About Urban

Our Story
Our History
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Making Facts Matter for More Than 50 Years

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1968
The War on Poverty

War on Poverty

 

In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson founded the Urban Institute to “help solve the problem that weighs heavily on the hearts and minds of all of us—the problem of the American city and its people.” The Urban Institute was born at a time of severe polarization, as Americans clashed about whether and how to grapple with the country’s deep legacy of racism and segregation. Early attempts to lift families out of poverty and narrow inequities were often stabs in the dark without a clear understanding of whether new policies were working—or for whom. Among Urban’s first contributions was a microsimulation tool that forecasted the combined effects of federal antipoverty programs on family well-being. How did cash benefits, food stamps, tax credits, and other subsidies interact? And were they helping people get ahead? Since then, Urban researchers have built a portfolio of microsimulation models on taxes, health insurance, and retirement security. Each is built to predict how people, communities, and spending will be affected by proposed policy reforms—giving policymakers and the public crucial information to better shape and target solutions.

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1973
A New Era in Federal Housing Policy

A New Era in Federal Housing Policy

 

When President Richard Nixon declared a moratorium on subsidized housing construction, Urban experts were among the first to explore how housing vouchers could address housing needs and support economic advancement among low-income families. Our research provided critical support for the bipartisan consensus that emerged in favor of this market-driven policy. Over three decades, we tracked outcomes for voucher recipients and recommended design and implementation changes to strengthen the performance of the voucher program.

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1982
The Reagan Revolution

The Reagan Revolution

 

President Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 set in motion dramatic domestic policy changes. To analyze the effects of these changes on people and communities, Urban launched the decade-long Changing Domestic Priorities project. Findings touched on every sphere of policy and American life—including family income, economic growth, poverty, elder care, taxes, and fiscal choices—and placed the administration’s policies in historical perspective. This work revealed a mixed record in achieving such goals as shrinking government’s size and scope, reducing taxes, strengthening the military, streamlining regulation, and cutting entitlements.

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1992
The Collapse of the Soviet Union

The Collapse of the Soviet Union

 

As fragile democracies emerged in Eastern Europe, they faced practical questions about how to transition to a market economy, provide basic services, and generate tax revenues. Drawing upon Urban’s broad policy expertise and a decade of work in developing countries, our experts provided hands-on help to local officials to strengthen the capacity of local governments, expand citizen participation, and improve performance management—practices that are now replicated across the globe.

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1996
The End of “Welfare as We Know It”

The End of Welfare as We Know It

 

Welfare reform in 1996 ended more than 60 years of guaranteed cash assistance to struggling families and turned responsibility for much of the social safety net over to states. The historic shifts raised many questions: How would states perform the devolved role? How would families fare under “work-first” programs? And what would happen to families once they stopped receiving assistance? Urban’s intensive research project, Assessing the New Federalism, tracked more than 40,000 families across the country, profiled state agencies’ capacities and challenges, and created a database of evolving state welfare rules. This vital information filled the vacuum created when the federal government cut back on welfare monitoring and offered a comprehensive history of welfare reform’s effects on families. One early finding revealed the critical role of food stamps in the new safety net, leading to lasting changes in enrollment policies to ensure families receive the benefits to which they are entitled.

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2002
The Bush-Era Tax Cuts

The Bush-Era Tax Cuts

 

The start of the new century witnessed a new round of income tax cuts, and post-9/11 national unity disintegrated as new budget battles ensued. It became clear that decisionmakers, media, and the public needed unbiased information to cut through political rancor on fiscal and tax policy. Researchers from the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution established a joint Tax Policy Center, distinguished for its respected tools that evaluate and explain distributional and cost effects of competing tax reform proposals with rigorous and transparent analysis. The Tax Policy Center continues to frame the national conversation about tax and fiscal policy during election cycles and in policy debates, including the heated debate about the most recent tax cuts proposed and implemented by the Trump administration.

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2006
Hurricane Katrina

Hurricane Katrina

 

In the months after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, shock gave way to deep concern about how to bring this unique city back to social, cultural, and economic health. Many of New Orleans’s problems—widespread poverty, a failing public education system, low wages, and a weak tax base—predated the storm. The rebuilding effort afforded a chance to tackle these challenges. Urban delivered evidence-based insights to help the city’s residents rebuild their social and economic infrastructure. In addition to offering strategies for providing urgently needed housing, jobs, health care, and schools, we helped decisionmakers rethink the role the safety net plays in the face of disasters and supported nonprofit and government efforts to tackle long-standing challenges laid bare by the storm.

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2008
The Mortgage Crisis and Its Fallout

The Mortgage Crisis and Its Fallout

 

After years of escalating housing prices and speculative financing, the subprime mortgage meltdown triggered a crisis that led to the Great Recession. Economist Ned Gramlich warned policymakers about predatory lending in the Urban Institute Press book Subprime Mortgages: America’s Latest Boom and Bust. Several of the book’s recommendations were later adopted by the Federal Reserve Board to tighten mortgage-lending standards. In 2013, Urban established the Housing Finance Policy Center, led by Wall Street analyst Laurie Goodman. The center has assembled an unparalleled data inventory and brings timely, impartial analyses to decisionmakers who have grappled with how best to rebuild the housing finance system, shape future capital market policies and regulations, and tackle long-standing inequities in access to homeownership.

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2010
Health Reform

Health Reform

 

After prior health reform efforts failed, the Obama administration took up the issue again, crafting a complex reform package modeled on the Massachusetts plan. Urban researchers had helped inform and evaluate Massachusetts’s universal coverage program, and they were called upon again to help design the Affordable Care Act (ACA). After it was passed, Urban researchers evaluated nearly every aspect of the ACA to assess whether it was working as intended and how it affected the economy, employers, and people. Their analysis was cited by Supreme Court justices in deciding the law’s constitutionality. More recently, when Congress debated how to “repeal and replace” the ACA, Urban’s analysis provided essential facts about the number of people who would lose their health insurance in every state.

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2017
The Trump Era

Assessing Trump-Era Policies

 

President Donald Trump's administration sought and won major tax reform legislation. It sought and lost efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act but accomplished major regulatory reforms to its policies. And his administration implemented a host of changes to safety-net policy, including enacting the “public charge rule” and permitting states to mandate work requirements for access to public benefits (both policies were challenged in court and ultimately reversed by the next administration). For each of these policy changes, Urban was the trusted source for media, advocates, litigants, and policymakers seeking to understand the potential consequences. Using proprietary sophisticated microsimulation modeling and quick-response surveys, Urban provided rapid analyses of shifting proposals and granular, state-by-state analyses of potential policy impacts. By reliably predicting who would gain and who would lose under different policies, Urban revealed the consequences of how changes to the social safety net would (and sometimes did) affect the health and well-being of millions of families.

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2018
Joining Changemakers to Show Why Facts Matter

Providing Evidence to Accelerate Solutions

 

Urban celebrated its 50th anniversary not by looking back but by kicking off our Next50 initiative. We found ourselves in a tumultuous period similar to the time of our founding. Once again, as a new generation of activists and advocates were finding their voices across a polarized, distrustful country, Urban recommitted itself to providing all changemakers—not just federal policymakers—with the power of knowledge to accelerate solutions. In a country facing rapid change, growing inequality, and deepening divisions, Urban argued to put technology to work to advance equity and upward mobility. Although some claimed that each side of a debate could have its own “alternative facts,” our experts showed why evidence is essential for holding leaders accountable. As Urban began its next 50 years, we sought to deploy state-of-the-art artificial intelligence, data science, and research technologies and to interrogate the systems and structures that perpetuate racism. And Urban remained focused on answering the question, “what it would take for all people to thrive?”

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2020
Demonstrating What It Means to Advance Racial Equity

Participants at BLM rally

 

As the COVID-19 pandemic upended people’s lives and livelihoods (disproportionately affecting Black and Brown communities) and the nation grappled once again with its cruel legacy of racism and discrimination, Urban delivered groundbreaking analyses to inform responses to crises ranging from renters facing eviction to families falling into poverty. Urban launched the Racial Equity Analytics Lab to equip today’s equity-minded leaders with timely, race-explicit data and analysis to advance social and economic policies that help remedy persistent structural racism. And we deepened our commitment to capturing the stories behind the data, demonstrating that understanding people’s lived experience is essential for developing effective solutions. Americans ended 2020 by electing a new president whose first executive action was to mandate consideration of how all administrative, regulatory, and legislative policy would impact equity. Urban was poised to be a trusted, go-to resource for evidence about the long-standing systems and structures that continue to drive inequities in our country and how well different policy choices would succeed or fail in dismantling them.