Newsletters

In the past week, there has been a flurry of articles about mayors (and former mayors) running for president (see, e.g., http://time.com/5510973/pete-buttigieg-mayors-president/). The announcements of South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg and former San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro (and the likely announcements of former mayors like Senator Cory Booker and (former) Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper) have clearly captivated the media.

As many of us involved in cities know, the indirect effects of large policy changes are often more important than the direct ones. The development of cities in the latter half of the 20th century was driven more by the Interstate Highway Act (negative) and the Immigration Reform Act of 1965 (positive) than by any law with “Urban” or “City” in the title. The Opportunity Zones tax incentive is shaping up as another federal intervention with multiple, indirect effects.

Happy New Year!

As many of you know, I (and a group of fellow travelers) have become virtually obsessed with building a new set of local institutions that align with our 21^st century economy and society and unlock and deploy capital for a new kind of purposeful growth.

For the past year, US cities have been transfixed by Amazon’s intention to build a second headquarters. An incredible 238 cities prepared bids to woo the tech behemoth and, in many cases, offered a plethora of incentives, ranging from enormous tax abatements to infrastructure improvements, free land and special fiber broadband networks.

Last week Accelerator for America and the Nowak Metro Finance Lab at Drexel University released a policy brief entitled “Opportunity Zone Investment Prospectus Guide.” The paper, co-authored by Ken Gross and myself, can be found here.

On November 14-16, we held a “soft” launch of the Nowak Metro Finance Lab at Drexel University with a several-day hands-on working session among a high-level group of reflective U.S. and European practitioners.

With election fever rightly seizing the land, I have spent the past several weeks visiting six separate cities — Albuquerque, Cleveland, Dayton, Madison, New Orleans and Winston-Salem. This whirlwind travel has given me a chance to tour dozens of Opportunity Zones and get an on the ground feel for market condition, practitioner energy, investment possibilities and social challenges.

Yesterday Accelerator for America and the Nowak Metro Finance Lab at Drexel University released a policy brief entitled “From Transactions to Transformation: How Cities Can Maximize Opportunity Zones.” The paper, co-authored by Evan Weiss and myself, can be found here.

I have been thinking a lot about Jane Jacobs recently and how her writing informs our thinking about metropolitan finance in general and Opportunity Zones in particular.

One of my favorite chapters in The Death and Life of Great American Cities is chapter 16, where Jacobs spelled out her views on “gradual money and cataclysmic money.”

As Jeremy Nowak and I wrote in a previous newsletter, realizing the full potential of the Opportunity Zone tax incentive will require a broad group of urban institutions to act with purpose and discipline. To that end, we began to ponder a set of steps cities could take to create a suite of modern institutions with the capital resources, public sector relationships, community standing, and private sector credibility to effect change.