This year has been a challenging one for Boston’s transportation system, which has seen the long-awaited and much-delayed Green Line expansion, a month-long Orange Line closure, and a cutting federal safety report that cataloged the MBTA’s shortcomings. But the city is also at the helm of the nation’s growing push for fare-free public transit. In March, newly-elected Mayor Michelle Wu – long a proponent of fare-free transit – announced that three of the city’s most-used bus lines would go fare-free as part of a two-year pilot program. For our keynote session, Boston’s Chief of Streets, Jascha Franklin-Hodge, joins Next City to discuss whether this experiment is proving its worth as a strategy to meet the city’s climate, mobility and racial justice goals. And as other municipalities, including Washington, D.C., take the leap to provide free public transportation, he offers some advice for other city leaders considering joining
The global #LandBack movement, with its powerful demand to go beyond claims of “decolonization” and “reconciliation” by returning land to the stewardship Indigenous people, may seem like a fantasy. But U.S. cities are beginning to act upon their values – and indeed, their promises of climate action – by working to return land to the Indigenous communities to whom it rightfully belongs. In 2004 and 2009, the city of Eureka, California, returned hundreds of acres on Tuluwat Island to the Wiyot Tribe in two land transfers. And last fall, the city of Oakland, California, announced a plan to grant an easement over five acres to local Indigenous organizations: the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, the East Bay Ohlone tribe and the Confederated Villages of Lisjan Nation. In this session, we’ll hear from organizers with the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust about their work in Oakland, their model of land rematriation and their plans for the future.
Accessory Dwelling Units, or ADUs, have burst onto the housing scene as a way to create “gentle density,” allow people to age in place, and provide cash flow to lower-income homeowners. More and more places are legalizing their construction, but that is only the first step. In this webinar you’ll hear from four people who have worked on both the policy and program side in various communities across the country, from the Bay Area to Durham. They’re working to refine the requirements and set up financing, incentives and support systems that not only enable ADUs to actually be built, but also to be affordable and forces for increasing racial equity. This session is part of Next City’s Solutions of the Year, a multi-day virtual convening of seven sessions that will frame the conversation for 2023. [[person 1]] [[person 2]] [[person 3]] [[person 4]] [[person 5]] [[person 6]] [[logo 1]]
Decibels for dollar, soda taxes or “sugary beverage taxes” spark some of the loudest policy debates relative to the amount of money they raise. Part of the reason is because sugary beverages have so deeply ingrained themselves into our collective minds – Santa Claus is always dressed in red today because of Coca-Cola marketing. In this free-flowing conversation, we’ll discuss what the latest data are actually revealing about the impact of these policies so far and whether they live up to the promises early proponents made about them — and just what were those promises to begin with? Since Berkeley became the first city to pass a soda tax in 2014, the debates have gotten louder and more complex, with seven other cities passing their own versions, billionaire philanthropists jumping in to support their expansion, and big beverage corporations fighting back with a vengeance. Meanwhile, peer-reviewed studies are now available that actually reveal what ha