2022 Newsletters
Linked below are Nowak Metro Finance Lab newsletters, shared biweekly by Bruce Katz.
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As 2022 comes to a close, I’ve been thinking about what the new (dis)order in Washington means for the role of cities and metropolitan areas and the political, business, philanthropic, university and community leaders who power them. The return of divided government at the federal level promises a new level of volatility and instability in our nation’s capital and, as in the past, de facto delegation of responsibility for getting stuff done to local doers and problem solvers, what Jeremy Nowak and I labeled the “New Localism.” My prediction: 2023 will, once again, be the Year of the Local. Read more...
Over the past four months, the Nowak Metro Finance Lab at Drexel University, The Enterprise Center (TEC), and the Philadelphia Equity Alliance (PEA) have partnered to develop an Investment Playbook for the 52nd Street Corridor in West Philadelphia.
Our goals were ambitious but straightforward. With funding flowing at scale from the federal and state governments and with racial equity commitments made by major financial institutions (see Economic Opportunity Coalition (EOC)), the regeneration of the 52nd Street Corridor is a real-world test of whether large scale resources will actually come to ground, blunt market headwinds, and drive inclusive growth. As written before in our 2019 Community Wealth paper, “mixed-income, mixed-purpose, and mixed-use” corridors can provide opportunities for small businesses to thrive, create jobs for residents, and keep money circulating within the local economy. Read more...
Last week’s election settled control of the Congress for the next two years, with profound implications for the focus and functioning of the federal government. With Washington headed for a return to a heightened level of partisan gridlock, responsibility for progress on a broad array of national challenges will largely revert to networks of public, private and civic leaders at the local and metropolitan scale. These leaders will be on the front lines of not only deploying unprecedented federal investments but also responding to complex market dynamics. Organizing capital, in novel ways, will be the order of the day. Read more...
Over the past year, the federal government has been making up for lost time on climate-related investment. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (enacted in November 2021) and the more recent Inflation Reduction Act (enacted this past August) provide hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funding to support a broad range of much-needed investments in renewable energy generation and storage, electric vehicles and charging infrastructure, energy efficiency upgrades, and other climate-related concerns. Read more...
For the past several decades, public private partnerships (or PPPs, as they are traditionally known), have been part of the urban lexicon. The phrase is often used to describe cross-sectoral collaborations to design, finance, build and operate infrastructure projects. More broadly, the concept describes the ways in which cities and metropolitan areas solve problems through networks of public, private, civic institutions and leaders. Read more...
Housing markets in the United States today are rapidly changing. We are bombarded in the news about corporations purchasing homes across sunbelt metros like Atlanta, Charlotte, and Phoenix. Reporting and research highlight the challenges faced by renters in private equity-backed properties, from maintenance requests gone unfulfilled to evictions as a core part of a fee-based business model. During the first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, homebuyers fought over a limited supply of for-sale housing, often finding out that they were beat by all-cash corporate offers. Now we wonder: will these homes ever come back on the market, and what happens to the tenants who live in these new rental properties? Read more...
The Potsdam gathering represents a critical juncture in the modern history of cities and nations. The meeting of G7 Urban Ministers was the first ever, representing the G7’s recognition that cities have a special role to play in achieving the UN backed Sustainable Development Goals in general and addressing climate change in particular. Read more...
It is no secret that the country’s housing market is suffering from an acute supply and demand imbalance. Supply has lagged with decades of under-building adding up to a severe shortage. Years of latent, suppressed demand have been released by healthier consumer financials and remote work flexibility. While the Federal Reserve has temporarily poured cold water on some demand segments by increasing mortgage rates at record pace, our long-term issues won’t be solved without generating more units to meet growing housing needs. Read more...
As the implementation of the Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act picks up steam, cities, counties and states are scrambling to identify projects that can deliver a new vision of mobility, connectivity, sustainability and quality placemaking. Read more...
Erie, Pennsylvania is on a roll. Like many communities in the Midwest, this city and county experienced the harsh effects of deindustrialization, decline and disinvestment. Over the past decade, however, a group of dedicated local government, corporate, university and civic leaders, spurred by Erie Insurance Company’s growth and investment, has begun to build the city back. There is no better evidence of this fact than a substantial recent development: today, Erie has one of the most ambitious Investment Playbooks in the country and a bold new governance model to ensure its sound implementation. Read more...
A shift to a more inclusive economy requires financial innovation and new tools to reach more entrepreneurs excluded from current capital products. This is the basis of the Innovative Finance Project, announced last spring, a partnership between the Nowak Metro Finance Lab and Blueprint Local funded by the US Economic Development Administration to identify and scale innovative methods of small business finance. This work is more critical than ever with interest rates rising, an influx of investors targeting Black and Brown neighborhoods, and more public dollars for transformative small business investment soon set to flow. Read more...
The Procurement Economy is having its moment in the sun. Last week the National Minority Supplier Development Council held a major conference in Chicago. The conference was an all-star event, attracting Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker, federal officials like Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and EDA Administrator Alejandra Castillo, private sector leaders like John Rogers and Magic Johnson and a plethora of leaders from financial institutions, public authorities, constituency organizations and local governments. Read more...
As the United States emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic, it is becoming increasingly clear that the country is entering a period of deep economic uncertainty and adjustment. While the media has extensively covered the acceleration of remote work and the fragility of global supply chains since the beginning of the crisis, only recently has attention focused on the dramatic rise of investor purchases of single-family homes and what that and other forces might mean for homeownership generally and among Black- and Latino-owners in particular. Read more...
Two weeks ago, I traveled to Toronto to participate in the Good Roads Conference. My talk, Mastering the New Disorder: Cities, Infrastructure and the Post Pandemic Economy – The New Localism, focused on the role of cities and metropolitan areas in delivering the unprecedented federal infrastructure investments that are being made in the United States. Read more...
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act represents a potential turning point for electric mobility in the U.S. as historic government investment takes aim at meeting climate, equity, and global competition goals. Commitments from automakers, electric vehicle sales targets, growing consumer interest, and emissions regulations essentially assure an increased transition to electrified transportation. Critically, sustaining this transition is reliant upon city and state planning and coordination to stitch electric vehicle charging infrastructure into a connected and reliable national network. Read more...
We often hear the phrase the “New Normal” to define periods that follow economic tumult. Yet that phrase inadequately captures the complexity and discontinuities of this moment. The “New Disorder” more aptly describes the large disruptive, if not destructive, dynamics which create the context within which cities function. Read more...
When we write about supplier diversity models that should be scaled, adopted, and adapted, our first inclination is usually to focus on state and local governments, or innovative private sector solutions. However, over the last year, the Small Business Administration (SBA) and the Federal government have made some impressive progress in advancing equity in procurement, with a focus on Black-, Latino-, and other Minority-owned small businesses. Their efforts have been fostered by a focus from the White House on advancing equity through a whole-of-government approach, and today we review the federal government’s activities to shine a light on the steps other organizations can undertake to ensure that their purchasing decisions can advance local and equitable economic development. As the world’s largest purchaser — with $665 billion spent through federal contracts in fiscal year 2020 [1]— there is much to learn from how the federal government decides to spend its money. Read more...
Following the passage of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan a year ago almost to the day, the Nowak Lab and New Localism Associates created an “Investment Playbook” tool to help cities maximize the fragmented flow of federal funds by strategically selecting geographies of opportunity and identifying and costing out concrete rescue and recovery projects within those geographies. This tool follows the simple maxim that “failing to plan is planning to fail”; federal investments may now be ample but only localities can design specific projects that are fit to place and geared for success. Read more...
Over the past two months, the five of us have been part of a community of practice selected by the Economic Development Administration to coach the winners of the $1 billion Build Back Better Regional Challenge (“BBBRC”). Along with partners at America Achieves, the Federation of American Scientists, the National League of Cities, and others, we have spent a great deal of time reflecting on what the BBBRC means for American competitiveness in this moment. Read more...
For the past several years, we have consistently recognized the immense value commercial corridors play in both urban and rural geographies. Commercial corridors are economic engines for communities — they provide jobs that keep money circulating in the local economy, offer goods and services for residents, and power entrepreneurship and wealth building for whole communities. They also serve as valuable gathering places and sources of civic pride. Commercial corridors hold economic and symbolic value, and impact public perceptions of surrounding neighborhoods and the communities. Read more...
As federal investments roll out at scale, it has become eminently clear that effective deployment is dependent upon networks of public, private and civic institutions coming together to design, finance and deliver concrete initiatives and projects. It is, in other words, a networked governance moment. Read more...
As the euphoria of enacting the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act fades, the challenges facing implementation of this complex and sprawling legislation have come into sharp relief. First among them is the lack of sufficient capacity among many cities and counties to design and deliver projects that have the transformative impact that has been promised by bipartisan Congressional sponsors. Read more...
In the mid-1930s, Charles de Gaulle, then a French Army colonel, went to visit Leon Blum, the French Prime Minister. The future leader of France reproached Blum about the state of the country’s defenses.
Blum was taken aback, declaring “But we are spending more for defense than the previous Government!” “It is what you are spending it on,’ de Gaulle said, “that I want to discuss.” Read more...
2022 marks what could be a new era for inclusive entrepreneurship and broad-based, dynamic growth. The historic federal investments set to flow to communities across the country in the next year present immense potential for metro economies and a tight nexus with an inclusive small business recovery. Read more...