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How Community Solar Turned a Superfund Site Into Savings in Illinois A new 9.1-MW solar array will help residents of Waukegan, Illinois, reduce energy bills. State incentives for low-income solar made the brownfield redevelopment project possible.

Love this visual of public transit in action in the Chicago region. This sort of thing redeems social media for a day.

Check out this awesome CTA visualization that a Chicago transit fan made! Huge shoutout to /user/mtdfan on Reddit for this amazing work ❤️

We love to share examples of innovation in community revitalization like this pilot project to anchor downtown revitalization with small scale manufacturing. That is defined as a business with less than 50 employees that creates a tangible product that can be replicated or packaged. Read more at Smart Cities Dive.

https://zurl.co/TMzIl

Can the maker economy drive local economic revitalization? 6 Michigan communities are about to find out. Leaders from six Southeastern Michigan communities will receive training on revitalizing downtowns by supporting small-scale manufacturing.

This is something we encourage all of our municipal and county clients to explore: bring modular manufacturing into your city. It can create jobs, increase the housing supply, and help shore up local manufacturing. Great to see Philly putting out an RFI to develop the means to do just that. Love it!

The City of Philadelphia is issuing this Request for Information (RFI) to solicit information to advise the development of modular housing factories within Philadelphia that will accelerate the production of homes and create jobs.

This RFI seeks information on site parameters, facility requirements, operational considerations and financial models to successfully build and operate modular construction housing factories.

To learn more and apply, please visit:
bit.ly/4pW94VJ or click the link in our bio.

When Brian White moderated a panel on the implications of AI in community development at the 2025 Ohio Land Bank Conference, he warned that AI stood to displace a lot of workers. That displacement, coupled with widespread automation and the massive water and energy consumption of data centers, were issues land banks needed to be thinking about. Why? Because land banks work to put property back to productive use and productive uses require business activity and people to live in homes near their jobs. No jobs for people = no people in homes and buildings.

It was a rather bleak assessment, but a recent study from MIT suggests it may not have been bleak enough. The study, based on modeling, suggests AI might be ready to displace 11.7% of the US labor market, representing $1.7 trillion (that's trillion with a T) in economic output.

When computers and automation replace human work, it can free up humans to do other work. But what other work will there be, when 11.7% of the labor force is made fungible almost overnight?

CNBC has a news item on the study. It's definitely the kind of thing that should be top of mind for all us working to rebuild communities: https://zurl.co/3H4DW

MIT study finds AI can already replace 11.7% of U.S. workforce Artificial intelligence can already replace 11.7% of the U.S. labor market, across finance, health care and professional services, according to MIT's study.