Last week I flew into Washington Dulles International Airport, a route I have taken dozens of times. This time I looked out the window and saw something I had never paid attention to before. Below the plane, spread across the rolling landscape of Loudoun County, sat rows of data centers.

What I was looking at was Data Center Alley, the corridor of eastern Loudoun and Fairfax counties that has become the densest concentration of data center capacity on the planet. Local officials count more than 130 operating facilities in Loudoun County alone, with dozens more approved or in the pipeline. County planning documents note that there has not been a single day in sixteen years when a data center was not under construction somewhere in the county. An estimated 70 percent of global internet traffic is believed to pass through this stretch of suburban Virginia at some point in its journey. Data centers now generate close to half of Loudoun County’s tax base, a dependency significant enough that the county has built a dedicated reserve fund to cushion itself against the industry’s swings.

Northern Virginia did not become the data center capital of the United States by accident. Cheap land, redundant fiber, proximity to federal networks, and decades of local incentives built the region into a hub before most Americans knew what a data center was. Now that everyone has an opinion about them, Virginia is a preview of a fight playing out nationwide.

The rare issue that unites

Data centers have become one of the few subjects in American life that Democrats and Republicans agree on, and they agree that they do not want one nearby. A Gallup poll conducted in March found that roughly seven in ten Americans oppose building a new AI data center in their area, with majorities across the political spectrum. A Reuters and Ipsos poll found 59 percent of adults opposed to a data center within ten miles of their home. Researchers who study public opinion have noted an unusual pattern in the numbers: the most conservative Republicans polled closer to Democrats in their opposition than to moderate Republicans, a rare inversion of the normal partisan order. More than seventy data center projects worth an estimated $130 billion were stalled or blocked nationwide in just the first three months of this year.

Most of the public conversation about why people object has centered on the environment. Data centers consume enormous volumes of water for cooling. Cooling fans and backup generators produce a low, constant noise that residents near facilities in Loudoun County have described as a persistent whine, audible enough to interrupt sleep in nearby homes. Land that once supported farms or forest buffers has been rezoned for server halls. These are real and well-documented concerns, and they explain much of the local resistance that has slowed or stopped projects from Virginia to Georgia to Texas.

The bill nobody voted for

Less attention has gone to a cost that touches nearly every household in the region, whether or not a data center is visible from their street: the price of electricity itself.

Data centers do not simply draw power. They draw so much of it, so fast, that they are reshaping the regional grid's economics. PJM Interconnection, the grid operator serving Virginia, Maryland, Ohio, and eleven other states plus the District of Columbia, runs an annual auction to secure future power capacity. In the most recent auction cycle, prices cleared at the federal cap of $329.17 per megawatt-day, roughly ten times where they sat just a few years ago. Monitoring Analytics, the independent watchdog that oversees PJM’s markets, has attributed 63 percent of that price increase to data center demand, translating to an estimated $9.3 billion in added capacity costs that will ultimately be recovered from ratepayers across the entire PJM footprint, not just Virginia.

Virginia is feeling the effect most directly, because it hosts the demand driving the increase. Dominion Energy, the state’s largest utility, has told regulators it expects its fuel costs to rise 88 percent between 2021 and mid-2027, a jump the company links to greater reliance on the volatile wholesale power market as data center load grows faster than new generation can be built. State regulators have estimated that the average residential customer’s monthly bill could climb from roughly $173 to $195, an increase of up to 13 percent, before any relief measures are applied. PJM itself has projected that its own capacity cost increases alone will add between 1.5 and 5 percent to customer bills across the region this year.

None of this means data centers are the only reason bills are rising. Grid operators point to aging infrastructure, the electrification of vehicles and heating, and the retirement of older power plants as compounding factors. But data centers are the fastest-growing piece, and they are new enough and concentrated enough for regulators and lawmakers to single out. Virginia’s legislature has already taken up bills to shift more of the cost burden onto data center operators rather than households. Oregon has created the nation’s first dedicated data center rate class. PJM has proposed rules that would require large new power users to secure their own supply before drawing further on the shared grid.

What this measures

In the Geography of Prosperity Index, this is as much a Governance and Foresight question as it is an economic one. The dimension asks whether a place’s institutions can see a structural shift coming and act before its costs land on people who never asked for the growth in the first place. Northern Virginia built the physical capacity of the internet. What it has not yet fully built is a governance framework that keeps the bill for that capacity from falling disproportionately on the household next door to the substation.

The data centers I flew over last week are not going anywhere. The industry that built them is only accelerating. The open question, in Virginia and in every state now courting the same investment, is whether the rules for paying the electric bill get written before the next auction clears, or after.

The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that. Reach out today to learn more.

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A Note From Washington

I returned to Washington last night after nearly a month abroad, traveling through Italy and Greece. The primary goal of the trip was to rest and relax, which was desperately needed, but also to experience European cities through the lens of the Geography of Prosperity Index. I found that cities like Venice, Rome, and Athens look like they are thriving to the average tourist with bars, restaurants, and retail flourishing. However, beneath the surface, their residents face many of the same challenges ours do here in the United States. Some are statistically worse.

The youth unemployment rate is nearly 20 percent in both nations — a shocking figure to someone from the U.S., where youth unemployment sits at 8.5 percent. Purchasing power is declining, too, with Greece remaining one of the lowest in Europe. Both countries are also confronting the harsh realities of declining birth rates, aging, and depopulation. Social welfare systems are struggling to keep up.

The irony is that average property values continue to rise in both nations against the backdrop of some pretty bleak economic news — don’t let those 1 Euro homes fool you. Two primary culprits: superstar cities, which continue to draw high-value talent and income from around the world, and favorable tax and immigration laws, which have welcomed the well-heeled foreign-born as workers and residents. Some have pointed to Airbnb's influence on the property market, but that figure pales in comparison to these other trends.

Next week, I’ll return to my regular publishing schedule. In the coming weeks, I expect to receive my peer review for The Geography of Prosperity: The Cities Reimagining the American Dream. I'd like to do another Maproom with you this month, so let me know if you’re interested by voting below.

— Bradley

Demographic Change

Seattle Moves to Cut Its Own Permitting Backlog

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson signed Executive Order 2026-4 on August 19, aiming to speed up housing permitting and creating a Housing Production Task Force. City data cited in the order show large multifamily projects currently take 374 days to reach permit issuance, against the city’s own 180-day goal. Middle housing takes 117 days against a 60-day target. The order creates an interdepartmental team across city utilities and housing agencies to resolve permitting delays and proposes funding an Affordable Housing Ombuds position in the 2027–28 budget. The task force is due to deliver initial recommendations by February 2027, including housing for residents earning less than 50% of area median income and reforms to the city’s Mandatory Housing Affordability program.

Why It Matters: Seattle’s own permit data is the story here. A city can pass housing policy, but if its internal process takes roughly twice as long as its own stated targets, the policy doesn’t translate into new units on the ground. The gap between what a city says it wants to build and how fast it can process approvals is a direct read on Governance and Foresight, and it shapes whether Population Renewal projections hold up over time.

Richmond Pulls Back Its Zoning Overhaul

Richmond released the third and expected-final draft of Code Refresh on August 17, its first comprehensive zoning rewrite since 1976. The new draft pulls back an earlier version that would have allowed two primary homes plus a smaller unit per lot. It now allows one primary home plus one accessory dwelling unit, a standard city officials are calling “1+1.” Duplexes remain by-right only in specific residential-attached zones, including much of the Fan, Jackson Ward, and Church Hill. The draft also sets citywide open-space designations and new minimum tree canopy standards. Planners say the rewrite implements Richmond 300, the 20-year land use plan the city adopted in 2020. The draft goes to City Council next for a vote.

Why It Matters: Richmond’s move from a denser draft to a more conservative one shows how density plans get renegotiated under neighborhood pressure. City planners are trying to add supply without losing the political support needed to pass the ordinance. That trade-off, between what a city’s own projections say it needs and what residents in single-family zones will accept, is the Governance and Foresight question at the center of the Index.

Climate Change

Cities Know What Extreme Heat Will Cost. Few Can Pay For It.

An August 27 report from Government Technology covered a Clark University panel on how cities are responding to extreme weather. Riverside, California, is expected to hit 100 degrees again this week; the city recorded 39 days above 100 degrees in 2024, a 51% increase from 2000. Riverside built a neighborhood tree-canopy mapping tool after hosting an Extreme Heat Summit with NOAA last year, and it broke ground on an 8.8-acre climate-resilient agriculture center powered by on-site solar. Massachusetts has identified $90 billion to $130 billion in resiliency investment it says it needs, according to the state’s climate chief, Melissa Hoffer. Panelists said the federal government has stepped back from supporting local climate preparation, pointing to the FEMA Review Council’s recommendations for restructuring the agency. Officials on the panel said most cities lack the funding or in-house expertise to act on climate risks they already understand, and argued that partnerships with states, philanthropy, and the private sector are becoming necessary to close that gap.

Why It Matters: This is the capacity gap behind the Climate Resilience score. Cities increasingly know what they’re facing. What separates high performers from low performers on the Index is whether they have the money and staff to act on that knowledge, not whether they understand the risk.

The West’s Wildfire Season Holds at the Top of the Scale

The National Interagency Fire Center has held its National Preparedness Level at 5, the top of its scale, since mid-July. As of the week of August 24, more than 7.65 million acres had burned nationally in 2026 across over 50,200 fires, running near 185% of the ten-year average. Major fires were active near Reno, Nevada, and west of Fort Worth, Texas, with extreme heat and drought keeping fire danger high across the West and into Texas. Seventeen states remained at above-normal significant fire potential heading into the week.

Why It Matters: The acreage figure, running well above the ten-year average, is a hard number behind a season that has felt unusually active. It’s a reminder that Climate Resilience scores reflect exposure to risks already running above historical baselines, not hypothetical future ones.

Artificial Intelligence

A Small Ohio City Blocks a $1.5 Billion Data Center in a Single Session

Chillicothe, Ohio’s city council passed a 60-day moratorium on data center approvals on first reading on August 24. Council bypassed the city’s normal three-day and three-reading rules to pass the ordinance in a single session. Council member Kathy Dunn sponsored the bill after developer Aligned proposed a $1.5 billion high-performance computing campus at a former paper mill site in July. City officials said the company that would actually build the facility had not responded to their requests for information. The moratorium blocks approval of both “auxiliary” and “large-scale” data centers until October 23.

Why It Matters: Chillicothe is a small city, and this is a single-site case. But the underlying pattern, a data center proposal moving faster than a city’s ability to evaluate it, has shown up in cities of every size this summer, including Fort Worth, Louisville, and Indianapolis. Automation Readiness in the Index isn’t only about whether a place has the fiber and power capacity for this kind of development. It’s also about whether local government can evaluate proposals at the pace the industry is moving, or whether it has to reach for a blunt tool like a moratorium to buy the time to catch up.

The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that. Reach out today to learn more.

Everything you need is here

A Note From Athens

There are plenty of things to contrast when looking at the United States and Europe, and fewer and fewer things to compare. For me, three big things stand out: urban design and public transportation, economic performance, and access to health care and better outcomes.

The walk from my hotel in Athens to the Acropolis, or anywhere for that matter, was along tree-lined streets, some of which were reserved exclusively for pedestrians. American cities, for the most part, were built around the car. European cities were mostly built before it. Americans drive for roughly 85 percent of daily trips. In much of Western Europe, that number is closer to half. You feel the difference the moment you stop needing a car to get anywhere.

Then there’s the economy, and this is where the comparison gets more complicated. The US economy has grown faster than Europe’s for years, and the gap in GDP per capita is real and getting wider. Here, the cost of everyday goods is incredibly low, especially at the grocery store. But economic growth and a good, prosperous life are not the same thing, and I believe that more and more Americans are arriving at this conclusion.

Health care is where the contrast is perhaps greatest. Americans spend more on health care than anyone else in the world, close to $15,000 per person a year. Europeans spend a fraction of that on care that is sometimes slower and sometimes more frustrating in its own way, waitlists included. And yet Americans live shorter lives. The average American today can expect to live to 79. The European average is closer to 83. I’ve been taken by the ease of using the farmakeío (pharmacy) and the sheer number of older adults working in and engaging with their community. There’s also a noticeable lack of smartphone use.

None of this means Europe has it figured out and America doesn’t. I keep thinking that there must be a middle ground, where economic growth and personal prosperity can thrive, hand in hand.

— Bradley

Demographic Change

New home construction picked up in July, but starts fell short of June’s pace

The Census Bureau and HUD reported that privately-owned housing units authorized by building permits rose to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,443,000 in July, up 5.0 percent from June and 3.1 percent above July 2025. Single-family authorizations climbed to 894,000. Housing starts told a different story: they fell to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,239,000, down 12.4 percent from June and 13.5 percent below July 2025.

Why It Matters: Permits and starts moving in opposite directions is a signal worth sitting with. Builders are lining up approvals faster than they’re breaking ground, pointing to a supply pipeline that looks healthier on paper than on the ground. For Population Renewal, the metros that convert permits into completed units the fastest will be the ones that can actually absorb new residents rather than just plan for them.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Monthly New Residential Construction report, July 2026, released August 18, 2026.

Massachusetts crosses 2,000 approved ADUs since its by-right zoning reform took effect

The Healey-Driscoll administration announced that Massachusetts municipalities approved 854 accessory dwelling units in the first half of 2026, bringing the statewide total to 2,084 since the Affordable Homes Act’s by-right ADU standard took effect at the start of 2025. Seventy percent of Massachusetts communities have approved at least one ADU. Lowell, Somerville, and Plymouth lead the state in approvals. The administration has also rolled out free ADU designs, feasibility support, and dedicated construction financing to help homeowners move from interest to completed projects.

Why It Matters: This is what Population Renewal looks like when a state removes the friction between housing policy and housing units. Before the reform, Massachusetts had no consistent statewide standard for ADUs, and a patchwork of local restrictions kept most of them from ever getting built. Two years in, the by-right model is producing incremental supply that doesn’t require a single megaproject or a single rezoning fight. It’s small, it’s distributed, and it’s actually happening.

Source: Massachusetts Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities, press release, August 12, 2026.

New York launches statewide listening sessions on how AI will reshape the workforce

Governor Kathy Hochul kicked off the next phase of her FutureWorks Commission on August 19, a series of public listening sessions examining how artificial intelligence will change jobs across New York. The first session focused on women in administrative, clerical, and customer service roles; the governor’s office says women make up 84 percent of the state’s administrative back-office workforce, a category widely seen as vulnerable to automation. The 20-member commission’s recommendations on workforce training, education, and worker protections are due by the end of 2026.

Why It Matters: This belongs as much to Population Renewal as it does to Automation Readiness. A state’s ability to retain and grow its workforce increasingly depends on whether it can move workers into roles that AI complements rather than replaces, and doing that requires knowing in advance which jobs and which residents are most exposed. New York is trying to get ahead of that question before the disruption forces it.

Source: Office of Governor Kathy Hochul, press release, August 19, 2026.

Cash buyers are pulling back, and the pattern varies sharply by metro

Realtor.com found that cash sales made up 31.4 percent of home purchases in the first quarter of 2026, down a percentage point from a year earlier. Cash sales fell 11.2 percent year over year, outpacing the 8.5 percent broader decline in home sales, as improving inventory and normalizing prices bring financed buyers back into competition. But the national pullback isn’t uniform: Pittsburgh, Austin, and San Francisco all saw cash sales increase between 2025 and 2026, with Pittsburgh’s cash share up nearly 7 percent and San Francisco’s up 7.7 percent, the latter a sign of AI industry wealth flowing into that market. Cash purchases remain concentrated at the extremes of the price spectrum: more than two-thirds of homes under $100,000 sold for cash in the first four months of 2026, compared with over 40 percent of homes selling above $1 million.

Why It Matters: This is a Population Renewal story hiding inside a market-mechanics headline. A national cash pullback signals a housing market slowly reopening to ordinary buyers who need financing, which matters for whether a metro can actually absorb new residents rather than just price them out. But the exceptions matter more: San Francisco’s rising cash share tied specifically to AI wealth is a live example of Automation Readiness reshaping a housing market in real time, concentrating buying power in ways that could offset any citywide affordability gains.

Source: Fast Company, “One of the housing market’s biggest advantages is starting to disappear,” August 18, 2026.

Climate Change

The White River shatters a 113-year flood record, killing at least seven in central Indiana

Multiple rounds of thunderstorms dropped over 11 inches of rain across central Indiana between August 11 and 15, sending the White River to levels not seen since the Great Flood of 1913. At Anderson, the river crested at 24.93 feet, breaking the 1913 record of 23.6 feet. At Noblesville, it broke its own 1913 record before 2 a.m. on August 15, reaching roughly 24.6 feet. At least seven people died across the state. Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett called it the city’s worst flooding in more than three decades; firefighters carried out 51 water rescues in a single day. Carmel, Fishers, and Noblesville all declared states of emergency, and the governor has requested federal aid.

Why It Matters: The 1913 flood was a spring event amplified by snowmelt. This one was a summer rainfall event alone, hitting the same benchmark without any snowmelt contribution at all. For Climate Resilience, that distinction matters: it suggests the rainfall intensity driving this event is a different animal than the one that set the historical record, which should reset how central Indiana communities think about their flood planning baselines going forward.

Sources: National Weather Service Indianapolis, “Record Flooding of August 2026”; CBS News, August 17, 2026; Watchers.news, August 16, 2026.

Gallup finds the Northeast among the regions hit hardest by extreme weather over the past year

A new Walton Family Foundation-Gallup survey found that 43 percent of residents in the Middle Atlantic region, which includes New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, reported their town or city experienced damage from extreme weather in the past 12 months, five points above the 38 percent national rate. Only the East South Central region (58 percent) and West South Central region (47 percent) reported higher rates. New England came in close behind at 41 percent. Nationally, Gallup counted 23 weather- or climate-related disasters last year, each causing at least $1 billion in damage, totaling roughly $115 billion combined.

Why It Matters: This rare data point puts the Northeast’s Climate Resilience exposure in the same conversation as the Gulf Coast and the South, regions more conventionally associated with extreme weather risk. The survey also found that concern doesn’t reliably translate into people leaving; most residents worried about future damage said they were still unlikely to move within two years. Resilience planning has to account for populations who stay put even as risk rises.

Source: Gallup, “How Opportunity Takes Root,” released August 17, 2026; Fingerlakes1.com, August 20, 2026.

New York City releases its first Urban Forest Plan, aiming for 30 percent tree canopy by 2040

The Mayor’s Office of Climate & Environmental Justice, in partnership with NYC Parks and a coalition including the Natural Areas Conservancy and The Nature Conservancy, released the city’s first Urban Forest Plan, laying out a roadmap to expand canopy coverage from roughly 23.4 percent today to 30 percent by adding an average of 700 acres a year through 2040. The plan covers all three categories of the city’s urban forest: street trees, natural area forests in parks, and trees on private and institutional land. City Comptroller Mark Levine’s office has since flagged that current funding, staffing, and interagency coordination don’t yet match the plan’s ambitions, and that recent canopy gains have come mostly from existing trees maturing rather than new plantings.

Why It Matters: Tree canopy is measurable, unglamorous Climate Resilience infrastructure. It cools streets by up to 2 degrees and forested areas by up to 6 degrees on average, and it helps absorb stormwater in a city that’s watched flash flooding get more frequent and more severe. The comptroller’s warning is the more important story here: a plan is not the same as the funding and staffing needed to execute it, and New York’s environmental justice communities, which have the lowest canopy coverage today, have the most riding on which way that gap gets resolved.

Sources: Brooklyn Paper, August 19, 2026; NYC Urban Forest Plan (urbanforestplan.nyc); Office of the New York City Comptroller, “New York City’s Living Infrastructure.”

The federal government finalizes a 10-year Colorado River plan. Experts say it still won’t be enough

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum signed the Record of Decision and 2027-2028 Operating Guidelines for the Colorado River on August 21, closing out a years-long federal environmental review and establishing a 10-year “Decision Framework” for Lake Powell and Lake Mead. The rules cut water deliveries to the Lower Basin by 1.25 million acre-feet in both 2027 and 2028, split unevenly among the three states: Arizona takes the deepest cut at 760,000 acre-feet, California 440,000, and Nevada 50,000. The decision comes as the combined contents of the two reservoirs sit at their lowest point since before Lake Powell began filling in 1963, after 26 consecutive years of drought and the lowest observed winter snowpack on record in 2025-26. Arizona’s top water official has already warned the plan could inflict “catastrophic harm” on the state and laid out seven formal objections that could become the basis for a lawsuit.

Why It Matters: This is a textbook Climate Resilience case of a system running out of runway faster than its governance can adapt. The plan buys two years of near-term certainty, but it doesn’t resolve the structural imbalance between what the river can supply and what seven states, tribes, and Mexico have rights to draw from it, and experts have said as much about earlier iterations of this same negotiation going back years. For the metros and farm economies across the Southwest that depend on this water, the deeper reckoning is still ahead, not behind.

Sources: U.S. Department of the Interior, press release, August 21, 2026; Western Water, “The Decision: Colorado River gets 2-year plan amid record lows,” August 21, 2026; KJZZ, August 14, 2026; CNN, August 7, 2026.

Artificial Intelligence

Texas’s data center audit grinds forward as the political fight over who controls the buildout intensifies

Texas regulators moved this week to implement Governor Greg Abbott’s directive ordering a comprehensive audit of every data center in the state’s electricity interconnection queue before any new projects can advance. At an August 14 open meeting, grid operator ERCOT said the verification process is expected to take several months but less than nine. ERCOT plans further implementation details at an August 20 open meeting. The audit itself traces back to an August 3 directive from Abbott, prompted by data centers’ failure to fully comply with an existing state survey of their water and power usage; it builds on a June directive aimed at protecting Texans from rising electricity costs tied to the buildout. Meanwhile, the fight over local control continues: Texas municipalities have considered at least 100 local data center ordinances since July 2025, ranging from Austin County’s moratorium to El Paso’s 300-foot residential buffer requirement, and a $100 million lawsuit against Hill County forced that county to rescind its own moratorium in June. Abbott’s Democratic challenger, state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, has called the audit “political theater” and pushed for a full moratorium instead.

Why It Matters: ERCOT is currently processing more than 474 gigawatts of interconnection requests, and roughly 90 percent of that is data centers, against a grid whose record peak demand is a fraction of that number. This is Governance and Foresight and Automation Readiness colliding in real time: the state is trying to build oversight capacity for an infrastructure wave that arrived faster than its regulatory tools could track it, while local governments and developers fight over who actually gets to say no.

Sources: MultiState, “The Local Fight Over Data Centers: A Texas Case Study,” August 19, 2026; Gibson Dunn, “What Governor Abbott’s Data Center Audit Directive Means for ERCOT and the Batch Zero Study Process,” August 2026; Office of the Texas Governor, press release, August 3, 2026.

New York launches statewide listening sessions on how AI will reshape the workforce

(See Demographic Change above — this story sits at the intersection of both beats.) Governor Hochul’s FutureWorks Commission held its first public listening session on August 19, centering women in administrative and clerical roles the governor’s office identifies as especially exposed to AI-driven change. The commission’s policy recommendations, covering workforce training, education, and worker protections, are due by the end of 2026.

Why It Matters: For Automation Readiness, the interesting move here isn’t the AI adoption itself, it’s the sequencing. New York is trying to build the workforce policy response before the job losses show up in the data, rather than after. Whether that foresight translates into protections that actually land before the disruption is the open question.

Source: Office of Governor Kathy Hochul, press release, August 19, 2026; WBNG, August 19, 2026.

The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that. Reach out today to learn more.

Everything you need is here

A Note From Rome

I’m writing this week’s issue from Rome, in the middle of one of the most brutal heatwaves the European continent has faced. Temperatures here have topped 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius) for multiple days, and evenings rarely drop below 80 degrees Fahrenheit (27 degrees Celsius). The heat is doing more than making the city miserable. It’s accompanied by a drought so severe that it uncovered the remains of Nero’s Bridge in the Tiber River, a structure that normally sits entirely underwater. Further north, the same drought is pulling relics of the Second World War out of European rivers. In Hungary, a Wehrmacht motorcycle and old ordnance surfaced from the Danube near Budapest. In Germany, a WWII-era bomb emerged from the Rhine near Cologne and had to be defused and removed. Nearby in Slovakia, a 700-kilogram bomb pulled from the same drought-stricken river system was detonated in a controlled explosion. River levels are so low that entire supply chain logistics have had to be rethought, since many of the rivers have become unnavigable.

What makes the heat especially brutal here is the near-total absence of air conditioning, standard in most American cities but still rare across much of Europe. Some cities are responding. Rome unveiled its Piano Caldo, or Heat Plan, this summer: €50 million over five years aimed at greening the city and removing as much pavement as possible to fight the urban heat island effect. It is a real strategy, and city officials call it a first for Italy. Locals I’ve spoken with don’t think it goes far enough. Whether that skepticism is fair or premature is worth watching. Either way, Rome is a live test case for what climate adaptation looks like in a city built long before anyone planned for this kind of heat.

— Bradley

Featured: On WOSU’s All Sides

I joined WOSU Public Media’s All Sides with Amy Juravich on August 13 for a panel on whether the Midwest’s long population exodus is ending. I was on with Bart Elmore, an environmental and business history professor at Ohio State, and Jason Reece, a city and regional planning professor at Ohio State’s Knowlton School of Architecture. The hour looked at whether climate pressure and affordability in other parts of the country are starting to push people back toward Midwest states.

Why it matters: This is Population Renewal and Climate Resilience meeting in the same conversation. For years the Midwest’s story was loss: manufacturing decline, population flight, disinvestment. Climate volatility elsewhere and affordability strain in growth markets are now doing some of the work that policy alone couldn’t. That doesn’t mean the reversal is even or guaranteed. It means the region’s fundamentals are being reevaluated on terms that didn’t exist a decade ago.

Source: WOSU Public Media, “Are climate change and affordability drawing people back to Midwest states?”

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Climate Change

Lake Mead hits its lowest water level since the reservoir was filled

Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States, dropped to 1,040.4 feet above sea level on August 7, a new record low that edges just past the previous mark set in July 2022. The decline follows the worst snowpack on record in the Colorado River Basin, which feeds the river that Lake Mead and Lake Powell depend on. Lake Powell is also nearing record-low territory. Together the two reservoirs haven’t been this depleted since 1957, before Lake Powell had even filled. Federal officials said this week they will not release cool water from Lake Powell through the Glen Canyon Dam, a step usually taken to protect a threatened native fish, in order to preserve the system’s hydropower capacity. J.B. Hamby, chairman of the Colorado River Board of California, said roughly 30 million people across the basin are directly exposed to the risk.

Why it matters: More than 40 million people across seven states rely on the Colorado River system for drinking water, agriculture, and power. This is Climate Resilience and Ratepayer Protection colliding directly. Cities from Phoenix to Los Angeles to Denver have built water and power planning around assumptions that this system could keep absorbing multi-year drought. Those assumptions are now being tested in real time, and the costs of that reckoning, through rate increases, new supply investments, or mandated cuts, will land on ratepayers regardless of which lever gets pulled first.

Source: Washington Post, CNN, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation data

A fresh heat wave pushes past 135 million people across Europe

Europe’s latest heat wave peaked on August 13, with France recording its hottest reading of the summer at 42.5C (108.5F) in Chateaumeillant and Paris reaching 38C (100.4F). Italy’s Meteorological Service forecast similar temperatures affecting 29 million people, concentrated along the west coast, the Po Valley, the south, and the islands. Roughly 25 million people in Spain saw temperatures near 37C (98.6F). In the UK, more than 40 locations across central and southern England hit 36C (96.8F) or higher. An AFP analysis put the number of Europeans facing temperatures above 35C (95F) at more than 135 million, with roughly 340 million, nearly three in five residents of the continent, forecast to see temperatures above 30C (86F). It is the fifth heat wave to hit Europe in 2026, part of a pattern that has run since late May.

Why it matters: Europe is warming faster than any other continent, and this summer is showing what repeat, back-to-back heat waves do to infrastructure, public health systems, and grids that were not built for this frequency. For U.S. cities, this is a preview, not a foreign story. The same heat-dome dynamics driving these European events show up in American summers, and the Climate Resilience question for U.S. metros is whether cooling infrastructure, emergency response, and grid capacity are being sized for occasional extreme heat or for the kind of recurring, multi-wave summers Europe is now living through.

Source: Euronews, AP

Artificial Intelligence

Cities are writing AI surveillance rules after the cameras are already up

Two city councils moved on AI surveillance governance this week, both playing catch-up to technology already in use. In Huntington, West Virginia, the city council voted to move forward with a partnership with Flock, an AI-powered surveillance camera system, prompting immediate resident pushback. Two competing ordinances are now headed to the public safety committee, both aimed at setting guardrails: who can access the system, how long data is retained, what gets audited, and confirmation that the cameras will not use facial recognition. Council member Tia Rumbaugh said officers need to treat the surveillance authority they’re being given seriously. Mayor Ferrell described his proposed ordinance as a model other cities could adopt. Cameras will not go live until an ordinance passes.

In Haverhill, Massachusetts, the city council moved on August 11 to draft its own ordinance governing Flock cameras, which the police department has used since 2023. Councilor Melissa Lewandowski noted that although the department has internal policies, the city itself has no ordinance on the books. She asked the city solicitor to work with police on drafting one, citing concerns about privacy and data sharing.

Why it matters: This is Governance and Foresight, and both cities are on the wrong side of the sequence. Automation Readiness usually gets framed as a question of adoption speed. These cases show the other half of the equation: governance capacity has to keep pace with deployment, not follow it. Huntington caught the gap before the cameras went live. Haverhill is writing the rulebook three years after the fact. The Index treats this ordering as a leading indicator of institutional foresight, and it’s a distinction that will keep showing up as more cities adopt AI-driven public safety tools first and debate the rules second.

Source: WCHS-TV, NewsLink Live

Three cities move to pause data center construction in the same week

Fort Worth, Louisville, and Memphis all took action on data center moratoriums within days of each other. Fort Worth’s city council unanimously approved the first step toward a 90-day construction pause on August 11, along with creating a data center advisory commission and requiring proof of ERCOT interconnection approval before any project moves forward. The pause won’t affect already-approved projects, including a Black Mountain Energy development that a nearby property owner has publicly opposed. In Louisville, the Metro Council’s planning committee advanced a six-month moratorium on August 11, and the full 26-member council passed it 24 to 1 on August 13, after nearly a year of delay and mounting pressure from a resident group called No Data Center 502. The vote came days after a developer filed plans to convert a 350,000-square-foot warehouse into a data center. In Memphis, the city council agenda released August 14 shows a moratorium proposal scheduled for discussion next week, backed by four council members and a gubernatorial candidate, aimed at giving the city time to study the impact of large-scale sites including the three xAI facilities built or under construction there.

Why it matters: This is Automation Readiness, Ratepayer Protection, and Governance and Foresight converging in a single week. Data centers bring jobs and tax revenue, but they also draw heavily on water and electricity in ways that show up on residents’ utility bills. Cities that adopt a moratorium are buying time to write zoning and utility rules before, not after, a project is built. The pattern across three different states in the same week suggests this is no longer an isolated local fight. It’s becoming a standard first move for cities that feel outpaced by how fast AI infrastructure is arriving.

Source: Fort Worth Report, LPM, Action News 5

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A Note From Venice

Here’s the final intro:

A Note From Venice

I’m writing this week’s issue from Venice. It’s a good place to think about the themes this newsletter tracks, because Venice is living through demographic and climate change at the same time.

The historic center’s population has fallen below 48,000, down from about 175,000 in the early 1950s. Rents, tourism pressure, and a lack of everyday services have pushed generations of Venetians to the mainland. At the same time, the lagoon keeps testing the city’s flood defenses. The MOSE barrier system has cut down on catastrophic flooding since it became operational, but acqua alta remains a fact of life here, and the years of water damage before MOSE already drove people out. It’s also incredibly hot this week, with temperatures across Italy soaring well above 90 degrees to over 100 in some places, and drought gripping most of Europe.

Population decline and climate exposure are usually treated as separate stories. However, Venice shows what happens when they compound, and there are lessons here for the United States. That’s one of the main reasons we scored five dimensions equally in the Geography of Prosperity Index. A shrinking population means fewer people left to advocate and pay for incredibly expensive infrastructure investment. Persistent flood risk makes it harder to convince anyone to stay. Each problem makes the other worse. Layer in other dimensions like social cohesion, automation readiness, and governance and foresight, and you get a much clearer picture of how your city is faring.

I’ll have more to say about this in the coming weeks. For now, thank you for reading, and for being part of this community.

— Bradley

Demographic Change

Santa Monica takes direct control of its homelessness response

The Santa Monica City Council voted Tuesday to establish a Housing-Focused System of Care, a locally controlled model that gives the city direct authority over homeless services from street outreach through permanent housing. The plan follows 14 community meetings held between April and July. It arrives days after the 2026 Point-in-Time Count found unsheltered homelessness in Santa Monica down 18.7 percent, even as homelessness rose 1.2 percent across the broader Los Angeles County Continuum of Care.

Why It Matters: Santa Monica’s decision to bring homelessness response in-house, rather than continue relying on a patchwork of county and regional systems, is a Governance and Foresight story. Cities that build direct institutional capacity to manage a crisis tend to produce more durable outcomes than those that outsource it. The divergence from the county trend line is early evidence the model may already be working.

Source: santamonica.gov

Chicago breaks ground on a $162 million office-to-housing conversion

Mayor Brandon Johnson and city officials launched a $162 million adaptive reuse project on July 29 that will turn a 25-story office tower at 500 N. Michigan Ave. into 320 apartments, including 64 affordable units, along the Magnificent Mile. The building’s zoning designation was approved in 2024, and the project draws on Chicago’s updated floor-area guidelines designed to make office-to-residential conversions easier to execute in the city’s highest-density districts.

Why It Matters: This is a Population Renewal story about repurposing existing stock rather than waiting on new construction. Chicago’s downtown office vacancy has been a persistent drag on the city’s tax base and street-level vitality; converting underused towers into housing is one of the more direct levers a city has to add both residents and revenue without a new building permit.

Source: Construction Review Online

New report finds arts investment linked to city resilience

A new report from SMU DataArts, produced through the City Arts Data Exchange with Bloomberg Associates, examined the finances of more than 4,400 nonprofit cultural organizations across 10 U.S. cities from 2019 to 2024. It found that sector health has diverged sharply since the pandemic: Atlanta, Cleveland, and Phoenix saw stable or growing revenues, while Des Moines, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, and Seattle experienced financial contraction. Cities that grew or maintained public arts investment saw more stable conditions. Local government support covered only about 5 percent of average organizational expenses in 2024, but that small share was linked to meaningfully stronger financial and attendance outcomes.

Why It Matters: Nonprofit arts organizations are part of a city’s civic infrastructure. Where they thrive, they create shared public spaces and sustain a creative workforce; where they contract, cities lose some of the connective tissue that holds communities together. This is a Social Cohesion story: the data shows that modest, sustained public investment correlates with a healthier cultural sector, and a healthier cultural sector is one input into whether a place feels like somewhere people want to stay.

Source: SMU DataArts

Climate Change

Wildfires destroy 700 structures and force up to 67,000 to evacuate in Spokane

Three fast-moving wildfires broke out around Spokane, Washington, starting August 1, fueled by record drought, high winds, and extremely dry vegetation. The largest, the Old Trails Fire, grew past 3,600 acres and jumped the Spokane River into residential neighborhoods. Washington Governor Bob Ferguson declared a state of emergency, and the National Guard was activated to assist with evacuations and firefighting. More than 700 structures have been destroyed, most of them homes, and a 37-year-old man has been arrested on arson charges in connection with one of the fires.

Why It Matters: A major wildland-urban interface fire inside a state’s second-largest city is a stress test of Climate Resilience infrastructure that most metro areas haven’t had to plan for. Spokane’s experience is a preview of the kind of urban fire risk cities in the interior West and Pacific Northwest will need to build response capacity for, not just rural and exurban communities.

Source: AccuWeather, ABC News

Extreme heat and flash flooding hit dozens of cities at the same time

More than 45 million people were under heat alerts the weekend of August 2, with Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Tucson, and Salt Lake City all under extreme heat warnings and temperatures challenging daily records. At the same time, flash flood watches covered parts of Michigan, Indiana, western New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, and West Virginia, with the flood risk later spreading into New York City and New England.

Why It Matters: The same weekend bringing record heat to the West brought flash flood risk to the East is a Climate Resilience story about simultaneous, geographically distinct hazards. Cities increasingly need to plan for concurrent climate stress, not sequential events, which puts real strain on emergency management systems built around responding to one crisis at a time.

Source: ABC News

Artificial Intelligence

Texas halts new data center grid connections pending statewide audit

Texas Governor Greg Abbott directed the Public Utility Commission of Texas and ERCOT on August 3 to conduct a comprehensive audit of every data center project in the interconnection queue before any new project can connect to the grid. ERCOT is currently reviewing more than 474 gigawatts of connection requests, up from 233 gigawatts in January, with data centers representing roughly 90 percent of that demand. Each project must now disclose its power and water use, cooling technology, tax incentives received, and community impact plans. ERCOT has already postponed its “Batch Zero” large-load review process to accommodate the audit.

Why It Matters: This is a Ratepayer Protection and Governance and Foresight story rolled into one. Texas has been the loosest-regulation, fastest-growth state for data center development in the country. A pause of this scale, in a state built on welcoming this kind of investment, signals that even the most permissive jurisdictions are running into the limits of grid capacity and public patience.

Source: Office of the Texas Governor, TechCrunch

AI leads job-cut announcements for a fifth straight month

Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported that U.S. employers announced 33,429 job cuts in July, the lowest monthly total in two years. Artificial intelligence was cited as the leading reason for layoffs for the fifth consecutive month, accounting for 10,970 cuts. Technology remained the sector with the most job cuts overall, posting 149,023 cuts so far in 2026, up 67 percent from the same point last year. Hiring plans, meanwhile, rose 25 percent year over year.

Why It Matters: This is an Automation Readiness story with a complicated shape. AI-attributed layoffs continuing for a fifth straight month shows real, sustained labor market restructuring, not a one-time event. But falling overall layoff totals and rising hiring suggest the disruption is concentrated rather than economy-wide. Cities with workforces heavily exposed to tech and routine information work carry more of this risk than others.

Source: Challenger, Gray & Christmas

The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that. Reach out today to learn more.

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Hi everyone,

A quick note as we head into August: I’ll be working on an amended publishing schedule this month and will send only the weekly news roundup through Labor Day. If you want more frequent updates in the meantime, you can find me on Instagram (@bradley.schurman) and TikTok (@bradleyschurman), where I’ll keep posting regularly.

I also wanted to share some exciting news. The Geography of Prosperity: The Cities Redefining the American Dream has been accepted by MIT Press and has now entered the review process. We have a publish date: September 7, 2027. Pre-sales will open in the spring — if you’re interested in a bulk purchase for your organization, team, or event, feel free to reach out to me directly at bradley@behumanchange.com.

This fall, I’ll be scheduling city visits to extend the research behind the Geography of Prosperity and to begin work on my next book, which is already taking shape. If there’s a city you think I should see — one that’s redefining what prosperity looks like, for better or worse — I’d love to hear your recommendations. Just reply to this email or drop a comment.

Finally, I’m booking speaking engagements for 2027 now. If you’d like me to hold a date for your conference, chamber, or organization, reach out today — the spring and fall conference seasons fill up fast.

Thanks, as always, for reading and being part of this community.

Bradley

Demographic Change

New home sales rise, but prices keep sliding

New single-family home sales rose to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 628,000 in June, up 1.6 percent from May, according to Census Bureau and HUD data released July 24. The median sales price fell to $398,300, down 3.3 percent from May and 2.7 percent below June 2025.

Why It Matters: Rising sales paired with falling prices point to builders and sellers cutting into margin to move inventory rather than a demand-driven rebound. That pattern is a Population Renewal signal worth watching closely. Metros where price concessions translate into actual household formation are building real capacity for growth. Metros where sales rise, but population stays flat, are just clearing a backlog.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau and HUD, New Residential Sales, July 24, 2026.

Pittsburgh Council approves $50 million Downtown tax-increment plan

Pittsburgh City Council voted 6-3 on July 28 to approve a Transit Revitalization Investment District that will issue bonds against future property tax revenue to fund Downtown redevelopment, including office-to-housing conversions. The initiative launches with $50 million — $40 million for a Downtown real estate investment program and $10 million for transit and public-space projects — and could eventually provide up to $200 million in financing. Allegheny County and Pittsburgh Public Schools still need to sign off. Councilmembers Barb Warwick, Deb Gross, and Khari Mosley voted no, arguing the money should address blight citywide rather than concentrate Downtown.

Why It Matters: This is a clean test of the announce-versus-execute gap. The vote gives Pittsburgh a financing mechanism, not a finished district. Whether TRID becomes a genuine Population Renewal engine depends on execution speed and whether county and school board approval holds, both of which sit squarely in Governance and Foresight territory.

Source: 90.5 WESA, July 28, 2026.

Seattle’s police chief steps down after a chaotic shooting response

A shootout among multiple gunmen at the Bite of Seattle festival on July 26 killed three people, including one of the shooters, and injured four others, including a toddler. In the aftermath, city officials waited roughly five hours to hold a public briefing, never activated the AlertSeattle emergency notification system, and gave shifting accounts of how many suspects were in custody. A 15-year-old was later ordered held in connection with the shooting, and police say a third suspect remains at large. On July 30, Mayor Katie Wilson announced she had accepted Police Chief Shon Barnes’s resignation, four days after the shooting and following sustained criticism of his frequent travel and the department’s handling of the response.

Why It Matters: A city’s crisis communication is as much a Governance and Foresight signal as its long-range planning. AlertSeattle sitting dormant during an actual emergency, and officials giving conflicting public accounts of an active investigation, points to a gap between stated readiness and executed readiness. It’s the same failure mode the Index tracks in slower-moving contexts like budget planning or land use, just compressed into a single weekend.

Source: KOMO News and KING 5, July 26–30, 2026.

Mississippi’s brain drain deepens, even as overall outmigration slows

A Clarion Ledger analysis published July 30 found that nearly half of all Mississippi-born college graduates now live and work outside the state, even as the state’s broader outmigration trend has recently slowed. Demographers and economic development experts quoted in the piece said reversing the trend will take more than headline industrial announcements. It requires aligning education and workforce development with the kind of jobs that keep four-year graduates in the state. They also pointed to strengthening urban centers like Jackson as central to retention, arguing that quality of life and community amenities matter as much as job availability in keeping young, educated residents in place.

Why It Matters: This is a direct Population Renewal gap between what a state’s economic-development dollars target and what would actually change its migration numbers. A state can announce industrial wins every quarter and still hollow out its graduate population if it isn’t also investing in the urban centers and job types that give young, educated workers a reason to stay.

Source: Clarion Ledger, July 30, 2026.

Climate Change

Record rain floods New York’s Capital Region

A slow-moving storm system dropped nearly 12 inches of rain on Schodack, New York, on July 29, shattering regional records and triggering flash flooding across the Albany-Colonie area. Central Avenue, one of the Capital Region’s busiest roads, went underwater; vehicles were stranded and towed. More than 10 million people across the Northeast were under flood alerts as the system pushed into New England, with Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Vermont bracing for the worst of it.

Why It Matters: A storm behaving like a cold-season system in late July, arriving outside the window when infrastructure and forecasting are calibrated for weaker summer events, is exactly the kind of mismatch that strains Climate Resilience scores. Cities built their stormwater systems for a rainfall pattern that no longer holds.

Source: Spectrum News 1, July 29, 2026.

France activates EU emergency aid as Bordeaux wildfire becomes one of its largest since WWII

A wildfire in the Gironde region has burned more than 42,000 hectares near Bordeaux, forcing the evacuation of roughly 250,000 people since it began July 22. France requested activation of the European Union Civil Protection Mechanism on July 24, bringing in water bombers and helicopters from Croatia, Portugal, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. The fire has begun generating its own lightning-producing weather, a phenomenon common in North America and Australia but never before recorded in France.

Why It Matters: The scale here is instructive for American readers even though the geography isn’t. A fire generating its own weather system is a Climate Resilience threshold, not a matter of degree. When cross-border emergency mechanisms activate, it signals that local and even national capacity has been outpaced. American metros with wildfire exposure should read this as a preview of what “beyond local response capacity” looks like in practice.

Source: France 24

Artificial Intelligence

Montgomery County, Maryland passes 18-month data center moratorium

The Montgomery County Council voted unanimously on July 28 to halt new data center permits for 18 months, replacing County Executive Marc Elrich’s six-month executive order pause. A companion zoning measure defines large data centers and blocks any over 25 megawatts from being built in the county until further study. The moratorium puts a $1.4 billion data center project in Dickerson on hold, along with an estimated $758 million in tax revenue over 15 years. Council members said the pause gives them time to study impacts on the electric grid, water supply, and residents’ bills before deciding where, or whether, to allow the facilities.

Why It Matters: Montgomery County chose to forfeit a specific, quantified revenue stream in favor of Ratepayer Protection and Governance and Foresight. That’s a real trade-off, not a symbolic one, and it puts the county in company with New York State’s statewide moratorium as evidence that this is becoming standard governance practice rather than an outlier response.

Source: Montgomery County Council press release and The Banner, July 28, 2026.

Data center backlash becomes a midterm election issue

Data center opposition is showing up directly in 2026 midterm campaigns, with candidates cutting ads on their anti-data center positions and protesters interrupting a Trump economic speech in Michigan on July 27. A June Yale Program on Climate Communication poll found 58 percent of registered voters oppose data center construction in their own area, including a majority of conservative Republicans. More than 300 cities, towns, and counties have enacted bans or moratoriums on hyperscale construction.

Why It Matters: When a Governance and Foresight question stops being a local zoning fight and becomes a ballot-box issue, it signals the public has concluded local and state officials aren’t moving fast enough on their own. That’s a warning sign for any metro still treating data center siting as a routine economic-development decision rather than a live political one.

Source: NBC News, July 29, 2026.

Coordinated cyberattack hits 30-plus Minnesota water systems

A coordinated cyberattack targeted more than 30 municipal water systems across Minnesota on July 27–28, briefly knocking a treatment plant offline in Braham and prompting Plymouth, Maple Plain, and South St. Paul to report attempted breaches of their operating technology. State officials activated a statewide cybersecurity response alongside the FBI. Investigators say the attacks share characteristics with methods previously linked to Iran-aligned actors, though attribution remains preliminary. No contamination or water-quality impact has been reported.

Why It Matters: Automation Readiness usually measures how prepared a metro is to adopt new technology. This incident tests the inverse: how exposed decades-old operational technology becomes once it’s networked at all. A single coordinated attack reaching more than 30 separate systems in two days shows that small and mid-sized utilities, not just major metros, are now inside the same threat perimeter as critical infrastructure anywhere else.

Source: MPR News and CBS Minnesota, July 28–29, 2026.

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For a generation, Baltimore’s national image has been shaped less by its own institutions than by a television show. The Wire aired its final episode in 2008, but the picture it painted — open-air drug corners, a police department out of answers, a city losing a war it couldn’t win — has proven durable. It shows up in how people talk about Baltimore at dinner parties, in how it gets cited in national crime debates, and in how outsiders size up the city sight unseen.

The numbers tell a different story now, and they come from a source with no reason to flatter City Hall.

What the data actually shows

The Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank that has tracked crime trends across dozens of large U.S. cities since 2020, released its mid-year 2026 report in July. Comparing homicide levels in the first half of 2026 to the first half of 2019 — the last full year before the pandemic — the report found Baltimore’s homicide rate down 68%. Among the 30 cities in CCJ’s sample, only Lincoln, Nebraska, and Rochester, New York posted steeper declines over that stretch. Arlington, Texas, matched Baltimore at roughly half.

That’s a meaningful detail on its own: Baltimore’s decline isn’t happening in isolation. It’s part of a broader, if uneven, national pattern. Rochester fell 76%. Arlington fell 50%. Different regions, different city sizes, same underlying signal.

Baltimore’s own police data backs up the national numbers. The city recorded 50 homicides through the first half of 2026, down from 65 in the same period the year before — a year that was already a historic low. The department also reports a 60% homicide clearance rate, which it says outperforms the national average.

Not every metric is moving in the same direction. Non-fatal shootings in the city are up slightly compared to last year, a shift the mayor’s office attributes in part to a single mass-casualty incident in South Baltimore. Motor vehicle theft is also running well above 2019 levels — 30% higher, by CCJ’s count, compared to a 3% decline across the broader sample of cities. Baltimore’s turnaround is real, but it isn’t uniform, and a full accounting has to hold both facts at once.

The strategy behind the numbers

Mayor Brandon Scott has pointed to a specific mechanism behind the homicide decline: the city’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy, an approach that focuses resources on the relatively small number of people most likely to be involved in violence, either as victims or perpetrators, and offers them a documented path away from it. The program now covers roughly 60% of Baltimore’s population after expanding into the Northern District.

CCJ’s researchers are careful not to credit any single policy for the national trend — their report explicitly states it isn’t evidence of the success or failure of any particular strategy. But Baltimore’s specific combination of a below-2019 baseline, a named intervention, and a sustained multi-year decline gives the city a stronger evidentiary claim than most.

Why this matters beyond Baltimore

This is a great example of the Geography of Prosperity Index dimensions of Social Cohesion and Governance and Foresight — not the absence of a difficult past, but the measurable, sustained rebuilding of public safety and civic trust over time. It’s a structural indicator, not a headline. A single good year doesn’t move it. A multi-year decline against a pre-pandemic baseline, backed by an independent national dataset, does.

It also points to something mayors across the country are starting to treat as economic policy rather than a separate public safety concern. Crime reduction isn’t just about making a city feel safer. It changes who moves in, who stays, where businesses invest, and how a city’s reputation ages. Baltimore, Rochester, and Arlington are proof that this shift isn’t limited to one type of city or one region — it’s happening at different scales, in different political environments, for reasons researchers are still working to fully explain.

This piece draws on the Council on Criminal Justice’s Mid-Year 2026 Crime Trends report and Baltimore Police Department mid-year data. It’s part of an ongoing series connecting current events to the dimensions of the Geography of Prosperity Index — the analytical framework behind my forthcoming book, The Geography of Prosperity: A New Map of the American Dream.

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Demographic Change

New residential construction data shows housing starts jumped, but permits pulled back. The Census Bureau and HUD reported June 2026 figures on July 17: housing starts rose 19.0 percent from May to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,427,000, up 3.5 percent from a year earlier. But building permits — the better leading indicator — fell 3.0 percent from May to 1,367,000, with single-family authorizations down 2.4 percent. The gap between a strong starts number and a softening permits number suggests builders are working through an existing backlog rather than committing to new supply.

Why It Matters: Population Renewal depends on housing supply keeping pace with demand. A pipeline that looks strong on completions but weak on new permits is a lagging indicator dressed up as a leading one — the kind of number that looks better in a headline than it will in twelve months of inventory data.

Sources: U.S. Census Bureau and HUD, New Residential Construction, June 2026 (released July 17, 2026).

Foreclosure filings are up sharply nationwide, and the impact isn’t evenly spread. An ABC News analysis of ATTOM data found foreclosure filings rose 21 percent in the first half of 2026 compared to the same period last year, and 28 percent compared to 2024. Filings are up 71 percent since 2020. Florida had the highest average yearly foreclosure rate per ZIP code, followed by New Jersey, Delaware, Nevada, South Carolina, Illinois, California, Maryland, Ohio and Arizona. Majority non-white ZIP codes saw foreclosure rates more than three times the national average. Higher mortgage rates, rising property taxes and insurance costs, and the end of pandemic-era protections are the cited drivers.

Why It Matters: This is the other side of the housing story above. New supply doesn’t help if existing homeowners are losing what they already have, and the unevenness by ZIP code shows Population Renewal isn’t just about growth — it’s about who gets to keep a foothold once they have one.

Sources: U.S. Census Bureau and HUD, New Residential Construction, June 2026 (released July 17, 2026); ABC News/ABC Owned Television Stations analysis of ATTOM data, “Foreclosures on the rise nationwide, data shows” (July 23, 2026).

Climate Change

A second heat dome of the month set records across the northern Rockies and Plains. Montana broke more than 130 daily heat records in mid-July, with one station reaching 116°F on July 13 — a degree short of the state’s all-time record. Death Valley hit 120.9°F on July 15, the hottest reading recorded anywhere in the country this year. Nationally, more than 1,400 daily heat records fell in July through the 19th, on top of 1,035 in June. A confirmed super El Niño is keeping the heat-dome pattern locked in place through the summer.

Why It Matters: Climate Resilience scores capture more than coastal flood risk. Inland heat extremity — especially in places without the cooling infrastructure of denser metros — is becoming a defining variable for where people can reasonably live and work through the summer months.

Flash flooding hit multiple regions in the same week, exposing stormwater systems built for a different climate. West Virginia saw record flooding Tuesday night, with one stream gauge cresting above 10.6 feet. Utah had flash flooding Sunday in a wildfire burn scar. Texas’s Hill Country flooded again, with campers rescued from cabin rooftops. New York City went from heat wave to wildfire-smoke haze to flash flooding within days in mid-July, with water rushing into subway stations. New York’s stormwater system is built to handle up to 1.75 inches of rain per hour — a threshold now being exceeded with increasing frequency. More flash flood emergencies are expected before the month ends as Tropical Storm Bertha interacts with a stalled front over the southern Mid-Atlantic and Carolinas.

Why It Matters: This is a Governance and Foresight problem as much as a weather problem. Stormwater infrastructure sized for a mid-20th-century rainfall model is failing in real time in some of the country’s best-resourced cities, not just its most exposed ones.

Sources: CNN, “July is flash flood emergency season now” (July 23, 2026); NOAA/National Weather Service seasonal heat record data.

Artificial Intelligence

New York City’s new in-house tech teams drew 2,800 applicants in their first week. Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Chief Technology Officer Lisa Gelobter launched the Public Interest Technology (PIT) Crew initiative on July 13, embedding small teams of technologists directly inside city agencies to build digital tools quickly rather than relying on outside contractors. The first crew is working with the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection to build a portal enforcing the city’s new “Click to Cancel” subscription rules. The city plans to hire 30 full-time staff across four crews on $5.24 million in baselined funding, with a fifth crew backed by the Rockefeller Foundation. As of late July, roughly 2,800 people had applied, an early signal of interest ahead of the first crew’s real-world test.

Why It Matters: Governance and Foresight isn’t only about regulating outside technology — it’s also about whether a city can build its own. New York is testing an in-house model at the same moment the state is pausing large-scale data center permitting, two different bets on how much technical capacity government should hold directly.

Gov. Hochul explained her reasoning behind New York’s data center moratorium in a new interview. Nine days after signing the executive order pausing state permits for hyperscale data centers (50+ megawatts) for up to a year, Hochul told NBC News that tech companies “are flooding the zone” with construction faster than states and localities can manage. She said the decision followed requests from local governments seeking help managing the buildout. The order, the first statewide moratorium of its kind, also directs state regulators to build a new environmental review framework and community investment structure during the pause.

Why It Matters: Automation Readiness isn’t just about whether a metro can plug into the AI economy — it’s about whether governance can move at the same speed as the buildout. Hochul’s framing puts the burden explicitly on the state to catch up, rather than on localities to accommodate.

Sources: NBC News, “New York Gov. Kathy Hochul explains why she signed the first statewide moratorium on data centers” (July 23, 2026).

The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that. Reach out today to learn more.

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Seven airports made the 2026 Prix Versailles World’s Most Beautiful Airports list, unveiled in Paris in mid-June. The judging panel picked terminals in China, Germany, India, and Cambodia alongside two in the United States: Pittsburgh International and San Diego International’s new Terminal 1. No other North American airport made the cut.

The prize, awarded annually by an architecture jury affiliated with UNESCO, doesn’t just reward good looks. Judges said the winning terminals manage to move large volumes of travelers quickly while still feeling distinct to their places, rather than reading as generic transit infrastructure. Airports, the jury’s secretary general argued, have become fixtures of their regions in a way that goes beyond function. They shape how cities present themselves to the world.

Pittsburgh Builds a Mountain

Pittsburgh’s new terminal takes its shape directly from the surrounding landscape. The roofline rolls and folds like the Allegheny Mountains, and inside, 38 steel columns branch upward and outward, forming what amounts to a man-made forest spread across the building. Gensler and HDR designed the terminal with Luis Vidal + Architects, drawing on western Pennsylvania’s wooded terrain while also trying to shorten the long walks that plague many large American airports. Glass walls bring daylight deep into the interior, and four outdoor terraces are planned to let passengers step outside.

The terminal also carries a piece of local infrastructure into its layout. Travelers pass through a “tunnel,” reminiscent of the Fort Pitt Tunnel, that leads them from darkness into a sudden view of the Pittsburgh skyline, echoing the moment drivers experience upon entering the city.

San Diego Opens Up the Coast

San Diego’s Terminal 1 makes its case with a single dominant gesture: an 800-foot wall of curved glass that runs the length of the building. Gensler designed the terminal with artist and architect James Carpenter, and the facade serves a dual purpose. It floods the departure hall with Southern California’s light without turning the space into a greenhouse, filtering glare and heat while keeping the interior bright. An unconventional structural system let designers strip out many of the columns that typically clutter an airport ticketing hall, opening up the floor plan and helping cut the building’s carbon footprint by 30 percent.

The redesign extended beyond the terminal itself, reshaping the roads, parking, and public transit connections around what is the busiest single-runway airport in the country.

The Company They’re Keeping

The other five winners lean hard on nature and cultural symbolism: a flower-shaped terminal in Guangzhou built around Lingnan garden traditions, a bamboo-inspired “sky forest” in Guwahati modeled on the region’s orchids, a lotus-canopy terminal outside Mumbai by Zaha Hadid Architects, a Foster + Partners terminal in Cambodia with a basketry-patterned roof and living rumduol trees growing through the concourse, and a modular, plaza-like expansion at Frankfurt Airport built around rotating aluminum-disc sculptures.

Set against that group, Pittsburgh and San Diego stand out less for spectacle and more for restraint. Both terminals lean on a single strong architectural idea, mountains in one case and coastal light in the other, rather than layering in the multiple cultural references some of the international winners use. Both also replaced aging, decades-old facilities, which means the recognition is arriving at the exact moment each city has something genuinely new to show for the investment.

The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that.

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This week: Missouri signs legislation to convert vacant downtown buildings into housing, and Cleveland’s lakefront redevelopment gets an unconventional anchor. Central Texas floods again, a year after last summer’s deadly disaster, while Missouri recovers from its own historic flash flood and a second heat dome pushes the PJM grid toward record demand. And on AI infrastructure, New York becomes the first state to freeze new data center development statewide, even as small towns from Wisconsin to Indiana pass their own local pauses.

Demographic Change

Missouri signs legislation to convert vacant downtown buildings into housing

Governor Mike Kehoe signed House Bill 3231 on July 13, creating a new “Missouri innovation zone” designation that lets cities apply for state tax incentives to convert vacant or underused downtown properties into housing. Cities must identify specific underutilized buildings, define district boundaries, and project housing and employment growth in their applications; each city may establish only one zone. The legislation makes up to $50 million in tax credits available annually for residential conversions. In St. Louis, officials have pointed to the AT&T tower and the Railway Exchange Building as likely candidates.

Why It Matters: This is Population Renewal policy written directly into state law rather than left to individual city budgets. St. Louis has spent years announcing downtown revitalization ambitions; a dedicated state tax credit is the kind of execution mechanism that separates a stated goal from a fundable one.

Sources: St. Louis Public Radio, July 13, 2026.

Cleveland’s lakefront master plan gets an unconventional public art anchor

Brooklyn-based art collective MSCHF, known for viral internet stunts, has been tapped to design a public gathering space for Cleveland’s lakefront redevelopment, encircled by 250 bronze statues depicting real Americans from across the country. The installation is part of a broader lakefront master plan from the North Coast Waterfront Development Corporation, with complete planning documents due in October. It anchors a larger transformation: after 2029, when Huntington Bank Field closes to major events, the stadium will be razed to make way for new lakefront uses.

Why It Matters: Placemaking investment is a slower-moving but real signal for Population Renewal. A public realm built to draw visitors from outside the region, timed to a multi-year stadium transition, is Cleveland's bet on identity and civic appeal as part of its long-term growth case, not just housing supply.

Sources: Crain’s Cleveland Business, July 15, 2026; NEOtrans, July 11, 2026.

Climate Change

Central Texas floods again, a year after the deadly 2025 Hill Country disaster

Flash floods struck Central Texas this week, with the Guadalupe River rising more than 30 feet in three hours near Comfort on July 16. Governor Greg Abbott issued a disaster declaration for 59 counties, and Texas Game Wardens reported more than 40 rescues involving people trapped in vehicles and flooded homes. The flooding comes almost exactly one year after the July 2025 Hill Country floods that killed more than 130 people, including 25 girls and two counselors at Camp Mystic, and struck some of the same communities, including Kerrville and Kerr County.

Why It Matters: A region flooding again at this scale within a year is the sharpest possible test of whether Climate Resilience investments made after a disaster actually change outcomes the next time. The Index treats repeat exposure as a distinct risk category from first-time exposure, precisely because recovery spending and warning systems either hold up under a second event or they don’t.

Sources: CNN, July 13, 2026; NPR, July 16, 2026; KSAT, July 16, 2026.

A 1-in-1,000-year flood devastates Missouri’s Black River region, killing one and prompting hundreds of rescues

Governor Mike Kehoe declared a state of emergency on July 10 after storms dropped up to 12 inches of rain in hours across central, south-central, and southeastern Missouri. The Black River in Iron and Reynolds counties broke its all-time record crest, and more than 350 water rescues were carried out, including some 200 children evacuated by helicopter from a flooded summer camp near Lesterville. One woman died in the flooding.

Why It Matters: A flood this rare hitting a rural river region rather than a major metro is a reminder that Climate Resilience isn’t only a big-city concern. Missouri’s emergency response capacity, and the state’s ability to fund recovery in low-density counties, is exactly the kind of governance stress test the Index is built to track outside the largest metros.

Sources: ABC News, July 10, 2026; AccuWeather, July 13, 2026; Office of Governor Mike Kehoe, July 10, 2026.

Second heat dome of the summer pushes PJM grid toward record demand

A second major heat wave formed over the eastern and central United States in mid-July, following the heat dome that disrupted July Fourth celebrations two weeks earlier. Temperatures climbed into triple digits again across the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest, and grid operator PJM Interconnection, which serves 67 million people across 13 states and Washington, D.C., faced renewed strain after already breaking its 20-year-old summer peak demand record during the first heat wave.

Why It Matters: Back-to-back heat domes in the same month are exactly the kind of repeat-stress scenario the Climate Resilience dimension is built to catch. A grid that survives one emergency order is not the same as a grid built to absorb two in a single summer.

Sources: ABC News, July 2026; Electric Choice, July 2026.

Milwaukee records its worst air quality in city history

Milwaukee measured an air quality index of 644 on July 16, more than double the previous record of 300 set in 1987, as smoke from roughly 858 active wildfires in Canada settled over the city. New York State issued a statewide air quality advisory the same day, and Detroit and Chicago also ranked among the world’s most polluted cities on July 16, according to IQAir’s global monitoring.

Why It Matters: Milwaukee is exactly the kind of second-tier metro the Index is built to track: a city whose Climate Resilience score depends on infrastructure and public health systems built for local risk, not imported smoke from another country.

Sources: Deseret News, July 16, 2026; Spectrum News, July 16, 2026; CNN, July 14, 2026.

Artificial Intelligence

New York becomes first state to enact a statewide AI data center moratorium

New York has enacted the first statewide moratorium on new AI data center development in the country, a sharp departure from the local and county-level restrictions that have defined the regulatory response to data center growth so far. Governor Kathy Hochul has also signaled plans to pursue repeal of the state’s sales tax exemption for large data centers, which would raise construction costs for projects already underway. Six other states, including Minnesota, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, are weighing similar legislation.

Why It Matters: This is a Governance and Foresight story before it is an Automation Readiness story. A state moving first, rather than waiting for federal direction or watching municipalities absorb the fight one zoning board at a time, is itself a signal about administrative capacity.

Sources: Foley & Lardner LLP, July 15, 2026.

Small towns from Wisconsin to Indiana pass their own data center pauses

Separately from New York’s statewide action, a wave of local governments moved on data centers this week, mostly in places with no project actually proposed. Oshkosh, Wisconsin’s Common Council advanced a pause on data center construction and directed staff to draft a formal moratorium ordinance, citing concerns about water usage and utility rates. Indianapolis’s City-County Council advanced a moratorium on new data center approvals through the end of 2027. Broken Bow, Nebraska, approved a six-month pause to give officials time to draft formal regulations, and Wausau, Wisconsin, passed zoning rules that confine data centers to industrial areas.

Why It Matters: These towns are legislating ahead of demand, not in response to it. That is Governance and Foresight in its purest form, and it also reflects Ratepayer Protection anxiety, since utility cost and water usage are the recurring concerns driving these votes, well ahead of any specific project.

Sources: Data Centers: Daily Notes, July 13–15, 2026 editions.

The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that. Reach out today to learn more.

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CNBC just published its list of America’s 10 worst states to live in for 2026. It includes Tennessee, Texas, Indiana, Louisiana, Georgia, Utah, Missouri, Alabama, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. The ranking comes from the Quality of Life category in CNBC’s annual America’s Top States for Business study, which now accounts for 11.6% of a state’s overall score, up from roughly 10% the year before.

Tennessee took the top spot, posting the lowest Quality of Life score of any state in the country. Texas landed at number two, largely dragged down by health care access — the state has the highest rate of uninsured residents in the nation, more than twice the national average, and finishes dead last in primary care physicians per capita. Utah, despite its reputation for natural beauty and a hardworking culture, ranked 47th for primary care providers and has a state minimum wage that covers less than a fifth of the cost of living for a family of four. Missouri’s placement traces back to violent crime rates that rank among the highest in the country. Oklahoma’s stems partly from one of the strictest abortion bans in the nation, a policy that research from the National Bureau of Economic Research has linked to increased outward migration, particularly among single adults.

It’s a useful list. It is also, I’d argue, asking the wrong question.

The contradiction

The ranking doesn’t mention that nearly every state on that list is also among the fastest-growing states in the country. People are moving to Texas, Tennessee, Georgia, and Utah in large numbers, in some cases faster than in almost any other state in America. Florida’s governor picked up on exactly this point when he called the CNBC ranking “nonsense,” arguing that Tennessee couldn’t really be the worst place to live if people are moving there in droves.

He’s not wrong that there’s a contradiction. He’s wrong about what it means.

Growth and livability are not the same thing, and most rankings — CNBC’s included — only measure one of them. A place can have poor quality of life by today’s metrics and still attract enormous numbers of new residents, because people respond to the cost of living, job availability, or housing supply, not to a composite score built from crime data and health care access. Those are different signals, and conflating them is how you end up with headlines that talk past each other instead of a real picture of where a place is headed.

Why the growth story doesn’t settle the question

I’ve watched this play out on the ground, reporting for my forthcoming book, The Geography of Prosperity: A New Map of the American Dream. Houston is a perfect example. The city has spent years paving over the wetlands that once buffered it from flooding, largely in service of growth. The result is that storms that used to be minor inconveniences now produce catastrophic flooding. That’s a resilience failure that compounds over time.

The same pattern shows up in fast-growing cultural capitals. Austin and Nashville have both absorbed population growth at a pace that’s measurably changed the character of each place — the eccentricity that made Austin “weird,” the music-city identity that defined Nashville. Rapid in-migration, on its own, tends to fray the social cohesion that made a place desirable in the first place. That’s a structural dynamic, and it’s invisible to a ranking based on this year’s crime rate or air quality index.

A different question

This is the gap that the Geography of Prosperity Index was built to close. Rather than asking whether a place is a good place to live today, the Index asks whether it is structurally positioned to continue thriving twenty or thirty years from now. Working with Jaymes Cloninger and the team at Motivf, I scored 250 U.S. metro areas across five dimensions: Population Renewal, Climate Resilience, Automation Readiness, Social Cohesion, and Governance & Foresight.

Population growth, or as we call it, renewal, is one of five inputs —not the whole story—and it’s evaluated for durability, not just volume. A metro that’s growing fast but hollowing out its climate buffers or straining its civic infrastructure can score well on migration and poorly on the dimensions that predict whether that growth is sustainable. That’s a very different picture than a state-level quality-of-life snapshot can offer, and it’s a more useful one if you’re trying to answer the question people actually care about: not just where is good right now, but where will still be good.

CNBC’s list tells you where people are least satisfied today. The fastest-growing-states data tells you where people are moving anyway. Neither one, on its own, tells you which of those places will still be worth living in a generation from now. That’s the question the Index is built to answer.

The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that.

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A Note From Me

I turned in the manuscript for The Geography of Prosperity to my editor at MIT Press this week.

That starts a long process, which includes peer review, editing, layout, and marketing. It could take a year (or more) before the book is in your hands. But I wanted you to know, because so many of you have shaped this work through your comments, your city nominations, and your pushback when I got something wrong.

This doesn’t mean the work is done. In fact, it’s just beginning. I’m going to keep traveling around the country, meeting with local leaders and residents, trying to understand what’s actually happening in the places you live. I’ll continue to share the best practices and innovations that are taking hold in the local laboratories of civic innovation. If you think I should visit your city, drop a comment below and tell me why.

I’m also starting to book speaking engagements for late 2026 through next year, so please reach out if you’d like me to join your event.

Bradley

Demographic Change

U.S. population growth slows to a near-record low as World Population Day arrives. The Census Bureau’s Vintage 2025 estimates, expanded on ahead of the July 11 UN observance, show net international migration falling from 2.7 million in 2024 to 1.3 million in 2025, with a projected further drop to roughly 321,000 in 2026. Population growth between July 2024 and July 2025 came to just 1.8 million people, or 0.5%, the slowest pace since the early pandemic. That 321,000 figure for 2026 would mark the fewest immigrants in more than 60 years outside of 2020’s pandemic border closures. Thirty-one states still posted positive domestic migration, with South Carolina, Idaho, and North Carolina leading growth rates nationally, even as several Northeastern and Midwestern states stayed afloat only because of immigration.

Why It Matters: This is Population Renewal in its rawest form — the engine of civic vitality running on far less fuel than it did two years ago. Metros that built their growth models around immigration now have a narrower runway. The Index’s Population Renewal dimension was designed to flag exactly this kind of structural exposure before it shows up in a city’s tax base.

New York City launches an interactive map of who speaks what language, and where. The Department of City Planning’s new Language Explorer draws on Census American Community Survey data to show language proficiency at the borough and community-district level. The tool found that roughly 1.8 million New Yorkers have limited English proficiency, with Spanish the most common non-English language citywide, and nearly 23 percent of Brooklyn residents over age 5 reporting limited English proficiency. City Planning director Sideya Sherman framed the tool as a way to support more responsive planning, outreach, and services across the five boroughs.

Why It Matters: This is civic innovation working exactly as the Index’s Governance and Foresight dimension rewards — a city turning open data into a tool that makes its own services more responsive to who actually lives there. Population Renewal isn’t just about growth rates; it’s about whether a city’s institutions can see and serve the population it already has.

New Orleans approves tax breaks for a $100 million affordable housing complex. The City Council voted 6-1 on July 9 to approve a payment-in-lieu-of-taxes deal worth an estimated $33 million over 40 years, clearing the way for the 220-unit Rivana apartments in the city’s River District. All units will be affordable to households earning up to 80% of area median income, with developers pitching the project as workforce housing for the convention and tourism economy next door. Council President JP Morrell cast the lone dissenting vote, questioning why residents should subsidize a project with no guarantee that displaced locals get priority as applicants.

Why It Matters: Population Renewal depends on whether the workers a local economy relies on can actually afford to live near their jobs. This is the announce-vs-execute tension playing out in a single vote — a headline investment paired with a real, unresolved question about who it’s actually built for.

Climate Change

A new heat dome is building over the West, aimed at the Midwest by this weekend. The heat dome is forecast to expand into much of the Midwest next week, with Minneapolis, Chicago, and Kansas City potentially seeing their highest temperatures of the year, 10 to 20 degrees above the historical average for mid-July. The heat may push into the mid-Atlantic and even the Southeast by mid-July, arriving barely a week after the July 4th heat dome that strained the PJM grid. This is the second major heat dome of the summer to threaten the same corridor.

Why It Matters: Climate Resilience isn’t tested by one bad week — it’s tested by long-term exposure and the ability to respond. Back-to-back heat domes are the stress test the Index is built to score.

A wildfire in southern Spain kills at least 12 people amid extreme heat. The fast-moving wildfire near Los Gallardos in Almería broke out July 9 and killed at least 12 people, injured eight, and left 19 missing as firefighters worked through steep terrain and strong winds. Andalusia’s emergency chief said the deaths occurred when residents tried to flee by car or on foot rather than sheltering in place. The fire follows Copernicus’s confirmation that June 2026 was the hottest June on record for western Europe.

Why It Matters: Climate Resilience scoring increasingly has to account for evacuation behavior, not just infrastructure hardening. A fire that outruns official guidance is a governance failure as much as a weather event.

New York City inspected barely a fifth of its cooling towers this year, as a Legionnaires’ cluster emerges. A Gothamist analysis of city data found NYC inspected only 1,306 of the nearly 6,000 cooling towers in the city in the first half of 2026, as a new Legionnaires’ disease cluster emerged on the Upper East Side. As of April 17, more than half of the city’s cooling towers had gone over a year without a city inspection.

Why It Matters: This is Ratepayer Protection and Governance and Foresight colliding directly. Cooling towers are the infrastructure that’s supposed to make extreme heat survivable at scale — the same heat the rest of this beat is tracking. An inspection backlog discovered mid-outbreak is the announce-vs-execute gap in its most literal form.

Artificial Intelligence

New York’s governor turns AI loose on the state’s own law books. Governor Hochul’s Regulatory Reset initiative, built with civic tech group Recoding America and Stanford University, uses AI to scan 18 million words of New York state law for outdated requirements — fee schedules, notary rules, defunct task forces — for state agencies to eliminate or modernize, with humans still deciding what actually changes.

Why It Matters: Governance and Foresight usually gets scored on how a place regulates AI. This story flips it: a government using AI to audit and modernize itself is a foresight signal in its own right, and one most metros in the Index haven’t attempted.

Illinois signs the nation’s strictest AI safety law. Governor Pritzker signed the Artificial Intelligence Safety Measures Act on July 6, requiring the largest AI developers to publicly disclose safety practices, report significant incidents, and undergo independent audits. The law is modeled on similar legislation in California and New York, and lawmakers estimate the three states together account for roughly 40% of the U.S. AI market, effectively setting a national standard without federal action. Illinois’s version adds a first-in-the-nation requirement for mandatory annual third-party audits.

Why It Matters: Automation Readiness in the Index isn’t just about adoption speed — it’s about whether a place has built guardrails before the technology outruns them. Illinois just moved from follower to leader on that dimension in a single signing ceremony.

The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that. Reach out today to learn more.

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Demographic Change

The Supreme Court kept the citizenship clause intact. On June 30, the Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees citizenship to nearly all people born on U.S. soil, rejecting the administration’s executive order that sought to end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented or temporary-status parents. The ruling reaffirms more than a century of precedent.

Why It Matters: This is a Population Renewal story about the rules of the game staying fixed. Population Renewal measures whether a place can replenish and grow its base over time, and that calculation depends on citizenship being a known, stable quantity. A ruling that had gone the other way would have injected uncertainty into who counts as a resident, a worker, a taxpayer, a future adult, for millions of families already living in these places.

America turns 250, and the Census Bureau is keeping count. As the country marks its 250th birthday on July 4, the Census Bureau’s new Freedom 250 Project used the occasion to look back at 250 years of population counting (and growing), starting with the first census in 1790, which took 18 months and counted just under 3.9 million people — today, the U.S. is nearly 10 times that size. The project frames the agency’s work as more than a headcount: it’s the record of how one generation’s America became another’s, tracking growth, movement, and change since the founding.

Why It Matters: This is Population Renewal in action over time. The United States has never struggled to count itself. What it struggles with now, for the first time in history, is the ability to grow its population, as birth rates crater and immigration slows to a trickle.

Source: Nextgov/FCW and Government Executive, “America at 250: What the Census reveals about our journey,” July 1, 2026.

Climate Change

A holiday-weekend heat dome forced the grid’s hand. A severe heat wave broke records from Washington, D.C., to Boston over the Independence Day weekend, with cities including Philadelphia and Raleigh opening cooling centers and New York deploying mobile medical vans. The Department of Energy issued two emergency orders authorizing PJM (Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland Interconnection) Interconnection — a Regional Transmission Organization (RTO) that coordinates the movement of wholesale electricity in all or parts of 13 U.S. states (DE, IL, IN, KY, MD, MI, NJ, NC, OH, PA, TN, VA, WV) and Washington, D.C — to curtail data centers and to waive power plant pollution limits, effective through July 3. PJM forecast demand approaching 166,000 megawatts, which would top the grid’s all-time record set in 2006.

Why It Matters: This is a Climate Resilience story about margin. The gap between a normal hot week and a grid emergency turned out to be a few degrees and one holiday weekend. Cities that scored well on climate readiness still had to open cooling centers and beg residents to set their thermostats to 78.

Source: CNN, “Heat records broken from DC to Boston, more to come Friday,” July 2, 2026; Electric Choice, “PJM Emergency Orders: Heat Wave Threatens Record Demand,” July 2026.

Heat and drought turned fireworks into a fire risk. Large parts of the West and Great Plains are in extreme or exceptional drought heading into the July 4th weekend, with the national wildfire outlook showing above-normal risk continuing into July across much of the West and Texas. Research cited in the coverage found that 42 percent of all land burned in the West from 2001 to 2024 occurred during or immediately after a heat wave, and that fireworks alone start roughly 32,000 fires a year nationally.

Why It Matters: This is Climate Resilience compounding with itself. Heat, drought, and a national tradition of setting off explosives outdoors are three separate variables that all point the same direction this week. Places that scored well on Climate Resilience mostly did so on longer-term structural measures, not on whether this particular week’s conditions happened to overlap this way.

Artificial Intelligence

The AI buildout just got its first real stress test. The same DOE emergency orders required transmission owners to direct data centers and other large energy users with at least 50 megawatts of peak load to switch to backup generators within 15 minutes of an emergency signal, freeing grid capacity for homes and businesses. The order is the first real-world trigger of commitments data center operators made back in March, when several signed a voluntary pledge to cover the cost of new power generation and coordinate with grid operators during emergencies.

Why It Matters: This is a Governance and Foresight test, not a technology one. Voluntary pledges are cheap to sign in March and expensive to keep in July. Whether AI infrastructure actually yields capacity when a grid operator asks, on the timeline it promised, is the difference between a policy announcement and a working system.

Source: Electric Choice, “PJM Emergency Orders: Heat Wave Threatens Record Demand,” July 2026.

AI-led job cuts for a fourth straight month. Challenger, Gray & Christmas’s June report, released July 1, found that Artificial Intelligence was cited as the leading reason for job cuts for the fourth consecutive month, accounting for 31 percent of June’s cuts. Technology led all sectors with 15,503 cuts in June, bringing the sector’s 2026 total to 139,156, up 83 percent from the same point last year. AI has now been cited in over 101,000 job cut announcements this year, about 23 percent of the total.

Why It Matters: An Automation Readiness story about who absorbs the transition. The metros with strong tech sector concentration are the ones most exposed to this restructuring. Automation Readiness measures whether a place’s workforce and institutions can adapt when this happens, not whether the disruption itself can be avoided.

The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that. Reach out today to learn more.

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In 2019, Minneapolis did something no major American city had done. It got rid of single-family-only zoning across the whole city, so duplexes and triplexes could go up on lots that had held one house apiece for a century. The plan behind the change, Minneapolis 2040, became a national model. Pew later pointed to it as an example for other cities. The press wrote it up as a clean before-and-after: the city that broke the zoning that had broken American housing.

That was the announcement. Making it stick took six more years, two court orders to stop, a near-total unwinding by a judge, and an act of the state legislature. The gap between those two things, the headline and the work it takes to back it up, is the more useful story, and it’s the one Minneapolis can teach.

I spent several days in the city recently, including a long talk with Mayor Jacob Frey, who backed the 2040 Plan before it passed and then had to defend it. He says the zoning fight is what pulled him into politics. “My passion, when I decided that I wanted to get involved in politics, was a very specific thing,” he told me. “It was desegregation. It was allowing for beautifully diverse neighborhoods, putting affordable housing in middle- and upper-income neighborhoods, which everybody’s for, until you start talking about putting it in the vicinity of where they live, and then suddenly there’s pushback.”

What the announcement actually was

It’s worth being clear about what Minneapolis changed, because the famous part and the part that worked weren’t the same.

The reforms came in pieces. Starting in 2009, the city cut parking minimums, first downtown, then near transit in 2015, then everywhere in 2021, when the council dropped them entirely. The 2040 Plan, which took effect in 2020, did the bigger job. It ended single-family-only zoning, allowed two- and three-unit buildings on residential lots citywide, made room for apartments along transit and commercial streets, and set minimum building heights in the densest areas to push for more units where demand was highest.

The supply numbers are good. From 2017 to 2022, Minneapolis grew its housing stock by 12 percent while rents rose just 1 percent. Over the same years, the rest of Minnesota added 4 percent to its supply and saw rents climb 14 percent (Pew Charitable Trusts, January 2024). Frey returns to this contrast often and to the strategy behind it. “We’re subsidizing deeply affordable housing while also boosting overall housing supply, whether market-rate or affordable,” he said, describing a two-part approach: build subsidized units at the bottom, let the market add supply on top.

But look closer. Of the roughly 21,000 units permitted from 2017 to 2022, Pew estimates 87 percent were in buildings of 20 units or more, and just 1 percent were in the two- to four-unit buildings that ending single-family zoning was meant to unlock. The Minneapolis Fed, looking through 2025, counted only about 362 units in two-, three-, and four-unit buildings since the plan passed in 2019, roughly 2 percent of all permits. That’s a small number, though a real change. What actually moved the needle was the quieter stuff: rezoning the corridors and dropping the parking minimums.

Then the foundation got tested

Here’s the part most of the national coverage skipped. Almost as soon as the plan passed, it went to court, and for years it was losing.

A group of environmental organizations, led by Smart Growth Minneapolis, sued under the Minnesota Environmental Rights Act. They argued the city had to study the environmental effects of all that new density first. In 2021, the Minnesota Supreme Court let the suit go forward, a surprising call that a city’s comprehensive plan, a broad guiding document, could be challenged like a single construction project. In 2022, a Hennepin County judge stopped the plan. In September 2023, the same judge ordered the city back to its old 2030 plan, the one with single-family zoning still in place. For a while, the most famous housing reform in the country was dead on paper.

The city’s statements from that time read nothing like the upbeat Pew summaries. After the 2023 ruling, Frey’s office said it was “extremely disappointed” and tied the city’s affordability record straight to the plan being struck down. The reform the rest of the country had marked down as a win was, at home, barely holding on.

What saved it wasn’t a court win. It was the legislature. In 2024, state lawmakers passed a measure exempting city comprehensive plans from environmental review under the act, which covered the Twin Cities’ plans, including 2040. In January 2025, citing the new law, a judge threw the case out. “The plan is in place and effective now,” Frey said then, “and this allows us to continue our deeply important work around helping to desegregate our city” (Star Tribune, January 2025).

Look at that whole run. The announcement was one vote in 2019. Making it hold meant taking a state Supreme Court loss, a reversion order, and years in limbo, then getting a state law changed, all while still issuing permits under a policy that might get tossed. Keeping a hard-won policy alive through that isn’t the thing cities run on. But it’s what decides whether the promise turns into anything.

Execution has a second meaning, too

There’s a quieter problem still running, and it has nothing to do with courts. Even with the reform safe, Minneapolis hasn’t built much lately. Permitting and construction have fallen hard since the 2022 peak, dragged down by high interest rates, expensive construction and insurance, and, some locals say, investors spooked by the rent-control fights in the Twin Cities. The Minneapolis Fed has also been careful to note that the city’s flat rents may have as much to do with a 2020 drop in demand as with new supply, and that the two are hard to pull apart.

So the city is in an odd spot. It won the policy battle, and the building slowed anyway, mostly for reasons city hall can’t control. That’s not a knock on the reform. It’s just a reminder that a city sets the rules, not the conditions, and that “we changed the zoning” and “the homes got built” are two different things, with a lot of economics in between.

Frey himself talks about the city’s edge as a matter of foresight more than of any one policy. He spent a while on Minneapolis’s old habit of guarding its public space, the independent park board, and the ring of lakes kept in public hands, as proof of a place that plans for things it can’t yet see. “Having the foresight and the flexibility when that comes,” he said, talking about everything from self-driving cars to climate migration, “I think is going to be really important.” It’s a telling thing to value, from the mayor of a city whose biggest housing win came down to the same question: whether the foundation could hold what had already been announced.

The blueprint, reread

Minneapolis belongs on the short list of cities that proved supply-side zoning reform can work. The Geography of Prosperity Index puts the Minneapolis–St. Paul urban area at 15th in the country, a ranking Frey brought up himself, with some pride, while we talked, and the city earns it.

But the part other cities should copy isn’t “pass the bold thing.” Plenty of places can pass a bold thing. The part worth copying is everything after 2019: sticking with it through a six-year legal siege, getting state law changed when the courts rule against them, and being honest that the famous reform and the one that worked necessarily the same thing. The Index doesn’t reward cities for making news. It looks at whether they can carry the weight once the news arrives. Minneapolis announced in 2019. It’s still building.

Sources: Pew Charitable Trusts, “Minneapolis Land Use Reforms Offer a Blueprint for Housing Affordability,” January 2024; City of Minneapolis, Office of the Mayor, “Affordable Housing”; Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, “Unpacking supply and demand in rent trends since the Minneapolis 2040 Plan,” August 2025, and “Housing policies in Saint Paul yield mixed results,” 2026; Star Tribune coverage of the 2040 Plan litigation, 2023–2025; MinnPost and Minnesota Reformer on the 2024 legislative fix; author interview with Mayor Jacob Frey, June 2026.

The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that.

Everything you need is here

DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE

Congress Passes the Largest Housing Bill in a Generation — Then the Signing Stalls

In a rare burst of bipartisanship, the House passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act 358-32 on Tuesday after the Senate approved it 85-5 the day before. Led by Senators Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren and Representatives French Hill and Maxine Waters, the package bundles more than 50 provisions to remove barriers to building, lower costs, shift more control to the local level, and limit large institutional investors from buying single-family homes — the most significant housing legislation since the Cranston-Gonzalez National Affordable Housing Act of 1990. Then the execution wobbled: on June 24, President Trump abruptly canceled the signing ceremony, saying he wouldn’t sign unless Congress passed a separate voter-ID bill.

Why It Matters: This is announce-versus-execute written into federal law. Washington’s leverage over housing is real but limited — local governments and private builders hold most of the controls, and the bill leans on incentives, tying federal dollars to places that actually build and pulling them from places that don’t. Whether it moves the needle on Population Renewal depends entirely on what cities do with it. A statute is a signal of intent; a permitted, occupied home is the outcome. The gap between the two is exactly where the Index looks.

Source: “Congress passes the largest housing affordability bill in decades — and Trump cancels the signing,” NPR, June 23, 2026 (updated June 24); “Inside the Deal: What’s in the Final 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act,” Bipartisan Policy Center, June 24, 2026.

Immigration’s Retreat Keeps Reshaping the Metro Map

The demographic backdrop to the housing debate hardened this spring and keeps setting the terms. Census Bureau Vintage 2025 estimates show net international migration fell from 2.7 million to 1.3 million between July 2024 and June 2025, with the Bureau projecting roughly 321,000 by July 2026. Brookings notes that major metros — New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, Miami, Boston — have leaned on international migration to maintain or grow their populations, and several now face the prospect of renewed decline without it.

Why It Matters: Build all the housing you want; you still need people to fill it. Population Renewal isn’t only a supply story — it’s a question of who arrives, who stays, and who ages in place. For metros whose recent growth was carried almost entirely by foreign arrivals, a new housing law and a shrinking inflow pull in opposite directions. The places that fare best will be the ones whose renewal doesn’t depend on a single source.

Source: “U.S. Population Growth Slows Due to Historic Decline in Net International Migration,” U.S. Census Bureau (Vintage 2025); William H. Frey, Brookings Metro.

CLIMATE CHANGE

A Double Heat Dome Tests the Center of the Country

Two high-pressure systems are converging into what forecasters describe as the first widespread, significant heat wave of 2026 for much of the South and Midwest. The ridge builds over Texas and neighboring states on Saturday, June 26, shifts its hottest core over the Midwest by Tuesday, June 30, and expands westward by the Fourth of July. St. Louis may see eight straight days at or above 90°F and Chicago at least five, with AccuWeather RealFeel temperatures near or above 100°F during peak afternoon hours. Unlike the desert-Southwest records earlier this year, this event targets metros that haven’t yet faced prolonged extreme heat this season.

Why It Matters: Heat is the cleanest test of Climate Resilience there is, because it exposes the gap between a metro’s averages and its margins. A city’s cooling capacity, grid headroom, tree canopy, and emergency coordination don’t show up in GDP or job growth — they show up at 4 p.m. on the eighth consecutive 95-degree day, when overnight lows never drop enough to let the urban core recover. The cities that absorb this week quietly are the ones that invested in systems before they needed them. The ones that make headlines are usually the ones that didn’t.

Source: “Double heat dome coming to US: Here’s when it’ll start, where it’ll be worst,” The Hill, June 25, 2026; “Massive Midwest heat dome brewing prior to Independence Day,” AccuWeather, updated June 25, 2026.

Wildfire Season Is Already Running Ahead of Schedule

While the East bakes, the interior West burns. As of Thursday, June 25, there have been 35,118 wildfires across the U.S., burning 2.9 million acres — exceeding the recent 10-year average for both fires and acreage. Smoke from large Great Basin fires has been drifting east across the Rockies toward Front Range cities, with the potential to carry a thousand miles or more across the Plains and eastern U.S.

Why It Matters: Wildfire smoke turns a regional hazard into a national one, and it scrambles the usual geography of climate risk. A metro can sit far from any fire line and still absorb the public-health burden through its air. That’s a Climate Resilience problem that no single city can solve alone — which is precisely why it’s also a Governance and Foresight problem, testing whether regional and federal coordination still functions as the load grows.

Source: “’Extreme’ weather conditions could fuel erratic wildfires in western US,” AccuWeather, updated June 26, 2026.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Cities Keep Hitting Pause on the Infrastructure of AI

The physical footprint of AI keeps colliding with local governance. In the last two weeks, council after council has moved on data-center rules: Nashville’s Metro Council advanced a moratorium, while Clinton, Iowa voted one down 5-2 rather than signal it was “closed for business” to a proposed $10 billion, 5-million-square-foot QTS facility. Meanwhile, in Seattle, Councilmember Eddie Lin announced on June 25 that Phase 2 of the city’s Comprehensive Plan — “Centers & Corridors” — is delayed until 2027 because of litigation, as SEPA appeals are used to challenge proposed zoning and development.

Why It Matters: AI stopped being only a software story the moment it became a land-use, water, and power story. Data centers concentrate enormous demand in specific places, and the question of who bears the cost — and who decides — lands squarely on Automation Readiness and Governance and Foresight. The Seattle delay is the tell: even a city with the assets to lead can be slowed by the machinery of its own process. Readiness isn’t just having the right plan; it’s being able to execute it before the conditions change.

Source: “Data center moratorium gets first yes vote from Metro Council,” Nashville Banner, June 10, 2026; “Majority of Clinton City Council vote down data center moratorium,” WVIK, June 10, 2026; “Councilmember Lin: We need immediate action to build more housing and protect the environment,” Seattle City Council, June 25, 2026.

THE CROSS-BEAT CONNECTION

This week’s three beats describe one motion from three angles: load arriving faster than the systems built to carry it. The housing act is a load of intent dropped onto local permitting systems that may or may not be able to convert it into homes. The heat dome is a literal load on the grid, on cooling capacity, on the human body. And the data-center fights are about load in the most concrete sense — megawatts and millions of gallons — forcing cities to decide what their infrastructure is for.

In all three, the headline is the announcement. The bipartisan vote, the heat warning, the groundbreaking. But the thing that determines whether a place prospers isn’t the announcement — it’s what the foundation does when the load actually hits. That’s the gap the Geography of Prosperity Index was built to read: not which cities make news, but which ones are built to carry the weight when the news arrives.

The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that. Reach out today to learn more.

Everything you need is here

Three-quarters of the residential land in incorporated Los Angeles County is zoned for single-family homes. On July 1, that changes.

A new state law takes effect that day: Senate Bill 79, the Abundant and Affordable Homes Near Transit Act. If you live within a half-mile of a qualifying rail station or major transit stop, the rules for what can be built near you change. Mid-rise apartment buildings become legal by right on land zoned residential, mixed-use, or commercial. The state preempts local zoning in the half-mile ring around transit, with height and density floors that scale by how close a parcel sits to the station and how frequent the service is.

It applies to counties with real rail networks, meaning those with more than 15 passenger rail stations — currently 7, soon 8. In the north: Alameda, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, and Sacramento. In the south: Los Angeles and San Diego, with Orange joining once its streetcar service opens later in 2026. That list can grow as counties add stations, so the map keeps redrawing itself.

That’s the law, but the fight over it is more telling.

The story is the resistance

In the last few months, the most interesting fight over this new law wasn’t between developers and homeowners. It was inside the transit system itself.

On January 22, 2026, the board of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority — the agency that runs the trains and buses SB 79 is organized around — voted to formally oppose the law's local implementation. Only two members, County Supervisors Janice Hahn and Lindsey Horvath, declined to join. A Metro staff report went beyond technical fixes and floated two asks: either exempt Los Angeles County from the law entirely or pilot it in the Bay Area.

The agency whose stations the law is built around asked to be exempted from the housing meant to fill those stations with riders.

The reasoning behind it isn’t foolish. Metro’s concern, in its own framing, was that SB 79 had “become a catalyst for local opposition to Metro’s transit projects.” The agency is in the middle of a multibillion-dollar, voter-funded expansion of rail and bus lines. It worries that by automatically tying up zoning to new stations, the law hands neighborhood opponents a reason to fight the transit to stop the density. The carrot of a new rail line becomes a stick. Build the station, trigger the apartments. Some cities and community groups, Metro reported, had started treating planned transit investments as something to resist.

Housing advocates were unmoved. The executive director of Abundant Housing LA called the recommendations “absolutely ridiculous,” arguing that an agency perpetually fighting housing next to its own stations is arguing against its own ridership. Metro’s reading of the politics can be both plausible and self-defeating, a system working against itself.

What cities can — and can’t — do

One constraint keeps this from being a story about cities “blocking” the law: they can’t opt out.

What Los Angeles actually did, in an implementing ordinance adopted in spring 2026, was lean on every exemption the statute provides (temporary carve-outs for lower-resource neighborhoods, fire-hazard zones, historic districts) and push the hardest reckoning down the road to its next Housing Element cycle in 2030. Pro-housing groups called the result too cautious. But the city shaped how the law is implemented; it cannot stop its implementation. The political fight over whether SB 79 exists is over. The implementation fight across the city is just beginning.

That distinction matters here, and it’s exactly the kind of distinction the Geography of Prosperity Index seeks to identify and to measure.

Where the Index comes in

The Index scores cities across five dimensions: Climate Resilience, Population Renewal, Automation Readiness, Social Cohesion, and Governance. On its surface, SB 79 is a housing story. But housing is rarely just housing. It’s where several of those dimensions collide.

Start with Governance, because that’s where SB 79 lives most directly. The Index treats governance not as “good intentions” but as institutional capacity to act under constraint. SB 79 is a clean stress test. Every affected city faces the same mandate taking effect on the same date. What differs is the response. A city that treats the law as a framework to build within is showing a different governance capacity than one that treats it as an attack to be litigated, delayed, and exemption-mined. Both responses show up later, in what actually gets permitted over the next three years.

Then Population Renewal. The logic of SB 79 is that proximity compounds. Homes near transit produce riders; riders justify service; service anchors more homes. A city that leans into the law is choosing to renew its population base in its most connected, lowest-carbon locations. A city that defends its single-family constraints is choosing, in effect, to cap its own renewal and export its growth, young households and all, somewhere cheaper and further out.

Climate Resilience sits underneath all of it. Transit-oriented density is among the most reliable levers for per-capita emissions in a metro region. The half-mile ring isn’t an arbitrary radius; it’s roughly the distance within which people actually walk to a train instead of driving to it. Multiply that across the state’s most populous transit counties, and the climate math becomes clear.

Los Angeles is an important case because it has spent decades and tens of billions of dollars building the transit spine that makes prosperity-by-proximity possible, and then, at the decisive moment, watched its own transit agency ask to be excused from the housing that would justify the expansion. Call it less hypocrisy than a government caught between two of its own goals, with no clean way to serve both at once. The Index doesn’t resolve that tension. It scores how a city works through it.

The real question

So the question July 1 raises was never “will the housing come?” The statute answers that: near transit, by right, it will.

The question is which California cities treat this as permission to compound, adding homes, riders, density, tax base, and momentum in the places best equipped to carry them, and which spend the next five years running out the clock with carve-outs and cycle delays.

That choice separates a city building toward the next twenty years from one defending the last twenty.

Watch which cities lean in. They’re telling you who’s serious about the future.

The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that.

Everything you need is here

Thank you to everyone who joined our first Geography of Prosperity Maproom this week.

The Geography of Prosperity began as a way to view the American Dream through a new lens—not as a verdict on where cities stand, but as a diagnostic to understand the structural conditions shaping their futures. Sharing it live and hearing your questions and reactions in real time made it clear that this is a conversation worth having together.

Your engagement is exactly what makes the work better. The challenges, the curiosity, the local knowledge you brought —all of it sharpens how we think about population renewal, climate resilience, automation readiness, and the other forces redrawing the map of opportunity.

This is just the beginning. There’s much more to come, and I’m grateful to have you along for it.

With thanks,
Bradley

Demographic Change

A “Prosperity” Ranking Lands in the Triangle — and Sparks a Useful Argument

WRAL ran a feature this week on a newly launched ranking that placed Durham at No. 2 nationally and Raleigh at No. 8, with the reporter pressing its co-creator on a fair question: should anyone take another city ranking seriously? The index compiled data points across the largest 250 U.S. cities, “not on growth, but on a range of factors that are intended to represent future-readiness for a prosperous life.” The answer offered was that it deliberately doesn’t measure growth — it weighs whether a place has the foundational elements that let economic success harden into durability. Durham, one of the three municipalities in the top ten with a population less than 400,000, outranks major U.S. tech cities like Washington, D.C., Seattle and San Francisco. The piece also gave space to a sharp counterpoint: Dr. Gerald Cohen, chief economist at the Kenan Institute, questioned the separation of Raleigh and Durham as different cities in the rankings when his own American Growth Project treats the Triangle as one economy — and pushed on the deeper divide between measuring readiness and measuring realized growth.

Why It Matters: This is the announce-vs-execute tension showing up as a measurement argument. Cohen and the ranking aren’t really disagreeing about Durham; they’re disagreeing about whether to credit a city for momentum already on the board or for the conditions that determine whether momentum lasts. That distinction — Population Renewal and Governance and Foresight as leading indicators rather than lagging ones — is what separates a brittle boomtown from a durable one.

Source: Alex Littlehales, “Durham ranks No. 2 and Raleigh No. 8 in new ‘Geography of Prosperity’: What exactly is it?,” WRAL, June 18, 2026. (The Geography of Prosperity Index was built with Human Change and Motivf and supports the forthcoming book The Geography of Prosperity: A New Map of the American Dream (MIT Press, 2027).)

India Slips Below Replacement — and the Global Map Tips With It

The world’s most populous country crossed a demographic threshold this period: India saw its total fertility rate fall below replacement for the first time in 2026, joining a list of below-replacement countries that already includes China, Japan, South Korea, Russia, Italy, and Germany. The milestone fits a broader pattern demographers have been tracking for months: global birth rates have now reached below replacement in most of the world, including Australia, and the St. Louis Fed devoted a June analysis to the same downward trend in total fertility rates across countries. By the end of the 21st century, nearly all countries in the world are likely to have fertility rates below replacement levels.

Why It Matters: When the high-fertility outliers themselves tip below replacement, the long-run logic of population renewal changes for everyone. A world of below-replacement fertility is one where migration becomes the only near-term lever for a city or country to grow its working-age population — which puts even more weight on whether places can attract and retain people. For U.S. metros already watching immigration slow, the global convergence is a reminder that the competition for people is intensifying, not easing.

Source: “Are Declining Birth Rates a Problem?,” Britannica (updated June 17, 2026); “Birth rates are declining in most of the world,” Phys.org, June 6, 2026; “Declining Fertility Rates across the World,” St. Louis Fed, June 9, 2026.

Climate Change

A Solstice Heat Dome Settles Over Western Europe

A massive high-pressure heat dome built over Western Europe heading into the June 21 solstice, trapping Saharan air and triggering an early-season heatwave of well-above-normal intensity. Portugal and Spain are bracing for temperatures that could reach 45 °C, while cities like Paris face extended, multi-day stretches in the upper 30s to low 40s — roughly 10 to 15 °C above seasonal averages. The soil in many regions remains exceptionally dry from a record-breaking hot spell in late May, which strips away the land’s natural ability to cool itself through evaporation, and with no significant disturbances foreseen, the heatwave is expected to be long-lasting, worsening drought conditions and supporting wildfires. The setup echoes the May event that, per Carbon Brief’s June 9 research digest, had already broken May temperature records across the region.

Why It Matters: The heat-dome physics are familiar; the compounding is the story. A dry-soil spring removes the buffer that would normally blunt the next heat event, so each wave lands harder than the one before. And the burden is not evenly distributed — heat domes fall hardest on the elderly, outdoor workers, and people in housing built from heat-trapping materials. This is Climate Resilience as a test of the systems underneath a city: cooling capacity, building stock, and the public-health plans that decide who is protected when the lid stays on for a week.

Source: Marko Korosec, “Scorching Heat for the Summer Solstice,” Severe Weather Europe, June 17, 2026; “Cited 9 June 2026: Europe’s ‘exceptional’ heatwave,” Carbon Brief, June 9, 2026.

The Hidden Climate Cost of the AI Build-Out: Seattle Moves to Make Data Centers Pay Their Own Way

On June 17, Seattle City Light rolled out a rate proposal that would raise typical residential bills by roughly $10 in 2027 and another $10 in 2028 — an average 9.5% annual increase — while creating a distinct rate structure for “large-load” customers, chiefly data centers. The utility framed the large-load policy as a way to hold existing ratepayers harmless if a highly portable operation relocates after the grid has been built out to serve it. It arrived alongside the one-year data-center siting moratorium the City Council passed June 9, after four companies approached the utility about five facilities with a combined demand near 369 megawatts — enough to power roughly 300,000 homes. To cushion the hike, the utility is expanding discount eligibility to an additional 30,000 income-qualified households.

Why It Matters: The climate story here isn’t only emissions; it’s the distributional politics of a decarbonized grid under sudden load. An aging grid, electrification, and a wall of AI demand are landing on the same ratepayers at once. How a city splits that bill — who is held harmless, who absorbs the increase, who gets a discount — is a Governance and Foresight question as much as a Climate Resilience one. Seattle is trying to answer it before the facilities are built rather than after.

Source: “Seattle City Light rolls out proposal for rate increases — including ‘large-load’ data centers,” Capitol Hill Seattle News, June 17, 2026; Seattle City Council, June 9, 2026.

Artificial Intelligence

Where the AI Build-Out Touches the Ground: A National Backlash Takes Shape

The Seattle fight is one node in a national pattern that sharpened this spring: more than 300 state data-center bills filed across 30-plus states in a matter of weeks, marking a shift from incentive-focused policy to regulatory oversight. Several states, including New York, South Dakota, and Oklahoma, have introduced data-center moratorium bills to pause construction while studying impacts on utilities, the environment, and local communities, and at least 18 states have introduced bills creating special rate classes for large energy users, with some requiring data centers to fund infrastructure improvements and demonstrate benefits to ratepayers. Brookings has flagged rising electricity rates as a likely 2026 midterm issue, with some regions seeing annual increases north of 25%.

Why It Matters: This is Automation and AI Readiness measured not by how many models a city trains but by whether its grid, its rate design, and its political institutions can absorb the infrastructure the technology demands. A metro can host the data centers and still lose ground if the cost lands on residents who see no corresponding benefit. The cities that come out ahead will be the ones that negotiated the terms — cost allocation, grid-upgrade responsibility, community benefit — before signing, not the ones that simply won the siting competition.

Source: MultiState, “State Data Center Legislation in 2026”; Brookings, “How rising electric rates could affect the 2026 midterms.” (Trend synthesis spanning early-to-mid 2026.)

PwC: AI Is Splitting the Global Labor Market Into Two Tracks

PwC released its 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer, drawn from more than a billion job ads across six continents. The headline finding is that AI is driving a “two-track” global labor market in which “professionalized” roles — where AI automates routine tasks so human judgment and expertise are emphasized — are growing faster than roles “democratized” by AI, in which the technology makes the job easier for non-experts. Jobs requiring specific AI skills are growing almost eight times faster than the total jobs market, with the average wage premium for AI skills rising to 62%. And the entry-level picture is diverging sharply: AI-exposed entry-level roles are seven times more likely to require traditionally senior-level skills such as judgment and leadership.

Why It Matters: A two-track labor market is also a two-track geography. The metros with deep concentrations of “professionalized” work — and the training pipelines to feed them — pull further ahead, while places anchored in “democratized” roles risk wage stagnation even as employment holds. This is the workforce side of Automation Readiness: the question isn’t whether a city’s residents have jobs, but whether those jobs are on the track that’s gaining or the one that’s flattening.

Source: PwC, “2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer,” June 15, 2026. (Note: released four days before the issue window opened; included given continued in-window coverage and topical weight.)

The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that. Reach out today to learn more.

Everything you need is here

A few weeks ago, on June 4, a Philadelphia real estate columnist posed a question that had been hanging over City Hall since winter: whatever happened to Mayor Cherelle Parker’s 20-year tax abatement for converting Philadelphia’s empty office towers into housing? The answer was that nothing had. The legislation needed to create the abatement had never been introduced. Amid a debate over school closures and a bruising budget fight, the bill meant to unlock the city’s conversion future spent six months in limbo. Parker insists it isn’t dead. But for now, the marquee policy sits exactly where it was in January: untouched.

Here is the strange part. While that policy gathered dust, Philadelphia became the fastest-growing office-conversion market in the country.

Over the past year, the metro’s pipeline of office-to-apartment conversions more than doubled — a 119% jump to 2,697 units, vaulting Philadelphia from 18th place nationally to seventh. It was the first time the city had ever cracked the top ten. Of the twenty largest conversion markets in America, only three saw their pipelines more than double, and Philadelphia led them all. The change didn’t arrive because of the new abatement. It arrived without it.

A national pattern

Step back, and Philadelphia is one of many cities riding this national trend. At the start of 2026, the U.S. office-to-apartment pipeline reached a record 90,300 units, a 28% jump in a single year. Since 2022, the pipeline has grown roughly 290%. What began as a desperate response to pandemic-era vacancy has hardened into something more permanent: a standard tool in the urban development playbook, with office buildings now making up nearly half of all adaptive-reuse projects nationwide. New York leads the pack by a wide margin, trailed by Washington, D.C., and Chicago.

In Philadelphia, the Wanamaker Building — Daniel Burnham’s 1911 “cathedral of commerce,” its Grand Court organ still playing above the marble — is the face of this change, and is being converted into more than 600 loft apartments on its upper floors. Its last tenant, Macy’s, closed in early 2025; by mid-year, the building had passed through a bankruptcy auction into the hands of a New York developer, and construction is now underway. A century ago, it was where Philadelphia went to shop. Soon, it will be home to several hundred residents.

Why didn’t the wave wait for the policy?

The conventional assumption is that conversions happen because cities incentivize them. Philadelphia’s success complicates that narrative by illustrating underlying conditions, including the market's power. Its pipeline doubled on the strength of fundamentals the city had built long before Parker’s abatement was ever drafted: a downtown with a genuine residential core already in place, dense transit, walkable streets, and rents meaningfully below New York or Washington. Developers converting Philadelphia offices aren’t conjuring residential demand out of nothing. They are expanding an existing ecosystem that is desperate for more capacity.

That distinction matters because it means the surge is partly a story about accumulated structural advantage — the slowly built conditions that make a place ready to absorb change when it arrives. A city without that foundation can put in place all the tax incentives it likes and watch nothing happen. A city with it can lead the nation, while its signature tax policy stalls.

Which raises the obvious question: if conversions are happening without the tax abatement, why does the abatement matter at all?

What the stall is really about

Because the easy conversions are only one part of the story. The buildings being converted now are, by and large, the ones that don’t need help — prominent towers in prime locations, converting into apartments aimed largely at the upper end of the market. To date, most of Philadelphia’s conversions have targeted high-end renters. The abatement was never really about accelerating those. It was about reaching the buildings and the residents that the market won’t reach without help — and that is exactly where the politics seized up.

City Council didn’t sit on the bill out of indifference. Members balked because they wanted the abatement to produce homes at below-market rates, and a tax break engineered to deliver affordability is a far more contested instrument than one that simply rewards regardless of income. Some experts have even questioned whether an affordability requirement would survive a legal challenge. The holdup, in other words, is the messy reality of policymaking and of a city negotiating who these conversion projects are actually for.

That argument is the signal worth reading. The pipeline number indicates that Philadelphia will continue to generate conversions and build, regardless of policy. The stalled tax incentives suggest it hasn’t yet decided where it’s headed or who it is for. Those are different civic capacities, and a place can be strong in one while still working out the other.

Not a Philadelphia quirk

Lest this look like one city’s idiosyncrasy: Denver’s conversion pipeline grew 114% over the same period, and St. Louis’s 110%. Across very different cities, the same surge is underway, which means the same question is coming for other markets. Filling a pipeline and directing it are not the same thing, and the cities now discovering the former will, before long, have to face the latter.

This is the kind of distinction the Geography of Prosperity Index was built to surface — the difference between a city where momentum is happening and one that is consciously shaping where it goes. The Index has its own way of weighing that gap. What Philadelphia shows, in the meantime, is the gap itself: a downtown filling with newly converted housing for the wealthy, and a City Council still deciding what all that motion is supposed to build, for whom, and where.

A stalled bill is not a verdict on a city. Philadelphia is, by the most telling national measure, doing this well. But it is mid-stream — riding a wave it genuinely caught, and still learning to steer at the same time.

The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that.

Everything you need is here

You’re invited to the first Geography of Prosperity Maproom
Thursday, June 18 · 12:00 PM EDT

Join me for an informal conversation about the Geography of Prosperity Index and my forthcoming book, The Geography of Prosperity: A New Map of the American Dream (MIT Press, 2027). I’ll share early insights from the research, walk through what the Index reveals about where opportunity is moving in America, and take your questions.

Bring your curiosity—and your city.

Register Here

Index in the Wild: The Prosperity Lens Goes Global

The Geography of Prosperity Index was featured in a long-form Podcast Portugal conversation with co-creator Bradley Schurman, applying the framework’s logic — demographic shifts, longevity, labor shortages, migration, and climate resilience — to the question of which Portuguese cities are positioned to prosper over the next two decades, and whether smaller regional centers can compete with Lisbon and Porto.

Why It Matters: The Index was built on 250 American urban areas, but the diagnostic logic — that traditional economic measures are lagging indicators, and that resilience lives in systems rather than single metrics — travels. The Portuguese framing (can secondary cities compete, what role does immigration play in sustaining prosperity) is the same question the Index poses domestically, and a useful reminder that “future-readiness” is a structural condition, not a national peculiarity.

Source: Podcast Portugal, “The Geography of Prosperity: Why Some Cities Thrive and Others Decline” with Bradley Schurman (June 2026)

👥 DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE

The Labor Market Refuses to Break

The U.S. economy added 172,000 jobs in May, more than doubling the roughly 80,000 economists had penciled in, while unemployment held at 4.3%. Gains clustered in leisure and hospitality, local government, and health care; financial activities shed jobs. The report also revised March and April upward by a combined 93,000, and prompted one economist to declare the hiring recession over. The release was the first full data point since the BLS leadership change last summer, and it landed firmly on the resilient side of the ledger.

Why It Matters: A national headline number this strong can mask how unevenly the gains are distributed across places. Leisure, hospitality, and local government hiring tend to track population and consumer presence, not the high-wage knowledge sectors that move a metro on Automation Readiness. A city can ride a strong national labor market and still be adding the jobs most exposed to the next downturn or the next wave of automation. The Index treats employment composition, not just employment levels, as the signal worth watching.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Situation — May 2026 (June 5, 2026); CNBC

The Immigration Math Behind the Slowdown

Fresh analysis this period underscored how quickly reduced immigration is reshaping the demographic floor under American cities. The Census Bureau’s own projection puts net international migration for the year ending June 2026 at roughly 321,000 — down from 1.26 million the prior year and 2.73 million the year before that. Brookings’ metro analysis found that the places most dependent on foreign-born workers for population and economic growth are precisely the major metros now facing the steepest slowdown, with some large states already tipping from growth into outright population loss.

Why It Matters: This is Population Renewal in real time. For two decades, immigration quietly compensated for below-replacement fertility in the metros that drive the national economy. Remove it, even temporarily, and the arithmetic turns negative faster in cities that built their growth assumptions around newcomers. The diagnostic point is not that these cities are failing — it’s that a variable they didn’t control is now exposing how thin their domestic demographic margin had become.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau population projections; Brookings Metro analysis (William H. Frey)

🌍 CLIMATE CHANGE

Cities Are Heating Faster Than They’re Counting

A study of 1,400 cities published in Communications Earth & Environment this period quantified something urban planners have felt but rarely measured: over two decades, global exposure to extreme daytime heat in cities rose 51%, driven by warming and population growth compounding each other. The researchers separated the two forces and found that climate warming amplified the increase in exposure by roughly 82% beyond what population growth alone would have produced. The effect was strongest in cold-winter and arid cities — places whose infrastructure and habits were never built for heat. Hot nights are now 47% more frequent in arid cities.

Why It Matters: This is the empirical core of Climate Resilience. The finding that cold and arid cities are heating fastest is the dangerous part — these are the metros least likely to have heat-adapted building stock, tree canopy, or cooling infrastructure, precisely because heat wasn’t historically their problem. A low Climate Resilience score in a place like this isn’t a verdict that the city is doomed; it’s an early warning that the adaptation clock started late and is running fast.

Source: Naserikia et al., “Two decades of urban heat intensification and exposure across 1400 cities,” Communications Earth & Environment (June 1, 2026)

Europe’s “Exceptionally Early” Heat Gets Its Post-Mortem

Carbon Brief’s June research digest examined how the scientific and media community is processing western Europe’s record-shattering late-May heatwave, which pushed temperatures past 40°C in Portugal, 36°C in France, and to a record 35.1°C in the UK — with France’s weather service attributing a “heat dome” producing temperatures more than 10°C above normal. The digest also surfaced new research linking human-caused emissions to a ninefold increase in the likelihood of landfalling oceanic heatwaves, and findings that wildfire disturbance has been flipping Canada’s forests from carbon sink to carbon source since the 2000s.

Why It Matters: The timing is the story. A heatwave that would once have been a July event now arrives in May, and the cluster of research around it points to compounding feedback loops — forests that stored carbon now releasing it, ocean heat driving land extremes. For the Index, this is why Climate Resilience can’t be scored as a static hazard map. The baseline conditions a city plans against are themselves moving, and the cities that treat last decade’s normal as this decade’s design spec are the ones most exposed.

Source: Carbon Brief, “Cited 9 June 2026” research digest (June 9, 2026)

🤖 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

AI Policy Becomes Industrial Strategy

Synthesis of the period’s AI developments points to a consolidating shift: governments are treating compute, chips, and data centers as strategic national assets rather than optional technology investments. The week’s reporting tracked the U.S. accelerating AI deployment for national security and examining direct stakes in AI companies, the UK announcing a major AI hardware and infrastructure program, and — notably — the distribution of AI’s productivity gains and questions of “workforce legitimacy” emerging as explicit political issues rather than abstract economic ones.

Why It Matters: When AI moves from a technology question to an infrastructure question, it becomes a geography question. Data centers need power, water, land, and grids — and they don’t distribute evenly. The metros that capture AI infrastructure investment may see Automation Readiness gains, but the ones absorbing the energy and water burden without the high-wage jobs face a Governance and Foresight test: can local institutions negotiate terms that leave the community better off? “Workforce legitimacy” entering the political vocabulary is the early sign that the distributional question is now unavoidable.

Source: AI sector synthesis, period of June 1–10, 2026

🔗 CROSS-BEAT CONNECTION

This week’s three beats rhyme on a single uncomfortable theme: the systems were calibrated for conditions that no longer hold.

The labor market looks strong on the national scorecard, but that scorecard was built for an economy where job growth meant durable prosperity — and it can’t account for the fact that the gains are concentrated in sectors most exposed to automation and most dependent on a population base that immigration policy is quietly draining. The urban heat study delivers the same lesson in physical form: cities that assessed their risk against a 20th-century climate are discovering that the cold and dry places — the ones that never had to think about heat — are warming fastest, even as infrastructure assumed they wouldn’t. And the AI buildout turns an abstract technology race into a concrete contest over power, water, and land, where the question of who absorbs the cost and who captures the benefit is now openly political.

The connective tissue is the lag between a metric and the reality it’s supposed to measure. A strong jobs number, a manageable climate risk rating, an AI investment headline — each can look like good news while the conditions underneath shift faster than the measure updates. That gap is exactly what the Geography of Prosperity Index was built to close: to read the structural signals before the lagging indicators catch up. Not as a verdict on which cities win or lose, but as a diagnostic for which places are still planning against a world that has already moved on.

The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that. Reach out today to learn more.

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Just in time for summer, water is flowing again from some of Washington’s most recognizable fountains — basins that residents and visitors had spent years walking past as dry stone behind construction fencing. For the first time since 2007, the year the first iPhone shipped, the Columbus Fountain outside Union Station is running. The 45-foot marble shaft, dedicated in 1912 as part of Daniel Burnham’s grand vision for the capital’s gateway, had sat dry for nearly two decades. In late May, the Department of the Interior cut a ribbon, foreign ambassadors attended, and the plaza reopened after five months of work.

It is hardly the only one. Dupont Circle’s fountain is once again a functional centerpiece at the heart of one of the city’s most walkable neighborhoods. At Meridian Hill Park — known to many as Malcolm X Park — the National Park Service reopened the lower plaza and its famous Italian-inspired cascading fountain on May 14, after roughly seven years dark since 2019; the terraced water feature is the visual spine of a park equally known for its Sunday drum circle and sweeping views. The historic fountains in Lafayette Park, directly across from the White House, returned ahead of summer after most of the park had been fenced off for construction since January. And along Embassy Row, the Sheridan Circle fountain is once again one of the quietest and prettiest landmarks in the District.

It is a genuinely good thing when a beautiful, long-neglected piece of civic infrastructure is repaired — and these are the kinds of places, the gathering spots and people-watching circles and shaded benches, where a city’s public life actually happens. It is also worth looking closely at how this particular round of repairs is being narrated, because the story Washington tells about its own public spaces is itself a kind of infrastructure — one that shapes who feels welcome in them.

The work itself

The National Park Service is rehabilitating fountains across the District in phases, repairing some that have been inoperable for years and upgrading others still running. The full roster spans some of the city’s most recognizable water features.

Nine inoperable fountains are being returned to service: Columbus Plaza at Union Station, Freedom Plaza, John Marshall Park, the John Paul Jones Memorial, Lafayette Square, Meridian Hill Park, the Philip Sheridan Memorial, Rawlins Park, and the Simón Bolívar Memorial.

Another nine operational fountains are getting maintenance and system upgrades, including Dupont Circle, the FDR Memorial, the George Mason Memorial, the Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism During World War II, the Korean War Veterans Memorial, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial, the Taras Shevchenko Memorial, the U.S. Navy Memorial, and the World War II Memorial.

This is real money spent on real conservation, and most of these fountains genuinely needed it. Decades of weathering and outdated mechanical systems don’t fix themselves. The price tags are roughly what this kind of work costs: the Columbus Fountain contract runs about $11.8 million, in line with the $8–10 million the Obama administration estimated for the same job back in 2016, once you account for inflation. Ripping out and replacing corroded pipes in century-old plumbing is not cheap, and these aren’t padded numbers.

The harder question is not how much the work costs but where the money comes from.

Where the money comes from

According to a New York Times analysis of federal contracting records, the Park Service is using at least $67 million in national park entrance fees to fund the Washington beautification push. Nearly $60 million of that — fees paid by visitors to parks across the entire country — is going to repair nine of the capital’s fountains, with another $7 million directed to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool renovation (a $13.1 million project overall). The spending is legal: under a 2004 law, at least 80 percent of entrance-fee revenue must remain in the park where it was collected, but the remaining 20 percent may be spent at fee-free sites, such as the National Mall.

What stands out is the scale of the redirection. The Times found that of the roughly $75 million the Park Service committed from its recreation-fee account between December 2025 and March 2026, more than three-quarters went to the Washington fountains and more than 90 percent to D.C. projects overall. In the same fund earlier in Trump’s second term, D.C. projects accounted for about 2 percent of spending; under Biden and the first Trump term, the figure was 5 percent or less. The single largest fee-funded project under Biden was a Grand Canyon water pipeline.

That redirection lands against a documented backlog. The Park Service estimated roughly $23 billion in deferred maintenance across the system at the end of 2024 — crumbling retaining walls along Shenandoah’s Skyline Drive, potholed roads and mold-closed staff housing at Crater Lake, a failed sewer system at Zion that replaced flush toilets with port-a-potties. Conservation groups have objected that visitor fees collected nationwide are being steered toward, as one put it, projects the president can see out his window, while urgent safety repairs elsewhere wait. The Interior Department defended the spending and pointed to deferred-maintenance work continuing around the country.

Not every park advocate objects. Some welcomed the fountains finally running, and one D.C. parks leader called it a fitting use of fee dollars — while making a pointed observation: the entire country benefits from free entry to D.C.’s national parks, yet the city’s inner-city park sites go underfunded because the District has no voting representation in Congress and “has to beg for crumbs.” That tension — national money, national landmarks, a local population with no vote over either — sits at the center of this whole effort.

The framing

NPS attributes the effort to two executive orders. The first, EO 14189, directs federal agencies to prepare for the nation’s 250th anniversary on July 4, 2026 — uncontroversial as a deadline. The second, EO 14252, “Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful,” is where the story gets more complicated.

That order is not primarily about fountains. Signed in March 2025, it established a federally appointed D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force whose mandate pairs beautification with law enforcement: directing the removal of homeless encampments and graffiti on federal parkland, expanding the federal law-enforcement presence around the National Mall and Union Station, accelerating concealed-carry permitting, and monitoring the District’s sanctuary-city status. By August 2025, a related crime-emergency order had deployed a multi-agency task force to the streets of D.C.

The order has drawn pointed objections from civil-liberties groups and local advocates, who argue it overrides the District’s right to self-governance and that “beautification,” framed alongside encampment removal and immigration enforcement, criminalizes poverty under an aesthetic banner. Supporters in Congress have moved to codify the order, casting the capital as a symbol of national pride that the prior administration let decline. Both readings now travel attached to every restored fountain, whether NPS intends it or not.

The clearest illustration came in May, when the White House posted a before-and-after meme: a gleaming Columbus Fountain labeled “Trump” beside a graffiti-covered version labeled “Biden.” Snopes found the contrast misleading. The grimy image was authentic but captured a specific, short-lived episode — pro-Palestinian graffiti sprayed during Prime Minister Netanyahu’s July 2024 visit, cleaned up shortly after — not a state of general neglect. A real restoration was being used to manufacture a narrative of decline-and-rescue that the underlying facts don’t quite support.

Why it matters

A fountain is not just a fountain. It is a piece of shared civic infrastructure, and the condition of a city’s shared spaces is one of the clearer signals of its long-term viability — a place where the Infrastructure, Governance and Foresight, and Social Cohesion dimensions all converge. On the Geography of Prosperity Index, deferred maintenance of public assets is a structural vulnerability, and reversing it is exactly the kind of intervention that strengthens a place. By that measure, water flowing in the Columbus Fountain is a point in Washington’s favor.

But the funding pattern is itself a Governance and Foresight signal, and it cuts the other way. Foresight, in the Index sense, is the discipline of allocating finite resources toward the most consequential long-term needs rather than the most visible short-term ones. Concentrating a national fee pool on the capital’s ornamental fountains on a July 4 deadline, while a $23 billion safety-and-maintenance backlog waits elsewhere in the system, is close to the inverse of that discipline — optically driven allocation, legible from a particular window. A place can score a near-term Infrastructure gain on the back of a Governance choice that, examined system-wide, looks like the opposite of foresight.

But Social Cohesion is not only about whether the stonework is clean. It is about whether residents experience public space as theirs, as a commons that belongs to the people who live alongside it. The Meridian Hill drum circle is a useful emblem here: the park is on the official maps as Meridian Hill, but generations of residents have called it Malcolm X Park, and its life as a gathering place was built by the people who use it, not by a ribbon-cutting. That is where coupling restoration to an enforcement regime gets analytically interesting. The same coordinated federal action that returns water to a fountain also concentrates federal authority over a city whose 700,000 residents have no voting representation in the body now legislating their parks. You can improve the physical condition of a public space while narrowing the sense of who that space is for. Those are different ledgers, and a serious read of a city’s prosperity has to keep both open.

This is the diagnostic point, not a verdict. The restoration work is, on its own terms, an investment worth making, and Washington’s fountains will be better off running than dry. The question the Index asks is not whether the marble gleams. It is whether the people who walk past it every day are counted among those the gleaming is meant to serve — and on that question, a ribbon-cutting answers less than it appears to.

The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that.

Everything you need is here