Empire Mayonnaise, the Brooklyn artisanal mayonnaise store once parodied in a Saturday Night Live sketch about gentrification, is being forced to move because the neighborhood “has gotten really expensive.” I bet they are so sick of the joke you are making right now.

Creating enough affordable housing is one of the hardest political and economic challenges in the world. (If you think you know an easy answer, you’re wrong!) Here is a new piece of data that could “add to our understanding,” and make everyone mad.

For more than four decades, the television show Sesame Street has existed to teach children lessons. Today’s lesson is that people without disposable household income are in an inferior position and should be happy to receive secondhand goods.

The founder of a charity group that was displaced from its Venice Beach office by Snapchat’s expansion says that “a Snapchat executive told her he had noticed one of her homeless clients sweeping the street with an old broom, so he offered to buy the organization a new one.” Kindness—it’s affordable :)

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I work at a soul-food restaurant owned by a very attractive black biracial man. The restaurant is located in South Los Angeles, across from what used to be the Magic Johnson Theater, a place once known for shootouts during movie screenings. But, I digress.

Weeks ago, reeling from a night of booze and bad decisions, I ventured to a local Bayou-themed restaurant in search of comfort food. I wanted to absorb the last of the alcohol that remained from just hours before, fully determined to get rid of my hangover. When you live alone, this is not an uncommon practice. I…

Jerome Robinson only got to live in the home of his dreams for five years before he was told to leave.

"Gentrification tends to stop when affluent people stop wanting to move into the city," Megan McArdle says in a fine overview of the intractability of the affordable housing problem. The only real solution, it would seem, is to close the gap between the affluent and everyone else.

There are two narratives about Camden, New Jersey that media outlets like to rely on. One is of a city so dangerous and poor that its salvation is near-hopeless. That narrative can be seen in Matt Taibbi’s Rolling Stone article “Apocalypse, New Jersey,” in The Nation’s “City of Ruins” and in NBC’s “America’s…

A series of MIT Media Lab maps are percolating through the internet, showing the locations and "walksheds" of independent coffee shops in San Francisco, Brooklyn, and Cambridge. These shops play an important role in urban life, as the researchers explain in their project description: