Live-near-your-work policies can benefit all stakeholders: shorter commute times and lowered housing costs save time and money for employees; improved employee morale, productivity, and retention reduce turnover and training costs for employers; communities can see better air quality, less urban sprawl and decreased traffic congestion.

\"In this report, the Center for Progressive Reform has brought together more than a dozen of the nation’s leading legal scholars to address different aspects of the nation’s disaster planning and its environmental, health, and safety standards, with a particular view to mitigating the social inequities laid bare by last year\'s storms. The policy solutions they propose will not stop hurricanes or other disasters from occurring. But they could make their impact far less severe by taking toxic chemicals and other dangerous hazards out of the path of storms so that they would not poison those who come into contact with floodwaters; they could make the power grid more agile and adaptable to power shortages and outages; they could reduce the incentives to build in flood zones; they could better protect the health and safety of recovery workers; they could improve disaster response so that it serves all Americans, not just those in wealthier neighborhoods; and they could future-proof vital infrastructure — roads, bridges, pipes, wires — against the creeping effects of climate change that exacerbate the impact and increase the frequency of major storms.\"

The four case studies illustrate how the pursuit of civil justice is able to contribute to a fair economy in each of these ways. “Civil justice” refers to holding people and corporations accountable for their actions (or in some cases, their inaction) through laws and procedures that ensure fair compensation for anyone harmed.

This paper offers a new approach for systematically linking catastrophe bonds and conventional project finance to support large-scale resilience projects. The following sections describe the RE.bound Program framework for catastrophe modeling, bond structuring, and bond sponsorship; summarize key insights and lessons for extending the approach to a range of resilience applications; and offer ideas for government and other public-interest entities seeking to build resilience and mitigate disaster risk.

In early 2015, New Cities Foundation launched the Financing Urban Infrastructure Initiative to address critical infrastructure financing issues and challenges facing cities today. This handbook is the culmination of that initiative.

Best Value Contracting creates a set of enforceable qualifications with a single point of accountability, pervormance qualifications, workforce development, oversight and transparency on publicly funded projects.

Tax abatements makes Ohio schools lost revenue, causing spotty reporting in forgone revenue with government compensation. The report provides recommendation for better tax abatements report.

In recent years, cities have become the drivers of government innovation. As urban growth has exploded over the past half century - increasing from a third to nearly 60 percent of world population today - local officials have been forced to solve problems and generate new ideas, policies, and approaches. From New York to Medellin to Copenhagen, mayors and city managers are finding novel ways to address some of the biggest challenges facing society, whether combating entrenched poverty, financing new infrastructure projects, or protecting the environment.

By 2050, two out of every three people on the planet will live in a city. Urbanization and new ideas go hand in hand; by their very nature, cities have long served to create pockets of innovation, changing and improving the way we live our lives in the process. Historically this process was organic and somewhat serendipitous, but modern advances in technology mean that today\'s city administrations can play a more deliberate role in accelerating and nurturing innovation. The stories hidden in even the most routine city data sets give insights into how real people live their lives, enabling government to do more than simply clean the roads or provide clean water. Armed with these data points on what people do - not what they say they do or what they wish they did - government can create tailored solutions for their residents and discover what works, all without breaking the bank.

Fact sheet supporting Chicago\'s energy benchmarking program.