Productive Growth

Making Markets Work in Inner Cities: A Next Generation Policy Agenda
Since the 1990s, market-oriented strategies have been at the heart of efforts to revitalize inner cities. Now it’s time to take stock. This paper assesses how well institutions and policies of the past 15 years have integrated inner-city markets into the wider economy, and proposes next-generation innovations in areas such as small business finance, real estate, and information and data gathering.

Knowledge that Motivates: Using Information to Catalyze Metropolitan Problem-solving
Radical advances in information technology have greatly increased the potential for a high-value federal role in organizing, analyzing, and disseminating statistics and other information relevant for public policy and business decision-making. Building on those advances, this brief will provide a guide to new approaches to federal information policy for use by Congress, the OMB, and federal agencies, particularly as applied to metropolitan areas. Ultimately, the brief argues that improved information will lead to a more productive economy, improved public policy, and healthier democracy.

Inclusive Growth

 
Platforms for Social Mobility: Rethinking U.S. Workforce Housing Policy
Recent gyrations in housing markets underscore that the federal government has largely ignored housing and particularly rental housing issues, which are critical to tackling national challenges of economic growth, wage sufficiency, educational outcomes, and environmental protection. A renewed federal rental housing policy should build on innovative state and local efforts to boost the housing purchasing power of low-income families, expand the supply of moderately-priced units, and ensure full and fair access to housing opportunities for low-income and minority households throughout metropolitan areas.

All Integration is Local: Advancing Immigration Policy with a National New Americans Initiative
Regardless of how the current federal immigration debate is settled, states and localities—especially cities and suburbs where foreign-born populations are growing quickly—need help as they manage immigrants’ residence in the United States. For that reason, the federal government should establish a New Americans Initiative to seed and coordinate state-level public-private partnerships to increase English language access, citizenship, and related services for immigrant populations, thereby strengthening the U.S. economy and improving the health of local communities.

Investing in the Divested: A New Financial Services Policy for Building Wealth and Prosperity
Most American households continue to struggle to make the most of the financial opportunities available to them and end up paying too much for cashing checks, buying home mortgages, and making basic stock market investment mistakes that add up to billions of dollars in lost wealth every year. In response, we need a new federal financial services policy designed to substantially improve the ability of American households to use financial services to convert work into wealth and upward mobility.

Promise of Prosperity: Supporting Community Compacts for Human Capital and Economic Renewal
Started in 2006, the Kalamazoo Promise is a local program that guarantees up to 100-percent financial support at any public Michigan college or university for public school students who graduate from Kalamazoo’s schools and retain a minimum grade point average. Based on early signs of success from this model and similar state efforts in Georgia and Indiana, the federal government should, on a demonstration basis, match the investments of state, local, private, and philanthropic groups that adopt similar community higher education financial guarantees. Sustainable Growth

Sustainable Growth

 
Greening the American Dream of Homeownership
Although detached single-family homes account for nearly half of the 43 percent of U.S. carbon emissions arising from the built environment, the nation currently lacks any viable mechanism for reducing residential emissions and advancing residential energy efficiency especially in the existing single-family homeownership market. To fill that gap and stimulate widespread middle-class demand for green and energy efficient homes, this paper proposes several far-reaching federal engagements that include: increasing transparency in home purchase market transactions (ultimately enabling consumers to make more informed decisions regarding home costs); and catalyzing an innovative financing mechanism—employing an on-the-bill accounting model—that enables existing homeowners to undertake energy efficiency retrofits at essentially no cost, and with no post-tenure debt repayment obligation. Through these interventions the nation can ensure that lower- and middle-income Americans can capture the savings associated with energy efficiency and green homes now available only to the wealthy while achieving a 5 to 10 percent reduction in the carbon emissions associated with residences.