Environmental challenges have never been more pressing for local governments to address. Intensifying climate change, resource disputes, and ecosystem disruption are increasingly being scrutinized and through a patchwork of local policy action. The environmental problems facing us demand immediate attention. However, the current policy landscape is, in many ways, poorly organized to accomplish this task. Local governments will need to engage in coordination if we want to tackle these issues more effectively moving forward.

Climate change doesn’t hit everyone equally. Socioeconomically disadvantaged groups—particularly low-income communities and communities of color, often termed “frontline communities”—face the greatest climate risks while possessing the fewest resources to adapt or recover (Schlosberg and Collins 2014). As local governments have become key players in U.S. climate action over the past decade, many cities have explicitly integrated equity into their Climate Action Plans (CAPs) as a stated priority alongside emissions reductions and resilience building.

With political polarization threatening American democracy at almost every level, scholars, policymakers, and pro-democracy advocates have invested considerable time and resources in efforts to mitigate polarization, prevent democratic decline, and avert violent conflict. Despite these efforts, polarization continues to deepen, extending beyond Congress and national politics to state and local governments.

In 2020, it seemed that the United States (and the world) might be on the verge of significant structural change regarding racial justice. And Atlanta, a city with a Black mayor and Black majorities on the City County, School Board, and among the Police Department appeared poised to make substantial change in its urban policies. Then-Mayor Keshia Lance-Bottoms supported a movement to “defund the police,” diverting $73 million from the APD budget to social services and then-City Council member Andre Dickens authored legislation to close and repurpose the City Jail as a community resource center. But quickly, the political tides turned and instead, Mayor Bottoms announced the construction of the $90 million dollar Atlanta Police training facility, colloquially known as “Cop City.” The resulting theatre of events included domestic terrorism charges, protests, and the trampling of democratic norms. Intrigued (and appalled), I decided to investigate why Atlanta’s Black-led municipal leadership would suppress sustained activism against police brutality, preferring instead to embrace an escalation in militarization.

The accelerating climate and nature crisis and the political ambition to ensure distributed socio-economic prosperity call for swift action to create a sustainable future while leaving nobody behind. While global and national efforts to promote green and just transitions in contemporary societies are indeed crucial, they rarely consider the challenges that such transitions entail for local communities—and not least for those living in poor and devastated urban areas.

Americans tend to have strong feelings about cities. For many Americans, cities are almost not even real places at all, but mystical, foreign realms that represent and confirm their fears about crime, poverty, race, immigration, terrorism, and dozens of other social ills. Cities are not where decent, upstanding citizens live; they are simply a concentration of problems. Social scientists have recently begun to focus on the resentment of urban spaces and populations, especially among white Americans, and how this resentment affects political behavior and state decision-making.

Good research on cities hinges on collecting accurate information from diverse groups of people. For instance, the use of focus groups, interviews, and ethnographies can teach us a great deal about the nuances of urban communities. This can help researchers and policymakers think through important issues such as trust, cooperation, and the needs of a community that may not be reflected through survey research alone. My own research began with a single question: How do Black Chicagoans in Bronzeville, Greater Englewood, and Calumet Heights interact with institutions and neighbors they distrust to find solutions to police violence and community violence? This type of question requires deliberation, follow-up, and elaboration. In short, a qualitative research approach. Yet, what happens when a crisis shakes the ability to meet and build relationships with community members?

One national concern is the lack of affordable housing. Among other challenges (such as homelessness), this deficiency encourages gentrification, a process entailing affluent newcomers flowing into lower-income, disinvested neighborhoods. These districts are often initially dominated by minority populations, while gentrifiers are usually White. Encroaching residents raise rents through their demand for homes, and increased rents financially encumber the incumbent, more resource-limited denizens. Additionally, many scholars, journalists, and activists assert that rising rents displace economically disadvantaged occupants. Gentrification also inhibits the entrance of lower-income households, a less visible but more pervasive concern.

By Isaac Oates (CUNY Graduate Center)

New York City’s 2021 legislation establishing minimum pay for app-based food delivery workers represents a significant recent effort to protect gig workers. This essay argues that the legislation is counterproductive: by raising pay without reclassifying workers as employees, it gave delivery platforms an incentive to extract more output per worker hour, shifting the cost of higher wages back onto workers in the form of greater strain and risk. Drawing on data reported by delivery platforms to the city under the 2021 legislation, the essay shows that between the second half of 2023 and the second half of 2024, deliveries per worker hour rose 75% while consumer spending per delivery stayed flat and platform gross profit per delivery fell only modestly, suggesting that workers absorbed the bulk of the mandate’s cost. The essay situates these findings within Richard Florida’s framework of the new urban crisis, arguing that Florida’s prescription of converting low-wage service jobs into family-supporting work cannot be achieved through wage protection alone when the underlying power asymmetry between platforms and workers remains intact. The New York case is not exceptional: platform companies have pursued analogous arrangements in California and other states, and a proposed 2026 federal rule would make independent contractor classification easier nationally. For this class of worker, the new urban crisis is not a failure of policy ambition, but a predictable feature of how platform labor markets distribute power.

By Yetimoni Kpeebi (UNC Charlotte)

Homelessness in the United States has reached its highest recorded level in decades, yet governance responses remain overwhelmingly punitive. Drawing on critical urban theory, this essay frames homelessness as America's “new urban crisis.” By exploring the unprecedented scale of homelessness and the intensification of punitive governance, this essay shows that homelessness has shifted from a temporary social emergency to a normalized mode of urban governance in contemporary American cities. I conclude by arguing for a decisive shift away from punitive governance and toward housing-centered solutions grounded in the rights and dignity of the unhoused.

Public Safety Realignment significantly changed spending behavior in California’s city governments. Taking changes in spending behavior as an indication of policy prioritization, I provide statistical and descriptive evidence that the design of the Realignment policies led city officials to de-prioritize enforcement when dealing with the policies’ effects. I use a policy feedback framework to explain why this happened. The provisions within Realignment that led to large reductions in the state’s incarcerated population also made local policy makers feel that increased law enforcement would lead to redundancy, thus exacerbating the “revolving door” problem in their local jails.

Fear changes behavior. Based on an original survey of Mexican undocumented immigrants in the United States, our research reveals that those afraid of deportation pull back from the most routine interactions of modern life — talking to police, enrolling children in school, visiting a hospital, even leaving a phone number at a restaurant. These are the small acts through which people participate in society. When fear suppresses them, the consequences ripple outward.

In many small towns, public finances seem to improve at exactly the moment things are getting worse.

Fewer residents… but higher spending per person.
Fewer people… but more revenue per inhabitant.

At first glance, this sounds like good news. But our research shows the opposite: in many shrinking municipalities, these “improvements” are largely an illusion. Across Spain—and in many other countries—rural areas are steadily losing population. This trend is often discussed as a social or demographic problem. But it also has a less visible consequence: it changes how we measure and interpret the financial health of local governments.

When national governments make new policies, they often rely on cities to carry them out. But cities are not passive delivery machines. They have elected councils, local priorities, and their own understanding of what is needed locally. So, what happens when what the national government wants conflicts with what the city council has already decided to do?

America's housing crisis has reshaped cities in profound ways. As rents have skyrocketed and affordable neighborhoods have become harder to find, higher-income residents have increasingly begun moving into historically lower-income, predominantly Black neighborhoods. This process, gentrification, has generated enormous debate about displacement, neighborhood change, and racial dynamics. But one question has received surprisingly little attention: how does gentrification affect the way Black residents feel about the racial groups moving into their neighborhoods?

Cities that reclaim their water services from private operators tend to invite citizens into governance during the dramatic transition, then quietly push them out once serious decisions begin. This is the central finding of our comparative study of Paris and Naples, published in Urban Affairs Review: public ownership is not sufficient for public accountability, and participatory governance structures created to legitimize reform are routinely dismantled or emptied of meaning the moment civic actors start pressing on questions of budgets, hiring, and investment priorities. In other words, participation is welcomed at the margins, but becomes contested once it reaches decisions about how resources are actually allocated.

Contrary to other countries such as Denmark, in the Netherlands local party systems shows signs of reverse nationalisation. Using data from seven municipal elections between 1998 and 2022, we observe that the Dutch local party system nationalisation index decreases considerably over time, meaning more independent local parties in the local council. We find that size, rurality, peripherality and mergers all have an influence on the index.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, over 1.5 million people fled to Poland in a matter of weeks. Poland had no national integration strategy, no refugee camps, and very little experience managing large-scale displacement. Cities, rather than the central government, became the frontline responders and improvised solutions for housing, healthcare, education, and social support with minimal guidance from above.

Urban sprawl has been a dominant feature of U.S. urban expansion over the past five decades. Sprawl has many well-documented negative consequences, such as the degradation of prime agricultural land, higher per-unit costs of land development and urbanized land and housing, higher municipal costs to maintain services and amenities, longer and more frequent travel distances in single-occupancy vehicles, and even poor health. Unsurprisingly then, many U.S. cities, regions, and states have tried to combat urban sprawl since the 1960s using four main approaches: state growth management laws, urban service area boundaries, local government regulations, and smart growth strategies.

Since its introduction in the 1990s, researchers across disciplines painstakingly analyzed HOPE VI, a public-private redevelopment initiative that transformed over 100 thousand units public housing across the United States while also displacing an estimated 250,000 residents. Despite it being adopted for the last fifteen years and being poised to convert four times as much public housing as HOPE VI, much less attention has been given to outcomes of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Rental Assistance Demonstration, or RAD program.

Homeownership has long been one of the primary ways families build wealth in the United States. But when families become homeowners through inheritance, the legal rules governing inherited property can introduce new challenges that threaten housing stability and wealth preservation.

By Richardson Dilworth (UAR Managing Editor)

In this brief introductory essay I focus on articles on urban crisis published in the first two decades of UAR, leading up to the 1985 symposium, “Whatever Happened to the Urban Crisis?”, which included an introductory essay by Mark Gottdiener (1985) and three articles, by Eric Monkkonen (1985), Alexander Ganz (1985), and Irene Rubin (1985). I then provide a quick and admittedly incomplete overview of changing notions of urban crisis since that symposium to suggest that, despite healthy usage of the term in the decades that followed and the invention of new terms such as “permacrisis” and “crisis cities” that suggest some evolution in this particular framework, the framework itself has always been so malleable and potentially inclusive that its subject is not crises per se but rather how and why we might define things as crises.

Across Europe, women are steadily increasing their presence in local councils, yet they are still far less likely to become mayors. Our research suggests that the way mayors are elected plays an important role in shaping this legislative-executive gender gap. We conducted the cross-sectional time-series analysis using the original dataset describing women’s descriptive representation among local councils and local executives in 33 European countries. We found that countries where mayors are directly elected by citizens tend to have fewer women mayors compared to countries where councillors elect the mayor or the executive committee.

Local officials face a stubborn challenge: public-safety gains can be fragile when budgets and political attention shift from year to year. Our new Urban Affairs Review study examines a practical governance tool that Texas communities have used to stabilize crime-control funding: Crime Control and Prevention Districts (CCPDs). The central takeaway is simple: cities that adopt CCPDs tend to see meaningful reductions in crime for several years.

When Congress created Opportunity Zones in 2017 as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the promise was compelling: use tax incentives to redirect private capital into distressed communities that had been overlooked by investors. Seven years later, with the program recently made permanent by Congress in 2025, a crucial question remains: is it actually working? New research analyzing over 70,000 property transactions across the United States reveals that Opportunity Zones are delivering measurable impacts on real estate markets—with important nuances about where and how the policy succeeds.

In many city elections across the United States, voters face a similar challenge: they are asked to choose among candidates they know very little about. Ballots often list only names, not party labels, and local races receive little media attention. In these low-information settings, voters look for clues that can serve as “shortcuts,” or anything that will help them quickly decide which candidate to vote for.