Next City

At its peak in 1960, Gary boasted a population of 180,000. Today, there are 100,000 fewer people spread across a city footprint slightly larger than Boston’s, and investment is desperately needed. Can an innovative Chicago artist, armed with a large grant from the Knight Foundation, develop the city into a culinary destination?

Could the Rust Belt be the Silicon Valley of hardware?

Downtowns have become profitable again—so why are cities still subsidizing urban development?

Writer and illustrator Aaron Reiss uses his germaphobia as a lens to explore why transit ticket kiosks work the way they do.

Is it possible for a city to both welcome new investment and avoid displacing its residents at the same time?

An illustrated look at how cities became indebted to Goldman Sachs.

How Medellín went from crime-ridden cocaine capital to one of the world’s most innovative cities:

The Medellín Cartel, headed by Pablo Escobar, perhaps the only drug lord to become a worldwide household name, transported billions of dollars worth of cocaine, which had surpassed coffee as Colombia’s leading export by 1982. Arriving on U.S. shores, the exploits of cocaine cowboys made Miami the murder capital of the world in the early ’80s, an ignominious title Medellín itself stole in 1991, when it topped out at 381 murders per 100,000 residents, 40 times what the United Nations considers “epidemic.” That rate, if translated to New York

Next City’s Forefront Magazine has unlocked their story about the rise of Uber, our member pick from November.

Longreads Members support this service and receive exclusive stories from the best publishers and writers in the world. Join us to receive our latest Member Pick—it’s a new story from journalist Nancy Scola, published in Next City’s Forefront magazine, about the rise of Uber.

For more from Next City, you can check out their site or subscribe here. For a limited time, Next City is offering the Longreads community a 20 percent discount on a one-year subscription. Enter the offer code: LONGREADS (case sensitive) for your discount at nextcity.org/subscribe.

For this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share a story from Next City’s Forefront magazine, by journalist Nona Willis Aronowitz. Aronowitz looks at the story behind the minimum wage increase in San Jose, which jumped to $10 per hour from $8 per hour after the city’s residents voted for the increase last November—”the single largest minimum-wage jump in the nation’s history.”