Welcome back to the Monday Good News Roundup, where the GNR Newsroom (Myself, Killer300 and Bhu) brings you all the good news to start your week off right
Don’t really have any personal news to report. So lets get right to the good stuff (Of which there is a lot. So much you guys).
Despite being nearly 15,000 feet above sea level and far from the center of power in New Delhi, Ladakh has become a major source of strife for Modi’s government in recent years. From a border dispute with China that dented BJP’s macho image to the rise of a protest movement pressing for autonomy, statehood, land and jobs, it is perhaps no surprise that the BJP candidate lost in this region.
With the advent of the weakened Modi 3.0 in New Delhi, the movement’s key figure — Ladakh engineer and climate justice activist Sonam Wangchuk — is preparing to launch the next phase of action. “If our rightful demands aren’t met, then we will resume our campaign soon,” he said. “The ball is in the court of New Delhi.”
Back in March, Wangchuck began a 21-day fast that sparked thousands of others to follow suit. One of those who joined was 28-year-old rapper Padma Ladol. In April, Ladol assisted a group of women climate justice campaigners in Leh, one of Ladakh’s two provinces, high up in the Himalayas.
All over the world, people are standing up for their rights and for the environment.
The sun showers us all with energy, but not everyone can put solar panels on their roofs to harness it for themselves. Enter community solar, an increasingly popular way to expand access to solar and help fix its equity issues. For the first time, evidence shows that it’s working.
Community solar allows customers to reap electric bill savings by subscribing to a share of a local solar project, rather than installing their own array. It’s an arrangement that ideally makes the benefits of solar more accessible to people who live in rental or multifamily housing and those who just can’t afford the upfront cost of rooftop systems. Forty-two states have community solar projects in place — but the precise nature of who has benefited remained unclear. Until now.
This is a neat idea: Its like a solar power co op.
The recent lawsuit that the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) and 30 state and district attorney generals filed against Live Nation Entertainment and wholly-owned subsidiary Ticketmaster is not a case that presents a “close call.” It is a case in which consumers, artists, promoters, and venues all have suffered from anticompetitive conduct, and have done so for years. And it is one in which the company will likely not be able to offer countervailing justifications. In short, it is one of the strongest monopolization cases in the modern era.
More and more big corporations are being taken down a peg.
Part 2 of the Ticketmaster story
At Strong Towns, we like to amplify local wins. Sometimes, that looks like a small business triumphing over arcane parking mandates with the support of the local community. Other times, it’s a motley crew of neighbors coming together to calm traffic in the aftermath of a tragedy.
Sourced from small towns and big cities alike, these stories inspire communities on opposite sides of the country to be the change they want to see. Tactical urbanism in Chattanooga, Tennessee, birthed similar efforts in Denton, Texas. The elimination of parking mandates in one California city of 20,000 compelled another in Minnesota to do the same. A “bike bus” in Oregon has spawned copycats across the country.
These stories showcase that concerted local action can actually catalyze meaningful change. They also offer a counterpoint to the nihilism that empowers larger institutions. The local is where we live, we’ve often written, and therefore local government is a “collection of us.” It's in our day-to-day lives that we (and our neighbors) experience most acutely the effects of decisions made about how we build and grow our communities.
Nice to see more and more people are getting on board with making good news aggregates. I’m honored to be part of one of the first, but everyone is doing their part now.
Now that the Supreme Court has issued its historic decision on presidential immunity — one that will be “for the ages,” as Justice Neil Gorsuch put it — the most pressing question yet to be answered is far more immediate: What does this mean for special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of former President Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election?
Yeah, I know the recent Supreme Court ruling was...disturbing to say the least. But Trump isn’t off the hook just yet, and we’re going to make sure he doesn’t get the chance to use his new power.
Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, is expected to sign the legislation into law in the coming days, allowing Michigan to officially join 29 other states and Washington, D.C., in taking away this barrier to rooftop solar adoption. While it’s a shift that applies only to a specific group of homeowners, laws like these help make solar accessible for the roughly 75.5 million people in the United States who live in communities governed by HOAs.
HOA’s are a scourge on humanity, so any laws that undermine them are a good thing.
oday, the Phoenix real estate market is bouncing back hard. Prices have risen by as much as 35 percent in the last year, and sales have picked up significantly. New home developments are once again sprouting out on the fringe where greater Phoenix bleeds into the Sonoran Desert landscape.
Something else is going on, however. As they emerge from the Great Recession, Phoenix and the adjoining cities of Mesa and Tempe are focusing development efforts on their urban cores, with projects concentrated in the corridor around the regional light rail system, which runs from Tempe into downtown Phoenix. Political leaders and several local developers have embraced the virtues of transit-oriented development, walkable neighborhoods, and higher-density building. “The character (of Phoenix) has changed tremendously over the past year or so,” says Craig Randock, AIA, president of AIA Arizona and design studio leader at HDR in Phoenix. “You’re really seeing the interest in development here in the city, and there are some very smart, young developers involved in that.”
Here’s to learning from the past.
Each year, U.S. cities lose an estimated 36 million trees to development, disease and old age, many of which ultimately end up in landfills. Losing these urban trees – known to help cool their neighborhoods, lower carbon emissions and improve mental health, among other benefits – costs an estimated $96 million annually.
In Philadelphia, a partnership is giving the City of Brotherly Love’s fallen trees new life. Philadelphia Parks & Rec joined forces with Cambium Carbon, a Washington, D.C.-based startup that repurposes waste wood, and PowerCorpsPHL, a local nonprofit that creates job opportunities for unemployed and under-employed 18- to 30-year-olds, to launch the Reforestation Hub in late May.
Rather than sending trees straight to the landfill or the city’s organic recycling center to simply become mulch or wood chips, the Reforestation Hub (which is co-located in the city’s organic recycling center) will salvage as many trees as it can. As many as possible will be turned into Cambium’s Carbon Smart Wood, which stores 5.23 pounds of carbon in each board foot, before going on to become everything from desks and tables to fences and even decking and siding.
Not only are we fixing these old tress, we’re making jobs. Its a win win.
Hawaii Youth Win Climate Settlement
Hawaii reached a settlement with climate activists for the state’s Department of Transportation to rapidly eliminate transportation-related carbon emissions by 2045, The Guardian reports. The agreement essentially makes a previous statewide goal to decarbonize by 2045 mandatory. The lawsuit, filed in 2022 by 13 young climate activists, most of whom are Indigenous, claimed that the state’s transportation policies violated their rights under Hawaii’s state constitution, including by prioritizing highway expansion instead of promoting walking and biking. (The federal infrastructure law has exacerbated this problem in some states: In New York, most of the $1 billion of flexible spending went to highway expansion.) The state also passed a law in 2015 requiring its energy sector to end carbon emissions by 2045.
Great news from Hawaii.
On the 18th of every month, Rickards receives a small cash stipend – $21.62 – in exchange for paying her rent on time. It amounts to 2% of her total rent amount – not just the amount she pays, but the total due before her housing authority voucher kicks in.
The money goes onto a kind of debit card run by a financial technology company called Stake; she can spend the money from the card or deposit it into her checking account. It’s a small amount, but she says she’s put it toward groceries and gas.
In one case, the card and the funds helped her out of a jam: She was driving to Denver late at night, planning to stay the night before a doctor’s appointment, but forgot to fill up the tank. When the fuel light came on, she realized she didn’t have enough money on her. But there was $42 in her Stake card, enough to get her to Denver and back.
“Thank god I had the Stake card,” she said. “It was too late to call anyone.
“I just absolutely am so grateful,” Rickards said. “It sounded too good to be true. You get free money back for paying your rent, which you have to do already?”
The money is part of an arrangement between the property owner and a company called Colorado Housing Accelerator Initiative testing out new forms of “tenant equity,” which seeks to compensate tenants for the value they create in the properties they live in. It could also be a preview of how Colorado will operate a new, statewide program meant to help renters make money off the buildings they live in.
Now this is a great idea.
n a time of extreme national polarization and toxic partisanship, to the point where many Americans are anticipating the upcoming presidential election with fear and dread, one state stands out as a model of bipartisanship. This state is known as being fiercely conservative – Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by nearly 15 points and Joe Biden by 10 points.
That state is Alaska. The Last Frontier State, with its 663,000 square miles, two and a half times larger than Texas, also happens to be the first frontier of states that has combined Ranked Choice Voting with a Top 4 (open) primary in a conscious attempt to support the election of more moderate politicians.
“Moderate” and “Alaska”? Previously, those two words were seldom used in the same sentence.
But lo and behold, Republicans and Democrats in Alaska are actually cooperating. More than that, they have actually formed a governing coalition together. A bipartisan coalition.
Great news out of Alaska.
When Federal politics are super stressful, the local and state level can be great places to see more productivity.
erhaps the most worrying aspect of this year’s UK general election, if the polls are to be believed, is the resurgent far right. Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party failed to win a single seat in 2019 but this time around its successor, Reform UK, is tipped by YouGov to scoop up five.
Reform’s expected success is partly a reaction to the government’s adoption of a number of climate policies and the reality of the transition to a net zero economy promised by both Labour and the Tories (even if neither party goes anywhere near far enough on this).
Yet dig a little deeper and another new political movement is sweeping the country – and receiving far less media attention.
Of course this was from a few days ago before we saw the awesome election results out of the UK (Way to go Labor Party).
Know how you can tell if women’s sports has finally broken into the American mainstream consciousness? When your 82-year-old grandmother-in-law tells you, “They’ve been showing a lot more girls basketball on television these days.”
With viewership for women’s basketball at an all-time high, "Power of the Dream" — Amazon’s new documentary directed by Dawn Porter that highlights the WNBA’s fight for equity and representation — arrives at an apex moment.
Great news, good for them.
Kenya has a long history of protests. Mass protests took place during the colonial period and continued in the post-independence era.
Important democratic gains were achieved through protests, such as the introduction of multi-party politics in 1991. Many will also remember the violent clampdown that followed the disputed 2007 elections, which left more than 1,100 dead.
The dramatic scenes unfolding in Nairobi on 25 and 26 June 2024 are the latest episode in Kenya’s tumultuous protest history. Some protesters stormed the Kenyan parliament, where a contentious finance bill had been passed a few hours earlier, and set sections of it on fire.
By the day’s end, the government had called in the military to support the national police.
Scream loud enough that you cant be ignored.
While Southern states have chipped away at protections for workers for decades, New Flyer workers like Shannon Franks remember that union jobs have long provided well-paying, high-quality jobs to the region. Her dad left the mountain town of Ider, Alabama, population 700, to find work, and landed in Chattanooga, where he got a union job with the Tennessee Valley Authority that paid for him to attend electrical school. “They gave him a chance,” she told me. Now, Franks works at the Anniston plant installing motors in the backs of electric buses. When she and her co-workers won their union at New Flyer, “It was like history repeating itself,” she said.
Just six months after the organizing drive officially began in November 2023, New Flyer workers ratified a historic contract with significant pay raises, restrictions on forced overtime, and expanded vacation time. “The wage package alone is life-changing for me,” said New Flyer employee Ryan Masters. “Now I’ll be able to save up some vacation time and spend more time with family for those pivotal moments.”
They will never report on how well Unions do and how they help us, but don’t worry, we will.
Vancouver has long been nicknamed the “city of glass” for its shimmering high-rise skyline. Over the next few years, that skyline will get a very large new addition: Sen̓áḵw, an 11-tower development that will Tetrize 6,000 apartments onto just over 10 acres of land in the heart of the city. Once complete, this will be the densest neighbourhood in Canada, providing thousands of homes for Vancouverites who have long been squeezed between the country’s priciest real estate and some of its lowest vacancy rates.
Sen̓áḵw is big, ambitious and undeniably urban—and undeniably Indigenous. It’s being built on reserve land owned by the Squamish First Nation, and it’s spearheaded by the Squamish Nation itself, in partnership with the private real estate developer Westbank. Because the project is on First Nations land, not city land, it’s under Squamish authority, free of Vancouver’s zoning rules. And the Nation has chosen to build bigger, denser and taller than any development on city property would be allowed.
Vancouver, lots of people talking about it. Sounds like a great place to me.
Forget the opera and the Schönbrunn Palace. Some of the hottest tourist attractions in Vienna these days are the city’s social housing complexes. Delegation after delegation of American politicians, housing advocates, and journalists have descended upon the Austrian capital to see government-owned housing developments that are nothing like those in American cities. At Karl-Marx-Hof and Alt-Erlaa, residents ranging from the very poor to the upper middle class live side by side, sharing amenities like swimming pools and tennis courts. Since their landlord — the government — has no profit motive, some residents spend as little as 4% of their income on rent.
An interesting idea. Wish I had one of those around here.
Instead, however, there are promising signs that people who aren't political junkies are starting to hear about Project 2025. Even better, those folks aren't immediately dismissing it as progressive theatrics but may be genuinely alarmed.
“Hey here’s our evil plan to make you all slaves and turn the world into a shittier place for everyone but us and…wait why are you booing? What did we do?”
Yeah. I hope this is another millstone around the neck of the GOP.
They did it. They did it on a shoestring budget, with no organizational support from national groups. Just Arkansas women with clipboards, hustling.
With 100,000 signatures in hand and more still being counted, backers of the Arkansas Abortion Amendment say they’ve got the numbers they need to put reproductive rights on the November ballot. And so far 53 counties reached the qualifying minimum, more than the state’s required 50.
We will not go back.
And on that note, I think we’ve done enough this week. Always leave them asking for more says I. And I’ll be back next week with more good news.