The water in Charleston does not flow through the city as a policy debate. It comes gushing over curbs, through intersections, around school buses and storefronts. The city sits at sea level, and the sea is rising.
For years, Charleston flooded, recovered, and waited for the next storm. What changed was not the weather, but participating in the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative and carrying those lessons home. City Hall began using data in new ways: tracking road closures alongside tide and weather patterns, analyzing high-water vehicle deployments, and mapping 118 vehicle rescues from floodwater over two years. A 7.1-foot tide with a northeast wind no longer leaves crews guessing. What had looked like scattered emergencies became a shared set of facts from which to build solutions.
Local government brought transportation planners and civil engineers, emergency managers and first responders, neighborhood leaders and environmental organizations, parents and business owners to the same table. This led to real-time barricade deployment on dangerous streets, basin-by-basin planning, a platform called WaterWise that brings residents into resilience, and protections and public space that cost less, arrive faster, and come together because city hall pulls other partners in to share the load—including the $1.4 billion Battery Extension, a local and federal project that will shield the peninsula while creating miles of waterfront promenade.
The same approach now guides decisions which are measured in generations. Today, infrastructure, transportation, housing, and land use no longer compete for lawmakers’ attention. Work that began with water in the street became a way of seeing the whole city at once—and the residents whose lives depend on it working together.
We are the mayors of Charleston, South Carolina, and Boise, Idaho. We come from different parties, different regions, and different circumstances. As the nation’s 250th birthday invites reflection on the ideas that built this country, we write together about one of the most overlooked investments in strengthening it. For centuries, Americans have argued about what government should do. Michael R. Bloomberg has instead bet on what it takes.
Most mayors inherit a crowded ledger: housing shortages, aging infrastructure, public safety, rising costs, and economies and technologies changing beneath people’s feet. Yet local governments, often charged with the most, have the least room to move. Municipal pay runs about 35% below federal and 17% below state levels, and 50% to 75% of many operating budgets is fixed before a mayor can make a single new choice. That is not a shortage of will. It is the math of the job.
Nearly 2,000 miles west of Charleston is Boise—long considered a place where a teacher, a firefighter, or young family could expect to build a future. Now, the defining pressure is the cost of living. Population growth in and around the city accelerated in the 2010s and surged during the COVID-19 pandemic. Demand soared. Housing could not keep pace. By 2022, one study ranked Idaho’s capital the least affordable housing market in the country.
Boise officials began to address these issues by reaching out to residents experiencing the problem—and joining arms with neighbors to solve them together. City Hall brought more than 200 people into the process—homeowners, renters, developers, service providers, and frontline municipal employees. They offered more than 500 ideas. Officials tested them, set aside what didn’t work, learned from what did, and moved the strongest forward. Reforms including preapproved blueprints for accessory dwelling units helped drive an 113% increase in rental housing construction.
What began with housing policy became a different way of governing. Boise created a chief innovation officer to spread these practices across city hall. Today, that leader oversees the city’s first Department of Organizational Effectiveness. When in-home childcare providers said licensing was too slow and too expensive, staff closest to the process worked with providers and community groups to rebuild it, reducing approval times by 60 days and fees by roughly $230. The same discipline positioned Boise for its next Government Innovation effort. As one of 24 winners of Bloomberg Philanthropies’ 2025—2026 Mayors Challenge, the municipality will be the first in the U.S. to connect municipally owned geothermal systems to affordable housing—350 units and counting—cutting utility bills by up to 80% and turning a public asset into a lever for affordability.
Charleston and Boise are not alone. The mayors who passed through the same programs are posting gains of their own: Sioux Falls Mayor Paul TenHaken rebuilt a broken transit system that now covers 100% of the city, connects people to more than 50,000 jobs they could not reach before, and cuts costs per ride by 25%. In Chattanooga, after Mayor Tim Kelly listened to 500 residents about youth violence, one of the municipality’s most dangerous neighborhoods went a full year without a homicide. Anchorage hit zero major encampments by March 2026 under Mayor Suzanne LaFrance. In Las Vegas, four months were enough for Mayor Shelley Berkley to bring critical care to 1,000 residents experiencing homelessness and a home to 242 more.
This work largely goes unnoticed. So does what makes it possible. When local government succeeds, the results look ordinary. What stands behind them rarely does—and is so rarely funded.
That should matter now. The country is entering another great age of giving. Fortunes created through artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and industries still taking shape will define the next century of American philanthropy, just as Carnegie’s libraries, Rockefeller’s universities, and Gates’s fight against disease helped define the last.
But they should study the former mayor’s Government Innovation wager, which asks what most skip: not just which problems deserve funding, but whether the public institutions closest to the people they serve—responsible for them all—can succeed.
Two hundred and fifty years after our nation’s founding, that may prove to be one of the most consequential investments philanthropy can make in the country itself.
