Our Mission

For many people, New York City is just a place to live.
For others, it's a passion.

We employ the power of investigative journalism to explore public policy and the tools of new media to uncover aspects of our city that help you understand the people and politics of America's largest city.

From making the city's housing affordable to preserving historic buildings in an environmentally friendly way, we dig deep to get you the facts and context you need to understand the most complicated and pressing issues facing our city.

Our History

In 1976, New York City was not the best place to live. Tens of thousands of apartment buildings for low- and moderate-income New Yorkers were in foreclosure, plagued by arson and outright abandonment. And public funding for community rebuilding and other services was in short supply, as New York’s state and city governments levied devastating budget cuts to neighborhood development programs.

Throughout the city however, in neighborhoods like Morris Heights, East Harlem, and Southside Williamsburg, residents stepped in to reclaim the buildings that government and private developers had ignored, forming community organizations and pouring sweat equity into rebuilding their homes.

It was in this environment that City Limits was born, as a typed and hand-stapled newsletter for non-profit groups and tenants in the city’s housing community. From its outset, the publication would have an independent voice, but remain uncompromising in its mission to focus on the many challenges facing New York during a time of federal disinvestment and political gridlock.

Soon, City Limits' lens expanded from issues like tenant harassment and government mismanagement of New York City housing programs to include topics like mass homelessness, the loss of manufacturing jobs, the lack of citywide recycling programs, the need for community input in economic development projects, and much more.

Due to its reputation for thorough immersive long-form reporting, City Limits quickly became a sought after destination for ambitious investigative journalists interested in exposing the city’s problems and highlighting those city organizations and programs that offered innovative solutions.

City Limits served as a valuable training ground for generations of New York City’s journalists, and reporters who started their careers here would go on to bring their focus on impassioned journalism to newspapers like The Daily News, The Village Voice, The Washington Post, and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

But in the face of continued budget cuts, ineffective government programs and persistent corruption, something more was needed in order to generate the type of analysis and ideas necessary to move New York City into the future.

So in 1995, City Limits launched The Center for an Urban Future to identify the successful policies in other urban centers that could improve the standard of living for all New Yorkers. Today, America’s largest city is faced with growing income disparities between its richest and poorest citizens, an underfunded and overused transportation system, perennial abuses of power by the officials elected to represent us, low graduation rates, high recidivism rates and unprecedented increases in the cost of renting an apartment, owning a home or starting a small business.

City Limits will continue digging deeper to report on these challenges the same way we have since we first started in 1976.