24 – Your city's resource gap (and what you can do about it)

Running a city is hard work, and it’s even harder when there aren’t enough resources to cover basic service and infrastructure needs. More and more cities are finding themselves in this tricky spot, and it’s easy for city leaders to feel helpless. In this episode, we talk about the challenges facing city administrators (as well as their staff) who are increasingly stretched thin by their city's growing resource gap. Then we discuss what they can do about it. There are plenty of tools (related to land use, growth management, economic development, etc.) that cities across the country are using to become more fiscally viable. But these involve changes to the status quo, and change often generates pushback. This episode is about clarifying and communicating your city's resource gap so that you can build consent for taking measures that cultivate greater financial resilience. We discuss: The importance of quantifying your city's real resource gap. How you can use fiscal strength as the common language for framing your community's decisions on planning, development, housing, economic development, street design and maintenance, and more. How you can put fiscal analysis to use to communicate the resource gap to the broader community—and the 3 options it presents you with. Attention Podcast Land! Could you take a moment to help us make this podcast more relevant or interesting to you? We're running a quick (nearly pain-free!) little questionnaire to learn more about what you'd like us to dive deeper into, and what things we could stand to work on. Just go to this Google Form. It'll take you 5 minutes, tops, or your money back. ;) We really appreciate it. The Go Cultivate! podcast is a project of Verdunity. Learn more at verdunity.com. Find more about this and other episodes, and our blog here. (Music in this episode is from Custodian of Records and Tours.) https://www.verdunity.com/podcast/episode-24