If this year proved anything, it’s that cities are still where the biggest policy fights are happening – and where the most innovative solutions are emerging.

As federal retrenchment cuts into local efforts to improve housing affordability, public health, small business stability and inclusive finance, our most-read coverage of 2025 follows those battles up close. Revisit the reporting that drew the biggest audience — and captured the challenges and possibilities shaping urban life right now.

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

The City of Portland, Oregon is at the center of a growing battle over its last remaining immigration detention site: a 5,194-square-foot holding facility inside ICE’s Portland field office. In September, the city issued a land use violation notice against ICE over prolonged or overnight detentions that violated the conditions of the land use approval. Federal data showed that ICE had violated its permit at least 25 times by repeatedly detaining people for more than 24 hours, the city says. –Wesley Vaughan, September 2025

A quick check-in on this story, our No. 1 most-read piece of the year: The building owner has since requested an administrative review of the city’s finding that ICE facility violated its land use permit, and city officials have provided the landlord with multiple extensions. Earlier this month, Portland’s City Council also adopted an ordinance that creates “nuisance” fees for use of chemical and munitions that affect community health as well as an “detention facility impact fee” if ICE seeks to renew its use of the property upon the lease’s expiry.

Trump’s HUD Cuts Are Gutting Protections Against Housing Discrimination

In 1968, the Fair Housing Act banned discrimination in renting, mortgage lending and home sales, marking a major turn in the fight for housing justice nationally. From the start, the bulk of enforcement duties have been outsourced to nonprofits: Private organizations processed 75% of Fair Housing complaints in 2023, according to the National Fair Housing Alliance.

But those agencies are facing an existential threat after 66 organizations received a letter from HUD, notifying them that their Fair Housing grants were being canceled. There is an intent here to really cripple civil rights,” says Jay Young, executive director of the Southwest Fair Housing Council. –Roshan Abraham, March 2025 (produced in partnership with Shelterforce)

Checking back in on the status of these grants: In late July, following a class-action lawsuit filed by the National Fair Housing Alliance and the Tennessee Fair Housing Council, a federal judge ordered HUD to reinstate these grants and provide status updates.

This City Removed Water Fluoridation – And Is Now Reinstating It. Here’s What It Cost Residents.

Fluoride naturally occurs in drinking water in various concentrations, but municipalities add fluoride to their water to help prevent tooth decay. But with U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pushing the widely-debunked claim that fluoride is linked to cancer and neurodevelopmental disorders, some states and cities are considering removing fluoride or have already begun the process.

But one city, Calgary, Canada, offers a clear lesson into what happens when fluoride is removed — and how costly it can be to reinstate it. In May 2011, as a result of cost cutting and differences between the city and the province, Calgary ended its water fluoridation. The city reinstated fluoridation on June 30, a process that Calgary City Councilor Gian-Carlo Carra says has been both expensive and difficult. He estimates the capital infrastructure cost to do so at over $20 million. —Cinnamon Janzer, June 2025

Tariff Whiplash and HUD Cuts Will Cripple Affordable Housing Development

Trump’s sweeping tariffs on foreign goods have affordable housing developers staring down the barrel of a gun. Not only have existing tariffs on steel, aluminum, lumber, home appliances, and other construction materials prompted fears of a recession, but threats of new tariffs have made an already-hurting housing market much more uncertain to navigate.

“The challenges to make these deals economically viable are already numerous, including construction and labor costs, in addition to permitting and the escalating cost of insurance. As a result, many units will not be built despite the acute need for units,” says Monica Martinez, who leads Denver community development nonprofit Fax Partnership. The Fax’s plans to redevelop 40 motel units into affordable housing and create a 110-unit workforce housing development are in limbo due to uncertainty caused by tariffs and extreme HUD cuts. –Robert Davis, March 2025

Five Years In, Philly’s Kensington Corridor Trust Is Building Momentum

The Kensington corridor has seen much better times. Today, the intersection of Kensington and Allegheny Avenues has gained notoriety as the epicenter of the region’s opioid epidemic. The corridor’s decline has discouraged many landlords from keeping up with basic maintenance: There’s little financial incentive for traditional property owners to spend on repairs or keep up with updated building codes if they don’t believe the rental income from those properties would justify the expenses.

That’s slowly changing under the Kensington Corridor Trust, emerged from a dialogue between community members and Shift Capital, a Philly-based real estate development firm created with a mission to revitalize disinvested communities. Kensington Corridor Trust is coming off its busiest year yet, making eight acquisitions in 2024. The trust now owns 30 properties, which include a mix of vacant lots and mixed-use buildings all along Kensington Avenue. —Oscar Perry Abello, February 2025

The CDFI Fund Is Under Fire. What Does That Mean for Community Development?

Community development financial institutions around the country have been roiled by the Trump administration’s March 14 executive order targeting the CDFI Fund for elimination “to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.”

More than 1,400 CDFIs help finance affordable housing, small minority-owned businesses, green energy, disaster recovery and other projects in underfunded communities — including in red districts. All of the CDFIs that Next City has spoken with have said some version of the same thing: Losing the CDFI Fund wouldn’t stop them from continuing their work, but it would slow them down. —Oscar Perry Abello, March 2025

LA’s Traffic Ordinance Went Into Effect 100 Years Ago. It Changed Streets Across America.

American streets were once dominated by people. A documentary travelogue of New York City in 1911 is crowded with pedestrians crisscrossing streets in their daily routines. Trollies, carriages, and the occasional automobile jostle by, unhindered by traffic signals or centerlines.

In the early 1900s, L.A. had the most extensive electric streetcar system anywhere. From Minneapolis to Washington, D.C., bicycles were used by women and men commuting to work in the 1890s. People rode bikes in U.S. cities as much as they now ride in Amsterdam and Copenhagen, the best cycling cities in the world.

This was all before the Los Angeles Traffic Ordinance was passed. January 24, 2025, marks the centennial of the implementation of a 35-page bureaucratic document that redefined the use of America’s streets, tailoring them to the benefit of the automotive industry. —Alison Sant, January 2025

Inside the Rise and Fall of Hester Street

In August 2024, Hester Street’s board shocked many by announcing that Hester Street was sunsetting its operations, more than 20 years after the community development luminary was founded by New York architectural practice Leroy Street Studio. “We’ve determined that Hester Street’s financial model has proven unsustainable,” the board said.

I spoke to more than a dozen people, including Hester Street’s founders, former executive directors, former staff, former board members, former partners and former clients, to understand exactly what went wrong. Ultimately, it seems, Hester Street’s financial model was sustainable only as long as the organization could find an executive director who would throw themself into the role in an unsustainable way. —Oscar Perry Abello, January 2025 (produced in partnership with Urban Omnibus)

The Unexpected Psychological Reason Why Some People Dislike Density

As intense debates rage between so-called NIMBY and YIMBY camps in cities across North America, recent research suggests an alternative way of understanding debates over densification and helps explain the intense differences of opinion with which they are accompanied.

My recent study into disgust sensitivity and perceptions of urban density asks if subconscious, but deeply-rooted, psychological and emotional factors could underpin people’s divergent responses to density. The answer provided by the research is, in short, yes. Disgust, which evolved to protect people from sources of disease and contamination, is associated with how people perceive density. —Michael Hooper, August 2025

How Mayor Mamdani Could Reshape New York City

Democratic Socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani’s stunning upset in the New York City mayoral race has turned a slate of once-dismissed ideas into the city’s next policy blueprint. From publicly-owned grocery stories to free buses, the incoming mayor’s agenda has been hailed by supporters as visionary – and widely criticized, even within his own party, as unworkable.

As Mamdani begins the task of bringing his platform from rhetoric to reality, we’ve rounded up some of the most thoughtful analyses exploring how his ideas could be implemented, their potential benefits and the challenges ahead. —Aysha Khan and Eliana Perozo, November 2025

This post was originally published on Next City.