In Oakland, California, when it comes to Black homelessness and dispossession, dystopia is already here.

After taking on gentrification in Denver, did a successful anti-gang activist become a target of law enforcement?

A writer bears witness to New York’s endangered species.

The problems go much deeper than food safety and point to an industry that systematically rewards and enables star chefs while asking few critical questions about the workers who often power their success.

A friend's party brings up sad memories and introspection.

The story behind an Instagram sensation is the story of a changing coastal Maine.

A dispatch from th Park Slope Food Co-op.

It was a place where you could, whatever you needed could to look like, for so many folks who’d been told they could not.

What happens when your neighborhood, your city, seem to have lost their way?

A Native American family’s fight for housing security in the city and on the reservation.

A rash of building fires in San Francisco has many speculating that the fault lies with landlords hoping to oust their poor tenants. One anonymous landlord describes his failed plan to do exactly that.

“It was a crumbling Parkdale rooming house, populated by drug users and squatters and available on the cheap. We were cash-strapped, desperate to move and hemmed in by a hot market.”

During my first weeks in Rogers Park, I was surprised by how often I heard the word “pioneer”. I heard it first from the white owner of an antiques shop with signs in the windows that read: “Warning, you are being watched and recorded.” When I stopped off in his shop, he welcomed me to the neighbourhood warmly and delivered an introductory speech dense with code. This neighbourhood, he told me, needs “more people like you”. He and other “people like us” were gradually “lifting it up”.

Excerpted from Notes From No Man’s Land

The landlord’s guide to gentrifying New York.

On Atlanta’s disappearing Afrofuture.

A reporter learns to slice lox—and digs into a Los Angeles landmark’s millions in debt.

Alex Nieto died because a series of white men saw him as a menacing intruder in the place he’d spent his whole life.

The grim, racist methods of a New York City landlord.

The artists are leaving San Francisco.

Fear, racism, and the historically troubling attitude of American pioneers.

To whom does San Francisco’s oldest neighborhood belong?

The story of Kokie’s, and its gentrifying Williamsburg neighborhood.

How a burgeoning tech workforce swallowed San Francisco.

A young black gentrifier gets lumped in with both groups, often depending on what she’s wearing and where she’s drinking. She is always aware of that fact.

Hipsters vs. Hasids in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. A skirmish over a bike lane becomes a battle for a neighborhood.