👀 All eyes on affordability in 2026

Nobody understands a city’s pulse quite like a City Cast host — their knack for spotting what matters proved them to be a reliable voice for 2025’s biggest local stories. Now, we’re turning to them to forecast what’s in store for 2026. From political shifts to data centers, their perspectives offer a candid preview of the issues and surprises that could shape our hometowns.

Curious what’s around the corner? Catch their unique insights on our latest podcast episode, where all 13 hosts predicted this year’s biggest stories. Here’s a preview of that conversation:

City Cast Austin Host Nikki DaVaughn says 2026 will be all about affordability in Austin. Voters’ rejection of Proposition Q, which would have raised property taxes in order to raise $110 million, is proof of that.

“All eyes are on what the city is spending (and) why it's not being spent more equitably to make our city more affordable, because the money is there. We are growing crazy. There's, like, crazy growth in our city, but there's a huge amount of us that can barely afford to live here,” DaVaughn said.

Local Politics

Zohran Mamdani’s election in New York has energized Democratic Socialists across the U.S. Seattle got a taste of that with the election of Katie Wilson, but it’s yet to be seen if she has the same star power or sway inside city hall.

City Cast Seattle Host Jane C. Hu says the linchpin of Wilson’s election is likely to come with this summer’s FIFA World Cup, as advocates for the city’s unhoused population watch whether Wilson will sweep encampments as previous mayors have.

“It’s going to be interesting to see what she decides there, because there's going to be tension between what people elected her for and what action she’s actually able to take,” Hu said.

Data Centers

Many City Cast cities are seeing a surge in data center development. “It’s going to be a doozy” of a conversation in 2026, our CEO David Plotz pointed out.

In Madison, the mayor and much of the City Council last year proposed a one-year moratorium on zoning certificates for new data centers while they try to better understand how data centers could impact the electric grid and energy bills. City Cast Madison Host Bianca Martin says Madisonians are “up in arms.”

“Folks are concerned that this might be a bubble, that this could be another dot-com bubble where Silicon Valley folks rush in, move to scale, and then they’re like, ‘let’s abandon ship,’” Martin says.

But aren’t data centers great for the economy? Plotz posed that question to the group, suggesting that data centers contributed to the tech economy in Washington, D.C. Well, that got the group fired up.

“We’re also talking about doing it in really beautiful green spaces that we don’t want to be cluttered with this kind of nonsense,” says City Cast Pittsburgh host, Megan Harris.