2021 Newsletters
Linked below are Nowak Metro Finance Lab newsletters, shared biweekly by Bruce Katz.
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We were recently at a gathering where someone triumphantly pronounced that “Infrastructure Week has finally ended!” With President Biden’s signature on the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that indeed may be the case, but we are left wondering: what happens in the weeks that follow? Read more...
With the signing of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the playing field now shifts quickly from members of Congress to networks of public, private and civic leaders in communities across the country. Passing laws is one thing. Deploying federal resources in ways that actually drive systemic and transformative change is another. Read more...
In the six months since we launched the Innovative Finance project a central theme has emerged: delivering capital to where it’s needed most — namely, to millions of underserved entrepreneurs — is a central challenge for an inclusive economic recovery.
Somewhat unexpectedly, the large sums of federal and private capital currently available for investment have illustrated a more fundamental truth in our country’s small business finance system. Capital is not the problem, delivery is. Read more...
As Congress continues to deliberate over the size and scope of the reconciliation bill and the timing of the infrastructure and innovation bills, it is clear that implementation of whatever passes will devolve down to networks of public, private, civic and community leaders and institutions in cities and metros across the country. The federal government is about to invest trillions of dollars through hundreds of programs across dozens of agencies. These programs will run through different distribution channels at different times and in accordance with different rules. Some funding will be allocated via block grants, others through competitions, still others through financial products and tax incentives. Read more...
In several weeks, the global community will gather in Glasgow for COP 26, the 26th United Nations Climate Change conference. There is no doubt that the “Conference of the Parties” will discuss in detail the role of cities in driving down carbon emissions as well as adapting to the disruptive effects of climate change. We urge the Summit to go one step further and make urban governance a critical element of transformational change. Read more...
If you have been following the news lately, you may have noticed the attention being paid to the complexity of Congressional deliberations. While important to modernizing America and meeting the moment, these deliberations are but an early step in achieving the Biden Administration’s ambitious agenda. We believe that history will show that appropriating federal resources was actually the easy part of the process; spending federal resources in efficient, effective and equitable ways — “smart spending” in a nutshell — is what should keep us all up at night. Read more...
The announcement of the Economic Development Administration’s (EDA) $1 billion Build Back Better Regional Challenge (BBBRC) has created a scramble not seen since the 2017 competition for Amazon’s HQ2. Read more...
In July, we wrote a memo detailing how states are spending their State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds (SLFR funds). Here we follow-up on this piece by examining how cities are using these flexible funds. This newsletter focuses on three areas where City Halls are moving forward with their SLFR funds. Read more...
With enactment of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, the recent bipartisan infrastructure deal and Congressional movement on innovation and workforce funding, it is clear that the federal government is actively engaging in an unprecedented multi-act effort to spur an equitable economic recovery. The combination of new resources, the Biden Administration’s commitment to high-poverty “qualified census tracts,” and existing federal programs and tax incentives raises the prospect of creating a new practice of Community Wealth that systematically regenerates disinvested neighborhoods and lifts disadvantaged residents by upgrading skills, growing entrepreneurs, increasing incomes and building assets. Read more...
In April 2021, the Nowak Metro Finance Lab at Drexel University and Accelerator for America released the Federal Investment Guide to the American Rescue Plan. The guide broke down the Biden Administration’s $1.9 trillion COVID relief package from a “bottom-up” perspective. The guide summarized how funding would flow to over 84 individual programs, originating from 19 federal agencies and through seven different distribution channels. Read more...
Regular readers of New Localism will know that we have spent the better part of 2021 focusing extensively on two topics: (1) how local leaders can strategically deploy recovery funds, and; (2) how to drive an inclusive small business recovery. Our argument here, based on a new white paper and research memo we’ve developed over the past month, is that to do both these things well local leaders across sectors must engage their state governments now (and visa versa). Read more...
In 2020, amidst an unprecedented year of national crisis and racial reckoning, business and civic leaders in the St. Louis metro began the hard work of devising a new approach to economic growth in the region. Against a backdrop of decades-long economic underperformance, population stagnation and racial division, these leaders commissioned New Localism Associates to craft a 10-year plan that combined growth in quality jobs and heightened global relevance with a steadfast and broad-based commitment to inclusive growth and racial equity. They also convinced Mark Wrighton, the former Chancellor of Washington University, to lead a local team of diverse, reflective stakeholders to ensure that the work was fully grounded in local knowledge. Read more...
Last week, in Tulsa, the Biden Administration announced a raft of steps they will take to close our country’s widening racial wealth gap. Central to the Administration’s wealth-building agenda are twin executive branch actions to reduce discrimination in home appraisals and to increase the targets for direct federal procurement from small and disadvantaged businesses (DBEs) by 50%, or $100 billion, over 5 years. These are laudable, bold and necessary moves. Read more...
With the reopening of the United States fully underway and the Biden Administration aggressively pursuing seismic investments in economic and energy restructuring, it is now urgent to think clearly about how to design and deliver an inclusive recovery. To that end, we have been looking for guidance from Jane Jacobs by rereading portions of her masterpiece The Death and Life of Great American Cities (originally published in 1961) as well as her lesser known but equally prescient and idiosyncratic, The Economy of Cities (published in 1969). Read more...
While Wall Street is booming, Main Street in America is just barely scraping by after a year of lockdowns and suppressed demand. According to estimates from Opportunity Insights, the number of small businesses currently open across the country has decreased by 32.2% compared to before the pandemic. In order for entrepreneurs and businesses to recover — and to have a recovery that provides fair opportunity for all — we need innovation in how we finance our country’s local businesses. Read more...
A year ago, we wrote about how a period defined by a global pandemic, economic contraction and racial reckoning might become a catalyst for institutional transformation in cities. These profound events have simultaneously exacerbated inequities in our cities and revealed the inadequacies of the current architecture of governance within and across cities. Advancing shared prosperity and racial equity requires structural reform, which even a torrent of federal resources cannot address. Read more...
We wanted to share testimony that was presented to the Philadelphia City Council’s Committee on Fiscal Stability and Intergovernmental Cooperation on April 13, 2021. The testimony builds on two signature research products published by the Nowak Metro Finance Lab and our partners — a Federal Investment Guide to the American Rescue Plan (ARP), which shows how ARP funds will flow to 84 programs from 19 federal agencies via 7 distribution channels, and the Small Business Equity Toolkit, which shows where the top 100 metropolitan areas stood before the pandemic on the number, size and sector concentration of women and minority-owned firms. Read more...
On March 11, President Biden signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan (ARP) into law. The legislation makes historic investments intended to steer people and places across the country out of the worst economic and public health shock in a hundred years. It strives to make the large-scale impact that the moment demands. To do so, though, the federal government must harness the full capacities of local state, city, and county governments. As we move from policy design to deployment of the ARP, cities and counties must be in the driver’s seat. Read more...
The COVID-19 crisis is America’s greatest economic shock since the Great Depression. It’s landing hardest on small businesses, the heart of local economies and community life. The pandemic has revealed not only the fragility of many of these enterprises but also the profound racial, ethnic, and gender disparities in how they are supported by federal policies, private practices, and local actions. Read more...
Yesterday, President Biden signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan (ARP). The scale of intervention is historic and unprecedented as befits the devastating impact of this global pandemic.
We now shift from legislation to execution — from design to delivery. There’s a lot in the bill, including substantial flexible resources sent directly to City and County Halls. The question for cities, metros and counties now is a big one:How can communities deploy the ARP in the most efficient and equitable manner? Read more...
The Biden Administration has built the strongest climate team of any U.S. Administration. As this team and their Congressional allies begin to craft federal policies to address climate change, it is critical that they focus on how they can leverage and learn from cities, in the U.S. and beyond. Read more...
As Congress moves closer to enacting President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, focus on the elements of a broader recovery package is intensifying. While the relief package addresses the urgent, immediate challenges of the pandemic (including state and local fiscal relief) and accelerated vaccine distribution, the recovery package is intended to address the structural challenges that pre-date the public health crisis: geographically unbalanced economic growth, accelerating climate change, growing income inequities and a reckoning with systemic racism. The recovery package is the vehicle for achieving President Biden’s vision for “Building Back Better.” Read more...
We spent much of last year detailing how the COVID-19 crisis has decimated small businesses, especially Black– and Latino-owned businesses, which have long faced challenging headwinds in the US economy. In order to address these challenges, a group came together to author Big Ideas for Small Business, emphasizing the need for transformative action by the federal government, the financial industry, states, localities, corporations, and other private institutions to reshape our economy so that it works for small businesses, especially Black-, Latino-, and Women-owned businesses. Read more...
The COVID-19 pandemic is a powerful mirror for the current state of U.S. society. It has exposed deep, structural racial and ethnic disparities on income, health and wealth, and barriers to social mobility in the country. In so doing, it has devastated Latino-owned and Black-owned businesses in the U.S., exacerbating what were already substantial gaps in the number, size and growth potential of these firms. It has also catalyzed broader support for racial justice and inclusion across America — recently illustrated by President Biden’s Executive Orders on Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government and preserving and fortifying DACA. Read more...
As we look back at one of the worst weeks in U.S. history, with an unprecedented assault on our democratic institutions and processes, cities need to keep an eye on what’s ahead. In the chaos and tragedy of the week it was easy to lose sight of the message coming out of Tuesday’s Senate races in Georgia: Cities get ready, there is a multi-trillion-dollar stimulus coming. Read more...