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Beyond its role in a jobs strategy, smart infrastructure investment has huge implications for metro regions’ ability to compete globally while becoming environmentally sustainable.

The federal government should reward regions that take a fix-it-first approach rather than heavily subsidizing sprawling growth, and that agree to performance-based allocations of transportation and other infrastructure dollars. Launch a pilot program that builds on the best regional-planning incentives and regional councils to help federal agencies coordinate locally (both were de-funded in the 1980s).

By repartnering with the federal government, we could charge America’s regions to strategize transportation, land use, and economic development together. To do this, you would need a White House council that coordinates implementation, not just urban policy development, across the agencies. There has never been one.

Next, there’s environmental sustainability. A consortium of federal agencies should be charged to sort through the myths and realties and still-unknowns about how to significantly reduce local carbon footprint—instead of just “green-washing” communities through ad-hoc reforms.

Meanwhile, we can’t wait to do the obvious: Triggering energy-efficiency upgrades is smart and very labor-intensive. So is distributed power generation, with solar panels, solar water heaters, and other energy infrastructure financed, installed, and maintained on millions of homes and commercial buildings by utilities, not the consumer. The president should work with Congress to create federal renewable-energy standards.

Urban regions are ground zero for meeting the climate challenge, and doing so could be a boon to civic engagement and the extension of prosperity broadly—through job, wealth, and skill creation.

But crime, and particularly the violent crime that remains heavily concentrated in many urban neighborhoods, undercuts investment, reproduces racial and economic segregation, and does more to fuel race and class stereotypes and undermine the quality of life of poor people of color than any other public issue. Crime policy is all about spillovers, and it’s one domain where a very targeted approach makes sense. Shift federal resources from the many unproductive aspects of the war on drugs to smart investments in prevention (especially positive youth development) together with successful deterrence, policing, and prisoner re-entry efforts. Learn from the best local efforts and make challenge grants available to state and local governments willing to pursue real reform.

Finally, revitalized national housing policy would provide a crucial, pro-work complement to these other urban policies. First, focus on solving the crisis-level shortage of affordable rentals, especially in the hot metro economies where wages for low- and moderate-income workers fall far short of housing costs, as part of a larger opportunity agenda for the poor and middle class.

The recently enacted national housing trust fund is a long-awaited step in the right direction. But we need to significantly expand the supply of rental vouchers for very low-income households, continue redeveloping distressed public housing (with much stronger protections against displacement and poor property management), and give production and preservation incentives to regions willing to target affordable rental housing toward job growth zones.

The next White House and Congress can move urban policy out of the impasse created by an entrenched, zero-sum contest over aid to address central-city distress. It’s time to put the broader view—the sustainability and jobs imperatives, the interdependence of cities and suburbs—front and center.