The Power of Civic Partnership

Los Angeles, long a city of promise and opportunity, has today become synonymous with homelessness and crime; where we educate the world’s innovators yet can’t provide them with housing that’s affordable; and where economic realities, such as a cost of living 44.3% higher than the national average, contribute to brain drain, with a net loss of 32% in college-educated population last year, according to recent census data.

I ran for mayor of Los Angeles in 2022 on the premise that we could and must do better. At the time, I believed that serving as mayor would be the best way for me to bring together the business community’s knowledge and expertise with the public sector’s ability to develop and execute on policy.

After ending my mayoral campaign, I made the move to CBRE. Many questioned why I was “abandoning” my work to bring forward solutions to our city’s problems.

What they didn’t appreciate is that working at a company like CBRE would give me a new platform to catalyze change by helping our elected officials make better decisions, improve the business climate, and ultimately deliver more benefit to the entire community.

Today, I challenge fellow business leaders to adopt the same approach to city partnership.

We all have to lean in and take control of the collective future of our urban environments.

Having spent two decades at the intersection of the public and private sectors in L.A., I’ve learned that most view our city’s challenges and their potential solutions as linear. We want to point the finger at one person—a mayor, a CEO—to assign credit or blame (mostly the latter).

The reality is that no one person or industry can conceive and implement meaningful, sustainable and sweeping change on their own. Solutions to our problems exist in the collective human capital all around us. With the diversity, talent and innovative spirit that define Angelenos, there’s no problem we shouldn’t be able to solve if we work together.

What does this look like?

First, it’s about supporting data-driven decision-making through partnership.

Making a good decision is hard—especially when you don’t have all the information. We often overlook the fact that government officials lack the resources, research and expertise necessary to make complex decisions that affect various industries and individuals.

Case in point: Measure ULA. Also known as the “Mansion Tax” or, more optimistically, the “Homelessness and Housing Solutions Tax,” Measure ULA is an example of a solution to a complex problem that was put forth with little to no input from the commercial real estate experts who work day in and day out in this space.

The measure, well-intended and seemingly logical on paper in its effort to generate revenue to create more housing, has raised just $215 million—far less than the $600 million to $1 billion that voters were promised—and has instead stifled growth in an already down market. Recognizing that our government partners need real-time data and information to support their policy development—and that our real estate expertise could help close a sometimes-wide knowledge gap in the public sector—last year our local leadership team launched a civic engagement initiative in L.A. to build trust and relationships with our policy-makers.

As part of this initiative, local-market and line-of-business leaders from CBRE, along with our research team, meet regularly with elected officials and agency heads to discuss macro issues affecting our city and share data-based insights targeted to specific districts. We have no ask from our elected leaders; we simply want to help educate and build relationships.

While there may have been some skepticism initially, time has shown that it’s working. We’re engaging with policymakers who aren’t traditionally in conversation with the business community, helping provide context and expertise as they consider critical decisions on important issues.

At the same time, we need to align across industries to solve our city’s complex problems.

When we focus on a problem together, we can achieve meaningful results. I like to give the seemingly mundane example of the sidewalks in Downtown L.A.

When I served as Executive Director of one of the largest BIDs in Downtown L.A. from 2013 to 2016, I took on the challenge of finding an effective solution for an ongoing issue with our sidewalks being impassable due to tree roots lifting the concrete.

At the time, the city’s idea was the costliest: completely replacing the sidewalks. But our coalition knew there must be a more cost-effective approach. Through the BID’s partnership with the local business community, we identified a company that had the technology to shave the sidewalks down and maintain their integrity at a fraction of the cost.

We enlisted the city’s Bureau of Engineering and created a pilot permit to fix over 800 sidewalk locations in the 52-block district at a nominal cost. The project became an applauded public-private partnership that’s been replicated across L.A.

Take this one example to scale: Imagine if all businesses in L.A. were able to share their expertise and knowledge as our city officials develop solutions to address complex social and financial problems like homelessness, housing and economic growth.

More yet, imagine if this same knowledge-sharing were applied across and among all cities.

It would be like a multi-lane freeway (familiar to us Angelenos) with all of us moving forward, in synch, together.

Meaningful solutions are born of a dynamic exchange of ideas, knowledge, influence, relationships and, dare I say, compromise. In a city known for being future-forward, civic dialogue and information-sharing are on life support. And almost everyone is guilty on some level of contributing to the status quo.

This is my urgent advice to my fellow business and civic leaders across all cities: Have the courage to meet with someone with whom you think you may not share any common ground.

We cannot continue to sit in silos and complain about our city’s problems or deride what we consider to be ineffective solutions. Instead, let’s leverage our expertise to partner with policy- and decision-makers to drive meaningful progress on complex challenges, regardless of our political differences.