Next City

Next City is on a brief hiatus for the summer. We'll be back at the end of July. Thank you for listening to Next City. Together we can spread good ideas from one city to the next city.

We are creating a podcast episode about these three episodes related to the Planners With A Purpose conference that Next City sponsored.

The Next City podcast debuted in November 2021 and has now recorded 150 episodes, with hundreds of interviews about solutions with changemakers. Host Lucas Grindley and Editorial Director Deonna Anderson look back on some of the biggest takeaways after more than 75 hours worth of journalism.

Sponsored podcast: From Chelsea to the Berkshires, these organizations do the frontline work of caring for their community when federal policy turns hostile.  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 wit...

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 comple...

Today, we're learning about the effort to ensure public school buildings continue serving neighborhoods even after they close. 

A partner episode with the podcast, Real Solutions, produced with The Othering & Belonging Institute.

As immigrant communities face daily threats from ICE and the Trump administration, they need allies they can trust. And that's why today we're looking at nonprofit newsrooms that speak directly with immigrant communities. 

Community-owned commercial real estate models are starting to make bigger splashes, thanks in part to building relationships with investors and officials who see their value.

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 fa...

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 f...

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 ba...

 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,...

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 exp...