HR&A at 50: Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Going

The year is 1976. The economy has fallen flat for most Americans. An oil crisis abroad has strained budgets at home. Technology is rapidly changing work, and pollution is a growing threat. Racial and economic inequality is underlying all of it. 

Certainly, there are echoes of today’s challenges, but with a notable catch. Crime and “blight” had sent people packing from urban centers, with stark divides between who left and who got left behind. Cities weren’t the engines of innovation and creativity they are now; instead, many saw them as places unworthy of saving.

But defying predictions, cities bounced back. They evolved, and since 1976, HR&A has too. Back then, it was a new venture based in California, providing best-in-class data analytics to support public budgeting, public administration, and corporate strategy. Fifty years later, our identity is still rooted in our origin, but we’ve grown into a global firm advising cities on everything from broadband access and climate resilience to housing affordability and public sector efficiency.

That evolution didn’t happen by accident. It happened because cities kept transforming, and we kept adapting with them. We didn’t always get it right—and I’ll be the first to admit that. But we never stopped asking how we could do better.  As we celebrate our 50th anniversary, what’s top of mind for me is making sure we’re ready for the next 50. Because what hasn’t changed is our commitment to take on big, complex challenges, forge creative and unconventional solutions, and stay connected to the communities and leaders we serve.

Like before, cities are absorbing a lot right now. Downtowns still haven’t fully recovered from the pandemic. AI is reshaping how people live and work faster than most cities can respond. Worsening climate disasters have transformed worst-case scenarios into a matter of when, not if—and most cities are still not prepared. And all of this is landing hardest on the communities that were already struggling.

Our focus this year and beyond—housing; tech and society; climate and energy; thriving places; and a government that delivers for everyone—forms a framework that we didn’t invent. It’s what every mayor, agency head, developer, and nonprofit leader that we work with is telling us where they need help. It’s what drives the questions that our clients are asking us to help answer right now. And it’s what cities will need to problem-solve to succeed.

Day to day, I hear it from the communities we support. People are struggling to afford rent in cities, with housing costs rising faster than incomes. Neighborhoods are asking whether a new data center will bring jobs or just drain the water supply and drive up their utility bills. Workers are watching new industries arrive in their cities and wondering whether the training and pathways will ever reach them. Residents are wondering whether high-speed internet—something so many of us take for granted—will ever reliably reach them. And communities are questioning whether city services will ever work as well for them as they do for others. 

These aren’t abstract policy questions. They’re real pressures on real people, and they’re the reason our work matters.

Much of my career has been shaped by being in places where these issues actually stopped being abstract. After Katrina, I went back to my hometown of New Orleans and saw firsthand what happens when a city hasn’t been built to withstand what’s coming. I also saw what’s possible when a community refuses to give up. That experience reinforced something I’ve carried ever since: resilience is both people and infrastructure. It’s about who has the resources to rebuild, who gets overlooked, who gets to live in a vibrant neighborhood, and who gets a voice in what comes next.

This came to life recently when we worked with the City and County of Honolulu to assess their climate-related financial risks. Sea level rise, flooding, coastal erosion—the threats are accelerating, and the fiscal exposure is enormous. And what strikes me is how these themes converge: you can’t talk about climate adaptation without talking about housing, equity, governance capacity, and the role of technology. The climate challenge is also a housing challenge, an economic development challenge, an equity challenge, and a workforce challenge.

These challenges don’t arrive in silos, and neither can our solutions. The path forward is through the connections, not around them. We can’t solve the housing crisis without thinking about climate risk and displacement. We can’t build vibrant neighborhoods without thinking about who they serve. And we can’t invest in transit infrastructure without asking whether it heals historic inequities or deepens them.

Seeing those connections clearly is one thing. Acting on them is another. 

We are at a moment that demands creativity from everyone with a stake in our cities. Governments are being asked to do more with less. Businesses are navigating markets reshaped by forces no one fully anticipated. And nonprofits are holding communities together while the systems around them strain. The leaders who succeed, across all sectors, will be the ones who find new funding structures, build unlikely coalitions, and refuse to treat these challenges as separate line items. Because cities don’t advance through government alone — and cities are where the abstract turns into action.

Our work over the last five decades gives us something that you can’t shortcut — a deep understanding of the systems and structures that make cities function, and how they can quickly fracture. Because not every firm makes it to 50. The ones that do are the ones that never confuse what worked before with what’s needed now.

For HR&A, this anniversary isn’t a celebration of where we’ve been. It’s a commitment to the work ahead. Cities are always in motion, and so are we.

That commitment extends to how we show up. To mark this anniversary, we’ve evolved our brand identity and website to reflect the firm we’re becoming. —> Explore our new look and feel.