How Mayors Across The Globe Are Making A Difference

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0:38Mayors are uniquely aware of the innovations needed to make their cities run more efficiently. And when it comes to improving city life, from housing to public safety and city services, cost and limited resources can be major obstacles to realizing those innovations. In February, Bloomberg Philanthropies announced the winners of this year's Mayor's Challenge. A$1 million prize was awarded to 24 winners from 20 countries, representing 35 million people. They were selected from 630 entries. I'm Jen White. You're listening to the 1A Podcast. Today, we're sharing our exclusive conversation with some of the winners of Bloomberg's City Lab Summit in Madrid, Spain.

1:19The summit was held in April and convened mayors from across the globe to talk about the latest in city planning. I sat down with Viko Soto, mayor of PASIC in the Philippines, Lauren McClain, the Democratic mayor of Boise, Idaho, and Jordan Hill Lewis, the mayor of Cape Town, South Africa. When we come back from this short break, you'll hear that conversation. Stay with us.

1:45Each story you hear on Planet Money starts with a question. What happens if we refund tariffs? Why are groceries so expensive? At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious, because the forces shaping our world can be hard to see. Follow NPR's Planet Money wherever you get your podcasts and start seeing how the economy really works. Welcome back to the 1A podcast. We talked to some of the winners of Bloomberg Philanthropy's 2025 Mayor's Challenge. The winners were chosen for the approaches they took to solving specific problems in their cities. I began by asking each mayor what the support of the program means for them and the cities they represent.

2:27Here's what they said, starting with Mayor Soto. Well, it really means a lot. And first and foremost, it helps to push us innovate a little bit more and to think outside the box. I mean, we could, our project is a floating park in the Pasig River, trying to create more open spaces, being creative in how we do it. And left to our own devices, we'd probably do things how we've always done things. But through the mayor's challenge of Bloomberg, we're pushed to do things a little bit more differently. Mayor McLean, what about for Boise? You know, I'd say just overall, before getting into the specifics of the project, being named one of the winners was just really exciting.

3:04And it meant so much. I could see it in the eyes and faces of my staff when we shared the news. and then to see them, even before they got that news, work so hard when we were winners in that first step, the finalists, to work hard to create the pilot, if you will, the first steps of the program in that section, but then to hear that they had won. It'll be transformational for my city when we complete this work, but it's been really transformational for my staff. And Mayor Hill-Lewis for Cape Town. I echo a lot of that. I think it's been hugely encouraging for the staff who, the teams of professionals who deal with really tough urban situations in the, you know, developing world, Global South City.

3:48And I could just see how deeply encouraged and moved they were to have that recognition and that help. And it's really tackling a project that is going to meaningfully improve the quality of life of the city's poorest people and which I think is replicable elsewhere in the world. So it was just a great experience to win, and I'm very grateful to Bloomberg Philanthropies. Municipal budgets are historically, well, tight. I think it's fair to say you are often working with fewer resources than you actually need. So what does it mean to have an opportunity to pilot a program before building it out to scale?

4:31Mayor McLean? Yeah, that's a great question because especially nowadays, our budgets are becoming more constrained with rising costs. Our cities and region is one of the fastest growing in the country, so we have more people to serve. And the extras are the things that come off the plate, right? And when we're looking at tight budgets and their basic things that we have to deliver on as a city, the things that we want to do become harder to do. And with this prize, it makes it possible for us to tackle something that we're really excited about, but that likely would in this time of really tight budgets have to go by the wayside.

5:09And Mayor Hill-Lewis, you're in a city with over 5 million residents. And so building out a program to scale is an enormous undertaking. So having this opportunity to try it first, test it, see if it works, and then expand it to the rest of the city, what does that mean for you? It's absolutely invaluable. We've got 1.2 million residents out of those 5 million that are living in informal settlements, which might not be a term familiar to listeners, but it's essentially people who live in, you know, lean-to homes made of tin and wood that they've built themselves. It's very common in cities in the developing world, you know, obviously very uncommon in the U.S.

5:53And that is where this project is located. Working in a community like that, delivering greater dignity, delivering better quality of life is unbelievably tough. There's no predictable grid pattern. There's no formally laid out services like you're in my neighborhood. And so having the ability to just really get down to the nitty-gritty and test something and try it until you get it right before you replicate it and waste money, that is just super, super valuable. And in our case, the pilot is complete already and has been tremendously successful, which is also satisfying. I want to get into some of the specifics of your projects.

6:37Mayor Soto, you worked with community members to address the chronic flooding in PASIC, and it's an issue that persists in the cities. Residents have sort of learned to live with the flood season. Explain a bit about the flooding challenges in PASIC. Right. So our city is actually named after the river. The river traverses through six different cities. But interestingly enough, we're the city that's named after it. And so our origin story sort of is tied, whether we like it or not, to the river. Unfortunately, in recent decades, flooding has become worse. And so from a place where people play, you know, in the riverside and people swim or they grew up around the area, now people are more afraid of the river, understandably so.

7:24And after the bigger floods, particularly in 2009, we've disconnected the people who live by the rivers to the river. And there are now river walls and such. So part of our project is really trying to reconnect people to our history, to our heritage, to our culture, and to the river again by being creative. We can't just remove the walls, but we can reconnect them by being creative in this. And how important was it to have residents be a part of how this project was developed and implemented? Yeah, actually, I always say that our project is a floating park, but it's really a community engagement program disguised as a floating park project.

8:08The focus here is engaging our citizens in problem solving to come up with solutions that work for them in a sustainable manner. So it's not just like we're thinking of something and we're going to implement it, whether you like it or not. No, we're working with you, working with the people to figure out solutions to them. Now, Mayor McLean in Boise, the challenge your city was presented with had to do with energy costs. When did you realize the scale of the energy cost problem and how it was related to broader questions around affordability in Boise? When we look at affordability in Boise, we're thinking about the monthly budget of our residents.

8:45I mean, you've got limited dollars that you've got to figure out how to spend. And so some of that goes to housing, which we're addressing. A lot of that also goes to utilities. you've got transportation, all those pieces. So in my mind and in the minds of our residents who are trying to make these tough decisions, utilities and housing go hand in hand in the affordability equation. And so we wanted to come up with a project that would allow us to connect those two in real time. So by talking with residents, hearing from them stories that they cut off groceries at the end of the month to make sure that they could pay their multiple utility bills is really impactful.

9:23And so we set out to take advantage of the clean heat system we have, a direct source geothermal system that provides clean heat to 100 buildings downtown, but it's never been used for multifamily housing, affordable housing. We wanted to come up with a way to provide this affordable clean heat to folks living in affordable housing. And Mayor Hill-Lewis, resident participation is also a central part of Cape Town's approach to addressing waste management. 10 % of the city's residents, more than 5 million people, we should note again, live in these 649 informal settlements. You described them for us earlier.

10:01So when it comes to waste management, things are challenging for your city. So talk about some of the other challenges to providing city services to all those people. Unbelievably challenging. I kept visiting this one particular informal settlement, and every time I just left downhearted. and eventually I said, you know what, something is not working here and I can't keep putting another$10 million, another$10 million behind this problem. It's not sustainable. And I did a little informal, literally just went and knocked on some doors and I said, can I chat to you about what's not working here?

10:37One of the first mothers that I spoke to said, well, the people who collect the waste, they don't even clock that it's a waste contractor. So they just see it as the city staff. So they see, you know, the city people that collect the waste never come down my street. They only stop at the corner down there. And if I don't come to them, then they don't collect my waste. Within just the first few conversations, I realized we've got this totally the wrong way around. We are doing this top-down design of a system which applies to, again, to a formal neighborhood and works perfectly in a formal neighborhood, but just doesn't work in this context.

11:12And we've got to go the other way around. I have a question. Mayor, I'm so impressed at what you're doing in Cape Town with bottom-up problem solving. But has there ever been a time where the community came up with solutions that didn't work? Or has it always worked so far? So far, I must say, this pilot has been a tremendous success. So just one of the most heartening and satisfying things is going back to that same informal settlement today, about 15 months later after those first conversations. And it is clean. It is clean and tidy and spotless. The parks are open again where they were just strewn with litter and rubbish before.

11:51It's all credit to that community who've really come alongside us. The reason I'm asking is that I'm actually thinking about implementing what they did in Cape Town in Pasig City. And my experience is sometimes our technical experts and the people inside the city government, when we do community engagement, sometimes there's sort of friction in the opinions and the people who say, you should do it this way. Our experts or people in-house will say, no, that's not going to work. So I was wondering how sort of that played out. But it's good to hear that it's been working. We're definitely going to try it.

12:26Coming up, how are the mayors hoping to address housing in their cities? We'll be right back.

12:36Let's get back to the show. We spoke with a few of Bloomberg Philanthropy's 2025 Mayors Challenge winners. The program provides funds to mayors across the globe to address their biggest city planning projects. I asked the mayors about how they're addressing one of the biggest challenges when it comes to fulfilling their ideas for their cities, cost. Here's what they said. As costs become more constrained, it's harder and harder for our city to engage in affordable housing work because we don't have funds from the state. But so that's why with this project and the housing land trust model that we've taken, it reduces the costs that the city has to expense.

13:13So we had the land. And we said, okay, we know we have goals of 1 ,250 affordable homes by this year, and we have more goals moving forward. And so we're going to put our land out for the best proposals. So the land is the city's, and we rent that to the developer. But then the developer is paying to build and coming up with that capital stack. He's using low-income housing tax credits for some of that. He takes out the loans. We've provided the land. And now when we think about the heating structure, this prize helps us advance this in a way because we didn't have that million dollars to figure out how we would extend the system and then build the prototypes to create this new billing model.

13:54That'll help us do that. But as the keeper of this utility, this is a Boise City utility from a geothermal perspective, We have the infrastructure in place once we have the model and the way to do it to be able to maintain the provision of heat to this development. And then we really hope ultimately to bring this to up to 10 ,000 more homes throughout the city for those that live above the geothermal system where we can expand it. This makes me wonder about the communication strategy you've each used around these programs, because there's the infrastructure or the logistical side of the work. but there's also especially I'm thinking in Cape Town and and to a lesser degree perhaps in Boise there's also just perhaps the cultural is not the right word but there is a behavioral component attached to it as well so how did you approach that with your residents so it's like we're going to do this new thing but this is what it requires of you.

14:57Firstly I think residents have to believe that you actually want to have a better quality of life for them, that you're invested in this, and that you want to really try and help solve this because when you've lived in really tough living conditions and unhygienic living conditions for the longest time, you might think, well, this is just the way it is. This is how you grow up. And there's lots of kids who have lived their entire lives like that growing up. So, having a conversation with the community to say, let's figure out a way that it doesn't have to be like this. That you can have your kids playing in clean streets.

15:42You can actually, that park over there that is now just a dump site, it can be a park. Let's do this together. But if we do this, we set up the system, we agree to hire these folk and redesign this whole thing, then we have to agree together that we're going to keep it clean, that we're going to try and stamp out the illegal dumping. And that has, by and large, as I said, it's early days. We're 12 or 15 months in. It has worked. I mean, of course, with this prize, we're now going to try and scale it up to many other informal settlements and some much larger ones. So the social challenge and the communications challenge, the buy-in challenge becomes, you know, multiplied.

16:31But, you know, hopefully that's the point of being in politics. If you're not going to tackle difficult things and try and improve things, then what are you really doing? Well, I want to get into some of the specifics of your programs. And Mayor Soto, the idea of these floating parks. I haven't seen images of it yet, but describe what these would look like. Well, we're not 100 % final with the design yet. And actually, you know, we were talking about prototyping earlier and how it's important to try things on a small scale first. You know, we're just trying to be creative. Initially, we saw unused barges in the Pasig River.

17:11Pasig used to be very industrial, now less and less. So we saw a lot of barges that were just parked on the sides of the river. Unfortunately, it looks like, well, it worked. The barges work as a prototype, but maintenance seems to be, it's going to be too expensive. So we were connected by our Bloomberg coach to a Danish architect who taught us a different technology that we can use, concrete floating pontoons. So that's what we're looking at now. And hopefully we finalize the design by this year and build by 2027. Is there any concern about the safety of the water in the Pasuk River? Because, I mean, you're talking about waterways that are rising after flooding.

18:00Exactly. And that's really why we're very intentional and careful with our conceptual design. We're making sure that it's safe. And that's actually the number one thing that came out through the community engagement that we've done so far. The people, obviously, they want an additional open space in their community. They want to be connected with nearby communities that the wall has disconnected them from. So they want to see this happen. But to put it, they were scared. Is it going to be safe? And the second question was, if it's safe, if you can assure us that it's safe, aren't we going to get dizzy while we're in the floating park?

18:38So we had to work with engineers, architects, urban planners, and other people with more know-how to make sure that it's safe and not dizzying. Now, Mayor McLean, Boise's solution to high utility bills, as you mentioned, is the city's geothermal heating system. Just explain a little bit more about how it will work and how it will lower costs. So we have the largest direct source geothermal system in the country, the sixth largest in the world, and it heats 100 buildings downtown. Our city system does, but then it's also neat. The state capitol has a system. The Veterans Administration has a system.

19:12Then there's a private system that was the first in the world built by residents about 100 years ago. Our system right now heats buildings, it heats city hall, but we haven't used it to heat multifamily housing because the submetering issues present a problem. How are you going to charge folks equitably and equally for just the heat that comes off water that runs through a system? So what happens is really hot water comes up, we pipe it through buildings, and it heats. So this expansion will allow us to try for the first time in the country, actually, a system that would heat 300 homes within a multifamily housing development, affordable homes.

19:54And the reason it saves money is because it's a clean, renewable heat that the city has the utility system for. And so they would be charged for the heating costs that actually we can show save quite a bit of money in the winter when you're using the system. And we're doing some feasibility work to see if ultimately we can use this in other housing developments for cooling, which would save even more money. Were there infrastructure changes that had to happen at the city level to make this possible? Yes, so a couple of things. First off, the big infrastructure changes, we have to extend the system.

20:28So that's a piece. We have a housing land trust program in the city where we put, to meet our affordable housing goals, we look at the land that we have as a city that could be better used for homes than something else, and then put it out for the best proposals from private developers. And so we're working in partnership with a multifamily housing developer on city land. It's across from Boise State University, but the system isn't there. So that's the first infrastructure piece is you've got to just extend the pipes so you've got hot water over there. And then once it gets to the building, the infrastructure is, of course, the buildings are built differently because now you're heating with geothermal rather than a natural gas system.

21:06And then for the city, as the utility, we have to figure out how to bill for all these different individual units versus just for one building. And so that's what this first cycle, when we were finalists, the prototyping allowed us and my team to do, is figure out how that submetering and the billing would work while working with the developer to ensure that everything's set up right for the system to move into the building. Mayor Hill-Louis, you mentioned that you tested your waste management program in Danoon, and that's a township that's north of Cape Town, or in the north of Cape Town. Waste management diverted 36 % of organic waste, 51 % of recyclable waste left by illegal dumping.

21:49But you also created 26 new jobs as part of that initiative. So how important was it to create employment opportunities in addition to creating a new waste management system? All of those jobs came from the local community, which was very important to get the buy-in from the community where unemployment is very high. unemployment in that community is probably north of 50%. So that was really, really important. And then the primary purpose was not job creation, but we really wanted to show that when you care about a clean community, when you care about recycling diversion, collecting plastics properly, that there is actually economic activity there, that you can sustain those jobs because of the recycling value of everything you collect.

22:41So I think it's an important aspect. It's not the core aspect, but a very important aspect of making this a success. We're talking to Jordan Hill Lewis. He's the mayor of Cape Town, South Africa, Biko Soto, mayor of PASAC in the Philippines, and Lauren McLean, the mayor of Boise, Idaho. I'm Jen White. You're listening to 1A. In hearing each of you describe your programs, there's a very strong connection to the issue of housing, which I think almost every mayor I speak to talks about. And Mayor Soto, when you look at the project you're developing in Pasuk City, how does that connect to the housing challenges you face there and ensuring that residents can live across their lifespans in that city despite some of the challenges around flooding and perhaps affordability?

23:33Well, housing is also a big, big challenge for us. We also have very large informal settler communities, not as large as Cape Towns, but on a smaller scale, we do have that problem as well. And one of the things that we had to take into consideration when doing this project was, you know, we have to keep the people safe. That's the number one thing. You know, we're very careful in how we do projects because a lot of the people in Pasig City actually live very near the river. And that's also precisely the reason why river walls were put up. So we're not just going to tear down the walls. We're not going to just, you know, if we relocate them, it's going to be impossible.

24:16So we have to figure out ways to upgrade communities, you know, without upheaving everything, as well as making it more livable for people. So actually this project, the primary objective is really to increase the level of livability in the city by creating more open spaces where kids can play, where the elderly can just hang out, which currently they don't have. And Mayor Hill Lewis and Cape Town housing costs have risen by 38 % in the last six years. according to a report released by the city last year, 70 % of Cape Town's housing stock is being used by short-term rentals and houses. But you've said in the past that banning companies like Airbnb, it doesn't work for your city because of the tourism revenue they bring in.

25:04So what solutions are you looking at to address the broader housing issues faced by Cape Town? Yeah. So, you know, Cape Town, like most cities in the global South, I have no doubt it's the same in your city, Mayor, is often a story of two cities side by side. I sometimes say, you know, Cape Town is half Munich, half Mumbai, because we have this really well-developed, really quite wealthy part of the city where there's a very healthy housing market, very desirable places to live along the coast and around the mountains, and it's absolutely beautiful. And that's the area of the city, by the way, where there's so much tourist accommodation, right on the coastline.

25:48And then you've got this city where a million people plus are living in informality. So we've got, in a sense, two opposite housing challenges. And the one, you've got young professionals who are trying to live in that formalized and established part of the city where housing costs are rising sharply because Cape Town is a desirable place to live. and its tourism economy is absolutely booming. And on the other side, we've got this huge number of people who can't afford any housing at all, and we need to deliver fully subsidized housing, basically state-provided housing. And then we have the thing that underlies it all, and this is why we can't think of simplistic solutions around short-term rentals and so on.

26:39The biggest thing is unemployment. So the one part of our economy that is booming and providing so many new jobs is tourism. We've got so many tourists, and I'm very grateful so many more American tourists. You know, American tourism has grown by more than 40 % over the last couple of years, owing to those new flight connections. So we're so grateful for that. And now 220 ,000 people in the city work in the tourism economy. It's a massive job provider. So, there's no way that we can talk about kind of shutting down the tourism economy or doing anything to impinge its growth. What we need actually is to talk about how do we double it again?