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Steven Pedigo gives us his take in a recent essay in the New York Times titled "Texas is the Future of America." He is the founding executive director of the LBJ Urban Lab and a professor of practice at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.

"As goes Texas, so will the United States — for better or for worse," writes LBJ Urban Lab Director Steven Pedigo in a guest essay in the New York Times. His analysis looks at Texas's influx of citizens, its economy, its rapidly changing demographics, its approach to business and the politics its leaders are practicing — and predicts its influence on the rest of the country. 

As policymakers look to accelerate the Texas economy and manage growth challenges, state leaders must depend on investments in Texas cities. Researchers with the LBJ School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin, the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University and the George W. Bush Institute-SMU Economic Growth Initiative in Dallas have issued a statewide policy agenda for managing a growing, urban Texas.

Twenty-nine LBJ School authors have come together to craft interdisciplinary and resilience-based policy solutions, published in a policy toolkit, which trains a forward-thinking lens on what went wrong and what it will take to fix the system flaws exposed by the pandemic.

The LBJ School Urban Lab Director Steven Pedigo has partnered with the Texas Tribune Festival 2020 and Kinder Institute to produce five CityTalk podcasts on urban policy. In this series, experts unpack post-COVID urbanism, placemaking and more.

A coalition of the state's top public policy research institutions will work together to create the Texas Blueprint for Urban Policy, an outline for the future focused on a comprehensive suite of new plans for economic development, housing, land use and transportation.

Policy experts from UH and UT-Austin say the pandemic has exposed vulnerabilities in the Texas economy and offer “A Playbook for Resiliency” to address them.

Sometimes in the thick of this coronavirus crisis it's hard to think about a post-pandemic Texas. But the authors of a first-of-its-kind report are asking us to do just that. Leaders of the University of Texas at Austin's LBJ School of Public Affairs and the University of Houston's Hobby School of Public Affairs collaborated on a proposal that calls for a more inclusive, more resilient Texas.

Until now, the state’s worst-ever monthly unemployment rate was 9.2% in November 1986, as Texas reeled from the last big oil bust. A combination of the coronavirus pandemic and a contracting energy industry are expected to slow Texas' economic recovery.

CNN's Ronald Brownstein cites the Playbook for Resiliency in his discussion of how the partisan divide is affecting plans to re-open after COVID-19.