The University of Chicago is no longer accepting applications for the 2024 program.
Public finance faces heightened scrutiny, which presents opportunities and challenges. As communities continue to struggle with effects of the pandemic while facing urgent needs ranging from affordable housing to infrastructure investment, their decisions about revenues and expenditures must center on equity, efficiency, and sustainability.
Even before COVID-19, situations in communities like Detroit, Stockton, Flint, and Puerto Rico highlighted severe fiscal challenges—and ongoing stress—to public services caused by the shrinking revenue streams impacting many local governments.
While federal funding for local governments increased to provide the services and infrastructure residents demand, this funding source has limits and will soon go back to prepandemic levels. Communities must not only devise ways to spend this influx of money equitably, they must also be prepared to adequately and fairly raise revenues when federal funding diminishes.
Whether you want to better understand public-private partnerships, debt and municipal securities, or leading land-based strategies to finance infrastructure projects, this program will give you the skills and insights to advance your career in local government or community development.
Overview
This program was created by the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy’s Center for Municipal Finance in partnership with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. This course will include modules on the following topics:
Urban economics and growth
Intergovernmental fiscal frameworks, revenues, and budgeting
Capital budgeting and Infrastructure Maintenance
Debt/Municipal Securities
Land Value Capture and Municipal Finance
Public-Private Partnerships
Financial Analysis for Land Use and Development Decision Making
Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) in Municipal Finance
Upon completion of the course, participants will receive a certificate signed by both organizations. For planners maintaining their AICP credentials, this course provides 16 Certification Maintenance (CM) credits from the American Planning Association.
Course Format
The live virtual programming will last approximately 3.75 hours each day, and the additional coursework—viewing prerecorded lectures and reading introductory materials—will require up to two additional hours each day.
Who Should Attend
Urban planners who work in the private and public sectors as well as individuals in the economic development, community development, and land development industries.
Cost
Nonprofit and public sector: $2,000
Private sector: $2,500
Planejamento de Uso do Solo, Saúde Fiscal Municipal, Planejamento, Tributação Imobiliária, Finanças Públicas
This multimedia case examines the impact of Burlington, VT’s affordable housing strategies on the Old North End (“the ONE”)—a historically low-income neighborhood which boasts a robust stock of affordable housing while facing rising costs of living and demand for housing. It traces the history of Burlington’s efforts back to the 1980s, when the city government under then-mayor Bernie Sanders established programs and policies to produce affordable housing and combat gentrification and displacement.
Cohen, Helen, and Lipman, Mark. 2016. Arc of Justice: The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of a Beloved Community (documentary film). https://www.arcofjusticefilm.com/.
Opportunity Insights. “Neighborhoods Matter: Children’s Lives Are Shaped by the Neighborhoods They Grow Up In.” Online Research Collection. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University. https://opportunityinsights.org/neighborhoods.
In Cincinnati lately, good fortune extends well beyond the Bengals, the city’s football team, which has consistently been making the playoffs. The population is growing after years of decline, companies are increasingly interested thanks to its strategic location, and there’s even talk of southwestern Ohio becoming a climate haven.
But any resurgence in a postindustrial legacy city comes with downsides, as newly elected Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval has been discovering: the potential displacement of established residents, and affordability that can vanish all too quickly.
One of Pureval’s first moves was to collaborate with the Port of Greater Cincinnati Development Authority to buy nearly 200 rental properties in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods, outbidding more than a dozen institutional investors that have been snapping up homes to rent them out for high profits. That sent an important signal, Pureval said in an interview for the Land Matters podcast: transitioning neighborhoods will be protected from the worst outcomes of market forces in play in Cincinnati.
“These out-of-town institutional investors … have no interest, frankly, in the wellbeing of Cincinnati or their tenants, buying up cheap single-family homes, not doing anything to invest in them, but overnight doubling or tripling the rents,” he said, noting a parallel effort to enforce code violations at many properties. “If you’re going to exercise predatory behavior in our community, well, we’re not going to stand for it, and we’re coming after you.”
Pureval, the half-Indian, half-Tibetan son of first-generation Americans, said affordability and displacement were his biggest concerns as Cincinnati—along with Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and other cities hard hit by steep declines in manufacturing and population—gets a fresh look as a desirable location. Cincinnati scored in the top 10 of cities least impacted by heat, drought, and sea-level rise in a recent Moody’s report.
“Right now, we are living through, in real-time, a paradigm shift,” spurred on by the pandemic and concerns about climate change, he said. “The way we live, work, and play is just completely changing. Remote work is … altering our economy and lifestyle throughout the entire country but particularly here in the Midwest. What I am convinced of due to this paradigm shift is because of climate change, because of the rising cost of living on the coast, there will be an inward migration.”
But, he said, “We have to preserve the families and the legacy communities that have been here, in the first place. No city in the country has figured out a way to grow without displacing. The market factors, the economic factors are so profound and so hard to influence, and the city’s resources are so limited. It’s really, really difficult.”
Joining a chorus of others all around the U.S., Pureval also said he supports reforming zoning and addressing other regulatory barriers that hinder multi-family housing and mixed-use and transit-oriented development.
An edited version of this interview will appear in print and online as part of the Mayor’s Desk series, our interviews with innovative chief executives of cities from around the world.
There’s so much happening today in the world’s cities—from climate change to a massive shortage of affordable housing—that the job of the city planner has become a furiously busy one, requiring a singular talent for multitasking and managing the needs of increasingly divided constituencies.
Planners have traditionally labored largely behind the scenes, but are emerging into a more visible role as they explain their work and try to keep the peace, said author Josh Stephens on the latest episode of the Land Matters podcast. Stephens interviewed 23 big-city planners for a new book, Planners Across America.
“Planning directors have huge influence over these cities . . . but they’re not necessarily well known. They are not on the level of a mayor or a city council person who are obviously elected officials, and by definition in the public spotlight; they’re not necessarily like a police chief who is always doing press conferences,” he said. “I think one thing that is very clear in these interviews is how earnest planning directors are about mediating, about figuring out what different stakeholders need and want, and are willing to tolerate.”
Acknowledging the distrust that has grown particularly in communities of color, over urban renewal, highways through urban neighborhoods, and exclusionary zoning, Stephens said planners realize the importance of “listening to people, especially people who have historically been left out of the planning conversation.”
At the same time, planners must confront established residents fighting growth, in what is presented as a virtuous grassroots rebellion but is actually the manifestation of NIMBYism, standing for “not in my backyard.”
“Many communities are empowered, and some of that power is unevenly distributed to the extent that some communities have louder voices, and some communities will invoke people like Jane Jacobs in ways that are not necessarily beneficial for the city as a whole, or might even be disingenuous,” Stephens said.
As he spoke with planners, Stephens found widespread acceptance of the idea that most cities need a massive infusion of new housing supply including multifamily housing—and even high-end housing—to help bring prices down as a matter of basic economics. That’s been the aim of several statewide mandates requiring local governments to modify zoning.
“We do need to add luxury housing in high-cost places to accommodate the people who can afford it. I think ideally, that frees up space, and frees up capital and opportunity, and sometimes public funds to then also build deed-restricted affordable housing, and hopefully maintain a supply of naturally occurring affordable housing,” he said.
“You look at where the prices are highest, and that’s where you need to add housing. You need to add it at every level. There’s an argument that there’s no such thing as trickle-down housing. I don’t buy that. I live in Los Angeles, and there’s more than enough money to go around. If you don’t build luxury housing, that doesn’t mean that wealthy and high-income people are not going to move to LA. They’re simply going to move into whatever the next best housing is. That pushes people down, and eventually some people are left with no place to live.”
However, he said, there will be more post-pandemic movement, from hot-market cities to legacy cities, for example, suggesting the contours of a national housing market. “People have moved from LA to Phoenix, from San Francisco to Boise or Reno or Vegas, and there are other equivalents around the country. I think it’s going to be really interesting in the next decade to see how this filters out,” he said.
Josh Stephens is contributing editor of the California Planning & Development Report and previously edited The Planning Report and the Metro Investment Report, monthly publications covering, respectively, land use and infrastructure in Southern California. Planners Across America was published by Planetizen Press in 2022.
City and regional planning has been a major focus of the Lincoln Institute for many decades, from the annual gathering of 30-plus professionals in the Big City Planning Directors Institute, held in partnership with the American Planning Association and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, to the more recent promotion of exploratory scenario planning.
Scranton, Pennsylvania, is facing a challenge familiar to legacy cities across the US: building its postindustrial future, now that the industries of yesteryear—in this case, coal, iron, steel, and textiles—are long gone. Essentially, Scranton must reinvent itself as a metropolis that was built, more than a century ago, for purposes that no longer exist.
Into this moment comes Paige Cognetti, a transplant from Oregon with an MBA and a stint in the Treasury department during the Obama administration, to help forge a way forward. Cognetti was serving as an advisor to the Pennsylvania auditor general and director of the Scranton school board when she won a special election for mayor in 2019, replacing a chief executive who had resigned after pleading guilty to corruption charges. She won reelection to a full term in November 2021, and is the first woman to hold the office.
Earlier in her career, the 43-year-old Cognetti worked in several political campaigns and as an investment advisor in New York City. Senior Fellow Anthony Flint caught up with the mayor on a trip to Scranton for the annual meeting of the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Planning Association.
Anthony Flint: Scranton was President Biden’s hometown, the place where urbanist Jane Jacobs grew up, and the setting for the comedy series The Office. With these interesting connections to politics and culture in mind, what’s special about the city for you? What qualities are drawing new residents and facilitating regeneration?
Paige Cognetti: It’s funny, politics brought me to Scranton. I moved to Washington, DC, in 2005, and ended up coming to Scranton for a political campaign, and then met my husband. It’s a long story until we get here in 2023, but politics did bring me to Scranton, and it can be a real anchor for what Scranton is known for.
Mayor Paige Cognetti, with the iconic Scranton Electric Building visible in the background. Courtesy photo.
More important than that is its existence as a legacy city, as an industrial city that was part of the industrial revolution in the United States, and exported things abroad, exported energy all throughout North America. That’s a huge piece of our heritage. The anthracite coal that was mined from around and underneath us really set the tone for the type of entrepreneurship that we are still known for and that we’re looking to have more of in Scranton.
The textile industry was also big here. You would have men working in coal mines and women working in textiles. There was this really perfect marriage between those two industries, and that drove the economy for a very long time. Of course, we don’t have those industries here anymore. The Scranton story now is one, I think, of resilience and creativity. Also a little bit of luck.
The different generations before us saw that if you anchor everything in an extractive industry like coal, and that goes away, then you’re left with nothing. They did a good job of diversifying the economy. We have lots of educational institutions, we have hospitals, we have healthcare, we have services. We also still have 11 percent of our jobs that are based in manufacturing. You see a lot of families that have continued through generations to own different businesses and be a part of multiple types of industries. You still have people who live in the home that their grandparents or even great-grandparents built.
It’s a special place in that way. We’ve taken a lot of the great things about our past and are applying them to the future.
AF: Thinking about this idea of repurposing a city that was built for something else: the Scranton Lace factory used to employ thousands of people on a 34-building campus, which is being redeveloped into a mixed-use residential neighborhood. Is that a replica model, in your opinion? How can adaptive reuse go beyond a boutique scale?
PC: The Lace Village is going to be an entirely new neighborhood right in the core of our city. It used to have thousands of employees and there was childcare, there was bowling, there was hair salons, there was everything. By recreating that and making a new neighborhood right there, it’s just going to be really exciting for our whole city. It’s great for all the neighborhoods around it, it’s great for the school system, it’s going to reinvigorate this industrial heart that we have there.
An industrial loom on the grounds of the former Scranton Lace Company. The complex is being redeveloped into a mixed-use residential community. Credit: Anthony Flint.
We’ve got lots of different places that I think could be like Lace Village, though not on as big of a scale. We have a cigar factory that’s just about a mile from Lace Village that’s just been redone into, I think, 150 condos. Those opened up just a few months ago. That’s a huge population boost, an energy boost for this one little segment of our neighborhood. There’s pockets of that all over the city, and that’s something that I think we can replicate.
It does take a lot of funds. We have helped shepherd state money to that project. We believe very deeply that these have to be public-private partnerships. There’s so much remediation that needs to be done. There’s so much local work that needs to be done with the streets and the curbs and the sidewalks and the lighting.
It’s important that we try to find creative ways to help fund it because we know it’s a very heavy lift to take something that used to be a factory or an industrial area and make it usable again.
AF: Because of these earlier industrial functions, Scranton has a difficult legacy of toxic pollution. How does that make redevelopment more challenging?
PC: Scranton is built on mines. Our home is actually built on top of a mine. There’s an empty lot a few parcels down from us where a house actually started to subside, and they had to take the house down. We definitely have legacy issues. We all deal with them personally. Everybody who lives in Scranton, the earth got gutted beneath us and so we deal with that all the time now.
The generations before us did a good job of cleaning those things up. We’ve come a long way, but we still have a lot of issues.
An example in our downtown is a new pocket park that finally just got sod in and the flowers are planted, the trees are planted. It used to be a dry cleaner, and just from having a dry cleaner—not even a gas plant, not even coal mining—it’s been hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars and many, many different iterations of how we’re going to fund this.
There’s these things that just take so much time and money. Interestingly in a place like Scranton, folks are used to [the idea that] it’s going to take a while. It’s going to take some more money.
We see a lot of issues in our stormwater. There’s a lot of things that we have to be very careful with and how we do things underground because of that legacy of mining. The riverfront that we have [along the] Lackawanna River is beautiful, but it was built up with factories. We have a long way to go to redevelop the river and celebrate it in a way that people are putting restaurants and cafes there. We don’t have those places, but the river is clean. The river is absolutely beautiful. The next piece is that land use. The next piece is that development and we’re eager to keep partnering with our developers to help realize that.
AF: You’ve had some serious flooding issues—what is needed to manage those kinds of vulnerabilities and to build resilience? How might that apply to other postindustrial cities confronting more intense climate impacts?
PC: I think every city is facing intense climate impacts. What’s interesting about a place like Scranton is, we have not taken care of the infrastructure, and so even before these last few years where the climate-related storms have started to increase, we already had a long way to go. We had a huge storm in September. We got six inches in 90 minutes, and it just blew through a few of our creeks, jumped the creeks, made new creeks through people’s yards. Even if we’d done all the projects we already have planned and teed up, I don’t even know if we’d gotten those done if that would’ve helped much given the volume of that water that came down. We’ve got millions and millions and millions of dollars of work to do.
The challenge, of course, is the funding and the fact that no matter what we do, there’s still going to be issues. The other piece is the politics of it: we don’t have a regional stormwater authority. We’re working on it, and we’ve got some of our neighboring boroughs and townships on board. The county’s not interested in doing a holistic one, but we’re looking at probably eight of our municipalities that are going to join in this authority that will work together to do stormwater mitigation. Hopefully, by pulling those resources, we’ll be able to have an authority that’s taking care of those maintenance pieces and those bigger projects and is able to raise funds on its own for those big pieces.
AF: Finally, how satisfied are you that the city has increased bike and pedestrian safety? I’ve been here and have been walking around. It’s a wonderful grid.
PC: We just came off of a walkability study, and we have a plan. We’re looking to drastically reimagine our downtown’s flow. It’s a beautiful grid, it’s gorgeous architecture, but the one-way streets and all the stoplights create hazards for bikes and pedestrians that are unnecessary. We’re looking to go to two-way streets in most of the streets, we’re looking to take down many of the stoplights and do four-way stop signs to really calm that traffic and make a safer environment. With those buildouts will be bike lanes and lots of trees and things that should make it an even more beautiful downtown to walk around.
Though Scranton’s love of one-way streets has been memorialized in the city’s street art, a recently completed connectivity study recommends converting many of them to two-way routes to reduce traffic speeds and improve pedestrian safety. Credit: City of Scranton.
We’ve got a lot of different grants teed up to be able to do this work. Our engineers are working on it now. We’re really looking forward to matching the architectural beauty of Scranton and the energy of all of our great shops and businesses, restaurants and bars with a streetscape that does them justice.
I think it will be a huge positive difference for our downtown, but like everything we do as mayors, it will take a little bit of money, a little bit of time, a little bit of conversation and a lot of enthusiasm.
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