Lofts and studios for low-income artists may suffer a major blow if the Republican effort to overhaul the tax system is signed into law.An amendment to the tax bill passed by the Senate would strike artists’ housing from the list of qualified groups who can benefit from federally … | Continue reading
For Donald Trump and the populist wing of the Republican Party, immigrants are the enemy, taking jobs away from Americans and eating up public revenue. Since being elected, Trump has sought to curtail immigration in several ways: moving to cut legal immigration by as much as half … | Continue reading
The tax bill passed by Republican senators on Friday represents the most substantial overhaul to the U.S. tax code since the Reagan era. That legislative process in 1986 unfolded over six months, and involved more than a dozen public hearings. This measure was rushed through in w … | Continue reading
”Forget Paris”: Countering President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, at least 36 U.S. cities today are poised to sign on to their own accord for reducing greenhouse gas emissions—“The Chicago Charter.” Former President Obama is slated to address the group of mayors g … | Continue reading
Silicon Valley has long had a fascination with transforming tedious analog tasks into frictionless, touch-screen enabled transactions. Having thusly disrupted taxi rides, banking, and shopping, apartment-hunting appears to be next on the list. Mom-and-pop landlords are slowly bei … | Continue reading
The devastation to struggling small towns and cities of Appalachia and the Northeast unleashed by the opioid epidemic has brought renewed attention to the connection between the physical health of individuals and the economic health of their communities. Indeed, the opioid crisis … | Continue reading
Punishment—or the threat of it—is generally considered an effective way to shape human behavior; it is, after all, the foundation of our criminal justice system. But what if there’s a subset of the population for whom this paradigm simply doesn’t apply? New research suggests that … | Continue reading
Early on Saturday morning, the Senate passed a $1.5 trillion tax overhaul by a razor-thin margin. Draft pages of the tax bill were still being added to the legislation even as senators were debating taking the weekend to read the bill.Looking at the Senate bill in the bright ligh … | Continue reading
Consider two American children, one rich and one poor, both brilliant. The rich one is much more likely to become an inventor, creating products that help improve America’s quality of life. The poor child probably will not.That’s the conclusion of a new study by the Equality of O … | Continue reading
Taxing threat: Local governments are leery of a provision in the U.S. House of Representatives tax bill that could intensify the housing crunch in cities around the country, wiping out a key tool that finances more than half of the affordable units built. Bloomberg reports on the … | Continue reading
In August, after decades of failing to pay property taxes on their private cul-de-sac in San Francisco’s toniest hills, residents of Presidio Terrace were rudely awakened to fact that their street no longer belonged to them. It had been sold at auction, perfectly legally—and the … | Continue reading
In an unassuming park overlooking San Francisco’s Chinatown are three bronze women. They’re holding hands in solidarity, backs against one another, and standing defiantly on a pedestal as a halmoni—Korean for grandmother—gazes up at them. The four make up the city’s memorial to a … | Continue reading
My family didn’t really do vacations. Most of my summers as a child were spent milling about in the sweltering New Delhi heat, avoiding “holiday homework,” and dreaming of being somewhere else.So I’m pretty lucky to have spent this past holiday week in Europe, exploring two citie … | Continue reading
Jeremy Klaszus was one of many Calgary residents who wished aloud that somebody would create what became The Sprawl, a hyper-local digital news outlet aimed at the city’s younger residents. But it was Klaszus, a former alt-weekly reporter, who managed to swiftly put the platform … | Continue reading
Cortado is not just the way you order an overpriced espresso drink at your new favorite up-and-coming neighborhood coffee spot. Nope. In Spanish, cortado means to be cut.“Happily gentrifying the neighborhood since 2014,” read one side of the now-infamous sign posted in front of a … | Continue reading
To ride a bus in Beirut, you have to hail it like a taxi. Drivers pick riders up along routes that have been established informally, based on need. Mapping company Zawarib’s guide of the city’s typical routes advises, “Buses will stop for you at any point...Just make yourself ele … | Continue reading
Not guilty: In a case that ignited sanctuary city rhetoric around the U.S., a San Francisco jury determined Thursday that an undocumented immigrant is not guilty of murder in the death of Katie Steinle. The case became a catalyst in the Trump administration’s moves to undermine s … | Continue reading
At 7 p.m. on a Thursday inside the Bronx Criminal Court, Lisa Whiteside is trying to determine who she can prevent from spending the night on Riker’s Island. She scans the docket of 30 scheduled arraignments, knowing it will likely double in length as the night gets longer. White … | Continue reading
Columbus, Ohio, has one of the highest rates of babies dying before their first birthdays in the country. But many folks don’t know that this infant mortality crisis exists; with its growing workforce of younger, well-educated residents, the Midwest city has a reputation for liva … | Continue reading
You can’t miss the postmodern hulk known as No. 1 Poultry on a visit to London’s financial district, even if you wanted to.A fevered concoction in candy-striped sandstone, the James Stirling-designed office complex occupies one of the most contested and debated sites in central L … | Continue reading
The London of 2029 will hold more people, have fewer cars, and boast better public transit. It should also be easier to find a place to lock your bike or get a pint of lager—and harder to hit up a fast-food joint after school. That, at least, is the vision set out in London Mayor … | Continue reading
From the glowing orb in the King James gallery on the fourth floor of the Museum of the Bible, at least four different voices can be heard speaking. One of them, naturally, is Morgan Freeman.Freeman reads from scripture. Verses materialize on the floor in light and then evanesce. … | Continue reading
It’s not just economic inequality, but rising spatial inequality that is the defining issue of our time. The gap between have and have-not cities and regions is growing, and it contributes to our increasingly divided and dysfunctional politics.It’s an admittedly hard problem to c … | Continue reading
For 69-year-old Jeff Whipple, Bergen County, New Jersey, was about as good a place to grow up as anywhere. “Suburban New Jersey in the Fifties, in a working-class town—it was like Leave It to Beaver,” he said. “I lived on a block where there were probably 50 other kids. I had fou … | Continue reading
Tunnel vision: For all the brilliant engineering in Elon Musk’s plans for a network of high-speed transport tunnels beneath Los Angeles, the vision remains a shallow one, a Governing column notes, in its failure to predict impacts to the built environment above ground. Pointing t … | Continue reading
Welcome to the second edition of MapLab. If you're receiving this, you've probably already signed up. But I bet you have map-curious friends who haven’t. If you like what you're reading, forward this on.Compass points: Gratitude for data, dudeLast week, Google Maps released its a … | Continue reading
Buying an electric vehicle has long been pitched as being about saving something—the planet, your lungs, your children’s future, etc. But a new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists emphasizes how EVs can drive consumer savings. They aren’t just more environmentally frien … | Continue reading
A few Sundays ago, at the first weekly service of New City Church in Minneapolis, the Bible wasn’t the only book Rev. Tyler Sit used to preach his sermon. The other text was How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood.Peter Moskowitz’s book, … | Continue reading
For a few days earlier this month, a stretch of downtown Los Angeles’ Arts District was transformed into a circus of emerging transportation technology, with companies from around the world showcasing their newest and shiniest wares. Cordoned off from the rest of the “Street of t … | Continue reading
Uber’s double whammy: Uber’s financial troubles appear to only be getting worse, with a new report this morning that some early investors are looking to sell their shares amid third-quarter losses of $1.5 billion. That sale would drop the company’s valuation by 30 percent, Bloomb … | Continue reading
Spike Lee’s new Netflix series “She’s Gotta Have It” is an update of his eponymous 1986 movie, a portrayal of a black “sex-positive, polyamorous pansexual” woman named Nola Darling who’s trying to find a safe space for her sexual and artistic freedoms in Brooklyn. In the movie or … | Continue reading
A new series of maps wants city-dwellers to appreciate the public transit systems they love to hate.Blue Crow Media, an independent map publisher, recently released their first in a series of public transit maps: a double-sided, cartographic guide of the London Tube. The London U … | Continue reading
Last month, before any of the bids for Amazon’s HQ2 were submitted, CityLab profiled the Hypothetical Extreme Amazon bidder. We explained some of the more outrageous economic incentives that cities could offer to woo the corporation’s second headquarters to town. Now 238 cities’ … | Continue reading
If you’re looking at the British media, you might be forgiven for assuming that some kind of war has broken out between Britain and Ireland. A spokesperson for British far-right party UKIP claimed Ireland had “threatened” the U.K., taunting it as “the weakest kid in the playgroun … | Continue reading
CityLab has long chronicled the back-to-the-city movement of startups and technology companies. As that trend has come to full fruition, many voices on this site, including my own, have argued that it’s high time for big tech companies to invest in inclusive prosperity in the cit … | Continue reading
The 1900 Olympic Games were the brainchild of Pierre de Coubertain, a Parisian and founder of the International Olympic Committee. Held in tandem with the World’s Fair that same year, it brought Paris new massive infrastructure additions, including monuments and buildings that ar … | Continue reading
During the night of October 8, Santa Rosa, California, found itself pinned between two wildfires. To the southeast, the Nuns fire burned west of Highway 12. To the northeast, the Tubbs fire charred the hills outside Calistoga and worked its way southwest. In Santa Rosa, the latte … | Continue reading
Take a stroll through iconic public spaces like New York’s High Line and Central Park or Chicago’s Millennium Park. They are stunning. They are also enormously expensive, enormously well-gifted, and seldom surrounded by lower-income neighborhoods. They are “signature” parks that … | Continue reading
Whose data is it anyway?: Some privacy advocates have sounded the alarm on Sidewalk Labs’ plans to create a new high-tech innovation district on Toronto’s waterfront, noting the incentives for parent company Alphabet (Google’s owner) to collect personal data from residents. In an … | Continue reading
Wedged between shelves of hardback thrillers and DVDs, a whitesquare box adorned with a red cross blends into the scene at the Adams Public Library, belying the potency of its contents.Inside are four doses of a nasal spray that reverses the effects of opioid overdoses. It is one … | Continue reading
HQ2—Amazon’s very public search for a second headquarters in North America—has attracted applications from over 200 cities offering an array of taxpayer subsidies as part of their pitch. But the expense and distraction of the HQ2 competition have also created a backlash, as skep … | Continue reading
In 1991, the city of Medellín in Colombia registered a homicide rate of 381 per 100,000—among the highest ever recorded anywhere. In neighboring cities like Barranquilla, Bogotá, and Cali, the levels of violence associated with drug trafficking and political unrest were equally f … | Continue reading
Police officers kill and injure an alarming number of people in the United States each year. According to a 2016 study published in Injury Prevention, the police killed or injured over 55,000 people in 2012; the police-brutality monitoring website Mapping Police Violence reports … | Continue reading
Last month, researchers found the most compelling evidence yet that Uber, Lyft, and other ride-hailing services are worsening traffic and reducing transit ridership in cities across the U.S. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel proposed a solution: slap those trips with a fee to fund publi … | Continue reading
Much has been made of the death of the North American mall. It isn’t hard to see why: Dozens of malls have closed over past decade and an estimated 25 percent of the roughly 1,100 still alive in the U.S. are projected to close by 2022. Developers haven’t built a new mall since 20 … | Continue reading
Thanksgiving celebrates the fundamental American ideal of diverse groups coming together as part of a singular nation. But with the Trump administration’s harsh rhetoric on immigration, that ideal feels like it is increasingly under threat.Trump’s anti-immigrant stance not only v … | Continue reading
Had Uber not agreed to pay a $100 million ransom to hackers last year, the personal data of some 57 million riders and drivers may have been exposed. That 2016 breach, which was kept secret for one year by the world’s largest ride-hailing company, is now the subject of multiple s … | Continue reading
A potential new appointment at the U.S. Census Bureau has census-watchers worried that the agency’s core mission could be at risk as it enters into the home stretch for big 2020 count.On Tuesday, Politico reported that the Trump administration may appoint Thomas Brunell, a politi … | Continue reading