Here’s the final intro:
A Note From Venice
I’m writing this week’s issue from Venice. It’s a good place to think about the themes this newsletter tracks, because Venice is living through demographic and climate change at the same time.
The historic center’s population has fallen below 48,000, down from about 175,000 in the early 1950s. Rents, tourism pressure, and a lack of everyday services have pushed generations of Venetians to the mainland. At the same time, the lagoon keeps testing the city’s flood defenses. The MOSE barrier system has cut down on catastrophic flooding since it became operational, but acqua alta remains a fact of life here, and the years of water damage before MOSE already drove people out. It’s also incredibly hot this week, with temperatures across Italy soaring well above 90 degrees to over 100 in some places, and drought gripping most of Europe.
Population decline and climate exposure are usually treated as separate stories. However, Venice shows what happens when they compound, and there are lessons here for the United States. That’s one of the main reasons we scored five dimensions equally in the Geography of Prosperity Index. A shrinking population means fewer people left to advocate and pay for incredibly expensive infrastructure investment. Persistent flood risk makes it harder to convince anyone to stay. Each problem makes the other worse. Layer in other dimensions like social cohesion, automation readiness, and governance and foresight, and you get a much clearer picture of how your city is faring.
I’ll have more to say about this in the coming weeks. For now, thank you for reading, and for being part of this community.
— Bradley
The Santa Monica City Council voted Tuesday to establish a Housing-Focused System of Care, a locally controlled model that gives the city direct authority over homeless services from street outreach through permanent housing. The plan follows 14 community meetings held between April and July. It arrives days after the 2026 Point-in-Time Count found unsheltered homelessness in Santa Monica down 18.7 percent, even as homelessness rose 1.2 percent across the broader Los Angeles County Continuum of Care.
Why It Matters: Santa Monica’s decision to bring homelessness response in-house, rather than continue relying on a patchwork of county and regional systems, is a Governance and Foresight story. Cities that build direct institutional capacity to manage a crisis tend to produce more durable outcomes than those that outsource it. The divergence from the county trend line is early evidence the model may already be working.
Source: santamonica.gov
Mayor Brandon Johnson and city officials launched a $162 million adaptive reuse project on July 29 that will turn a 25-story office tower at 500 N. Michigan Ave. into 320 apartments, including 64 affordable units, along the Magnificent Mile. The building’s zoning designation was approved in 2024, and the project draws on Chicago’s updated floor-area guidelines designed to make office-to-residential conversions easier to execute in the city’s highest-density districts.
Why It Matters: This is a Population Renewal story about repurposing existing stock rather than waiting on new construction. Chicago’s downtown office vacancy has been a persistent drag on the city’s tax base and street-level vitality; converting underused towers into housing is one of the more direct levers a city has to add both residents and revenue without a new building permit.
Source: Construction Review Online
A new report from SMU DataArts, produced through the City Arts Data Exchange with Bloomberg Associates, examined the finances of more than 4,400 nonprofit cultural organizations across 10 U.S. cities from 2019 to 2024. It found that sector health has diverged sharply since the pandemic: Atlanta, Cleveland, and Phoenix saw stable or growing revenues, while Des Moines, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, and Seattle experienced financial contraction. Cities that grew or maintained public arts investment saw more stable conditions. Local government support covered only about 5 percent of average organizational expenses in 2024, but that small share was linked to meaningfully stronger financial and attendance outcomes.
Why It Matters: Nonprofit arts organizations are part of a city’s civic infrastructure. Where they thrive, they create shared public spaces and sustain a creative workforce; where they contract, cities lose some of the connective tissue that holds communities together. This is a Social Cohesion story: the data shows that modest, sustained public investment correlates with a healthier cultural sector, and a healthier cultural sector is one input into whether a place feels like somewhere people want to stay.
Source: SMU DataArts
Three fast-moving wildfires broke out around Spokane, Washington, starting August 1, fueled by record drought, high winds, and extremely dry vegetation. The largest, the Old Trails Fire, grew past 3,600 acres and jumped the Spokane River into residential neighborhoods. Washington Governor Bob Ferguson declared a state of emergency, and the National Guard was activated to assist with evacuations and firefighting. More than 700 structures have been destroyed, most of them homes, and a 37-year-old man has been arrested on arson charges in connection with one of the fires.
Why It Matters: A major wildland-urban interface fire inside a state’s second-largest city is a stress test of Climate Resilience infrastructure that most metro areas haven’t had to plan for. Spokane’s experience is a preview of the kind of urban fire risk cities in the interior West and Pacific Northwest will need to build response capacity for, not just rural and exurban communities.
Source: AccuWeather, ABC News
More than 45 million people were under heat alerts the weekend of August 2, with Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Tucson, and Salt Lake City all under extreme heat warnings and temperatures challenging daily records. At the same time, flash flood watches covered parts of Michigan, Indiana, western New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, and West Virginia, with the flood risk later spreading into New York City and New England.
Why It Matters: The same weekend bringing record heat to the West brought flash flood risk to the East is a Climate Resilience story about simultaneous, geographically distinct hazards. Cities increasingly need to plan for concurrent climate stress, not sequential events, which puts real strain on emergency management systems built around responding to one crisis at a time.
Source: ABC News
Texas Governor Greg Abbott directed the Public Utility Commission of Texas and ERCOT on August 3 to conduct a comprehensive audit of every data center project in the interconnection queue before any new project can connect to the grid. ERCOT is currently reviewing more than 474 gigawatts of connection requests, up from 233 gigawatts in January, with data centers representing roughly 90 percent of that demand. Each project must now disclose its power and water use, cooling technology, tax incentives received, and community impact plans. ERCOT has already postponed its “Batch Zero” large-load review process to accommodate the audit.
Why It Matters: This is a Ratepayer Protection and Governance and Foresight story rolled into one. Texas has been the loosest-regulation, fastest-growth state for data center development in the country. A pause of this scale, in a state built on welcoming this kind of investment, signals that even the most permissive jurisdictions are running into the limits of grid capacity and public patience.
Source: Office of the Texas Governor, TechCrunch
Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported that U.S. employers announced 33,429 job cuts in July, the lowest monthly total in two years. Artificial intelligence was cited as the leading reason for layoffs for the fifth consecutive month, accounting for 10,970 cuts. Technology remained the sector with the most job cuts overall, posting 149,023 cuts so far in 2026, up 67 percent from the same point last year. Hiring plans, meanwhile, rose 25 percent year over year.
Why It Matters: This is an Automation Readiness story with a complicated shape. AI-attributed layoffs continuing for a fifth straight month shows real, sustained labor market restructuring, not a one-time event. But falling overall layoff totals and rising hiring suggest the disruption is concentrated rather than economy-wide. Cities with workforces heavily exposed to tech and routine information work carry more of this risk than others.
Source: Challenger, Gray & Christmas
The most pressing question facing leaders today isn’t what’s changing — it’s what to do about it. I help organizations answer that. Reach out today to learn more.
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