Newsletters

Across the United States, local governments are facing regional-scale crises with municipal-sized tools. Housing, homelessness, infrastructure, and climate challenges have all outgrown the fiscal and institutional reach of any single city. Federal dollars that once underwrote public works and affordable housing have thinned out, while expectations for local governments have only expanded. The result is a generational shift toward what we call the New Localism: a world in which cities and metropolitan regions must design, finance, and deliver their own solutions.

In our earlier work, Organizing for Impact: Lessons from Atlanta’s Housing Strike Force, we argued that success depends as much on how cities organize as on what they choose to do. Atlanta’s experience showed that systems change requires new institutions (a public asset corporation to build mixed income housing on public land) and new capital (raised via municipal bonds, public asset disposition and the aggregation of private/philanthropic resources). But as the scale of our challenges continues to grow, that same logic must now extend beyond the boundaries of individual cities.

If it was not already certain, we now know; housing affordability is the top issue driving the electorate. Derek Thompson described last week’s election results as a referendum on the “affordability theory of everything”. Zohran Mamdani comfortably won the mayoralty of the most significant city in the world on the back of an affordability-focused campaign.

Mamdani campaigned on an affirmative message of hope and possibility, motivating a broad swath of voters to believe again in the nation’s largest city.  In the process, he made the problem of housing affordability a central issue, but in some ways dangled contradictory solutions. On the one hand, Mamdani insisted on rent freezes for stabilized apartments, satiating the left-leaning wing of the Democratic party. On the other, he emphasized the need to build more units, pledging to build 200,000 affordable homes with government support and also flirting with the Abundance coalition by embracing the importance of supply and offering fast-tracked planning review.

Yesterday, the Hampton Roads Alliance held a remarkable forum in Virginia Beach. The jam-packed gathering, aptly entitled “It’s Go Time,” was a vehicle for launching the Hampton Roads Playbook (Home – Hampton Roads Playbook). The Playbook, over a year-and-a-half in the making, boldly realigns the region’s economic development strategy with a national economy that is simultaneously remilitarizing, reshoring, and re-energizing, catalyzed by an accelerated deployment of next generation technologies. With new, objective evidence showing the region’s outsized and distinctive advantages, the Playbook puts forward 8 actionable projects and initiatives that exhibit the region’s determination to lead rather than merely participate in this transformation.

America’s housing crisis has reached a tipping point. As the country climbed out of the pandemic, the cost to rent or own a house reached record levels across the country and spread far beyond the coasts. Most Americans – regardless of geography, party affiliation, or whether they rent or own – feel that housing is too expensive. Calls for reform to increase housing affordability have reached a fever pitch and addressing the crisis is increasingly the top issue for elected leaders (mayors, governors, members of Congress) across party lines.

The country has seen moments like this before. But they happen once-in-a-generation. The last time that the housing shortage was so widespread and so deeply felt was after WWII, leading to marquee federal legislation that set the foundation for American life as we know it today. The country again finds itself in a historic moment to make big changes to address the nation’s housing shortage and affordability.

This article was originally published by The MJ on October 7, 2025: https://www.themj.co.uk/modern-city-governance-york-style. The MJ (Municipal Journal) is a UK magazine “designed for the people who work in the UK local government sector.”

In 1898, the modern city of New York was born.  The consolidation of separate governmental bodies and territories into 5 united boroughs (Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan and Staten Island) was a masterful stroke of government reform that has paid dividends for generations. It is simply impossible to imagine the rise of New York City as one of the preeminent global cities without the 19th century act of consolidation, its evolution over time and the strategic growth it enabled.

One of the hallmarks of this period is that places will need to work harder for themselves. While the federal political environment and the global economic context shift quickly, localities must find their own place in this new reality. To that end, we are constantly on the hunt for places and institutions that are successfully leveraging their existing assets to build and scale new local industries. The Hampton Roads Sanitation District (HRSD) is a particularly unique example of this: it has evolved from a group of water treatment facilities to a revenue-generating hub for water innovation, complete with nearly a dozen patents and global partnerships. HRSD is on the path to seed a new water technology cluster in Hampton Roads, providing a powerful compliment to the region’s existing defense-focused economy.

One of the most remarkable things about the United States is its limitless potential for renewal and innovation from the ground up. As New Localism has consistently observed, power in our nation is widely distributed across the republic via levels of government (states for sure but also counties, cities, municipalities and a plethora of public or quasi-public agencies) as well as networks of private, civic and philanthropic institutions and leaders. This expands the purview beyond traditional constitutional federalism (which only recognizes two layers) to a “whole of nation” construct.

Economic geography — the study of the spatial organization of cities, metropolitan areas and regions — is taking on renewed importance given mega trends around the rise of geopolitical tensions, the reshoring of advanced manufacturing and the acceleration of next generation technologies.

Manufacturing products and processes are being fundamentally reshaped by a broad array of rapidly advancing technologies. Take the production of semiconductors, a major focus of industrial policy in the United States.  The reshoring of semiconductor production has been accompanied not only by innovations in chip design and production processes (implicating technologies that range from artificial intelligence to machine learning to advanced materials) but also innovations in the design and construction of data centers.

Abundance, the blockbuster book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, two journalists we have long admired, has rightfully spent weeks on bestseller lists and has accordingly dictated months of policy discourse.

The book delivers on many levels and deserves the accolades it has received. The central thesis of the book — that it is time for the nation to build again and embrace abundance over scarcity — is timely and compelling. It has the potential not only to galvanize positive change across multiple areas of domestic life but also to alter our politics by showing that modern societies can function and provide affordable goods and services for broad segments of our population.

This article was originally published by RealClearPennsylvania on August 13, 2025: How Pennsylvania Can Lead the Physical AI Revolution | RealClearPennsylvania

As with every great industrial leap, the race among states to lead the AI revolution is reaching a fever pitch. We are living through a transformation that could shape the 21st century even more profoundly than railroads and steel defined the late 19th century, or the personal computer and the internet transformed the close of the 20th. We are now entering the steep part of the hockey stick curve for AI innovation—when breakthroughs move from research labs and pilot projects into the physical world, driving exponential changes in how we produce energy, manufacture goods, move people and freight, and secure national defense. In this age of “future shock” innovation, progress is inseparable from energy and infrastructure—and infrastructure, in turn, is inseparable from political will. The states that will win are those able to cut through permitting bottlenecks, align policy with industry needs, and move capital to the ground quickly. Speed, strategy, and scale—mirroring the first movers in tech’s Magnificent Seven—will decide who builds the competitive platforms that fuel generations of growth.