Third in a series

Boston is embarking on a new era, as Mayor Thomas Menino leaves office after two decades. His successor will have to both build on Menino’s accomplishments as an “urban mechanic” but also to reinvent the role of mayor. This election comes at a time of huge changes in our nation that are radically altering and elevating the role and responsibility of mayors.

It is no secret that American cities face super-sized challenges. We need to gain 8.3 million jobs to make up for the jobs lost in the Great Recession and to keep up with population growth and labor market dynamics. We also need better jobs to counter the sharp growth in poverty and near poverty: Between 2000 and 2011, the number of poor and near poor in the United States increased from 81 million to 107 million. There is also a growing gap in cities like Boston between lagging wages and soaring rents and home prices. Twenty percent of Boston families spend more than half of their income on shelter; half of those families are very low income and at risk of homelessness. Even working- and middle-class families struggle to find housing. A family of three making about $68,000 a year (80 percent of the region’s median income) can afford only about 12 percent of the housing available in the city, and are largely priced out of once affordable neighborhoods like Jamaica Plain and South Boston.

Boston and other cities will need to grapple with these difficulties with little help from the federal government, which is mired in partisanship and barely able to accomplish the most basic tasks, like passing a budget. As a result, mayors can no longer be content to be good managers of city services – as important as that task is. They also have to engage networks – within the city, across the country, and around the world.

The next mayor of Boston needs to excel at three tasks. First, he has to act as a leader for the greater Boston metropolitan area, and help elected officials in the region set a bold agenda on economic development. Mayor Menino played a leadership role in the Metro Mayors Coalition, and was always ready to help fellow mayors in the region solve problems. But the next mayor has to go farther, and make bolstering the economy of the greater Boston region a key priority of the coalition. That means, as Harvard’s Edward Glaeser has written, collaborating to bring new businesses to the region, and agreeing not to engage in wasteful and fruitless poaching of businesses from neighboring jurisdictions. The Metro Mayors Caucus in Denver, along with the Metro Denver Economic Development Corporation, has helped create a region where elected leaders and economic developers “collaborate to compete,” and do so quite successfully, as evidenced by projects like the Denver International Airport and the extensive FasTracks rail project.

Second, Boston’s next mayor has to galvanize other US mayors to make progress on the issues that matter most to them, specifically affordable housing. According to Mayor Menino’s Housing Boston 2020 plan, the city needs to fill an $81 million gap created by cuts in federal funds, and is looking at changing zoning and land use regulations so that developers spend less, and therefore can charge tenants less. The city, like others in the country, is experimenting with design solutions, including micro-units to provide less expensive housing for single people. Boston is also convening experts to think about how to deliver housing for families and seniors. All of these ideas could be shared with other mayors and improved through discussion and lessons learned elsewhere. Places like the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies and the strong financial and venture capital sector could also be part of this network searching for solutions. If the mayor can bring all these players to the table, he can leverage Boston’s astonishing intellectual capital for the nation as a whole. Cracking the code on making city life affordable for families up and down the income scale is critical for the success of Boston and other great American cities.

Finally, Boston’s next mayor needs to be ready to go global. Global urbanization is the dominant trend in world today, and it means that the economy is evolving into a network of trading cities. Currently, Boston is a middling performer on exports, in terms of the share of what it produces and sells to the rest of the world, and in its annualized export growth rate. Boston’s mayor needs a trade strategy focusing on everything from building up the region’s tradable sector (including precision instruments, R&D services, and computers) to improving ports and airports. This is as much the mayor’s job as getting potholes filled. Portland, Oregon’s business, civic, and elected leadership has an actionable plan to double exports in the next five years, which will add more than 100,000 jobs to the region’s economy. The new mayor needs to work with a coalition of industry and university leaders (higher education is a huge export industry for the region) on a greater Boston agenda.

It’s a daunting set of tasks for someone who faces the already difficult challenge of following a beloved and successful incumbent. But this is what it means to be a 21st century mayor. The great city of Boston deserves no less.

Bruce Katz is a vice president at the Brookings Institution and co-founder of the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program. Jennifer Bradley is a fellow at the Brookings Institution. They are the co-authors of The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy.