It is hot and sunny in New Orleans on the first day of the Cityscapes Conference. Hosted by New Growth Innovation Networks, the conference is about economic innovation and focuses on small and mid-sized cities. I’m aware that Kingston is more like a microcity alongside places like Memphis, Cleveland, Stockton, St. Louis, and I feel really lucky to be in New Orleans learning with my colleagues.

For my first session at the conference, I hop on a bus with thirty-five people for a tour of Bayou Road’s property stabilization project. Bayou Road is a historically Black and Indigenous crossroads called by the Choctaw “Bulbancha” or “the place of many tongues.” In recent decades, a wealthy, Black couple has been buying property and renting to small, Black-owned businesses. They hope to retain BIPOC residence and control of this cultural crossroad which sits on high ground in a city facing rising seawater and routine flooding.

Shana Sassoon of Broad Community Connections shares with us that this case study on Bayou Road is looking at deep questions: 

“Who gets to thrive? Who gets to stay? Who gets to go? Who gets to own?” 

These questions about value and power make the academic idea of ‘economic development’ personal and connected to lived experiences. Over the next two days, these questions were a current flowing through presentations and conversations about innovative strategies for affecting economic equity. 

In the opening plenary the next day, Dara Eskridge (Invest STL) pointed out that historically BIPOC housing stock is routinely either over or under valued. On the one hand, this can lead to pricing people out of their neighborhoods, and on the other can actively limit wealth or financial stability for BIPOC real estate holders. As Amanda Cage (Shift Work Forward) clearly highlighted, those disparate property values are just one way that “the legacy effects of red-lining are still active.”

In all our communities, we can feel the effects of disruption. This point resonated with the screening of Lost Rondout I had attended at Tempo shortly before the conference. The film illustrated far more clearly to me the disastrous effects of urban renewal that are still playing out in Kingston today. Our current housing crisis can be directly linked to the destruction of many homes in this formerly racially integrated, low-income neighborhood. Folks were relocated into housing projects that did not create the same sense of community that once existed. 

Connecting to this history opens up something about my understanding of Kingston now. I think about the work happening at Murray Street Parklet–now called the Murray Round Food Forest. This project is bringing life, connection, and shared investment into a pocket of land abutting the highway that cuts through the old Rondout neighborhood. The project is offering a space to gather, a space to tend together, and is planting food for the future. I believe Murray Round Food Forest is healing something here.

Back in New Orleans, I learn about multiple projects trying to confront and address how BIPOC neighborhood properties are valued: InvestSTL is piloting peer group comparable neighborhood statistics to lift assessment value, while LOITER is embracing lower property valuations to protect against displacement, and Kensington Corridor Trust is only accepting 0-2% interest debt from investors while retaining full community control of neighborhood assets. 

I left the conference with new understanding of financial, real estate, and development vocabulary, but more importantly, with a sense of hope. There’s a lot of work to be done in Kingston, nationally, and globally to address economic equity. But there is a wider network of people tuned in, trying out inspiring mechanisms for change at every scale, and sharing learnings across communities and place. 

Everyone I spoke with was excited to hear about Kingston Common Futures putting dollars and projects into shared community control. And I was happy to share with folks many other experiments happening locally: local currency, gift economies, non-extractive loans, unions, land trusts and banks, coops, and universal basic income pilots. All of these efforts in one way or another invite us to turn to our neighbors and say, “I value you. I hope we thrive together.” 

About Cityscapes 2026: https://newgrowth.org/cityscapes

Conference Resources: https://newgrowth.org/sessions-2026-resources

Conference Insights: https://newgrowth.org/cityscapes#insights-2026