Report
Who Pays For The New Downtown?
Office conversion can create housing. Cities still need to know what their incentives buy, and who keeps the value they add.
Research theme
Cities and Infrastructure
Whether ambition can become physical capacity.
We follow where infrastructure compounds productivity, which local constraints become national constraints, and who can still build at useful speed.
- 57.8%World urban populationShare living in urban areas
- 91.9%Electricity accessWorld population with access
- +1.4%Urban population growthWorld, annual
What we study
Housing
Zoning, construction costs, and supply.
Transport
Transit, ports, freight rail, and logistics.
Energy Systems
Generation, transmission, interconnection.
Building Capacity
Permitting, procurement, and labor supply.
What we believe
Infrastructure investment can raise a city's productive capacity.
Capital that raises a city's productivity, in housing near jobs, in transit and ports, in transmission and generation, compounds; capital that merely relocates activity does not. Data centers, factories, and housing now fail at the same point, the wait for a grid connection, a permit, or a zoning variance, and cities are where those waits are measured because they force land, labor, capital, and policy into one place.
Interconnection queues are the new zoning.
Gigawatts waiting for a grid connection determine where data centers and factories can be built at all.
Housing supply is productivity policy.
Cities that cannot add homes near jobs export their workers and import their inflation.
Time is the largest line item.
Permitting and connection delays add financing costs and postpone the returns from new capacity.
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Who Pays For The New Downtown?
Office conversion can create housing. Cities still need to know what their incentives buy, and who keeps the value they add.
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Key questions
Where does infrastructure compound productivity?
What keeps a city affordable and productive?
Who can still build at useful speed?
How do local constraints become national ones?