I turned in the manuscript for The Geography of Prosperity to my editor at MIT Press this week.
That starts a long process, which includes peer review, editing, layout, and marketing. It could take a year (or more) before the book is in your hands. But I wanted you to know, because so many of you have shaped this work through your comments, your city nominations, and your pushback when I got something wrong.
This doesn’t mean the work is done. In fact, it’s just beginning. I’m going to keep traveling around the country, meeting with local leaders and residents, trying to understand what’s actually happening in the places you live. I’ll continue to share the best practices and innovations that are taking hold in the local laboratories of civic innovation. If you think I should visit your city, drop a comment below and tell me why.
I’m also starting to book speaking engagements for late 2026 through next year, so please reach out if you’d like me to join your event.
Bradley
U.S. population growth slows to a near-record low as World Population Day arrives. The Census Bureau’s Vintage 2025 estimates, expanded on ahead of the July 11 UN observance, show net international migration falling from 2.7 million in 2024 to 1.3 million in 2025, with a projected further drop to roughly 321,000 in 2026. Population growth between July 2024 and July 2025 came to just 1.8 million people, or 0.5%, the slowest pace since the early pandemic. That 321,000 figure for 2026 would mark the fewest immigrants in more than 60 years outside of 2020’s pandemic border closures. Thirty-one states still posted positive domestic migration, with South Carolina, Idaho, and North Carolina leading growth rates nationally, even as several Northeastern and Midwestern states stayed afloat only because of immigration.
Why It Matters: This is Population Renewal in its rawest form — the engine of civic vitality running on far less fuel than it did two years ago. Metros that built their growth models around immigration now have a narrower runway. The Index’s Population Renewal dimension was designed to flag exactly this kind of structural exposure before it shows up in a city’s tax base.
New York City launches an interactive map of who speaks what language, and where. The Department of City Planning’s new Language Explorer draws on Census American Community Survey data to show language proficiency at the borough and community-district level. The tool found that roughly 1.8 million New Yorkers have limited English proficiency, with Spanish the most common non-English language citywide, and nearly 23 percent of Brooklyn residents over age 5 reporting limited English proficiency. City Planning director Sideya Sherman framed the tool as a way to support more responsive planning, outreach, and services across the five boroughs.
Why It Matters: This is civic innovation working exactly as the Index’s Governance and Foresight dimension rewards — a city turning open data into a tool that makes its own services more responsive to who actually lives there. Population Renewal isn’t just about growth rates; it’s about whether a city’s institutions can see and serve the population it already has.
New Orleans approves tax breaks for a $100 million affordable housing complex. The City Council voted 6-1 on July 9 to approve a payment-in-lieu-of-taxes deal worth an estimated $33 million over 40 years, clearing the way for the 220-unit Rivana apartments in the city’s River District. All units will be affordable to households earning up to 80% of area median income, with developers pitching the project as workforce housing for the convention and tourism economy next door. Council President JP Morrell cast the lone dissenting vote, questioning why residents should subsidize a project with no guarantee that displaced locals get priority as applicants.
Why It Matters: Population Renewal depends on whether the workers a local economy relies on can actually afford to live near their jobs. This is the announce-vs-execute tension playing out in a single vote — a headline investment paired with a real, unresolved question about who it’s actually built for.
A new heat dome is building over the West, aimed at the Midwest by this weekend. The heat dome is forecast to expand into much of the Midwest next week, with Minneapolis, Chicago, and Kansas City potentially seeing their highest temperatures of the year, 10 to 20 degrees above the historical average for mid-July. The heat may push into the mid-Atlantic and even the Southeast by mid-July, arriving barely a week after the July 4th heat dome that strained the PJM grid. This is the second major heat dome of the summer to threaten the same corridor.
Why It Matters: Climate Resilience isn’t tested by one bad week — it’s tested by long-term exposure and the ability to respond. Back-to-back heat domes are the stress test the Index is built to score.
A wildfire in southern Spain kills at least 12 people amid extreme heat. The fast-moving wildfire near Los Gallardos in Almería broke out July 9 and killed at least 12 people, injured eight, and left 19 missing as firefighters worked through steep terrain and strong winds. Andalusia’s emergency chief said the deaths occurred when residents tried to flee by car or on foot rather than sheltering in place. The fire follows Copernicus’s confirmation that June 2026 was the hottest June on record for western Europe.
Why It Matters: Climate Resilience scoring increasingly has to account for evacuation behavior, not just infrastructure hardening. A fire that outruns official guidance is a governance failure as much as a weather event.
New York City inspected barely a fifth of its cooling towers this year, as a Legionnaires’ cluster emerges. A Gothamist analysis of city data found NYC inspected only 1,306 of the nearly 6,000 cooling towers in the city in the first half of 2026, as a new Legionnaires’ disease cluster emerged on the Upper East Side. As of April 17, more than half of the city’s cooling towers had gone over a year without a city inspection.
Why It Matters: This is Ratepayer Protection and Governance and Foresight colliding directly. Cooling towers are the infrastructure that’s supposed to make extreme heat survivable at scale — the same heat the rest of this beat is tracking. An inspection backlog discovered mid-outbreak is the announce-vs-execute gap in its most literal form.
New York’s governor turns AI loose on the state’s own law books. Governor Hochul’s Regulatory Reset initiative, built with civic tech group Recoding America and Stanford University, uses AI to scan 18 million words of New York state law for outdated requirements — fee schedules, notary rules, defunct task forces — for state agencies to eliminate or modernize, with humans still deciding what actually changes.
Why It Matters: Governance and Foresight usually gets scored on how a place regulates AI. This story flips it: a government using AI to audit and modernize itself is a foresight signal in its own right, and one most metros in the Index haven’t attempted.
Illinois signs the nation’s strictest AI safety law. Governor Pritzker signed the Artificial Intelligence Safety Measures Act on July 6, requiring the largest AI developers to publicly disclose safety practices, report significant incidents, and undergo independent audits. The law is modeled on similar legislation in California and New York, and lawmakers estimate the three states together account for roughly 40% of the U.S. AI market, effectively setting a national standard without federal action. Illinois’s version adds a first-in-the-nation requirement for mandatory annual third-party audits.
Why It Matters: Automation Readiness in the Index isn’t just about adoption speed — it’s about whether a place has built guardrails before the technology outruns them. Illinois just moved from follower to leader on that dimension in a single signing ceremony.
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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