CityLab Daily: Public Housing Needs You

Keep up with the most pressing, interesting, and important city stories of the day. Sign up for the CityLab Daily newsletter here.

Do the work: It’s easy to feel cynical about the state of the public housing in the United States. Each day we see news about maintenance backlogs, declining federal funds, and increasingly unaffordable cities. But for every shocking story about moldy apartments, there are thousands of unheralded successes—families staying together, down payments made, and homelessness avoided. Sometimes, the way to make life better for your most vulnerable neighbors might just be to volunteer. That’s what Christian Milneil did when he saw that the housing authority in Portland, Maine, was spending thousands each year to maintain a little-used parking lot in his neighborhood instead of building more housing.