Shortest Way Home, by Pete Buttigieg: on Welfare & Poverty

Pete Buttigieg: Deal with 1,000 abandoned buildings in 1,000 days

Soon after taking office I convened a task force, which spent a year analyzing the problem. The result was an extensive report. But I was also fearful that we had just done one more exercise in describing the problem, without actually solving it. So, a goal of childlike simplicity: "Let's promise to deal with a thousand houses in a thousand days."

Pete Buttigieg: Public scoreboard showing progress on 1,000 abandoned homes

I began to understand the difference between my job and everyone else's. The experts could identify the legal tools for addressing neglected property. The council could allocate funds for dealing with the problem. But only a mayor could furnish the political capital to get the project done, by publicly committing to a goal and owning the risk of missing it.

Checking our website on Day 500, you would have seen that we had nowhere near having 500 houses addressed. By the 1000th day, our community had addressed not just 1,000, but over 1,100 homes. Hitting such an ambitious goal made it easier for residents to believe we could do very difficult things as a city at a time when civic confidence had been in short supply for decades.