Newsletters

Versions of this newsletter were initially published earlier this year by Governing Magazine and Context Magazine

For 25 years, the rebound of central business districts has been a driving force in the rebirth of U.S. cities.That positive dynamic is now threatened as the rise of hybrid and remote work drives detrimental, domino-like effects on commercial real estate, small businesses, transit ridership, and municipal tax generation. In certain sectors, working from home, either part time or full time, has become a structural feature of the post-pandemic economy, not a cyclical aberration. The harsh reality is that there will be no bounce back to the pre-COVID era. As a result, cities need to move fast to diversify their downtowns economically, amplify their downtown culturally, and remake their downtowns physically.

Earlier this week, the Nowak Metro Finance Lab at Drexel University and Accelerator for America launched the National Housing Crisis Task Force.

The Task Force, months in the making, held its first meeting in New York City, focusing intensely on the breadth and depth of the housing crisis and the urgent need for all layers of government and the private and civic sectors to rise to the occasion and fully treat the housing crisis like the crisis it is.

I’ve been thinking a lot about place lately.

By all accounts, the U.S. economy is undergoing an industrial transformation of monumental proportions. This transformation is gradually shaping a new industrial geography in the country – across and within metropolitan areas and broader regions — which could have profound implications for sub-national growth and development for decades to come.

An era of federal activism raises the potential to use public procurement to grow small businesses and create wealth.  To fully capitalize on this potential, we need innovative tools and techniques that turn procurement from an administrative process into an inclusive growth catalyst.

At the Nowak Lab we have developed a Procurement Playbook to seize the moment. These Playbooks size the procurement economy, identify challenges, and offer actionable small business strategies for governments and the broader ecosystem of business chambers, financial institutions, and entrepreneurial support organizations.

It’s no secret that the country is in the throes of a housing crisis. However, in the desperation to fix it, factions have gotten borderline religious about single, silver-bullet solutions. In reality, the housing crisis is more systemic and complex than ever before. Thus, moving forward will require a myriad of innovative, scalable solutions, elements of which are already being tried and tested at the state and local levels.

It has been ten years since we released The Rise of Innovation Districts and boldly declared that the spatial geography of innovation was shifting in the world towards innovation districts. Our observation was that monoculture science and research parks were no longer aligned with the nature of modern innovation. Rather, innovation districts, which concentrate in small (mostly urban) geographies a broad mix of academic institutions, corporations, researchers, startups, skills providers, and entrepreneurial support entities, were better suited to advance creativity and collaboration by leveraging physical proximity, accessibility, walkability and density.

About a year and a half ago, I had the privilege of visiting Bilbao at the invitation of Bilbao Metropoli 30. Famed for the Frank Gehry designed Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao has been a global inspiration for the regeneration of former industrial cities.

Bilbao is the capital of Biscay, one of the three Historical Territories of the Basque Country. It is located in the Atlantic Arc of Europe, a confluence of two continents and an axis of the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean.

The energy transition impacts every aspect of the modern economy, driving transformative changes in the nature and location of economic activities. With recent legislation such as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Inflation Reduction Act (“IRA”), and CHIPS and Science Act, the U.S. government is investing at record levels to expedite the transition to a low-carbon economy. Taken together, these historic federal actions are allocating hundreds of billions of dollars over the next five to ten years, driving an economic restructuring of monumental proportions.

Where you live is of supreme importance in America. Your address is a factor in what schools your children can attend, the jobs within reach, the value of your home or the price of your rent, the quality of your air, and much more. Your neighborhood is also your social network, your community, and often, part of your identity. Yet not all neighborhoods are equal: some have better or worse schools, higher quality or subpar housing, more or less access to transportation and jobs, and other forms of inequality. These neighborhood divisions are often the result of segregation by race and class, influenced by governmental policies like redlining, mortgage discrimination, and urban renewal.

A consistent focus of this newsletter has been the pandemic and other disruptive forces that have followed in its wake that have the potential to reshuffle the order of successful cities. As I’ve written before: “For cities that are organized, deliberate and purposeful, there is the tantalizing prospect of using this period to leapfrog, diversifying and greening their economies to become more economically resilient, socially inclusive and environmentally sustainable.”