What made the Model Cities program unique wasn’t just its scale but its philosophy. At the heart of the program was an insistence on “widespread citizen participation.”

In cities across the U.S., the housing crisis has reached a breaking point. Rents are skyrocketing, homelessness is rising and working-class neighborhoods are threatened by displacement.

These challenges might feel unprecedented . But they echo a moment more than half a century ago.

In the 1950s and 1960s, housing and urban inequality were at the center of national politics. American cities were grappling with rapid urban decline, segregated and substandard housing , and the fallout of highway construction and urban renewal projects that displaced hundreds of thousands of disproportionately low-income and Black r

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