December 20, 2016
As we all slow down a bit to enjoy time with friends and family, it’s also an opportunity to take a breath and consider how the historic 2016 election will impact the infrastructure space.
The president-elect’s team continues to signal that infrastructure construction will be a major agenda item for the next four years, but Congress and the next administration must still address major questions around scope and scale. Meanwhile, many states and localities will soon start planning for the hugely-consequential decades-long investments that their voters approved at the ballot box.
But as significant as the election was for future policy, we also shouldn’t let it overshadow what’s already happening on the ground today. Joe Kane has some impressive results from a stress test of big city water systems, and the results aren’t great. If we want to rebuild American infrastructure, the pipes under our roads and real estate may be the most important place to look.
Finally, I want to invite everyone to join us in Washington, D.C. or via webcast on January 11th when we host a public event on designing, building, and financing transportation in global cities. We’re expecting a great conversation with U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, Massachusetts Department of Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack, Buenos Aires Transportation Minister Juanjo Mendez, and noted scholar Gilles Duranton. We hope to see you all early in the new year.
Happy holidays,
Adie TomerFellow
Only a handful of drinking water utilities in the largest U.S. cities perform well across indicators of financial and economic health, while others struggle to manage their finances in the face of difficult economic realities. Their challenges are spurring a variety of innovative planning approaches.
This election season, infrastructure stood out as one of the few policy areas where candidates found common ground. Post-election, this policy brief lays out a blueprint for a modern federal infrastructure strategy to support sustained and broad-based economic growth.
While infrastructure investment is a tangible priority of the incoming Trump administration, prioritizing resilience can lead to more sustainable, durable infrastructure with a legacy that lasts well beyond the next four years.
Despite lingering uncertainty regarding specific infrastructure policies at the federal level, many cities and states got a more certain head start on Election Day by passing a variety of infrastructure ballot measures.
Journalism and analysis have been superb post-election, with much of it having nothing to do with the November results. The Urban Land Institute and City Observatory traded analytical punches about how to define growth in America’s suburbs. The New York Times explored how places are dealing with the challenges of legacy water infrastructure.And after the intense scrutiny surrounding Flint, water seems to be on everyone’s minds: as the EPA refocuses the federal drinking water role, both public and private organizations are considering the importance of creating a water-secure future for cities, and efforts to use existing or new data to provide actionable insights are ramping up (case in point: three incredible visualizations of water in the United States).
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