Harvard’s Rachel Meltzer and co-author Alex F. Schwartz describe their data-informed approach to helping public leaders address realities on the ground.

By Christopher Swope

Cambridge, Massachusetts (May 30, 2025)—Whether tackling housing shortages, poverty, crime, or other tough challenges, mayors and their staffs face difficult policy choices at every turn — and often, little time to weigh the pros and cons.

A recent conversation at the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University explored how city leaders can navigate this landscape effectively by expanding the evidence base they bring to high-stakes policy decisions.

The key is tapping into new data sources, said the co-authors of the book, Policy Analysis as Problem Solving: A Flexible and Evidence-Based Framework, just issued in its second edition.  In addition to using traditional economic analysis tools aimed at assessing the cost effectiveness of different approaches, they said, today’s policy analysts should also consider direct feedback from users of programs or services, insights from behavioral research, examples of successful policies elsewhere, and more.

Co-author Rachel Meltzer, Plimpton Associate Professor of Planning and Urban Economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and faculty affiliate of the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard, said this broader approach can bring marginalized voices into the policy-making process.

For example, when her students worked with New York City jails on reducing delays in bail payment, they did something policy analysts don’t always do: they went out and visited correctional facilities to interview people involved in the process.

“They spent time there putting themselves in the experience of what it would be like to make your way to Rikers Island and try to figure out how to pay bail for a loved one who was arrested hours ago,” Meltzer said. “In the end, they recommended an online bail payment system. That may seem simple but they harnessed a lot of data to get to that recommendation — not just numbers in a spreadsheet but experiential visits and a qualitative understanding of experiences that different stakeholders in this process are going through.”

Meltzer’s co-author, Alex F. Schwartz, Professor of Public and Urban Policy at The New School, added that traditional economic tools like cost-benefit analyses still play an important role in weighing policy choices. “But we found it was important to be broader and more agnostic in terms of the disciplinary boundaries that should be applied in policy analysis,” Schwartz said. “That was the main reason we decided to write another text.”

From the vantage point of City Hall, the fast-moving day-to-day reality of policy analysis can be messy, added Tiffany Chu, Chief of Staff to Boston Mayor Michelle Wu. She agreed that drawing on a diversity of data sources is important because “if you’re not careful, you can get into a pattern of listening to the loudest voices.”

Chu has found direct engagement with residents in their neighborhoods to be a critical part of how Boston leaders approach  policy analysis. That’s especially true, she said, when neighborhood associations complain about problems like speeding, for example.

“Once you dig in and unpack it further, it might be part of some larger situation, or it might be a micro situation,” Chu said. “That’s why we have neighborhood liaisons, who are so important to the functioning of the mayor’s office. Ground truthing, both with qualitative and quantitative data, is important. And actually going out into the field, door knocking, and asking people: ‘Is speeding actually a problem on your street?’ And if so, we can look into a solution like speed bumps.”

That messiness at the local level makes it more important to use an analytical framework like the one in the book, Meltzer said. City leaders often must make big decisions on tight deadlines, and emerging problems may not be well researched or understood. “The framework is really useful when trying to bring order to otherwise unwieldy problems that need to be solved,”  Meltzer said. “Even if you’re thrown something that feels insurmountable, you have this framework to lean back on so that the alternative is not to just keep putting that particular problem on the back burner.”

Policy implementation also can be complicated in city halls. All of the panelists agreed that policy analysts need to take implementation obstacles such as resource constraints and organizational culture into account when they make recommendations — a point underlined by moderator Jorrit de Jong, who is the Director of the Bloomberg Center for Cities, Faculty Co-Chair of the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, and Emma Bloomberg Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and Management at the Harvard Kennedy School.

“Implementation is not always fully appreciated or given an equal amount of attention as the analysis piece,” said de Jong. “In a way, policy analysis is only rigorous if it actually takes into consideration implementation, which has a whole different set of issues to consider and think about.”