Good Time to Fix Ailing Cities
January 26, 2023
Reinforced by the coronavirus pandemic, the downtowns of nearly every US city have died, the Washington Post declares, while seeing as something of a silver lining “a once-in-a-generation chance to revive them.” In Issues, Carl Schramm offers some basic principles for improving the prospects of dying cities. Among them, mayors and other urban leaders must focus on developing productive entrepreneurship that will make cities more competitive. But many knowledge gaps remain, the author writes, so policymakers and scholars must mount a focused research program to establish an empirical foundation that can guide effective interventions.