No one can control everything. Not even an administration hell-bent on striking fear into immigrant communities, pushing more families into hunger, poverty and homelessness, and wrecking the economy.

This year on the economic justice beat at Next City, our most-read stories include a few reports on landmark changes the Trump administration is making or attempting to make to the country’s community and economic development landscape. But the list below also features stories of community members winning landmark victories for development that align with their own visions for the future of their neighborhoods and cities.

These stories below about community-led development were all years in the making. It just so happens that, despite everything else happening, this year was also a year in which they hit key milestones or notable anniversaries, earning coverage from Next City and attention from you, our readers.

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

As of February 2025, Kensington Corridor Trust had come off its busiest year yet, making eight acquisitions in 2024. The trust had grown to 30 properties, which include a mix of vacant lots and mixed-use buildings all along Kensington Avenue. Some have occupied storefront and residential tenants; some have vacant storefronts but apartment residents above; others have a mix of occupied apartments and vacant apartments that need gut rehabs.

Those properties included 26 actively leased affordable apartments and 14 active storefronts, with another 25 or so apartments and seven more storefronts in the rehab and construction pipeline.

The trust had just made its largest and first multi-million dollar acquisition to date, a mixed-use building at the corner of Kensington and H Street. Acquired for $2.3 million, the building features 16 residential units above two commercial storefronts anchored by the Sunday Love Project, a food pantry that uses the client choice model that allows participants to select what they take home from the pantry’s shelves.

“I can’t ask for anything else in a landlord,” Sherry’s Restaurant owner Yolanda Del Valle told Next City. Normally, she says, landlords are just focused on getting their money. But the Kensington Corridor Trust’s approach is different.

“They’re more of a get-it-together, and we’re going to take care of this, and we’re going to help you,” she says. “You see them up and down the avenue. These people are actually in the streets trying to get things done. They ask the community, what do you guys want to get done here? What do you guys want to see? And they’re trying to make it happen.”

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

Community development financial institutions, or CDFIs, were roiled by the Trump administration’s March 14 executive order targeting the CDFI Fund for elimination “to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” In this story from March, Next City laid out what’s at stake — not just the CDFI Fund itself, but the legacy of grassroots advocacy that helped create it.

CDFIs include banks, credit unions, revolving loan funds, venture capital funds and other financial entities certified by the U.S. Treasury to have a primary mission of community development. In addition to administering the certification program, the CDFI Fund provides CDFIs with grants, tax credits and other forms of financial support for their work.

Across the country, 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.

“It’s not the time to run around and say the sky is falling, because it’s not,” said Brett Theodos, senior fellow and director of the Community Economic Development Hub at the Urban Institute. “On the other hand, it is the time for every CDFI in every red district to call their member of Congress and express how important CDFIs are to their local economy.”

The sky seemed to start falling for CDFIs in October, during the federal government shutdown, when the Trump Administration attempted to terminate all 80-plus staffers at the CDFI Fund. Lawsuits and bipartisan support from Congress — including GOP members in Congress — have pushed back against the terminations, calling them unlawful, though it’s still not 100% clear what is on the road ahead for the fund.

This Bronx Project Is Setting a New Standard for Community-Controlled Development

Though it only came out last week, this story quickly rose to become one of the most read economic justice stories on Next City for the entire year.

Community ownership and control of commercial and mixed-use real estate have been quietly gaining momentum across the country — Kensington Corridor Trust in Philadelphia, The Guild in Atlanta, E.G. Woode in Chicago, East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative in Oakland, Rondo Community Land Trust and Partnership in Property Commercial Land Trust in the Twin Cities, to name just a few.

Some of these examples are cooperatives, whose members include the occupants of the buildings as well as members of the surrounding community and investors. Others, like Kensington, have created perpetual purpose trusts as another form of intentionally structured community control over real estate. And in Denver, as Next City and Proximate recently reported, a community land trust has expanded beyond affordable housing to take control of 4,000 square feet of commercial and community space.

So far, as important as these storefronts and other spaces are to their surrounding communities, they’re mostly on the smaller end of the scale. A few hundred square feet here, maybe a few thousand square feet there. None comes close to the 570,000 square-foot Kingsbridge Armory. There aren’t many projects of that scale, period. Something so large and also something city-owned, which offers a moment to set some new precedents for how public officials and city agencies can act in situations where they’ve historically been all too easily prone to ignore communities and follow the lead of whoever has the deepest pockets.

The Next Round of Opportunity Zones Is Coming. New Data Shows How Cities Can Help Get Them Right.

Governors and state chief executives across the country are already in the process of selecting the next round of Opportunity Zones. The next designations will be finalized by July 1, 2026, with the new set of zones going into effect at the beginning of 2027.

Since it was created as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, the Opportunity Zone tax incentive has accounted for at least $100 billion of investment nationwide, meaning it’s already one of the largest federal policy tools for low-income community investment. But who ultimately benefits from those investments, other than the wealthy individuals and corporations who stand to gain healthy tax-free investment returns down the line? The answer remains the subject of speculation and debate.

New research shows that across Ohio, the incentive is mostly supporting projects in just a third of Opportunity Zone-designated census tracts. Those census tracts were, as a group, already experiencing economic gains prior to designation. Those projects are producing mostly market-rate rental housing that’s more expensive than most other rental units in the communities surrounding each project.

A Community Land Trust Is Raising the Bar for Community Power in Economic Development

In this story we published just two weeks ago, Next City covered the journey of Denver’s Tierra Colectiva Community Land Trust, from its origins in grassroots organizing to developing a pipeline of permanently affordable homes to a larger-scale mixed-use project that it sees as a proving ground to influence broader development in the neighborhood.

The Globeville and Elyria-Swansea neighborhoods surround the National Western Center, home to a major annual livestock show that takes place every January, going back to 1906. In 2015, Denver City Council approved a new master plan calling for the expansion of the facility into a year-round hub for entertainment and education. The Globeville Elyria-Swansea Coalition came together that same year, as residents and local businesses grew concerned that the city’s plans would displace them from their neighborhoods.

In 2018, the city itself used eminent domain to seize five properties, four commercial and one residential, part of a larger set of city acquisitions in the area to make way for the National Western Center expansion. Further real estate speculation started happening nearby, with investors looking to capitalize on the city’s plans. Against that backdrop, the coalition formed Tierra Colectiva Community Land Trust to fight back by taking land off of the speculative market, placing it in service to the community for good.

A former used car lot at 4965 Washington Street was one of many properties that the Globeville Elyria-Swansea Coalition started organizing around for acquisition as part of Tierra Colectiva Community Land Trust. This is the story of how the land trust came to be a co-developer of the property.

Was This the Last Dance For New York’s Chinatown Night Market?

It wasn’t an easy decision for the event’s nonprofit organizer, Think!Chinatown, to call it quits after this year’s two Chinatown Night Markets. The markets nearly didn’t happen after corporate funders backed away. The $15,000 in hard costs per night market was covered at the last minute by local funding sources Send Chinatown Love (which itself shut down its operations in June) and Trinity Church.

Capacity is the main issue. Think!Chinatown wasn’t created just to run seasonal night markets, but it ends up becoming an all-consuming venture for a significant part of the year. Aside from fundraising to cover the hard costs for the event — permits, equipment rentals, crews to unload and load a rented truck, and other per-night costs — the nonprofit has never really fundraised to cover the countless hours of staff time behind the scenes to run the night market as Think!Chinatown originally envisioned it five years ago.

In those five years, the Think!Chinatown team recruited at least 36 existing businesses and local artists as Chinatown Night Market participants. Most of these legacy business owners and artists had never participated in formal festivals or street markets before, and only with Liu’s urging came to see it as an opportunity to help keep their business afloat during the pandemic.

In some ways, the Chinatown Night Market has fulfilled some of its original purpose. The legacy businesses that Think!Chinatown wanted to help have survived, some to the point of being able to participate in other street festivals and night markets on their own, some to the point of no longer needing the additional revenue outside of their brick and mortar space.

This post was originally published on Next City.