How paying people to be parents has created a baby boom in Finland. Decoding the maybe-too-flashy urban renewal of once-dangerous Medellín, Colombia. And why a long-standing rivalry between Boston and New York led to the first American subways. Here are today's Urban Reads.

• This Finnish town is paying residents 10,000 Euros to have a baby. Now they're facing a housing crisis [Atlantic Cities]
• As part of answering Amtrak's request for proposal for new train car designs, manufacturers must also include a strategy for producing them in the U.S. [Next City]
• A beautiful and touching photo essay of 16 hours on a bus with newly-paroled prisoners [Gothamist]
• Sriracha Showdown! The hot sauce factory has been given a June 1 ultimatum by the California city of Irwindale to stop the offending smells [Los Angeles Times]
• Why Boston and New York were the first American cities with subways (spoiler: because they hate each other) [Planetizen]
• How cars conquered the American city (and how we can win it back) [Salon]
• "This is not about my neighborhood or my city not caring about me, or having the audacity to change over time. The city can't care about me or want me or miss me; it's just a place." How a native New Yorker feels she ruined Manhattan by moving to Queens [Medium]
• "Interventions can be second-guessed as too little or too much, or even just a little other-worldly. The stretch of the cable car line from Santo Domingo and the Spain Library seems like an awful lot of infrastructure to get to a park for horseback riding and hiking trails. At the 20 Julio neighborhood near San Javier, festive music plays as one ascends on a series of shiny new escalators right out of a suburban shopping mall. In advance of the World Urban Forum, residents were encouraged—or maybe instructed, as one colleague mused—to paint their homes in bright colors. The project cost $8 million." The urban renewal darling Medellín, Colombia is falling victim to its own hype machine [Atlantic Cities]
• How a dazzling typographic mural from the CBS Building in New York City was rescued from the dumpster, painstakingly restored, and is now being installed at the Culinary Institute of America [The Fox is Black]

Top photo is by Jorge Colombo—who you should be following on Instagram. Have an image you'd like to share? Tag it #gizmodocities and we'll be in touch if we'd like to publish it.