American Singapore(s): Taking Inventory of Competent City Governance
American Singapore(s): Taking Inventory of Competent City Governance
Hidden Success Stories in American Cities Challenge Our Understanding of Urban Governance, and Why We Need to Find More of Them
In 2024, deep in the heart of the Bronx - one of the most reliably Democratic districts in the country - voters shifted 22 points to the right. They weren't alone. Queens moved 21 points. Miami-Dade, 19 points. Chicago's Cook County moved 11 points. Even Manhattan, the epitome of urban progressivism, shifted 9 points right.
This isn't about people becoming conservative - on ballot initiatives in the same election cycle, voters approved minimum wage increases to $15 per hour in two states (Alaska and Missouri), expanded workers' ability to earn paid sick leave in three states (Alaska, Missouri, and Nebraska), and rejected school vouchers in three states (Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska). Alaska voters opted to ban anti-union captive audience meetings. In contrast, Oregon voters passed a measure to protect cannabis workers' right to unionize.
This isn't a story about Republican victory or Democratic defeat. It's a story about a growing frustration with governance that cuts across all political lines. We aren’t seeing mere political realignment; we are witnessing Hegelian dialectics in action for better or worse.
Purpose Of a System Is What It Does, and Systems Deliver According to their Purpose
Here's a story that tells you everything about how we got here: In 1963, America, despite all its flaws, homes were getting more affordable, not less. Hard to believe. The average home costs about four times the typical family's yearly income, down from six times a decade earlier. During America's post-war economic boom, the American Dream was getting easier to reach, not harder.
Consider UC Berkeley in the 1960s: It wasn't just competing with Harvard and MIT - it was beating them. Berkeley ranked first overall at a time when Harvard didn't even have engineering programs, and MIT was still focusing on technology over humanities. Every department at Berkeley - from English to Physics - ranked in the top three nationally.
During a time when college students could afford rent on a part-time salary because of abundant housing, world-class education came without cost.
Today? The UC System charges its own California residents more than some universities charge out-of-state students. That free, world-class education now costs a small fortune. What's worse, longtime Berkeley residents now call current students "pollution" and fight tooth and nail to stop building new dorms, let alone any attempt to create housing for the next generation seeking the same American dream they enjoyed. The State of California has passed reforms to increase (in theory) housing supply rapidly, but in practice, the growth isn’t happening fast enough, and most of the units are granny flats. Why? The reforms turned out to be filled with loopholes, or the governor interpreted them to let local governments refuse to build more housing. Not to mention, the state hasn't dealt with, or even attempted to deal with, the financial issues that prevent the manufacturing of new housing units due to rising Fed rates since 2022 and restrictive credit since 2008.
None of this was inevitable. It wasn't some natural disaster or economic law that made housing unaffordable and education expensive. We chose this. Through systematic policy decisions, one after another, we dismantled systems that worked. Some decisions were made to artificially restrict the housing supply. Others were made to limit (or cut on a per pupil basis) funding and refuse to create more high-quality universities, despite the ROI, and jack up tuition to save money in the short term and raise tuition rather than focus on reducing long-term costs. We traded long-term success for short-term gains and are paying the price.
The results are everywhere you look:
San Francisco spends $61,000 per tent for "safe sleeping sites" while homelessness grows, and Los Angeles builds $600,000+ homeless units while tent cities expand.
New York pours billions into unclear initiatives but halts congestion pricing because car dealers and New Jersey residents complained.
Houston's successful housing-first homeless program faces dismantling under new leadership.
Hidden Successes
Yet amid this landscape of dysfunction, pockets of extraordinary competence exist across the political spectrum. In the first American Singapore(s) article, we see that in Carmel, Indiana, under Republican leadership, a mid-sized suburb transformed into a national urban planning model. Its roundabout-based traffic system saves residents an estimated $28 million annually in fuel and lost time. At the same time, its cultural district has become a regional draw.
Under Democratic leadership, Las Vegas achieved what many thought impossible: reducing water consumption while growing its population. Through aggressive conservation measures, water-smart landscaping requirements, and innovative recycling programs, the city cut its water use by 47% between 2002 and 2020, even as its population grew by more than 500,000.
Houston developed one of the nation's most successful Housing First programs, reducing chronic homelessness by 63% between 2011 and 2020. The program's success came from a relentless focus on outcomes rather than ideological purity (conservative, progressive, or neoliberal), combining housing vouchers with wrap-around services and aggressive outreach.
In addition to those cases, we have seen a Republican mayor in Maine turn his town into one of the YIMBYists in the country by promoting granny flats and ADUs as a first step. Not to mention, both Austin and Minneapolis, under Progressive leadership, are rapidly reforming zoning and building codes so they can build more housing.
This isn't a new pattern, folks, despite branding. As we talked about in Don Quixote's Fried Eggs, what people talk about and brand themselves as isn't what they do. That said, they also paint everyone who shares the same branding with their actions. What about the results? Shouldn't they speak for themselves?
There is no basis in history that results, in themselves, guaranteed adoption or even spread.
History has way more examples of innovators being destroyed for producing results than rewarded. Take Dr. Semmelweis, who proved handwashing could slash maternal mortality from 18% to 1%, saving mothers and babies when he ran the maternity ward. His reward? The medical establishment flat out destroyed him - mocking his work, stripping his position, and finally throwing him in an asylum where he died in agony from the very kind of infection he'd spent his life trying to save mothers and babies from. Only years later did Florence Nightingale stumble across his documented work and implement his practices during the Crimean War, cutting death rates from 42% to 2%. As discussed in 'Results Don't Speak For Themselves,' good ideas don't just spread on their own - they require both documentation and champions willing to fight for them, even in the face of vicious opposition.
The Unknown Scale of Success in an Ocean of Failure
While results don't speak for themselves, dozens of equally effective programs operate in relative obscurity in every success story we are marginally aware of. There might be small and mid-sized cities across America that are quietly solved, one of the problems that plague their larger counterparts, but they rarely make headlines. We don't know how many Carmels exist because we've never bothered to count.
This knowledge gap has real consequences. Cities repeatedly reinvent the wheel, spending millions on clearly bad-faith consultants to design programs that fail while hiding programs that already work. Who knows what successful policies and innovations die with their creators, lost to retirement or political turnover?
The Case To Take Inventory
Before we try to come up with new ideas or go gun-ho on specific policy recommendations, we need to know what's out there. We need a comprehensive inventory of what works in American cities—not just the headline-grabbing initiatives but ignored competence that people don't realize until years later. This isn't just about counting successes; it's about understanding the full scope of possible solutions, roadblocks, and whether there are any bad faith tactics to be aware of.
This inventory needs to be based on real-world results regardless of political lines, city sizes, and regional boundaries, with the understanding that some cities do one thing right really well while getting everything else wrong. We also need to identify the possible causes of variations that lead to the success of those policies. The task is daunting but necessary. Without this, efforts to improve city governance will remain scattershot, driven more by ideology and headlines than evidence and outcomes. The first step toward better cities isn't inventing new solutions – it's finding the ones that already work and the possible causes of variations in those policies.
The Current Blind Spots
The fascination with failure and wanting to punish failure has created peculiar blind spots in how we evaluate city governance. We obsess over New York's crime statistics but miss Detroit's success in cutting crime. We fixate on San Francisco's housing crisis while overlooking Oklahoma City's successful policy on attracting and keeping remote workers. These blind spots aren't random - they follow distinct patterns that systematically obscure success.
Size Bias: The Big City Trap
Our urban discourse suffers from what might be called "metropolitan myopia" - an overwhelming focus on major cities that blinds us to innovations happening elsewhere. The media gravitates toward stories from New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco as if these cities represent the total of urban America. Yet these cities, for all their importance, account for a tiny fraction of where Americans live.
This size bias creates three significant problems:
Mid-Size Invisibility: Cities like Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, have pioneered innovative approaches to economic development and digital infrastructure, respectively. Grand Rapids transformed its downtown through a unique public-private partnership model called Great Action, which has created thousands of jobs while preserving affordability. Chattanooga built America's first citywide gigabit network, spurring a tech boom while keeping prices accessible. Yet, these successes rarely inform national urban policy discussions.
Small City Innovation: Some of the most creative solutions come from small cities forced to do more with less. Carmel, Indiana's traffic management system delivers better results at a fraction of the cost of big-city solutions. Greenville, South Carolina's downtown revival, has created a template for sustainable urban development that other cities could readily adopt. These solutions often scale better than big-city approaches precisely because they were designed with limited resources in mind.
Regional Variation: Different regions face different challenges and develop various solutions. The Sun Belt's approach to growth management differs fundamentally from the Rust Belt's focus on renewal. Yet, we rarely examine these regional variations systematically.
Political Blind Spots: The Partisan Trap
Our political polarization has created equally problematic blind spots. Success stories get filtered through partisan lenses, leading to systematic blindness:
Conservative Successes in Blue States: A few Republican mayors in Democratic states have developed innovative approaches to governance that are ignored because they don't fit the narrative. Auburn's success with ADUs and Granny Flats in Maine is an example.
Progressive Successes in the Red States: Similarly, Democratic mayors in Republican states have achieved remarkable results that get overlooked. Austin's YIMBY reforms, Houston's The Way Home, and Nashville's transit developments offer lessons that transcend political boundaries.
Media Coverage Gaps: The Crisis Bias
Modern media economics create additional blind spots through what might be called "crisis bias" - a systematic preference for covering problems over solutions; the problem with this isn't so much that the media reports on them; these problems exist, and there is no point in denying them. The issue is the media fails to document success cases in the first place:
The Headline Problem: Dysfunction makes better headlines than competence. A hundred-million-dollar project that fails gets more coverage than a ten-million-dollar project that succeeds. This skews our understanding of what's possible and creates a falsely negative impression of urban governance.
Short-Term Focus: Media attention spans are short. Programs that deliver steady, incremental improvements over the years get less coverage than flashy initiatives that promise quick fixes. This incentivizes city leaders to favor short-term, headline-grabbing projects that failover more successful solutions for small and large issues.
Local News Decline: The collapse of local news coverage has created vast blind spots in our understanding of urban governance. As local newspapers shrink or disappear, successful programs lose their primary chroniclers. The innovations of mid-sized cities increasingly go undocumented, creating a dangerous feedback loop where lack of coverage reinforces the assumption that nothing interesting happens outside major metros.
Solution Aversion: Success stories often get less coverage because they challenge the existing narrative of government failure. When a city succeeds in addressing a problem that others claim is intractable, that success often goes unreported precisely because it contradicts the prevailing narrative of urban crisis, from the right trying to discredit all government intervention or the left's wanting to increase funding to unaccountable nonprofits and consultants.
These blind spots distort our understanding and actively harm our ability to improve urban governance. By systematically overlooking success, we rob ourselves of models we could adapt and scale. We trap innovations in silos, condemning cities to reinvent solutions that already exist elsewhere repeatedly.
Breaking free of these blind spots requires more than better attention—it requires systematic effort to identify and document success stories wherever they occur. This is why an inventory of successful programs isn't just useful—it's essential for breaking out of our current cycle of perceived failure and actual reinvention.
What We Need to Find: Where Success Hides in Plain Sight
Water Management
In addition to Las Vegas, San Diego offers a masterclass in drought-proofing a major city through systematic, multi-decade planning. Starting in the 1990s, they launched one of America's most aggressive water conservation initiatives, achieving remarkable results. Water usage plummeted from 81.5 billion gallons in 2007 to 57 billion gallons in 2020 - a 30% reduction that outpaced most other Western cities.
The transformation came through multiple channels. New construction requirements mandated water-saving technologies. An innovative program paid homeowners to replace water-hungry lawns with desert-appropriate landscaping, converting 42 million square feet. These changes slashed residential water use from 235 gallons per person per day in 1990 to just 135 gallons—a 43% drop.
But San Diego went beyond just conservation. In the 1980s, they relied almost entirely on a single source: Colorado River water traveling 242 miles through the Metropolitan Water District's aqueduct. Recognizing this vulnerability, officials diversified aggressively. They struck deals with agricultural districts to fund irrigation improvements in exchange for the water saved. They lined 82 miles of the All-American Canal with concrete, preventing massive water loss through seepage. They helped farmers switch from flood to drip irrigation. These agricultural partnerships now provide 55% of San Diego's water, while direct Colorado River supplies dropped to just 11%.
The city's infrastructure management is equally impressive. They monitor 310 miles of large-diameter pipes using acoustic listening devices and embedded fiber optic cables that detect problems before crises occur. When it rains - rare in this arid region - they capture 90% of runoff in 24 reservoirs. They're rapidly expanding water recycling, with neighboring Oceanside already converting wastewater to drinking water. San Diego aims to get 40% of its potable water from advanced recycling by 2035.
As a final insurance policy, they built North America's largest desalination plant, producing 50 million gallons of drinking water daily in just two hours. While expensive and energy-intensive, it provides crucial drought protection for this growing region.
San Diego's success shows how methodical planning, diverse approaches, and long-term commitment can transform a city's water future. Their model offers lessons for other regions facing similar challenges—proof that even with climate change, water scarcity isn't inevitable with proper management.
Housing Supply
Auburn, Maine, demonstrates how a mid-sized city can tackle the housing crisis through bold leadership, systematic reform, and lots of granny flats. Under Mayor Jason Levesque's guidance, this city of 24,000 launched an ambitious plan to increase its population by 25% by building 2,000 new housing units by 2025—the equivalent of New York City adding 800,000 homes.
The transformation started with a complete overhaul of the city's zoning code. Auburn simplified its byzantine system of over 20 zones to just eight, creating predictability for developers. They embraced an "all of the above" approach to housing: single-family homes, multi-family units, apartments, and accessory dwelling units. Even a former synagogue was converted into ten apartments. That’s just the beginning.
May 2021 - Secondary dwelling ordinance: Allowed a second, separate house on lots already zoned to allow duplexes across the city. Unlike many laws that allow ADUs, the second house does not need to be smaller than the original, and the minimum lot size for duplexes does not apply. Maine later passed a law allowing homeowners to build ADUs by right (without permission from a town’s zoning board).
June 2021 - Eliminated commercial parking requirements: The council failed to pass a measure that would have eliminated parking requirements for all uses but subsequently passed a measure to eradicate commercial parking minimums across the city.
July 2021 - Legalized more duplexes: Allowed duplexes in the low-density residential zone, with a minimum lot size of three acres.
March 2022 - Rezoning: Rezoned nearly 1,700 acres to increase density and allow mixed-use development (residential and commercial). This newly zoned area has no specific density limit, but its height and lot coverage restrictions allow about 16 units per acre.
July 2023 - Agriculture and Resource Protection Zone: Previously, the 20,000-acre Ag Zone allowed only new households who earned at least 30% of their income from agriculture. The new ordinance allowed income resulting from other ties to the land, including hiking and snowmobile trails or land conservation purposes, to be included in this calculation. The minimum lot size remained 10 acres.
Auburn's success is particularly noteworthy because it transcends political divisions. Housing reform gained broad bipartisan support in this purple city where mere dozens of votes often decide presidential elections. The mayor, a Republican, works closely with Democratic state legislators on housing initiatives. Their initial comprehensive plan passed the City Council 6-1, again showing how a strong Nightingale-like champion is needed for good governance.
The results are already visible. Accessory dwelling units appear throughout the city, often serving older residents who want to live near family while maintaining independence. Thousands of units were built as the reforms were passed, with new apartment buildings popping up. Most impressively, they achieved this while keeping their identity as a blue-collar community rather than trying to reinvent themselves as a miniature Manhattan.
Auburn's approach shows how systematic reform with a strong champion can surge a city’s housing supply using a salami-slicing strategy, i.e., a constant and consistent, despite being incremental. No complex incentive schemes, all-at-once deregulation filled with loopholes, or massive public spending on consultants and well-connected nonprofits. Instead, they simultaneously balance the difficult task of building trust and being relentless in passing policy.
Cross Training
Woodbury, Minnesota was a case study in cross training and police consolidation. While most cities maintain separate police, fire, and emergency medical services, Woodbury merged them into a single unified force. They became Minnesota's only city where on-duty police officers fight crime, battle fires, and respond to medical emergencies as paramedics.
The transformation began in the 1990s when Woodbury started training police officers as paramedics. The results were dramatic - their cardiac arrest survival rate jumped to over 50%, compared to the national average of 10%. Officers could begin treatment immediately instead of waiting for ambulances to arrive, even performing minor emergency procedures when needed.
But Woodbury didn't stop there. Facing a challenge in fire response times, they needed to get five firefighters to any scene within nine minutes, 90% of the time. Traditional solutions would have required hiring 32 new full-time firefighters—financially impossible for the city. Instead, they recognized that police officers were usually first on the scene anyway but couldn't help. The solution? Train them as firefighters, too.
The city equipped police vehicles with firefighting gear and offered officers an additional $1.25 per hour to take on firefighting duties. The program significantly improved response times, reaching its five-firefighter goal 75% of the time by 2007, up from 50% in 2005. Beyond faster response times, the program eliminated 4.5 full-time positions while improving service quality.
Woodbury's approach is particularly noteworthy because it challenges conventional wisdom about specialization. While both police work and firefighting are training-intensive careers, Woodbury proved that officers can excel in multiple roles with proper support and incentives. They created a more flexible, responsive public safety system without sacrificing quality in any area.
Like many successful innovations, Woodbury's program faced initial skepticism. Other cities' reactions ranged from dismissing it as crazy to cautious interest. But the results speak for themselves - better service, faster response times, and lower costs through intelligent resource utilization.
Taking Inventory: A Practical Approach
The solution exists, has been tested, and works—but it might as well be on Mars.
This is why taking inventory of what works in American cities isn't just another academic exercise or government database project. It's a critical missing piece in urban governance. We need a systematic approach to finding, verifying, and sharing successful urban solutions.
Avoiding Premature Categorization
It would be easy to make up different categorizations. However, like any data gathering and governance project, we're dealing with an essentially unknown amount of unstructured and wildly spread out data, with no real access to "systems" (i.e., articles, internal data, etc.) to attempt modeling it. Rather than creating categorizations ahead of time, it's better to gather case studies of local government success, and once we reach critical mass, develop categorizations based on the results and how we'll use that information.
Possible sources
The apparent sources - city reports, academic studies, award programs, and local news - only scratch the surface. The innovations often hide in less visible places:
Mid-level civil servants who've spent years quietly making systems work, rather than the public-facing high-level civil servants
Recently retired elected officials who can finally speak freely about what gets results
And, of course, you, who might have noticed something
But finding programs is just the start. Afterwards, it will be a bit of a process to reach out and find out how they were implemented, what the roadblocks were, and who the champions were who managed to push the policies through.
The Context Challenge
That said, even knowing the implementation details, some programs work because they're brilliantly designed. Others work because of how they're run. And some - this is crucial - work because of where they are. A program that succeeds in Tulsa might fail in Seattle not because it's terrible or because Seattle's wrong but because context matters.
Understanding these contextual factors requires examining the following:
City size and structure
Regional economic conditions
Political and legal frameworks
Cultural and demographic factors
Historical development patterns
Institutional capacity
Next Steps and Call to Action
The path to better cities doesn't run through think tanks in Washington, New York consulting firms, or San Francisco nonprofits. It runs through the thousands of public servants and the handful of strong champions who make American cities work daily. Our challenge isn't inventing new solutions—finding what works, documenting it properly, and creating the tools and networks to share this knowledge effectively.
What We Are About To Do!
Building a Global Success Database
Gathering success stories from local, state, and provincial governance worldwide
Documenting both high-profile wins and "hidden" successes
Making Accessible
Building an "Awesome List" and GitHub repository of case studies on GitHub, and store a copy of the case studies on Substack
Implementing a structured documentation system that includes:
Standardized templates for case studies
Taking advantage of Substack’s Tagging, Search, and Filtering
Establishing contribution guidelines and review processes
Creating easy-to-use templates for new submissions
Reaching Out
Reaching out to success stories' champions and staff
Conducting structured interviews with:
Current and former public officials
Program Staff
Gathering implementation documentation:
Internal planning documents
Budget and resource allocation data
Training materials
Evaluation reports
Timeline of policy changes
Obstacle mitigation strategies
The goal isn't to create another policy think tank or consulting firm—it's to build a living, breathing network of practical knowledge and proven solutions. We're creating the infrastructure for sharing what works in city governance, making it easier for good ideas to spread and take root.
Join us in building this crucial resource for better cities. Whether you have a success story to share, technical skills to contribute, or simply time and energy to help document what works, you have a role in this effort. If you think of anything now, please email us at ddeek@population.news