(Featuring Frances Mennone, Advisor, Consultant Cross Street Partners, and Bruce Katz, Co-Founder, The New Localism)

When the pandemic first spread across the globe in early 2020, real estate and urban experts collectively began to ask: What will this crisis mean for cities?

https://www.afire.org/podcast/mennonekatzcast/

And now, as the world now deals with the latter stages of the pandemic, with many cities now cautiously entering a recovery phase, what have we learned, and how should CRE investors think about the future of urbanism?

In April 2020, AFIRE’s CEO (and host of the AFIRE Podcast) Gunnar Branson joined Frances Mennone of Cross Street Partners and Bruce Katz of New Localism to ask—early in the COVID crisis—what it will take for cities to reopen and reactivate their economies. (See: “Re-Opening the Economy and the Complexities of Downtowns” at thenewlocalism.com)

At the time, the authors concluded that “the recovery, particularly in the cores of our cities and metropolitan areas, can be faster and more inclusive if communities plan with ambition and act with focus. The future of our cities begins now.”

Today, more than a year since their initial conversation, Mennone and Katz join the AFIRE Podcast to explore what cities have learned, and what they still need to do, in order to build back better—even as the pandemic enters its more muddled “delta phase.”

According to Mennone, “Cities are humming organisms, and when you stop them, you will need shock paddles to get them started again.”

Listen now on your favorite podcast service (Apple, Google, Spotify) for the full episode.