and housing alongside identity-affirming businesses and social services.

A Minneapolis startup is raising awareness about all the building materials that can be salvaged instead of sent to landfills.This episode is sponsored by:• Next City Newsletter - Signing up for our newsletters is the best way to stay informed on the issues that matter. To subscribe now, head to nextcity.org/newsletter and enter your email address.• Next City App - Downloading the Next City App is a smart way to stay informed. Turn on notifications and it’s easy to ensure you never miss a story. To download the app now, search for Next City in the Android

This episode of Next City delves into the impact of natural disasters such as hurricanes Harvey and Irma, and how they affect people even years later.In the wake of Hurricanes Irma and Harvey, two organizations provide solutions to the displacement crisis. The Florida Keys Community Land Trust was initiated by two altruistic individuals and creates housing that is far more affordable than market rate. The Houston Community Land Trust was created with $52 million of public funds and provides disaster resilient housing.