11/25/2025
City Building Means Everyone!
At Harvard’s Beyond Shelter: The Business of Ending Homelessness in America Deep Dive, I spent two days with leaders who are reshaping how our cities respond to one of the most urgent moral, public health, and economic challenges of our time. The program brought together business leaders, public health experts, researchers, policy makers, providers on the front lines, and people with lived experience. It was a reminder that the work of building cities is not the work of one sector but the work of all of us
I walked away with a deeper conviction that homelessness is a policy choice that can be redesigned when we choose coordination, investment, and human dignity as guiding principles. The case of Denver makes this plain. Mayor Mike Johnston took time to explain his process in detail
Google the "All In Mile High Report" Denver delivered the largest documented multi-year decrease in homelessness any major American city. More than 7,000 people have come inside from the streets and over 5,500 have transitioned into permanent housing. These outcomes were achieved not through punitive displacement but through coordinated engagement, micro communities, hotel conversions, treatment access, and a system designed to treat people as neighbors.
We laughed about he and Mayor Brandon Johnson being called “mayors / brothers from different mothers” and the important work taking place in Chicago on this same front.
Businesses have a role to play.
From the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation 's discussion of workforce inclusion to Amazon.com's $3.6 billion commitment to creating and preserving affordable housing, we saw how employers can drive stability by investing directly in housing and community infrastructure.
Housing supply is non-negotiable.
Research from the Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies underscored what many of us feel firsthand in our neighborhoods. Housing costs, stagnant wages, demographic shifts, and federal underinvestment have created a crisis that touches every city and town. Without production, preservation, and deeply affordable pathways, the crisis migrates
Innovation is possible.
Hearing Daniel Kroft and Steve Oyer speak about how potential for speed, cost savings, and design quality is real, especially when regulatory systems evolve to meet the moment.
Care is a form of infrastructure.
We need medical and behavioral health care for people living unsheltered reminded all of us that no housing strategy succeeds without addressing trauma, addiction, chronic illness, and the structural inequities that underlie them.
Cities cannot do this alone.
Robin Zeigler’s (my new muse) work at MURAL Housing Partners shows us what it looks like to build mixed-use, mixed-income communities where affordability is not charity but strategy.
City building means everyone.
It requires governments willing to lead, businesses willing to invest, universities willing to research, nonprofits willing to collaborate, communities willing to trust, and residents willing to see one another with humanity.
