Housing and Urban Issues
Stresses on urban communities continue to affect housing, food security, child services, homelessness, business development and crime. Coverage includes stories about new solutions to how cities are run, how they develop as urban centers and about the people who live there.
Matt Privratsky was appointed to serve as an interim city council member in St. Paul after the previous member resigned. He’ll cast some consequential votes.
Nearly 10 percent of the state can’t participate in elections because they have been convicted of a felony. Restoring the right to vote to those who have completed their time is complicated and frustrating, advocates say.
Climate change and other factors put growing pressure on critical watersheds.
But practitioners must remember there's a high bar and rigor required to making human-centric design work correctly. Simply saying a product was created using the practice won’t cut it.
The new $20 million bridge is similar to the Florida International University pedestrian bridge that collapsed in 2018 and killed six people. Officials are confident that critical design changes will prevent another catastrophe.
Construction on the $1.5 billion, 25.3-mile stretch of dedicated bus lanes could begin late next year or early 2025 if approved. Yet residents are concerned that a planned overpass will undermine the local community.
Kansas City tenants have formed a power base and are seeking equal footing with the forces that have traditionally defined how the city is governed.
People ages 15 to 24 account for more than half of people who are affected by sexually transmitted diseases in California and about 20 percent of California high schools’ students were sexually active in 2019.
The Army Corps of Engineers has proposed building 12 separate storm surge gates across the mouths of canals and waterways of the city's harbor. But environmentalist Tracy Brown questions the soundness of the plan.
To meet his goal of 500,000 new homes in the next decade, the New York City mayor has proposed new approaches to address the housing crisis, including creating incentives, single-room occupancies and more.
While improvements could take a decade to complete and cost more than $200 million, officials are hopeful that the city’s downtown transit system can improve its broken and run-down stations to boost ridership.
Some center cities are coming back from the pandemic, with residential populations increasing even as many continue to work from home. While restaurants and retail are still suffering, it seems fair to speculate that something meaningful is happening.
The legislation that awaits Gov. Beshear’s signature would increase the starting pay of security workers at juvenile detention centers, with the hopes of retaining staff, and require better mental health services for the youths.
Ridership levels on the system’s Gold and Red lines were only 30 and 56 percent of pre-pandemic levels, respectively. Meanwhile, 22 people have died on Metro buses and trains since January and serious crime increased 24 percent last year.
The Housing Choice Voucher program helps 2.3 million households pay rent. Biden has called for small increases to the program, while GOP leaders are eyeing cuts that will hit some states especially hard.
An initiative in Orange County, Calif., is taking an innovative approach to reducing social determinants of poor health. Screenings are vital, but social and environmental factors set the stage for the problems they detect.
Natural gas and electricity consumption by buildings are the city’s greatest source of greenhouse gas emissions, and yet there aren’t any city-mandated climate standards that buildings must meet.
Black women in Michigan are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than in other states. A proposal would require the use of the PREM-OB scale and create a complaint system for obstetric racism.
A 2021 investigation revealed Chicago’s deeply flawed inspection system for identifying and responding to safety issues in residential buildings. Since the report was published, 53 more people have died in residential fires.
Latinos are the nation’s largest ethnic or racial minority and yet they are far less likely to ascend to corporate boards than other groups. Forty-seven of the nation’s Fortune 100 companies have no Latino directors.
Environmentalists are pushing back against a proposal to install 12 moveable gates in local waterways. They say the plan needs more local input and less focus on the storm surge problem.
Our regions may be entering a new era in which they simply try to maintain what they have, or manage their decline. It’s going be harder for urban and suburban leaders to rise to the top by attracting new major corporate tenants.
Women across the state earned just 88 cents for every dollar earned by men in 2021, which, over a 40-year career, amounts to more than $350,000 in diminished earnings. The gap is larger for women of color.
The vote will determine whether Madison, Ala., should transition from a mayor-council format to a council-manager format, which is unusual for the state. If approved, the city will have until 2025 to make the transition.
The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority recently scaled back a voter-approved plan to add new transit lines, citing cost increases. Leaders worry that delays could further erode support for transit.
Census data predicts that by 2032, America will have more people ages 65 and older than it will have people who are 18 and younger. As the nation’s population ages, many predict that “age tech” will continue to boom.
Urban areas grew in 36 states. The New York-Jersey City-Newark urban area is the nation’s most populous with 19.4 million residents followed by the 12.2 million in the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim area.
Before COVID-19, just 1,400 city restaurants had outdoor permits. Today there are 13,000 of the structures scattered across the five boroughs, and many are showing wear and tear from life on the street.
The California county is examining millions of documents to remove discriminatory language to adhere to a 2021 state law. So far only 19 property deeds have been modified. They came primarily from the 1940s and ‘50s.
House legislation would create a task force to analyze the costs of a system under which copays and deductibles are prohibited and access and benefits are prioritized. More than $277,000 will be allocated toward the study.
A new report from the Nowak Metro Finance Lab at Drexel University examines the phenomenon of wholesale real estate investors targeting vulnerable homeowners in poor neighborhoods in Philadelphia.
