About the Metropolitan Policy Program
Created in 1996, the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program provides decision makers with cutting-edge research and policy ideas for improving the health and prosperity of cities and metropolitan areas.
The program is based on a simple premise: The United States is a metropolitan nation. Metropolitan areas are home to 83 percent of the U.S. population, 85 percent of the nation’s jobs and 92 percent of all college graduates. They are our hubs of research and innovation, our centers of human capital, and our gateways of trade and immigration. They are, in short, the drivers of our economy, and American competitiveness depends on their vitality.
Our work is designed to help metropolitan areas (and the cities and suburbs within them) achieve three goals that are central for success in the new global order:
Grow in robust ways by embracing an innovative, productive economy that builds on the distinct strengths of individual places
Grow in inclusive ways by fostering a strong middle class and reducing racial and ethnic disparities in education, income and wealth
Grow in sustainable ways by strengthening cities and older communities, and promoting energy-efficient and environmentally sensitive patterns of development
To achieve these goals, we have organized our research and policy efforts as follows:
Understanding a Changing Nation The Metro Program consistently chronicles the dynamic demographic, economic, social, and cultural forces sweeping the country and interprets what these forces means for cities and metropolitan areas. Our aim is to unveil the new spatial geography of work and opportunity in the U.S. and identify the new sets of challenges and opportunities (e.g., increased suburban poverty, downtown resurgence, declining older suburbs) that have arisen.
Current Efforts: The Living Cities Census Series examines key demographic, social, and housing data to document the changing reality of the nation’s top 100 metropolitan areas. The Metro website also hosts an interactive data site that places the top American cities and metropolitan areas in a national context and provides comparative rankings on key indicators from the Census.
The Metropolitan Economy Initiative seeks to better understand the effects of globalization, technological change, and other forces on U.S. metropolitan areas, and to offer policy solutions that respond to those changes. We are defining criteria for success in metropolitan economic development and helping metropolitan leaders understand the strengths and weaknesses of their own regional economies.
The Federal Data Project works to improve the availability, accessibility, and accuracy of up-to-date statistics on cities and neighborhoods produced by the federal government. The Federal Data Agenda achieves this purpose through two primary functions. First, it engages in general field-building activities—publications and collaborative efforts aimed at increasing the extent to which the federal statistical system meets the data needs of public and private decisionmakers.
The Transportation Reform Series, led by Fellow
Robert Puentes, has broadly reassessed the nation's transportation policies, providing options beyond the current hodgepodge of pet projects, to better address these critical needs.
The Walkable Urbanism Series, is a compilation of Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program speeches and reports on the development approach that creates pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use and mixed-income places. These places can either be regional-serving (anchored by regionally important employment, cultural and civic institutions, retail and urban entertainment as well as residential) or local-serving (residential with local-serving commercial). Both regional and local-serving places benefit tremendously by being transit-oriented, though this not mandatory.
Advancing State and Local Reform The Metro Program works closely with corporate, civic and political leaders to advance commonsense solutions that match the intensity of demographic and economic change. We have worked in states as diverse as Maine, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania as well as metropolitan areas as disparate as Louisville, Miami, and Minneapolis/St. Paul. Our work is driving ambitious reforms on a wide range of economic, social, and environmental policies.
The Restoring Prosperity Project aims to catalyze the economic revival of struggling older industrial cities in the Northeast and Midwest, building on successful efforts in Western Europe. Brookings is conducting tailored research in collaboration with a growing network of leaders from industrial cities and working to stimulate market generating policy reforms in seven states: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.
The High Costs Project strives to document the high prices that low-income families pay for basic goods and services and develop state and local policies that can lower prices, expand financial literacy, and make markets work for low-income families and communities. We are currently focusing on advancing reforms in a representative set of states (e.g., KY, WA) and cities (e.g., Los Angeles, Baltimore).
The Gulf Coast Recovery Effort continues to document the progress, or the lack thereof, in the region’s recovery via a quarterly “
New Orleans Index.” This index is compiled in close collaboration with local researchers in New Orleans and has become a respected go-to source for government officials, private investors, philanthropic leaders, community representatives, and the media.
Great Lakes Economic Initiative describes why the Great Lakes region developed as it did and how it is positioned today to be a global economic player. It provides a candid assessment of what assets the region can build on and the challenges it must overcome. And it identifies ways that Great Lakes states can strengthen their economies through collective action. Further, it describes how and why the region is a vital contributor to the long-term economic health of the nation and how it can join with federal partners to pursue an integrated state, multi-state, and national policy agenda.
The Greater Washington Research Program helps leaders of Washington, DC and surrounding jurisdictions to better understand the issues and options facing one of the strongest, most resilient, and fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country. The Program is currently focusing on three signature challenges facing the city: the loss of affordable housing, school reform, and access to healthcare.
Setting the National Agenda In advance of the 2008 presidential election, the Metro Program is developing the “
Blueprint for American Prosperity,” a federal roadmap for unleashing the full economic and fiscal potential of our metropolitan areas and helping them grow in sustainable and inclusive ways. The Blueprint asserts that the nation’s ability to maintain its economic pre-eminence and meet the social and environmental challenges of our time will depend heavily on the ability of our top metropolitan areas to grow in healthy and vital ways. Thus, the United States needs a new generation of federal policies which “bubble up” from and build upon the expertise and proven innovations of metropolitan America.
The
Blueprint has four signature elements:
An initial economy-framing paper, entitled Metros Matter: The Foundation for Strengthening U.S. Economic Prosperity, will demonstrate the primacy of America’s top 100 metropolitan areas in American economic life, demonstrate that these places are the driving engines of national prosperity, and discuss the policy implications of the global trend towards the agglomeration of workers and firms in large metropolitan places.
An initial policy-framing paper, entitled Unleashing America’s Metropolitan Potential: A New Federal-Metro Partnership for Prosperity, will present a bold new paradigm for federal reform to better empower metropolitan areas to adapt to change and innovate in order to increase the nation’s prosperity. This paper will describe the complicating, and often detrimental, effects of an outmoded federal-state policy structure that fails to enable cities and metropolitan areas to adapt to changing economic realities.
A series of Blueprint Policy Briefs will argue for specific, “legislatable” reforms in selected areas of federal policy including advanced research and innovation, regional economic development, transportation, energy efficiency, rental housing, higher education, and urban school reform.
Two major regional papers will identify how the federal government can help metro areas and states in the fast growing Intermountain West and the slow growing Great Lakes adapt to distinct economic, social, and environmental challenges.
The Blueprint is being prepared in close collaboration with a new Metropolitan Leadership Council, a bipartisan network of individual, corporate, and foundation investors from a representative set of metropolitan areas. In addition, the Metro Program is working closely with a growing network of metropolitan partners including local elected officials, university leaders, and metropolitan business alliances.
Learning from Abroad A globalizing world, particularly one that is rapidly urbanizing, requires the United States to learn from the best policy innovations abroad. To that end, the Metro Program has launched an intensive collaboration with the London School of Economics to discover policy lessons from both economically recovering cities in Europe as well as fast growing cities in the developing world. This collaboration is already yielding important transferable insights on transportation, environmental remediation, and metropolitan governance.