Portland, Oregon is renowned as a paradigmatic "sustainable city". Yet, despite popular conceptions of the city as a progressive ecotopia and the accolades of planners seeking to emulate its innovations, Portland's sustainability successes are inequitably distributed. Drawing on census data, popular media, newspaper archives, city planning documents, and secondary-source histories, we attempt to elucidate the structural origins of Portland's "uneven development", exploring how and why the urban core of this paragon of sustainability has become more White and affluent while its outer eastside has become more diverse and poor. We explain how a "sustainability fix"-in this case, green investment in the city's core-ultimately contributed to the demarcation of racialized poverty along 82 nd Avenue, a major north-south arterial marking the boundary of East Portland. Our account of structural processes taking place at multiple scales contributes to a growing body of literature on eco-gentrification and displacement and inner-ring suburban change while empirically demonstrating how Portland's advances in sustainability have come at the cost of East Portland's devaluation. Our "30,000 foot" perspective reveals systemic patterns that might then guide more fine-grained analyses of particular political-socio-cultural processes, while providing cautionary insights into current efforts to extend the city's sustainability initiatives using the same green development model.

Despite interest in the importance of social equity to sustainability, there is concern that equity is often left behind in practice relative to environmental and economic imperatives. We analyze recent climate and sustainability action plans from a sample of twenty-eight medium and large U.S. cities, finding that few made social equity a prominent goal of their plans, although there is a discernible trend in this direction. We present case studies of three cities that incorporated social equity goals, concluding that sustainability planning efforts provide strategic opportunities to pursue equity goals, especially where capacity exists among community-based actors to intervene and participate.

Urban data science (UDS) is developing rapidly and starting to be widely adopted in urban planning research and curricula. However, economic development planners have been relatively slow in introducing UDS into their toolkits. This reality is a disservice to the subfield and students. This article discusses the motivation and current practices of UDS in economic development, identifies successes and challenges, and suggests actions moving forward. Professional training, curriculum innovation, and support from departments, institutions, and the broader academic and professional communities are called for.

Owner Occupied housing is generally assumed to be safe and of reasonably high quality in the United States. Prior research on housing quality using the American Housing Survey generally finds housing quality is good. Recent research critiquing housing quality measures found in the AHS and offering alternative measures complicate this assumption by showing housing quality is more variable than usually assumed and the costs of housing repair needs are worth billions of dollars a year. In order to better understand the state of housing quality in owner occupied housing we present information from Philadelphia's Basic Systems Repair Program (BSRP). BSRP is an emergency repair program that offers grants to low income homeowners. From 2009-2019 the city has spect a little over $98 million in repairs helping nearly 11,000 households. Comparing AHS derived estimates of housing quality to the BSRP we find that housing quality for owner occupied homes in Philadelphia may be more severe than is often assumed and that severe housing quality issues disproportionately affect Black homeowners in the city. Planners concerned with stabilizing neighborhoods, protecting property values and the racially disparate costs of homeownership should pay closer to attention to housing quality issues and look at the feasibility of emergency home repair programs in affected areas.

Major US cities are faced with a dilemma- how to accommodate a growing population and support urban industrial users. One response that some cities are taking is explicitly protecting swatches of industrial land as they realize the strategic value of plentiful industrial land. This piece reviewed industrial land use policies of the fifty largest US cities in 2012 and provides descriptions for 12 city industrial land preservation policies.