Author: Alan Berube

National conversations tend to overlook the fact that the five new realities affect not only “macro” conditions such as the federal budget and the U.S. labor market. They are also experienced in places—mostly in our nation’s largest metropolitan areas. Actors at the metropolitan level cannot, on their own, tackle the enormous challenges emerging from these social, demographic and economic shifts.

Only national policy makers have the fiscal and jurisdictional reach, and authority to make the truly market-shaping decisions needed to address these new realities. However, this requires an agenda that goes beyond the conventional ways in which these issues are framed at the national level, to confront aspects of particular concern for the metropolitan communities on the front lines of these trends.