Carey L. Biron

Benefit or blight? This question is increasingly playing on the minds of officials in towns and cities across America as they count the cost of the breakneck expansion of discount stores like Dollar General and Dollar Tree.

In February, Chicago became the largest city yet to seek to limit the retailers, with officials deciding that although the stores fulfil a need for families in areas lacking basic retail services, they were also a cause of economic distress.

Last June, Breanna Sanchez was in trouble: she was behind on the rent, and her landlord in Los Angeles was threatening her family with eviction.

But then she was thrown a lifeline, helped by an invisible algorithm.

Jules Fishelman had ambitious plans to green up his century-old home in Burlington, Vermont, but the cost and logistics felt overwhelming.

"I've had in mind dozens of things I really wanted to do to make it more comfortable, but also to deal with the energy footprint - how much energy it uses," Fishelman said by phone from the converted duplex he has called home since 2001.

Artificial intelligence is about to transform Valerie Ingold's industry - debt collection - and she says it is about time.

"When you started a collections agency, you used to need a phone and a filing cabinet. We've progressed from there, but we're slow adopters," said Ingold, managing director of Commercial Collection Corp. in New York.

Even as corporate purchases of homes across the United States have spiralled upward, making it harder for many to afford to buy, local officials say they remain hamstrung in responding by a lack of hard data about what exactly is going on.

"We're government – we don't pay attention to private real estate transactions," Dina Blaes, regional development director for Salt Lake County in Utah, told Context.

They don't go missing or get torn and tattered, but e-books are posing concerns for U.S. libraries as publishers insist on restrictive and costly digital licensing contracts, librarians say.

"We have to pay for every single checkout, have major limitations on how many copies we can have ... and a lot of other arbitrary issues," said Alison Macrina, a librarian and director of the Library Freedom Project, an advocacy group.

A neighbour had already warned Todd Maxon of seeing something unusual hovering over his lakeside Michigan property – but then, suddenly, there it was.

"I walk out of my house, with my dog and kid, and here's a drone, directly above me," Maxon recalled of the 2018 incident.

The U.S. government decision last week to pause new gas-export permits will not remove the massive facility retired oil and gas worker John Allaire sees from his Louisiana property, but it will at least likely halt the plant's planned tripling in size.

The export terminal is one of several built in the rural, sparsely populated coastal area over the past decade that have transformed the local economy, but also led to rising protests and unease among residents worried about the environment.

Wildfires fuelled by climate change rip regularly through the wooded hills around Paradise, flattening its modest Californian housing and forcing a tough, new choice on residents.               

Should they stay or should they go?

Washingtonians curious about what the Franklin D Reeves Center would look like after redevelopment didn't have to wonder for long: all they had to do was scan a QR code on the pavement and hold their smartphones up to the hulking building.

Thanks to the magic of 3D graphics and augmented reality (AR), they could see a sleek glass-fronted space that would, when finished, house the national headquarters of the African American advocacy group NAACP as well as a dance theatre, restaurant and more.