October 07, 2024

The University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy is launching its second Harris Policy Innovation Challenge, with a new focus for this academic year: creating a thriving downtown for Chicago. Partnering with the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation, this year’s contest will, like the inaugural contest to address the local pension deficit, tackle an urgent problem of local significance. 

In the four years since the COVID pandemic forever changed the way Americans work, urban downtowns have struggled to regain their former energy and economic power. Amid efforts to transform scores of now-vacant office buildings and combat crime, U.S. cities have yet to crack the code how best to lure back business and tourism dollars. 

With this in mind, the Harris Policy Innovation Challenge—established in academic year 2023-2024—offers graduate students across the University of Chicago an opportunity to apply their knowledge and skills to a complex and crucial problem in contemporary public policy of local consequence. Student teams learn about the issue from experts from the Chicago business, government, and civic communities, and submit evidence- and analysis-informed policy proposals to a panel of expert judges, with the winning team awarded a prize of $10,000.

The inaugural Harris Policy Innovation Challenge produced a slate of inventive ideas to solve the city’s unfunded pension liabilities. This year, graduate student teams will devise policy solutions using a handful of measurable criteria for evaluation as their guides. The winning team’s proposals will be asked to consider:

  • Sustainability: Can commerce and other activity downtown grow and evolve as consumer tastes and preferences change? Does downtown include a robust mix of residential, commercial, entertainment, and other options?
  • Inclusiveness: Does downtown welcome and benefits all Chicagoans?
  • Fiscal health: Does downtown generate more property, sales, and other tax revenues than the spending on services it requires? 

“Ensuring the long-term vitality of the Loop is a crucial issue, and not just for Chicago,” said Research Professor Justin Marlowe, the initiative’s faculty lead, as well as the faculty director of Harris’s Center for Municipal Finance. “The solutions that our student teams will present next spring could easily serve as models of creative urban planning and financial strategizing for other U.S. cities to follow.”

Christopher Berry—director of the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation and William J. and Alicia Townsend Friedman Professor at the Harris School—added, “The theme of this year’s Harris Policy Innovation Challenge is a perfect fit for the mission of the Mansueto Institute: bringing together researchers from many disciplines to develop and nurture bold new thinking about cities and what makes them successful.”

The contest will also feature a slate of seminars on trends that shape downtown vitality in Chicago and beyond, including crime prevention, remote work, property assessment and taxation, architecture and design, and sports and entertainment. 

At the contest’s end next spring, a panel of experts will select three finalists. A closing event will follow in April 2025, to which members of the press, policymakers, and the community will be invited to watch the finalists present their proposals to the expert panel, who will select a winner. A $10,000 prize will be given to the team with the most compelling and promising solution. 

“At the Harris School of Public Policy, we take seriously the work of training a new generation of rigorous, thoughtful, and gifted policymakers, committed to tackling today’s most urgent issues—both here in Chicago and across the world,” said Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, dean of the Harris School and Sydney Stein Professor. “Last year’s inaugural Policy Innovation Challenge proved to be a remarkable opportunity for these students to apply their insights, analysis, and creativity toward cracking a looming fiscal crisis in Chicago, and I’m confident this year’s contest will yield similarly impressive new approaches to revitalizing our downtown.”