In 2025, displacement pressures intensified as federal immigration crackdowns, speculative investment and rising housing costs reshaped cities across the country. But communities didn’t stand still.

This year, Next City’s most-read anti-displacement stories tracked how local governments, nonprofits and residents fought back — challenging ICE facilities, expanding community land trusts, building land banks and creating new tools to stop public dollars from fueling displacement. Here are the stories our readers turned to most for practical strategies to protect people and place.

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Portland Is Taking Steps To Revoke an ICE Facility’s Land Use Permit

While the Trump administration continues to use violent and sometimes illegal tactics to detain and deport immigrants, the City of Portland, Oregon, issued a land use violation notice against ICE over alleged prolonged detentions that officials believe violated the conditions of an ICE facility’s land use approval. Read more about this story — our No. 1 most-read piece this year— in our roundup of Next City’s most popular stories of 2025. Reported by Wesley Vaughan.

What Should Nonprofits Do If ICE Shows Up? This Legal Guide Can Help

A legal guide by New York Lawyers for the Public Interest offers clear, simple, legalese-free guidance addressing both the federal and New York State legal landscapes when it comes to ICE. The document provides thorough yet accessible answers to common questions like what to do if ICE agents question staff members, whether or not nonprofits can deny entry to ICE, and more. Originally released during Trump’s first administration, the guide was updated in December 2024 in anticipation of what Trump’s second term could mean for nonprofits serving immigrant communities. Reported by Cinnamon Janzer.

A New Map Tracks the Growth of NYC’s Community Land Trusts

In February, New Economy Project released its first-ever interactive map of New York City’s growing community land trust movement. The city has seen its number of community land trusts grow by 10 times since 2014, researchers found. The 19 land trusts featured provide residents with deeply affordable rental housing, creating shared equity co-ops, converting abandoned property into art centers and more. Reported by Eliana Perozo.

In the Past 50 Years, We’ve Lost More Than 150 Majority-Black Neighborhoods

Gentrification and its impacts can be difficult to quantify. But a groundbreaking study released in May showed that 15% of urban neighborhoods across America show indications of gentrification over the last 50 years, with the number of gentrifying urban neighborhoods growing sevenfold from 1970 through 2020. The list of affected neighborhoods includes more than 500 mostly-Black neighborhoods, researchers found. Reported by Eliana Perozo.

This Land Bank Is Protecting Altadena From Displacement By Private Investors

It didn’t take long for disaster capitalists to begin swooping into Altadena after wildfires hit Los Angeles. Within weeks of the fires, 14 properties in the historically-Black community were bought up by offshore private developers. In an effort to compete with corporate buyers, the Greenline Housing Foundation purchased a burned lot through grant funding, marking Altadena’s first property to be protected in a community land bank.

Since this story’s publication, the foundation says it has “helped 33 families secure long-term temporary housing and has awarded over $550,000 in rental assistance.” Reported by Eliana Perozo.

Can Louisville’s New ‘Anti-Displacement Tool’ Redirect City Funds Toward Affordable Housing?

In 2023, Louisville passed a first-of-its-kind bill to make sure no more city subsidies help build new housing that displaces existing residents. Earlier this year, the city introduced a new tool to implement the law. The open-source tool analyzes whether any given project meets the neighborhood’s housing needs and income levels, ensuring that rents match local residents’ income. If the development does not meet these standards, then the city cannot subsidize it.

The tool takes on a wide range of data like changes in the share of college-educated adults, changes in household incomes, and changes in rent and home values to determine the displacement risk of a project and ultimately if the city will subsidize the project according to the displacement risk. Reported by Roshan Abraham.

How NYC’s Oldest Working-Class Theater Is Staging a Fight Against Displacement

In August, we launched Lessons from the Field, a series of interviews with anti-displacement practitioners across the country. So far, we’ve published seven Q&As with urban leaders who have built innovative, locally-rooted strategies to keep communities in place.

Our most popular interview so far has been with Colm Summers, who since 2023 has served as the artistic director at New York City’s Working Theater — which is, as Summers describes it, “the country’s oldest and only theater company committed to work by working-class people for working-class people.” Reported by Eliana Perozo.

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 post was originally published on Next City.