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Good municipal leaders work with the circumstances around them to help their cities run efficiently, create economic opportunities, and cultivate an excellent quality of life for residents. However, great leaders don’t stop there. They also secure the future of their communities by anticipating trends and positioning their cities to capitalize on them.
Through conversations with experts and city leaders, we are highlighting the seven trends that all municipal leaders should both monitor and act on in the coming years. Some trends are inspiring (the ubiquitous use of AI, the evolution of downtowns), while some focus on the challenges that lie ahead (climate resilience, the mental health crisis). However, they all represent a significant shift in how cities need to be governed to maximize their impact on residents.
“I wouldn’t necessarily say that cities are slow to adopt technology,” said Micah Gaudet, the Deputy City Manager and Chief Public Safety Officer, City of Maricopa, Arizona. “I think they’re thoughtful about adopting technology, and I think that’s a very good thing.”
That thoughtfulness, he noted, is why AI is gaining traction now in municipal governments. “We’re starting to see more real-world applications and more real-world things getting done,” said Gaudet, who’s also the founder of Civic.AI, where he provides AI consulting and training to local governments. “Now that [GovTech] companies have built those platforms out and have solutions to offer, cities have something concrete to engage with.”
Gaudet’s comments provide context on a noted increase in the number of city governments implementing AI-based solutions. A National League of Cities report, in partnership with Amazon Web Services, found that about 53% of surveyed cities were implementing AI into their operational processes, with 83% planning to do so within the next three years.
AI usage in city government reflects current uses by businesses and consumers, with most municipalities using it to increase process efficiency (including solutions related to zoning), enhance decision- making through access to specialized data, and provide better, more transparent service to residents.
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Chesterfield County, Virginia, a suburb of Richmond, is leading the way in terms of AI implementation. The county is currently implementing a variety of AI solutions across departments. The county’s circuit court deployed an AI-powered chatbot that answers legal process or procedural questions with the use of official documents.
Another AI search platform answers general questions for residents by referencing municipal documents and public information.
The county’s fire and EMS department created a predictive model to forecast emergency service needs over the next five years. The data gathered is being used to determine where to build new fire stations and how to best allocate resources. “I think the best use cases are those where folks are solving real problems using AI,” Gaudet said. “We’re in the problem-solving business, not in the AI adoption business.”
In Austin, Texas, AI start-up Pano AI developed a system that detects forest fires across a vast swath of land that would otherwise be difficult to cover by human means. This system uses cameras, weather data, and GPS positioning to detect smoke and the location of a potential fire.
In an interview with Community Playmaker, Chris Vetromile, the Wildfire Mitigation Manager for Austin Energy, said of the system, “We can get the firefighters there faster because AI can confirm the location. When they can put the fire out fast, it won’t have the destruction it’s capable of.” The technology was developed in response to forest fires that burned 200,000 acres across the state.
But growth in adoption will hinge on more than tools. “How do we do this in a way that enhances public trust?” said Gaudet. “This is the new reality, and we still need to cultivate and build public trust in our local government.”
San José, California, offers a practical blueprint for building public trust around AI. When the city initially rolled out automated license plate readers without community input, residents pushed back with concerns about surveillance. Rather than pressing forward, the city paused, engaged residents directly, and found that once people understood the purpose, they shifted from opposition to actively requesting where cameras should be placed.
San José now maintains a public inventory of every AI system in use, requires staff to disclose when AI is involved in public-facing work, and prohibits AI from making actionable decisions, such as approving job applications.
Image credit: Wilmington Brew Works
Throughout the country, cities, counties, and states are elevating buildings and brownfields from their neglected or underused pasts to become hubs for economic development, drivers of quality of life and placemaking, and solutions for enduring municipal issues. While well-known developments like Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco and the High Line in New York City get a lot of deserved attention, the most impactful application of adaptive reuse will be increasing the housing supply in American cities.
According to Yardi Matrix data (analyzed by RentCafe), over 70,000 apartments were converted from office buildings in 2025. This is 200% higher than the previous three years. Major hubs such as New York City (8,310 units), Washington, D.C. (6,533), and Los Angeles (4,388) are leading this trend, but even small communities like Cape Coral, Florida (600), and Bridgeport, Connecticut (1,473) are focusing on building reuse as well.
A couple of emerging societal trends lie at the heart of why cities are reinventing older properties. The first is a post-pandemic push towards location-independent work, which is driving up office vacancy rates (18.9% according to a CBRE report). Second, a national housing shortage has driven an urgent need for affordable housing. The core appeal is straightforward: converting underused or vacant office buildings adds housing units without requiring new land acquisition or ground-up construction in already built-up areas. This is especially meaningful in dense urban cores where developable land is scarce, and zoning has historically restricted residential construction. These factors have led to a sharp increase in office-to-apartment conversions, accounting for nearly 42% of the 168,500 future conversion projects, according to a RentCafe report.
Equally important is the emergence of brownfield redevelopment. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that there are over 450,000 brownfields across the U.S. They cover an estimated five million acres and are in nearly every state in America. The untapped opportunity is immense. Recent analysis from the U.S. Conference of Mayors estimated that U.S. cities could realize $1.3 to $3.8 billion in additional annual tax revenue if their brownfield sites were redeveloped. While redevelopment costs vary widely, with reported costs as high as $5 million, the EPA reports that $20.13 was leveraged for each dollar the EPA grants to cities for restoration.
One recipient, the city of Wilmington, Delaware, in partnership with the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, began work on the former site of the Delaware Chemical Engineering Company, which sat abandoned and deteriorating after closing in 2000. The state began remediation in 2006, and by 2018, the property had been transformed into Wilmington Brew Works, a brewery and restaurant that’s become a neighborhood anchor. This was part of a series of projects aimed at revitalizing brownfields throughout Wilmington and the state as a whole. “They did a wonderful job on that building,” said former Wilmington Mayor Mike Purzyck in describing the impact of the project to the Delaware Business Times. “What was almost a drain on our economy is just so vibrant.”
In Detroit, it wasn’t just a building but a 5.5 mile portion of their riverfront that was revitalized. For much of the late 20th century, the east riverfront — the stretch now known as Rivertown — was dominated by factories, rail yards, and industrial silos. The river became polluted and toxic over time, and eventually the manufacturing industry shifted away from Detroit.
Thanks to EPA’s Brownfields Assessment and Cleanup Grant Program and the work of the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy, several projects were launched along the river that have added community gathering points, housing, a popular beachfront, office and retail space, and multiple places for adults and children to play. The Detroit River Conservancy estimates $275 million has already been invested along the riverfront, with an additional $1 billion expected to be invested in the next decade. The Conservancy, which partners with the city of Detroit, General Motors, and The Kresge Foundation, says the riverfront draws 3.5 million visitors annually. It’s been named the country’s top riverfront by USA Today for three years.
Mental health has quickly become a public safety crisis that’s fundamentally reshaping how cities deploy first responders. Loneliness, housing instability, substance abuse, and the unraveling of community support systems have all contributed to a surge in behavioral health emergencies, and police departments are absorbing the consequences.
In Detroit alone, the police department’s mental health unit fielded more than 16,000 calls in 2024, an average of 40 per day, and that unit has more than doubled in size since it launched in 2022.
The challenge, as Larry Consalvos of IXP Corporation, which provides managed services for 911 call centers, puts it, is finding a response model that is both effective and sustainable. “Every community has to look at its emergency services and decide what is affordable when it comes to addressing the behavioral health issues inside their community,” Consalvos says.
IXP’s approach focuses on what the company calls a behavioral health hub, staffed by trained crisis navigators who field calls either as referrals from 911 or through a separate line, and connect individuals directly to local care systems, targeting treatment within 24 hours. In a pilot program conducted in partnership with Catholic Charities of Trenton, New Jersey, and funded through a SAMHSA grant, the model kept thousands of people out of emergency rooms and off the 911 queue entirely.
Detroit’s model takes a different but complementary path. Its centralized co-response unit pairs specially trained officers with behavior specialists, who arrive in distinct uniforms and vehicles to de-escalate crises and connect residents to care.
Of about 3,000 referrals to Oakland County’s (Detroit) co-responder network, a neighboring program pairing mental health professionals with officers, half of those individuals were able to remain at home and receive follow-up treatment rather than being jailed or hospitalized. Broader research indicates that this is the preferred direction among cities. A 2024 study published in Policing: An International Journal found that nearly half of all co-responder programs launched in the U.S. have started since 2020.
The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, which has handled more than 13 million contacts since its 2022 launch, provides communities with another access point. The FCC now requires all wireless carriers to implement georouting, so callers can connect to the nearest crisis center.
Communities like Pierce County, Washington, have gone further by embedding 988 counselors directly inside dispatch centers, enabling real- time routing of behavioral health calls away from law enforcement response altogether.
The infrastructure is available. The question, as Consalvos frames it, is whether cities have the will to build something sustainable before the cost of inaction forces their hand.
Image credit: Adobe Stock (Chattanooga, Tennessee)
The coffee shop that buzzed during morning rush hour traffic, the packed lunch spot, and the downtown ecosystem—that all thrived on commuters—changed during the 2020 pandemic.
According to the Crexi Market Trends Report, remote and hybrid work have permanently reduced weekday office occupancy across the country, with national office vacancy rates climbing to 18.9%.
In response, cities are shifting to a residential focus for their downtowns, starting with office buildings. Office-to-residential conversions surged 28% year-over-year,reaching more than 90,000 units in the pipeline at the start of 2026. Since 2022, the number of housing units generated through office conversions has grown by an extraordinary 290%. Small cities like Omaha, Nebraska, and large ones like Chicago are leading the charge.
The communities that are making it happen are doing so through policy innovation: zoning reforms that allow conversions by right, meaning developers can proceed without a lengthy discretionary approval process, long-term tax abatements tied to affordability goals (requiring that a portion of converted units remain priced below market rate in exchange for the tax break), and dedicated financing programs that make the economics work for developers.
Turning offices into apartments is a start, but neighborhoods need reasons to show up. The cities that are genuinely thriving have stopped designing downtown for the 9-to-5 and started designing it as a lifestyle center by developing walkable blocks, ground-floor retail, cultural programming, and gathering hotspots that attract people from morning to night.
Amanda Ellis, editor-in-chief of Livability.com, sees this shift playing out across communities of all sizes. “People are picking where they want to live based on what they like or where they want to be — and then figuring out the career part,” Ellis said.
“Events and festivals really create a buzz and bring people in. A density of things to eat or enjoy that’s feasibly walkable, that’s what makes a downtown feel alive,” she added. The formula looks different city to city, but the intent is the same: turn downtown into a destination that draws people on a Tuesday evening just as reliably as a Saturday night.
Cities are programming public plazas with outdoor fitness classes and food markets, converting vacant storefronts into popup venues and maker spaces, and building sports and entertainment anchors that generate foot traffic across entire districts. The underlying logic that the downtown of the future is built around experiences, not corporate headquarters, is driving investment from Nashville to Spokane.
Chattanooga is a perfect example of this shift, as the city is redeveloping 140 acres of the former Wheland Foundry and U.S. Pipe sites in its South Broad District, located roughly one mile south of Chattanooga’s urban core along Broad Street, anchored by Erlanger Park and a new stadium for the minor league Chattanooga Lookouts.
The project, backed by $80 million in city and county bonds and a Tax Increment Financing district, is projected to generate more than $1 billion in new investment and $2.3 billion in broader economic impact.
Although about 20% of the venue’s annual programming comes from minor league games, Erlanger Park is being designed as a year-round destination, with concerts, high school and college athletics, community events, outdoor fitness classes, and private gatherings filling the calendar year-round. The surrounding South Broad development is expected to transform an industrial dead zone into a mixed-use neighborhood built for people to live, work, and stay.
Valparaiso, Indiana, is running a similar play but on a smaller scale. A former industrial warehouse site just off the city’s main thoroughfares, the kind of blight that had sat untouched for years due to environmental remediation costs, is being converted into a $20–$30 million community and recreation complex.
The project includes outdoor courts, multi-sport playing surfaces, a children’s museum, and a senior center, all located within the Central neighborhood. City leaders are also attracting adjacent businesses, health providers, fitness studios, and coffee shops to build the kind of daytime and evening activity that makes a district feel alive.
The playbook is there. Office conversions create the housing. Zoning reform clears the path. And sports, recreation, and cultural infrastructure give people a reason to show up.
Climate resilience measures have become a baseline expectation for every significant municipal infrastructure project, and communities that haven’t started planning are already behind.
Nearly all U.S. cities, 98.6% to be exact, reported facing significant climate hazards in 2024, up from 83% the previous year. Annual disasters such as floods, heat waves, wildfires, and extreme storms have cost more than $30 billion for five consecutive years.
And since January 2025, a federal executive order has made it clear that state, regional, and municipal governments will bear most of the costs for disaster recovery and risk reduction.
Cities are now integrating resilience directly into their community infrastructure as a design standard, and the approaches vary as much as the hazards themselves. In Denver, the parks and recreation department partnered with the Mile High Flood District to build dual-purpose nature play spaces that manage stormwater, serve neighborhoods, reduce flood risk, and expand green space.
In New York City, the post-Sandy “Big U” project is wrapping lower Manhattan in a network of berms and parks engineered to absorb storm surge while creating usable public recreation space.
In Hoboken, N.J., BRIC grant funding went toward multipurpose infrastructure that simultaneously improves stormwater resilience and delivers public amenities. Each of these projects: resilience isn’t a separate line item — it’s baked into the design.
In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis announced $311 million in grants to improve infrastructure across 37 communities impacted by the 2023 and 2024 storm seasons, including Hurricanes Idalia, Debby, Helene, and Milton.
The funding, drawn from the Community Development Block Grand-Disaster Recovery Infrastructure Repair Program and the Rural Infrastructure Fund, supports utility upgrades, water system hardening, bridge rehabilitation — and in some communities — the construction or hardening of emergency shelters.
The grants reflect a growing recognition that post-disaster recovery costs far more than pre-disaster investment, and that communities with hardened, purpose-built infrastructure simply fare better.
The challenge is one of coordination. Resilience planning requires thinking simultaneously across departments, varied timelines, and funding streams — bond financing, state grants, and public-private partnerships all in play at once. The cities getting it right are treating resilience not as an insurance policy, but as an investment in the long-term viability of their communities.
Youth sports are an incredibly reliable anchor for mixed-use development. “People will change their spending behaviors, but they won’t take their kids out of sports,” says Eric Sullivan, partner and executive vice president of The Sports Facilities Companies (SFC), pointing to 2008 and 2020 as proof points.
Youth sports were among the first markets to rebound after COVID and the great recession of 2008, and that macroeconomic resilience is exactly what mixed-use developers and municipal leaders are looking for in an anchor tenant. According to Sports ETA, youth and amateur sports generated $60.1 billion in direct spending in 2025, outpacing spectator sports tourism’s $51.1 billion.
Communities of all sizes are building complexes that anchor hotels, restaurants, retail, and entertainment, creating self-sustaining ecosystems that generate traffic 365 days a year.
What makes youth and amateur sports uniquely suited to this model is that a multi-sport complex running soccer in the fall, basketball in the winter, and baseball in the spring creates what Sullivan calls “a very predictable buying cycle — 12 months a year.” That reliability is gold for hotel owners, restaurateurs, and retailers needing consistent foot traffic to thrive.
The demographic picture matters, too. Traveling families, the core audience for youth sports tourism, spend very differently from business travelers. They buy souvenir shirts, linger over dinner, and often extend their stays. And when local leagues fill the complex on weekday nights, they activate the surrounding restaurants and shops on a recurring weekly basis. “When you do this right,” Sullivan says, “it becomes a hub of the community.”
An example of this trend can be found in Overland Park, Kansas, where Bluhawk, a 277- acre master-planned development with healthcare facilities, multi-family residential homes, and retail components is anchored by AdventHealth Sports Park, a 420,000-square-foot indoor sports complex.
City leaders who understand this convergence and start treating tourism, parks and recreation, and economic development as a single strategy rather than three separate mandates will capture outsized returns.
In Mattoon, Illinois (pop. 16,700), the recently opened Emerald Acres, a sports complex anchors a 150-acre mixed-use development that includes hotels, restaurants, and retail from national chains like Texas Roadhouse and Hampton Inn. Developed through a partnership between the city and Rural King, the facility features indoor courts and upcoming outdoor fields, and is projected to draw 580,000 visitors and generate $23.8 million in annual economic impact — with an estimated $200 million in total construction over the next few years. “We don’t really know any other thing that could bring this many people to us from such a distance to a city of our magnitude,” said Mattoon Mayor Rick Hall.
Years ago, the idea of robotaxis seemed like a distant future scenario reserved for sci-fi movies. That’s no longer the case, and the implications for how cities plan streets, parking, transit, and land use are profound.
Waymo, the Alphabet-owned autonomous vehicle company, now operates a fully driverless commercial service in ten U.S. cities, including Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Miami, and Phoenix, providing more than 500,000 rides per week as of March 2026.
Its 2026 expansion plan adds more than 20 cities, including Dallas, Houston, Denver, Las Vegas, Nashville, Washington, D.C., and London, with a target of reaching 1 million rides per week by year’s end.
For municipal leaders, this has become a land use story. If even a fraction of daily trips shifts to autonomous ride-hailing over the next decade, cities will need fewer parking structures, freeing valuable real estate in urban and neighborhood commercial corridors for housing, retail, or green space. But the outcome hinges on how AV usage takes shape. In a recent panel organized by the Urbanism Next Center at the University of Oregon, Nico Larco, the organization’s director, noted that fleet-based models — companies deploying robotaxis — could “encourage denser development” and reduce the infrastructure burden on cities. But a shift toward personal ownership of autonomous vehicles, he warned, could produce the opposite: more sprawl, more congestion, and more pressure on the roads that cities are already struggling to maintain.
Street design will follow the shift. Fewer wide lanes, more dedicated pickup and drop-off zones, and potentially more space for pedestrians and cyclists. Transit investment decisions will change too — particularly in corridors where robotaxis can fill first- and last-mile gaps more effectively than fixed bus routes, forcing cities to rethink where public dollars go.
The cities that start planning for this transition now, even those not yet hosting robotaxi services, will have a significant advantage. That means revisiting parking minimums in zoning codes and building flexibility into street design standards before the pressure to do so arrives.
It also means confronting an equity question. Autonomous vehicle services are currently concentrated in higher-income, well-mapped urban areas. If that pattern holds, the land freed up by declining parking demand will benefit communities that are already well-resourced. Ensuring that underserved neighborhoods share in those gains — through affordable housing, public space, or improved transit access on freed-up land — will require deliberate policy.
