2023 Newsletters
Linked below are Nowak Metro Finance Lab newsletters, shared biweekly by Bruce Katz.
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In War and Peace, Tolstoy famously observed that “Nobody was ready for the war which everyone expected.”
I was reminded of this quote when reviewing many of the newsletters published this year. As readers know, this platform returns again and again to the wicked challenges that cities and metropolitan areas face during this disruptive post pandemic period. (It’s difficult to say “post” when COVID seems to be raging again, but so be it). Read more...
Since the passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law in 2021, the Biden Administration has championed unprecedented federal investments in infrastructure, clean energy, and advanced manufacturing. While the scale of federal investment has continued to grow, a disconnect between federal organization and local community operation has persisted. Read more...
Three years after the first wave of the pandemic, remote work is challenging the role and function of central business districts in the United States. This disruption has already pushed down transit ridership and revenues in major US cities and metropolitan areas: it is now triggering general concerns regarding the urban fiscal health of cities since central business districts and downtowns typically generate a disproportionate share of municipal tax revenues. Read more...
It is a curious moment for small businesses in America. More than three years after small businesses were a key pillar of the initial response to COVID-19, small businesses are now grappling with third and fourth order consequences from the pandemic. Supply chain challenges and labor market issues remain. Inflation, while easing, remains high. And today’s elevated interest rates meant to stem inflation have brought about a credit crunch and increased borrowing costs. In venture capital markets, we are witnessing a pullback in activity. Read more...
As readers of this newsletter know, my attention has recently turned to the profound macro forces that are reshaping our nation and the world. As an urbanist, I am interested in the interplay between the macro and the metro and the ways in which large, disruptive transnational forces (e.g., rising tensions with China, the existential threat of climate change, the accelerated pace of technological advances, the dissembling norms of democracy) come to ground and affect the shape of communities and the lives of people. Read more...
For the past 30 years, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the notion of a “peace dividend” took hold in the United States. To use an old metaphor, less funding for guns meant more resources for butter.
Times have changed. The world has, once again, become a dangerous, polarized place. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, rising tensions with China and the reignited Mideast conflict following the Hamas assault on Israel have meant that defense spending in the United States (and among its allies across the world) is on the rise. Read more...
As CIA Director William Burns asserted in a speech earlier this summer (DCIA William Burns Remarks – Ditchley 59th Annual Lecture), we are living through a rare “plastic moment” in history, one which is fundamentally remaking assumptions and arrangements that have been settled for decades. Read more...
By all accounts, the post-pandemic period in the U.S. is characterized by a remarkable resurgence in advanced manufacturing—a response to such challenges as rising geopolitical tensions, the climate crisis, and supply-chain vulnerabilities. This transformation, which we have termed the “industrial transition,” is being catalyzed by increased federal spending—notably, via the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the CHIPS and Science Act. Both acts confront these disparate threats by focusing on two key objectives: reshoring production and accelerating decarbonization. Read more...
America’s rental market has changed in many ways. Over the last 30 years, we’ve seen an increase in the number of landlords. We now have different types of landlords: larger landlords, corporate landlords, and laptop landlords. What was formerly a parochial, local operation has changed into a more professionalized, technology-driven business model. These multitudinous changes have coincided with each other, such that people often talk about corporate landlords and institutional investors as one-and-the-same. Yet these interrelated changes are distinct, and require us to disentangle them to understand why they pose a problem for America’s renters and America’s cities. Read more...
As the post pandemic economy takes shape, one thing is certain. The structural impact of remote work dramatically undermines central business districts that over-emphasize traditional office work. Historically, US office vacancy rates have hovered near 13%. As groups like CommercialEdge and Cushman & Wakefield have reported, office vacancy rates today are nearly 17%, with San Francisco at 20% and Houston above 23%. According to Brookings Institution estimates, office utilization is still less than 50% across major downtowns, indicating further headwinds for cities and landlords. Read more...
Over the past several years, this platform has returned multiple times to a geography found in cities of all sizes across the country – the neighborhood commercial corridor. With many others, we documented the harsh effects of the pandemic on neighborhood serving and locally owned businesses and offered practical recommendations for local stakeholders and state policymakers alike. To the greatest extent practicable, we have tried to be grounded and granular: using Investment Playbooks to identify concrete and fundable projects that can drive a burst of inclusive growth and entrepreneurship in real places, most recently 52nd Street in West Philadelphia. Read more...
One of my most rewarding activities this year is to serve as a member of the UK Urban Futures Commission.
This Commission, organized by the RSA and Core Cities UK, has a driving goal of unlocking the full potential of UK cities. That singular act, deceptively simple in its articulation, would have dramatic, outsized effects not only on reducing long standing spatial disparities in the UK around incomes, health, and wealth (“levelling up” in a phrase) but also making the UK globally competitive in a post Brexit world. Read more...
On June 13, the Port of Greater Cincinnati Development Authority (the Port) launched the $100 million Cincinnati Jobs Bond. With the proceeds of the bond, the Port aims to acquire, remediate, and prepare manufacturing sites in two distressed areas of the city.
As the country witnesses a boom in manufacturing, Cincinnati and the Port aim to show how cities can participate in the new industrial resurgence. If successful, it provides a replicable model that can be scaled across similar legacy industrial cities. Read more...
Over the past eighteen months or so, I have become intensely interested in the industrial and energy transformation underway in the United States. The staggering volume of advanced manufacturing-oriented transactions, fueled by federal and state investments, is scrambling economic performance across and within metropolitan areas. My colleagues and I recently examined the emerging spatial geography of advanced manufacturing in a recent post entitled The Industrial Transition and the US Metropolis — The New Localism. Read more...
As many readers of New Localism know, I have grown increasingly concerned over the past few years about the narrow scope of federal investments that are now flowing through the US. The use of the term “narrow” may seem odd, given the unprecedented volume of federal funding for investments in infrastructure, climate, manufacturing, and innovation. This funding is long overdue and has the potential to accelerate the transition of our economy to a more inclusive and sustainable future. Read more...
By all accounts, the post pandemic period in the US is characterized by a remarkable industrial transition. From the Covid-19 pandemic to climate change, the war in Ukraine, and rising tensions with China, macro forces and ample federal investments are prompting the re-shoring of advanced manufacturing and, relatedly, an accelerated decarbonization of the US economy. Read more...
The Inflation Reduction Act (“IRA”) is the largest legislative effort in U.S. history designed to accelerate the country’s transition to an alternative energy and climate future. This Act is remarkable not only for its ambitions but for its disproportionate reliance on tax incentives, a fundamental difference in structure from other Biden era legislation like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. A community hoping to maximize the value of IRA funding will need to organize networks of beneficiaries, intermediaries, and stakeholders in ways that integrate areas of practice (e.g., renewable energy, talent preparation and housing development) that are often kept separate and distinct. Read more...
In this time of intense polarization, it is rare to find an issue that both sides of the political spectrum can agree on. But small businesses seem to be one of the few exceptions. President Joe Biden has been a vocal champion of small businesses, emphasizing their importance as “the engines of our economic progress… the glue, the heart, and soul of our communities.” And Senator Marco Rubio, who led the Small Business Committee during the pandemic, has repeatedly emphasized the crucial role that small businesses play in job creation and the overall health of the economy. Despite this widespread support, there is still a critical missing piece: a consistent and robust data platform for small, diverse businesses. Read more...
One of the most intriguing questions to emerge in the aftermath of the pandemic is whether the confluence of seismic forces will disrupt the seemingly intractable pre-pandemic concentration of growth and prosperity in a small set of cities and metropolitan areas. These forces include the global health crisis itself but also Russia’s war in Ukraine, rising tensions with China, and the return of nation-shaping industrial policies. Read more...
Localities across the country are now all too familiar with the refrain: a lot of money has been made available by the federal government, but getting your hands on it – and putting it to good use locally – is akin to navigating a maze in the dark. In our recent work tracking and analyzing hundreds of federal funding opportunities, we’ve gained a unique look into this maze and how cities are making the most of the moment. In this newsletter, we highlight our new Funding Tracker Tool (developed by Florian Schalliol) and 5 tips for localities to seize the moment. Read more...
In March 1988, 35 years ago almost to the day, a high-profile National Housing Task Force released a stirring report entitled A Decent Place to Live. The Task Force, headed by James Rouse, the famed Baltimore developer and founder of the Enterprise Foundation, and David Maxwell, the CEO of Fannie Mae, explored and elevated the nation’s housing challenges and recommended an ambitious 10-point program to provide housing opportunity. Its focus was primarily on federal policy reform, in large part as a response to the dismantling and de-funding of housing programs during the Reagan years. Read more...
Last year, the Nowak Metro Finance Lab, Reinvestment Fund, and Accelerator for America published a report: Investor Home Purchases and the Rising Threat to Owners and Renters. The Lab’s report highlighted the disconcerting trends of investors large and small buying up residential properties, changing neighborhoods, and harming homeowners, homebuyers, and tenants. In Philadelphia, Jacksonville, and Richmond — which was the scope of the study’s data collection efforts — the results indicated that investors were most active in distressed neighborhoods: areas with low mortgage lending, low-incomes, and disproportionately large non-white populations. Last month, Bruce Katz presented these findings as part of a Housing and Urban Development event on Institutional Investors on Housing. Read more...
I was a major consumer of Saturday morning cartoons in my childhood.
My favorite, by far, was Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner. The plots were as simple as they were effective. Coyote would chase Roadrunner across deserts and mountains, concocting elaborate schemes to ensnare the fast-footed bird. The schemes always failed, with Coyote usually flying over a high cliff, realizing that he was suspended in midair, looking at the camera with an air of surprise and panic and then plummeting to the bottom of the abyss. Read more...
This newsletter has a longstanding affinity for metropolitan and regional thinking and action. As laid out in The Metropolitan Revolution (the 2013 book co-authored with Jennifer Bradley), metropolitan areas and their broader regions have emerged as the driving units of the global economy and the appropriate geography for solving cross-jurisdictional challenges like climate, economic competitiveness, housing, transportation, and workforce. The book extolled efforts in places as disparate as Cleveland, Denver, and Houston to bring governance into alignment with the reality that economic, environmental, and social challenges, alone and together, do not respect artificial, administrative boundaries. For these challenges, the geography of “real world” solutions are metropolitan in scale, even if general purpose local governments and specialized public authorities are bounded and fragmented. Read more...
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, small business has served as the focal point of relief efforts, from the earliest local relief funds and the Paycheck Protection Program, to a total of $1 trillion in relief disbursed by the Small Business Administration. These funds, though enormous in volume, exposed the deficiencies of our existing capital systems when it comes to serving small and marginalized entrepreneurs and enterprises. Read more...
The litany of disruptive effects is long and daunting. In the US alone, the pandemic disrupted global supply chains, accelerated remote work, devastated downtowns and amplified all forms of digital communication and commerce. Russia’s horrific campaign against Ukraine triggered volatility in energy and commodities markets, reinforced deglobalizing dynamics and intensified re-militarization given the struggle between autocracies and democracies. Read more...