Friday 20 November 2015
07:45
Bruce Katz
A Metropolitan Manifesto for the 2016 US Presidential Election
As the 2016 US presidential election kicks into high gear, the leaders of cities and metropolitan areas have begun to argue for a new compact with the federal government. Years of partisan gridlock and policy drift have forced cities – and their networks of local governments, corporations, philanthropies and universities – to shoulder the burden of investing in critical areas such as infrastructure, economic development, education, and the environment. At the heart of the new compact is a plea to devolve more powers to cities, giving them greater flexibility to leverage private and civic capital and adapt federal resources to their own needs and priorities.
This event will focus on how cities can be further empowered and enabled to fix America’s broken politics and address pressing social, economic and environmental challenges.
Bruce J. Katz is a vice president at the Brookings Institution and founding director of its Metropolitan Policy Program. He regularly advises on policy reforms that advance the competitiveness of metropolitan areas. Bruce Katz is a co-author of The Metropolitan Revolution (Brookings Press, 2013), a distillation of his work on the emerging metropolitan-led “next-economy” and its practitioners around the country working to produce more and better jobs driven by innovation, exports, and sustainability. Katz is a graduate of Brown University and Yale Law School and a visiting professor at the London School of Economics.
"The many governments within a single metropolitan area are almost designed to fight among themselves because state law makes them largely dependent on locally raised tax revenues...People, pies, cars, rails, and the nebulous entity known as the economy might flow seamlessly across local boundaries, but sales and property tax dollars rarely do"
Bruce J. Katz is a vice president at the Brookings Institution and founding director of its Metropolitan Policy Program. He regularly advises on policy reforms that advance the competitiveness of metropolitan areas. Bruce Katz is a co-author of The Metropolitan Revolution (Brookings Press, 2013), a distillation of his work on the emerging metropolitan-led “next-economy” and its practitioners around the country working to produce more and better jobs driven by innovation, exports, and sustainability. Katz is a graduate of Brown University and Yale Law School and a visiting professor at the London School of Economics.
