Bruce Katz
Vice President & Founding Director
Metropolitan Policy Program
Brookings Institution
Former Chief of Staff
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
(1993-1996)

Over the past 20 years, Living Cities has been recognized as a unique funding consortium, given its composition of major philanthropic and financial institutions. From my perspective, Living Cities’ distinctive mark is not just its diverse membership but the ability to be adaptive, inventive and entrepreneurial during a period of disruptive change. A philanthropic consortium that began with a focus on supporting affordable housing and community development has evolved into an organization at the cutting edge of a broad range of innovative policy and practice.

The evolution of Living Cities reflects our changing nation. The United States of 2011 is a profoundly different place than America circa 1991.

Successful organizations do not “stand still” in times of disruptive change. They maintain their core goals and values, but readjust their strategies and tactics to reflect new realities.

My organization, the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings, has witnessed Living Cities’ evolution close-hand. As an ardent supporter of data-driven decision making, Living Cities made two crucial investments in our trend and data analysis work—establishing the Living Cities Census Series and the Urban Market Initiatives. This work provided community, corporate, civic and political leaders with revealing analyses that unveiled a nation and its cities and metros in transformation. These assessments served as a platform for policy and practice reforms at the local, state and federal levels and left a lasting mark on the urban agenda-setting conversation. And, in recent years, Living Cities’ ability to adapt and react swiftly to economic changes helped us establish an invaluable data platform for post-Katrina New Orleans and explore the effectiveness and potential of the emerging green jobs sector.

While Living Cities has stepped up to tackle the challenges facing cities over the past two decades, even more challenges lie ahead that will require its leadership, engagement and support. For instance, how do we shift economic development in cities from consumption to production, from subsidy to investment, from domestic to global? How can we ensure that low-income workers and communities benefit from economic growth and restructuring? How do we make transformative investments in our cities at a time of fiscal austerity? And, how do we ensure that cities can continue to realize their potential during this period of federal partisanship and polarization?

I think it is a safe bet that Living Cities will continue to evolve, adapt and inspire and, by so doing, positively impact the health and vitality of dozens of cities and their citizens.