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It’s not hard to find evidence that Katz has hit prime time. After years of behind-the-scenes work, the 50-year-old wonk from Brooklyn has become America’s oracle for cities, the policy prophet on everything from public housing to bike lanes to Great Recession urban economies. During a single week in December, Katz was quoted in a New York Observer article on office leasing rates and an Entrepreneur.com post critiquing the Obama administration’s job-creation program. That week he also spoke to a Senate subcommittee, heard from the president at a Brookings event and co-authored a widely dissected article in The New Republic about the reinvention of Detroit. (The article’s subheading touted the three-page feature as “a plan for solving America’s greatest urban disaster,” which gives a clue to the wide berth of authority the media gives Katz.) Months later the cycle is no different: One day he’s alongside U.S. Transportation Sec. Ray LaHood at a panel discussion on national infrastructure policy, and two days prior he was on a D.C. podium with former Talking Heads singer David Byrne, an avid cyclist, for a talk on the future of urban transportation. A picture of the event shows the compact, bespectacled policymaker sitting behind the wiry, gray-haired musician like a proud doctoral adviser.
It’s not that tough to be an expert on some platform or another in America 2.0. By now, the media churn out talking heads like a multiplex does popcorn: The process is fast, the sounds familiar and the end product mass-manufactured and often stale. Bruce Katz is not this kind of expert. Rather, his rise to prominence has been gradual and on his own terms, an ethos reflected in his hardcharging agenda and his no-bullshit approach, his tie-free wardrobe and vast agglomeration of influential friends. Katz mentions the latter when asked to reflect upon his ascent: “I think this is less about personality, and more about a broad network of us who have been working on issues in tandem,” he says. “This is the moment to bring that to a national scale.”
Putting “Urban Development” Back into HUD After the 2008 election Obama appointed Katz to his transition team at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, signifying to Beltway insiders not only the arrival of an urban Democrat to the White House, but perhaps more important, the reform of HUD and a renewed focus on urban affairs. Katz last worked at the federal agency during the first term of the Clinton administration, serving as chief of staff to then-Sec. Henry Cisneros.
By the time Katz arrived at HUD during his first tenure there in the 1990s, he had already established himself as a kind of housing finance wizard on Capitol Hill. Cisneros recalls receiving a list of suggested candidates for key agency positions just after his nomination. “Bruce’s name had been written in for six of the 14 spots,” he remembers. In the end Katz landed as chief of staff, representing his first formal step toward his current incarnation as a policymaker. A lawyer by training, Katz cut his teeth on Capitol Hill first as senior counsel to the powerful U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Housing and Urban Affairs, and then as staff director of the subcommittee. But Katz says during his time as an associate at a corporate law firm, which he joined after Yale Law School, he was always interested in pushing government’s levers and, more acutely, making systemic change. “For me, it’s never about a single program,” he says. “It’s about the frames, the paradigms … You can’t defend pouring money into a broken system anymore.”
Urban policy junkies remember the 1990s, the time of Katz’s first stint at HUD, as the gestation period of HOPE VI, the massive federal public housing redevelopment program. Cisneros credits Katz with getting the multibillion-dollar program enacted. “He had the ideas. He knew the history and was in a position to begin writing the regulations right away,” Cisneros says. “The programs now being put in place by the Obama administration build on the work we did then.”
When Katz returned to HUD to work with the transition team through the first 100 days of the Obama administration, he worked as a senior adviser to Sec. Shaun Donovan, a fellow New Yorker and old friend from the Clinton administration days. Donovan recalls Katz taking a “very strong role” in the reprogramming of the department. “Bruce is one of the central thinkers we looked to for many of our major initiatives and will continue to look to,” Donovan says. “I have no doubt he will continue to be an important figure in the administration.”
Take a look at the programs put in place during Obama’s first year and that influence is already clear. The administration’s most ambitious community-development program to date, Choice Neighborhoods, sounds like something from a Katz research brief — and in fact, it was. The 2004 brief’s full title read “Neighborhoods of Choice and Connection: The Evolution of American Neighborhood Policy and What It Means for the United Kingdom.”
Choice Neighborhoods represents a $250 million attempt to connect public housing redevelopment more closely with school and early childhood education reforms. This holistic approach to fighting urban poverty is something Katz has advocated since designing HOPE VI back in the 1990s. HOPE VI aimed to transform troubled neighborhoods by replacing towering, brick public housing developments with less dense neighborhoods built with a mix of affordable and market-rate housing, as well as more deeply subsidized units. By 2007 the program had led to the relocation of 68,657 households, the demolition of 87,445 units and the reconstruction of 61,222 units. Though the program is credited with improving the face of hundreds of low-income neighborhoods nationwide, it is criticized for causing displacement by demolishing more units than it creates and failing to address underlying woes facing the communities it cosmetically rebuilds. The Obama administration has responded to these critiques by promising one-for-one replacement of all subsidized units and offering new incentives for neighborhood-based educational intervention through Choice Neighborhoods and another program Katz helped craft, Promise Neighborhoods.
The three programs, which will build on one another under HUD’s framework, share three essential Katzisms: First, poverty must be deconcentrated so new opportunities are created within poor neighborhoods. Second, government must work with partners from the private sector if it wants to leverage investment and permanently change communities. Finally, metropolitan areas require solutions that cross traditional bureaucratic and policy silos.
“We need to be thinking about integrated intervention,” Katz says. “The modern bureaucratic state operates in intensely technocratic and specialized ways, instead of thinking about places as they occur.”

“Where equity is concerned, he creates forums for people with that agenda to be heard. He’s taken urban issues out of the special interest zone and into the mainstream,” Angela Glover Blackwell says.

A Blueprint for Urbanism
Given Katz’s influence in the administration, many in Washington predicted that the president would snap up Katz for the newly created Office of Urban Affairs. But one year after the appointment of former Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrión Jr. for the job, Katz has carved out a privileged niche that’s at once outside the red tape of government and well within its sphere of influence. He says the perch suits him better than a seat closer in.
“A year ago people kept asking, ‘What do you want in the administration?’ I said, ‘Nothing.’ I feel like I did my stint in government … and I really have no desire to go back. I feel like where I am now is exactly where I should be.” Colleagues agree. “If he went into politics, he would have constraints he doesn’t have now,” says his Brookings deputy director Amy Liu. “He has more influence on the outside.”
The Metropolitan Policy Program came to life in 1996as the Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, at a time when the failures of urban housing and welfare policies were finally being confronted by Washington. Clinton, who rode to the White House on a welfare-reform platform, was nearly done with his first term in office. He had just signed a controversial piece of legislation requiring that tenants living in housing projects or otherwise receiving federal housing assistance be evicted if they, or any guest or visitor, engaged in certain types of criminal activity on the premises. The HOPE VI program was likewise attracting attention, as public housing residents in cities such as San Francisco grew concerned about displacement caused by the demolition of the dense housing projects and began to protest. Amid all of this, Fannie Mae chairman and chief executive Jim Johnson, then also the chairman of Brookings, approached Katz about leaving his post at HUD and starting an urban policy program at the influential Washington think tank.
“We built the program off a three-page memo,” recalls Liu, who was then working with Katz as a special assistant at HUD. The two left HUD that year, before the start of Clinton’s second term, to start what would formally become the Metropolitan Policy Program in the mid-2000s.
If Katz is the name in lights, Liu is the person makingsure the bulbs don’t burn out. “People talk about the Bruce and Amy Show,” Liu says with a laugh. “Sometimes where you end up is by luck, sometimes it is by intent,” she adds. “My luck was that Bruce was at the Senate when I decided to enter the urban field.” Liu began working with Katz the summer before her senior year at Northwestern University, when he was the staff director of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Housing and Urban Affairs. The two share a straightforward intelligence that allows them, in any given conversation, to jump from topic to topic without losing control of a tightly wound conceptual thread.
While the Bruce and Amy Show certainly has influenced the Obama administration on a programmatic level, the duo’s most enduring contribution may just be the way it has reframed how America understands cities and the metropolitan regions around them. “When we created the program we knew there was a real problem with the word ‘urban,’” Liu says. “It makes people think about race, poverty and deficits, not assets, not opportunities.”
Indeed, back in 1996, more people were talking about how to contain sprawl than how to save Detroit. Even in the gentrifying urban neighborhoods of Manhattan and Brooklyn, young professionals were expected to hightail it to the ’burbs when their kids reached school age. In order for any new program focused on urban policy to succeed, the “urban” would have to be put back into “suburban.”
Fourteen years later it has become downright trendy to cite Brookings data showing that more than 80 percent of Americans live in a metropolitan region — an urban core of 50,000 residents or more plus surrounding counties. Or that two-thirds of the country’s population lives in one of the 100 largest metropolitan centers. Or that those regions are also home to 68 percent of America’s jobs and the origin of 75 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.
By getting those stats into the PowerPoint presentations of economic development officials across the country, Katz has moved forward multiple conversations, says Angela Glover Blackwell, the founder and CEO of PolicyLink, a national organization that shares Katz’s regional approach to cities, but focuses more directly on working for economic and social equity within them. Glover Blackwell worked with Katz most recently during the transition to move forward the Choice Neighborhoods program. She describes him as a facilitator rather than an advocate.
“He puts more emphasis on understanding that we are a metropolitan nation,” Glover Blackwell says. “He definitely understands the place part of it. Where equity is concerned, he creates spaces and forums for people with that agenda to be heard. He’s taken urban issues out of the special interest zone and into the mainstream.”
Indeed, Katz, a white man who grew up 10 minutes from Coney Island and now lives in the first-ring D.C. suburb of Arlington, Va., is no fringe urban activist. With his high regard for public-private partnerships and global trade, it’s easy to see how he represents the evolution of urban advocacy from a fight over job creation numbers, fair housing and civil rights to a broader battle that encompasses climate change as well as issues of housing, economic development and Katz’s own buzzword of choice, “opportunity.”
THE DAY JOB

On a cold Wednesday in December, Katz started his day drinking coffee with John Austin, the former executive director of the New Economy Initiative for Southeast Michigan and a Metropolitan Policy Program fellow. The two met at Katz’s office in Brookings’ Northwest Washington headquarters to discuss, among other things, the relevance of Turin, Italy, to the future of Detroit — a point made in Katz’s recent New Republic article about the fallen car capital.
In the 1970s Fiat — now Chrysler’s corporate parent —employed 140,000 autoworkers in Turin. By the 1990s the number had shrunk to 40,000, the population had dropped by 30 percent and the once-vibrant industrial city had spiraled into the landscape of deficit Detroiters know all too well. Turin’s rebound began when a reformist mayor with a strategy for economic innovation took over in 1993. Autoworkers became aerospace technicians. New industries grew. By 2006 the city posted its lowest levels of unemployment ever. That year the city hosted the Olympic Winter Games, itself an engine of development and an opportunity for the city to broadcast its progress to the world. “Americans are odd in that we are a nation of immigrants, but we don’t get out much,” Katz observes wryly. “Europe has a playbook for recovery and we have to learn from it.”
Later that day Katz met with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom. Their conversation, too, revolved around ways to open metropolitan centers up to the global economy and its lessons. Newsom recently opened a trade office in Shanghai aimed at connecting businesses in China to the San Francisco Bay Area.
Katz, who likes to joke that he lives close to international airports the way other people live near subway stations, is interested in exploring how other metropolitan areas can establish themselves as presences within the international economy. After Newsom’s departure, Katz was pulled into a series of powwows with his staff about a planned summit in Chicago before heading into a conversation with a friend who works at the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority.
“Municipal water policy deserves a lot more attention than it gets,” he says, launching into an earnest tangent about the need for policymakers to pay more attention to the decidedly unsexy everyday nuts and bolts of environmental policy.
Before heading home, Katz met with Liu and a few other Brookings colleagues to talk over the Obama administration’s commitment to one of the team’s latest pet concepts: regional innovation clusters. Mapped out in the Metropolitan Policy Program’s “Blueprint for American Prosperity” policy papers, the clusters are federally sponsored partnerships designed to boost economic development through supporting business innovation in a particular metropolitan region. The Obama administration’s allocation of $50 million for the initiative over the next four year represents a major coup for the think tank and its allies.
“The clusters approach came out of people thinking about what the federal government does during the dry period of the last eight years, when nothing was happening,” says Katz, quickly adding that his program was not the “sole genesis” of the cluster concept, but that it was clearly influential.
How exactly this work will play out is up for debate. Think tanks often watch their ideas get picked up decades after they were first conceived. Katz’s ideas work well in theory, but their application can prove to be difficult, requiring the most steely of silos to be broken with new structures erected in their place. Over the past year Katz has confronted the challenge as he has watched the Office of Urban Affairs take shape. The creation of a czar for cities represents a huge conceptual victory for Katz. Finally, he has succeeded in reframing metropolitan policy not as a matter of local concern, but as a federal issue that can’t be divorced from other economic, environmental, infrastructural and equity concerns. Yet even he admits the office’s first year has highlighted the complications that come with knocking down traditional bureaucratic walls. “I think Adolfo [Carrión], in some respects, has the toughest job,” says Katz. “The other czars, their job is quite clear. His job is more complicated. In addition to creating programs, he has to first invent an entirely new narrative of how to approach cities and metros.”
When asked if he has ever disagreed with Katz’s read on an issue, Cisneros pauses before offering up this insight: “The only times when I sometimes find myself unable to follow Bruce, I think it’s because he moves so fast from thing to thing. The public policy is much slower and sometimes you have act slower. There is a disconnect between the speed his mind works and the pace required to move organizational structures and the people we need to be aboard.”
Katz chalks the disconnect up to the clunkiness of democracy. “Occasionally it would be nice to be China for a day, but we are not. I’m learning to adapt to the pace of change,” he says. Yet if Obama’s first year in power is any indication, bureaucracy may just be shaping up to keep up. The question is, is the rest of America?

This article appeared in the Spring 2010 issue of Next American City magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW!