Next City

Latest Episodes:

The Quiet Engine for Affordable Housing in Red and Blue States Apr 30, 2025

Show notes

The CDFI Fund is a proven driver of affordable housing in every state—red and blue alike. But now, this vital source of financing is at risk of federal cuts. In this episode, we highlight a project in Nashville, Tennessee, made possible by BlueHub Capital, a community development financial institution based in Massachusetts.
In today's episode, we speak to Oscar Perry Abello, the author of "The Banks We Deserve," and with Karen Kelleher, president of the BlueHub Loan Fund, which recently helped finance a project in Nashville that converted two abandoned motels into affordable studio apartments. It's just one example of how community development financial institutions (or CDFIs) step in all overt the country, in red states and blue states, where big banks usually won’t.
It's also the sort of project that would be harder to finance if the Trump administration gets its wish to eliminate the CDFI Fund, the federal grant program that helps fund and support more than 1,400 CDFIs around the country. (Read our analysis of Trump's executive order on the CDFI Fund and what it means.)
“The market is profit-driven and, to be honest, it's expensive to build housing,” says Kelleher, whose team makes about 30 loans a year to fund innovative projects like the adaptive reuse project in Tennessee. “The kinds of deals that we support…don't often pencil out without subsidy. That might be tax credits, it might be grants, it might be state funds, it might be local funds.”
Making the math work can lead to transactions that are complex, risky – and unpalatable for many market-rate lenders. That's where CDFIs come in.“We and other mission-driven lenders and CDFIs really make it our business to understand those tools, those models,” Kelleher says. “We find ways to structure our financing so we can take risks and be at the table with the community or the developer who's trying to make something happen that the market won't make happen.”

What Happens When Wildfire Relief Inspires Too Many Donations Apr 23, 2025

Show notes

When wildfires hit Los Angeles in January, people did what they always do in a crisis: They stepped in to help. And many of them donated clothes. Lots and lots of clothes. Volunteers were quickly overwhelmed as bags of clothes began piling up at relief centers.
“What happens is the help that's being offered actually clogs the ability for those cities and the community to help, because it's a mismatch of what the community and the city needs versus what's being offered,” says chief strategy officer Annie Gullingsrud at Trashie, an organization that worked to recirculate those donations and keep them from the landfill. “When these things happen, we just need to know that what we're offering is actual, informed help—not just perceived wishful thinking.”
As donation centers struggled to handle tens of thousands of pounds of clothing, sustainable fashion initiatives and recyclers stepped up. Their initiatives are part of a larger effort to ensure that reusable and recyclable clothing doesn't end up in landfills.
You can also read our Equitable Cities Reporting Fellow Maylin Tu's original Next City article on textile waste recycling after the L.A. wildfires here.

The First Draft of Pandemic History Apr 10, 2025

Show notes

Five years after the start of the COVID pandemic, we revisit journals from the nurses who lived through it. The stories are part of a first draft of history being remembered by the official Manhattan Borough Historian in his new book on New York’s essential workers, “When the City Stopped: Stories from New York's Essential Workers.”

In Conversation with the Former NEA Chair on What’s Next for the Arts Apr 02, 2025

Show notes

Dr. Maria Rosario Jackson is the former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, having resigned when President Trump took office. She talks about how the arts are shaping urban policy, including by “healing, bridging and thriving” in communities.

A Proven Solution For Preventing Homelessness Mar 26, 2025

Show notes

In this sponsored podcast episode with Results for America, learn how Santa Clara County helped thousands of Californians stay housed.
In 2024, homelessness surged by 18% nationwide, with 23 out of every 10,000 people living on the streets or in shelters. The costs of homelessness are enormous – not just to the health and well-being of those experiencing it, but also to taxpayers, as governments spend billions on housing and services.
But there’s a smarter solution: prevention.
Santa Clara County, California, has proven it works. By helping at-risk residents stay housed — 93% remained in their homes two years later — the county kept families stable and saved taxpayers money. Every $1 spent on prevention returned $2.47 in public benefits.
“More people are becoming homeless every single day, every single year, than we can house and we can ever think to house,” says Chad Bojorquez, Chief Program Officer at Destination: Home, who leads its homelessness prevention system. “If we don't turn off what we call inflow, if we don't turn off that spigot, we're never going to solve homelessness.”
We'll also hear from Brendan Perry of Notre Dame's Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities and Ross Tilchin, director of the economic mobility catalog at Results for America.

So Many Land Trusts Launched in NYC That They Created A Map Mar 19, 2025

Show notes

We talk about community land trusts, or CLTs, a lot at Next City. It's about ownership: The community owns the lands and stewards the land. That means that the buildings on the land – including housing and other spaces like storefronts – can made affordable to own or to rent, in perpetuity.
CLTs are also talked about a lot in New York City. That's how the city went from having just a small handful of CLTs in the early '90s to having 19. Now, the New Economy Project has launched an interactive map to track all of these land trusts.
In today's episode, we speak to Deyanira Del Río, executive director of New Economy Project, and Matthew Shore, a senior community organizer with South Bronx Unite and a member of the Mott Haven-Port Morris Community Land Stewards CLT, about how the city's seen this explosion of CLT growth.
This story was produced through our Equitable Cities Reporting Fellow for Anti-Displacement Strategies, which is made possible with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. This story has been corrected to clarify NYCCLI’s advocacy for CLT bills in city council.

How We Get The Banks We Deserve Mar 12, 2025

Show notes

Banks can be a force for good. It's an idea that's greeted with skepticism in some circles, given the endless list of inequities and disasters perpetuated by our country's leading financial institutions. But if you're a Next City reader, the idea that financial institutions can be part of the solution isn't foreign, given our senior economic justice correspondent Oscar Perry Abello's in-depth coverage of community development financial institutions, credit unions, alternative lending practice and mission-driven banking.
In his debut book, “The Banks We Deserve: Reclaiming Community Banking for a Just Economy,” Abello makes the case that it's time to shake up America's highly-concentrated banking system by shifting banking's power back to local institutions – thereby putting power back in the hands of local communities.
“If we want to close the racial wealth gap, if we want to make these investments in clean energy and energy efficiency, if we want to make the investments in housing that people can actually afford, we cannot and should not be expecting big banks to come and do that,” he says. “They're not built to do it. We should go to the community-based model.”
Listen to this episode to hear how Abello’s new book demonstrates ways banks’ money-creation power can be democratized. Helping communities tap into that power could address our climate, housing and economic crises.

Fixing the Housing Crisis Goes Beyond Building More Units Mar 05, 2025

Show notes

The housing crisis isn’t just about supply. This episode explores innovative solutions like community land trusts, tenant protections, and expanded assistance programs that are making homes affordable — and keeping them that way.

Inside the Fight to Save LGBTQ Landmarks and Culture Feb 12, 2025

Show notes

Preserving the stories and spaces that define LGBTQ communities is an act of resilience and resistance. Hear from designers, historians, and activists about the vital work of safeguarding these cultural landmarks and ensuring their legacy endures.

The Intersection of Philanthropy, Storytelling, and Racial Justice Feb 05, 2025

Show notes

Stories shape how we see the world. In this episode, we bring together philanthropic leaders to explore how funders are relying on journalism to dismantle harmful narratives, amplify underrepresented voices and create equitable communities.
If you know Next City, it'll come as no surprise that we believe journalism can be a powerful vehicle for racial justice. Here in the nonprofit media world, we've seen countless examples of how philanthropy can help fund that change by funding impactful, community-driven journalism. And it's not just media funders – increasingly funders who might not traditionally focus on media are leveraging storytelling to advance their broader missions of inclusive economies, cultural preservation, health equity and more.
“We think of narrative control as a precondition for long-term change,” says Inés Familiar Miller, program officer at the Kresge Foundation's Arts & Culture Program. “Seeing real people can combat some of those negative narratives where someone else is telling you the story of the immigrant community, of the Black community, of the Indigenous community. It's just not the full picture. And once you hear directly from the people … it could provide like a very different perspective.”
In this conversation, we hear from several funders of Next City's funders, including Miller, Surdna Foundation's Vice President of Programs Patrice R. Green, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Director of Media Relations Jordan Reese, who describe their strategy in funding journalism and media. We also hear from Karen Rundlet, CEO of the Institute for Nonprofit News, on the need to view our country's journalism infrastructure as a public good.

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected