Newsletters

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.

As a new year begins, I am reminded of the evocative image Jeanna Smialek put forth in the New York Times last March:

“The pandemic, and now geopolitical upheaval, have taken the economy and shaken it up like a snow globe. The flakes will eventually fall – there will be a new equilibrium – but things may be arranged differently when everything settles.”

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.

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.

Join us, Wednesday, December 7 at 1pm ET, for the Innovative Finance Playbook launch webinar; register here.

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.

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.

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.

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?

This past Tuesday I was privileged to present at the Meeting of G7 Urban Ministers in Potsdam Germany.  My keynote address was entitled A G7 Roadmap for Sustainable Urban Development and can be accessed here.  At the outset, I want to thank Mary Rowe, the President and CEO of the Canadian Urban Institute, for the time spent in reviewing multiple versions of the talk.

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.