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This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim Steneveek on Bloomberg Radio.
Well, if you're a regular viewer or listener of Bloomberg BusinessWeek, then you know we like to check in with mayors across America for a snapshot of what's going on in their communities. After all, Carol, they're the ones on the frontlines dealing with the macroeconomic challenges we talk about each and every day, economic development, afford ole housing, rising costs, not to mention the politics of it all.
Yeah, it's a great snapshot of so much in our world and really on the ground. GT Buying him is one of those mayors. He's the mayor of Tulsa, Oklahoma, a city of his family has lived in for six generations. And a fun fact, his great great paternal grandfather was mayor as well as his maternal grandfather, so it goes back many generations. We should point out to Mayor Bynham
in the city of Tulsa. I work with Bloomberg Philanthropies and it's Cities program, but he's here away from his own city and here in New York City, Mayor Biden, So good to have you here with us. Welcome, Welcome. We do like to talk with mayors around the country because it does feel like sometimes we're looking up too high and not getting down on the ground. And so tell us about what you guys are seeing when it comes to the economy, the needs of your citizens, kind
of the stress points or where there's growth. Give us kind of an overview, if you will.
Well, I think at the local level, and I hear this from my fellow mayors when we get together. One that I think is really important is you never run into the partisan divides that you see so much about at the national level. Like when mayors get together, we want to know what you're doing on homelessness, what are you doing on infrastructure and public safety. So I love
that part of being a mayor for us. I think from an economic standpoint, we definitely see the impact of inflation in the impact that that's had on people's buying power,
and even us in operating a city government. You know, we're heavily funded by sales tax and we had a really from the outside looks like a nice two year run where we had this massive increase in revenue, but it was because of the cost of goods going up and sales tax going up, and so that's eating into our employees' paychecks, and so we've had to really be disciplined about staying on top of that and proving increased
employee pay and compensation to couple with that. The other big one that I hear from mayors all over America really is around homelessness. That there is not a city that has it all figured out. If there was, I think we'd all be ripping them off and figuring out
how to pay for it. And instead, you just see these laboratories of democracy all over America right now where cities are trying out different approaches, collecting data on what's working and what's not, and trying to double down on those strategies that do.
Oftentimes, one of the reasons people find themselves on the streets is because housing is too expensive, and we talk about housing being affordable or the lack of affordability of housing in many parts of the country to also by no means immune to that. According to your own data that you provided us, you need over ten thousand affordable housing units in the next few years to accommodate people who live there.
It's exactly right.
How are you doing it?
We always thought of ourselves as being a very affordable place. When you compare Tulsa to the coast of the United States, were incredibly affordable. But you have to take in to consideration what your local per capita income is when figuring that out. And so to your point, we just had an independent study conducted funded by a local philanthropic foundation that says that we need about thirteen thousand housing units in the next ten years, and that's everything from homeless
shelter space to mansions and everything in between. What we've tried to focus on as a city are those things that the free market is not going to address, and that is homeless shelter space, permanent supportive housing, and transitional housing. We just passed in August a seventy million dollars voter approved initiative to help subsidize those things to make it more appealing for private sector developers to build that knowing that they can get some support from the city for
doing it. We just had The other thing that we tried to focus on is reducing the regulatory burden from the city. We've seen a lot of cities that will have a lot of incentive funding available, but the regulatory burden is so great and so private sector developers still don't build there. So we've reduced that significantly in Tulsa because of that. Last year we had the most home starts we've ever had in the history of our city.
But we're going to have to continue to ramp that up just to catch up to the pace we need to be keeping for the next decade to get the amount of housing that everybody tells us we need to reduce homelessness in our city.
All right, So there's demand for housing, no doubt about it. You want to make sure it's affordable right for the people who need it, And I'm just curious that at the same time, then, so you want to have an economy within your city and surrounding environs that can support that. What are you doing on that side of the leisure.
I would say probably a couple big things. One and I know last time I was on here we talked about our focus on advance aerial mobility. Since then, we were one of twenty six cities in America to receive a Build Back Better Regional Challenge grant, which we're using to build out the advanced aerial mobility drones, especially in the Tulsa area. We've partnered with the Osage Nation to build a drone testing corridor in Tulsa or in their nation,
their reservation that's about seventy miles long. So we're trying to build that industry out. The other big thing that we're doing is focusing on entrepreneurship and fostering that and in particular in our immigrant community in Tulsa.
Did your immigrant community.
Yes, it's largely, it's going to be well, it's all over the world. We have the largest Afghan refugee community in Tulsa of any city in America, heavily Hispanic, and then also a significant Asian population that has come as a result of refugee work that the faith based community
in Tulsa has been doing for decades. And so we just opened up a new business incubator in probably the most densely populated area of our city where the immigrant community lives, to focus in particular on immigrant entrepreneurs and making sure they have connections to the assets that they
need to build new businesses in our city. Because our data we've collected shows that the inclination entrepreneurship amongst immigrants, at least in Tulsa is much higher than the non immigrant population, so we want to make sure they have the resources they need. So there's there's a tremendous amount of work that's being done. Those are just two things, but you're right, we've got to keep pace with economic growth to support all of this housing and the population growth.
We're also not to belabor the point, but we have become an accidental mecca for remote work as well, and I know we visit about that a bet last time, Yah, you want to talk about work because the unemployment.
Rate relatively low in Tulsa about four percent according to the Labor Department.
With all the.
Companies that you're trying to attract to the area, are they going to be able to find the workers they need in Tulsa?
We believe so for one for one big reason, well two big reasons. One, we're very much focused on building up quality of life in our city, so it's easier for them to recruit people to Tulsa. We're on a twenty year run now of major investments at our concert arena that we built has been the concert arena at two of the last four years. We lost out to Madison Square Garden one year. We lost out to the Staples Center in La one year, So I'm not bad
competition for concert arena in Tulsa. We just opened the greatest park gift any city in American history about three years ago, the Gathering Place. It's a four hundred and eighty million dollar, entirely privately funded park in the heart of our city. We're building a lake in the middle of our city that's going to open on Labor Day weekend. We're building a museum to how's the greatest collection of American art outside of that owned by the federal government
that is in Tulsa. We just opened the Bob Dylan Archive about two years ago. So there's a lot going on from a quality of lifestyle and the other is and I think this is really important. We want to be the best city in America for immigrants. We're working very hard to make Tulsa a city that really lives up to the hopes and aspirations that immigrants from all around the world have when they come to the United States.
We want them to be welcome, we want them to find great jobs and opportunity in our city.
You're in art great city for a specific reason. Tell us about what you were doing last night.
So The Outsiders, which I imagine a lot of your listeners have either read the that's right. So The Outsiders was written by a high school student in Tulsa decades ago, Si Hinton. She still lives in Tulsa. Then Francis Ford, a couple of made a movie that launched the careers of just an unbelievable number of actors who went on to have big careers. Well, now it has been made into a Broadway musical and it's premiering tonight on Broadway.
So we have about two hundred people from Tulsa who are in town to support the show that we're just so proud of it and that this story written by our fellow Tulson, has become a classic of American literature film, and we believe it will be on Broadway as well.
Well, how was the show?
It was amazing, amazing. The performers in it are great, The special effects and stage work in it. I've never seen anything like it, and it they do a great job of honoring the spirit of the book and the story. That's so important.
We should note the show on Broadways, produced by Angelina Jolie and again, as you mentioned, based on the book by S. E. Hinton, really great stuff. It's amazing how young she was when she wrote What did you Do in High School? She wrote, she wrote a book.
I was like, Oh, can you imagine being defined for your whole life by one thing you did in high school? Exactly? Yes? No, no, no, most of us not.
Great to check in with you again, Good luck with everything, have a good trip.
Thank you boy so much.
Enjoy Yeah, great to see you. Mary G. T Biham of course, the mayor of Tulsa, Oklahoma, joining us here in our Bloomberg Interactive Brokers Studio