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When places rally their capital and networks around local economic development, remarkable progress can occur.

In July 2025, we wrote about the O.H.I.O. Fund (the “Fund”), a capital vehicle focused on investing in place. The Fund is a long-term, multi-sector fund that reinvests in Ohio, largely on behalf of Ohio families, family offices, individuals, and companies. Ninety eight percent of its committed capital comes from Ohio investors.

This July, Congress passed the most sweeping bipartisan housing legislation in a generation: the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act (ROAD). ROAD provides various policy and regulatory tools to help cities build, repair, and finance homes faster—and at a lower cost. ROAD is not a spending bill, and its long-term success will depend on future appropriations from Congress. Irrespective of this, the policy provisions in the law have potency and steer the law’s benefits toward jurisdictions that produce more housing.

As the national housing crisis continues to rage, the role of one historically essential player in the affordable housing system — philanthropy — is evolving in significant ways. In prior decades, national foundations essentially built the current affordable housing system by driving the design and delivery of federal policies and incentives. As the locus of reform shifts from the federal government to a mix of public, private and civic actors, philanthropies can once again shape the sector if they embrace the urgency of the moment and help catalyze and capitalize ground-up solutions.

As the nation’s affordable housing crisis persists, states and localities are beginning to experiment with new kinds of public institutions to design, finance and deliver housing. The goal of these efforts is to expand the mission and focus of housing institutions from mere implementers of federal programs and purveyors of federal resources to entities that can mobilize capital, ideas and civic energy in new and powerful ways.

One of the most promising institutional trends is the creation of public asset corporations in cities such as Atlanta, Chattanooga and Cincinnati. Modeled after successes in European cities, public asset corporations are structured both to put publicly owned land and buildings in the service of housing production and preservation and to accelerate housing development via powerful financial tools and mechanisms.

Every neighborhood should have a grocery store. Not just a corner store or a dollar store, but a place to buy fresh produce, meat and pantry staples at a fair price: the same kind of baseline amenity as a library branch, a pharmacy, or a transit stop. Governments across the country are stepping up to make that goal a reality. New York City has committed $70 million to open city-backed grocery stores in all five boroughs. Atlanta opened a publicly backed grocery store downtown last fall and has a second under construction. And the idea is far older than either: for more than a century, American cities have used public assets to bring private grocers into neighborhoods the market had abandoned.

Nations today are roiled by regional disparities and the turbulent politics surrounding “places left behind.”  Andy Burnham, Britain’s new Prime Minister, owes his recent ascension in no small part to the long-standing resentment of the radical differences in regional economic performance that have persisted in England, particularly between London and Northern cities.

Something is stirring in Britain, which bears watching on this side of the Atlantic.

On June 29th, Andy Burnham — the former mayor of Greater Manchester and soon-to-be-annointed British Prime Minister — made a remarkable speech at the People’s History Museum in Manchester.

The political earthquake in the UK has global reverberations. With the resignation of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Britain is about to have a new prime minister for the 7th time in the past decade. Nothing new there! What’s remarkable is the ascension of Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, as Starmer’s successor.

To move from Metro Mayor to Prime Minister is unusual in any electoral system, but particularly in Britain, which is one of the most financially centralized nations in the developed world.

One of the most rewarding things for me is to reengage with people I’ve worked with decades back.  A few months ago, I received a welcome email from Rey Ramsey.  I first met Rey after he had assumed the presidency in 1994 of (what was then called) the Enterprise Foundation. I was then serving as Chief of Staff to Henry Cisneros, the U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

It was clear to me from our initial meeting that Rey was going to be a fellow traveler in the world of housing and cities and metropolitan economies more broadly. He exhibited an affirmative energy that was truly infectious as well as a level of open-mindedness and intellectual curiosity that was greatly appreciated.

Much of the talk about artificial intelligence’s role in the built environment has, unsurprisingly, been about the massive amounts of computing power the new technology requires, and the real estate, construction, and energy that compute requires.