Inclusive Economic Growth in America’s Cities

This paper defines economic inclusion as
the ability of all people, including the disadvantaged, to
share in economic gains, that is, the conditions that allow
for broadly shared prosperity. Beyond the “right” to access
consumption in cities, and beyond relatively standardized
safety net policies that support economic security,
inclusion demands intentional, flexible, context-appropriate
strategies aimed at shifting the dynamics of local land and
labor markets, public education, and other institutions. The
paper analyzes the varied contexts for designing and
supporting such strategies in a rapidly changing society,
where urban regions have long been critical to incorporating
a broad cross-section of people, including immigrant
newcomers. Four dimensions are particularly crucial: an
urban area’s level of economic growth, the quality of its
jobs, its demographic profile, and its geography of
opportunity (degree and form of spatial inequality).
Economic inclusion is particularly urgent in America’s
strongest local markets, which are pricing out the
lowest-wage workers and showing a disturbing tendency to
import rather than grow the talent needed for the emerging,
innovation-driven economy. But weak-market regions face
important challenges—and a range of options for leveraging
demographic and other changes—as well. And for now, in all
types of cities, innovative and promising strategies remain
small in scale, in part because they are competing for
support with entrenched, underperforming systems.