How an American Dream of Housing Became a Reality in Sweden
The U.S. once looked to modular construction as an efficient way to build lots of housing at scale, but Sweden picked up the idea and put it into practice.
By Francesca Mari and

The U.S. once looked to modular construction as an efficient way to build lots of housing at scale, but Sweden picked up the idea and put it into practice.
By Francesca Mari and
In 1975, New Jersey’s Supreme Court ordered every town in the state to make way for multifamily housing. It’s been a long journey.
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The state has made it harder to widen highways, and transportation officials are turning their eyes to transit.
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In Baton Rouge, a public safety experiment could help to answer a critical question: Do community efforts to reduce street violence work?
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Is Guyana’s Oil a Blessing or a Curse?
More than any single country, Guyana demonstrates the struggle between the consequences of climate change and the lure of the oil economy.
By Gaiutra Bahadur and
How Free School Meals Went Mainstream
Over the past decade, many more schools started to offer free meals to all children, regardless of family income.
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Educators: How Are You Planning to Teach the 2024 Presidential Election?
The New York Times’s Headway team and Chalkbeat want to hear from you.
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High Schoolers: Are You Paying Attention to the Presidential Election?
The New York Times’s Headway team and Chalkbeat want to hear from you.
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Can a Big Village Full of Tiny Homes Ease Homelessness in Austin?
One of the nation’s largest experiments in affordable housing to address chronic homelessness is taking shape outside the city limits.
By Lucy Tompkins and
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Dear People of 2021: What Can We Learn From Hindsight?
For the first series from the Headway initiative, we followed up on forecasts from decades past to ask what the passage of time has revealed.
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Millions More People Got Access to Water. Can They Drink It?
The U.N. pledged to halve the proportion of the world without access to clean drinking water by 2015.
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What Can One Life Tell Us About the Battle Against H.I.V.?
In 2001, U.N. estimates suggested 150 million people would be infected with H.I.V. by 2021. That preceded an ambitious global campaign to curb the virus. How well did it work?
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Europe Met a Climate Target. But Is It Burning Less Carbon?
The European Union promised to reduce its emissions 20 percent by 2020. Did it happen?
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Extreme Poverty Has Been Sharply Cut. What Has Changed?
The U.N. pledged to cut by half the proportion of people living in the worst conditions around the world.
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Can a Big Village Full of Tiny Homes Ease Homelessness in Austin?
One of the nation’s largest experiments in affordable housing to address chronic homelessness is taking shape outside the city limits.
By Lucy Tompkins and
How Houston Moved 25,000 People From the Streets Into Homes of Their Own
The nation’s fourth-largest city hasn’t solved homelessness, but its remarkable progress can suggest a way forward.
By Michael KimmelmanLucy Tompkins and
This Is Public Housing. Just Don’t Call It That.
Montgomery County, Md., like many places, has an affordable housing crisis. So it started acting like a benevolent real estate investor.
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The Long Emergency of Homelessness
If we understood the loss of housing as a collective challenge engulfing our communities, how would it guide our response?
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30 People Tell Us What Homelessness Is Really Like
Packing groceries, bathing in fountains, finding comfort in an orange blanket. Explore people's stories and their answers to common questions.
Interviews by Susan Shain and
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How the Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike Changed the Labor Movement
The 1968 action led to greater economic mobility for Black workers. Today, union activists are trying to capture some of that spirit.
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Three Days That Changed the Thinking About Black Women’s Health
Forty years ago, Black women convened to discuss how race affected their health. They helped reimagine what medical care could look like.
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Sentenced to Life as Boys, They Made Their Case for Release
At age 17, Donnell Drinks was one of many young men in Philadelphia who went to prison for life without parole. Today, the city has resentenced more of those prisoners than any other jurisdiction.
By Issie Lapowsky and
How Greenwood Grew a Thriving Black Economy
W.E.B. Du Bois saw the key to Black prosperity in places like Tulsa, where Black residents patronized Black stores. Even today it serves as a model.
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The Elusive Quest for Black Progress
Many measures of Black achievement in the U.S. have stalled or reversed. A series from Headway looks back at historical gains for their lessons today.
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Remaking the River That Remade L.A.
Over the past century it has been channeled, subdued, blighted. Is it time for the Los Angeles River to serve the city in a new way?
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After years of destructive weather that have disrupted Puerto Rico’s food supplies, new visions of local agriculture are taking root.
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Architects Plan a City for the Future in Ukraine, While Bombs Still Fall
Irpin was one of the first Ukrainian cities to be destroyed and liberated. Now it’s becoming a laboratory for rebuilding.
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In an Age of Constant Disaster, What Does It Mean to Rebuild?
Each catastrophe is a test of what kind of society we’ve built. And each recovery offers a chance, however fleeting, to build another.
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Can a National Museum Rebuild Its Collection Without Colonialism?
After a fire destroyed thousands of Indigenous artifacts, the curators of this Brazilian museum are adopting a radical new approach.
By Mariana Lenharo and
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What We Learned From Bogotá’s Buses
Transformative projects don’t conform to election cycles. They’re not the work of any single person.
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Three Days That Changed the Thinking About Black Women’s Health
Four decades ago, 2,000 Black women converged on Spelman College for a conference on health.
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A Climate Change Success Story? Look at Hoboken
This flood-prone city on the Hudson River balances climate infrastructure with resident needs.
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The Lessons of the Crime Wave That Didn’t Happen
Fears of violence in the 1980s and ’90s resulted in life sentences for minors that are now being reversed.
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An affordable housing solution hidden in plain sight: Libraries
Building subsidized housing in America relies on cheap land, and creative ideas
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We asked for questions about the amazing carbon-storage capabilities of peatlands, and how these ecosystems keep the planet breathing. Readers sent us more than a thousand. Here are some answers.
Besides mosquitoes, what lives in a peatland?
We asked for questions about the amazing carbon-storage capabilities of peatlands, and how these ecosystems keep the planet breathing. Readers sent us more than a thousand. Here are some answers.
How do peatlands capture carbon, and why is it so important to the planet?
We asked for questions about the amazing carbon-storage capabilities of peatlands, and how these ecosystems keep the planet breathing. Readers sent us more than a thousand. Here are some answers.
Why can’t we create, build or plant new peatlands?
We asked for questions about the amazing carbon-storage capabilities of peatlands, and how these ecosystems keep the planet breathing. Readers sent us more than a thousand. Here are some answers.
How do we preserve or restore peatlands?
We asked for questions about the amazing carbon-storage capabilities of peatlands, and how these ecosystems keep the planet breathing. Readers sent us more than a thousand. Here are some answers.
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Cole Mannix, of Old Salt Co-op, is trying to change local appetites and upend an industry controlled by multibillion-dollar meatpackers.
By Susan Shain and Rebecca Stumpf
The U.S. once looked to offsite construction as an efficient way to build lots of housing and drive down costs. Sweden has embraced the idea and put it into practice. Francesca Mari, a contributor to The New York Times, breaks down the process.
By Francesca Mari, Gabriel Blanco, Ruru Kuo and Amir Hamja
An enormous amount of work is underway to remove carbon from the atmosphere, but who will pay for it?
By Lydia DePillis
Headway wants to hear from people affected by gun violence and those working to end it.
By Kristen Bayrakdarian
As forests succumb to ever-fiercer wildfires, the federal government and some adventurous private companies are trying to resuscitate an industry.
By Lydia DePillis
No offense, but if you’re reading this, chances are you’re not a teenager
By Kristen Bayrakdarian and Terry Parris Jr.
Some homeless shelters now offer resources so that people can squeeze in with family members. It’s an acknowledgment that entering the shelter system can lead to a downward spiral.
By Aidan Gardiner
Progress’s challenge: Our problems shape-shift in response to our solutions, which then become problems themselves.
By Matthew Thompson
Via Verde aspired to serve as a model of beautiful, sustainable subsidized housing. A decade later, our critic finds that a building can change minds, but maybe not systems.
By Michael Kimmelman
La capital de Colombia se convirtió en referente mundial en innovación y tráfico masivo barato. Su experiencia muestra lo que se requiere para sostener el avance.
Por Michael Kimmelman
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