Municipal Budgeting in Times of Crisis: A Study of Fiscal Conjunctures in Three U.S. Cities

Since the late 1950s and early 1960s, U.S. cities have been associated with various types of crises. Recent decades have been no exception, with the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and COVID-19 pandemic being external events that severely disrupted U.S. urban fiscal governance. This disruption involves both the generation of new challenges (e.g., housing market declines, social distancing) and a worsening of longstanding urban challenges relating to, for example, housing, inequality, racism, segregation, and so on. This paper focuses on how the internal fiscal governance of three U.S. cities—Buffalo, Nashville, and San Jose—navigated the GFC and COVID-19 pandemic. We find that all the cities experienced these events as crisis moments, with immediate and very real consequences, while these global crises were also interpreted and mediated through longer-standing fiscal challenges in each. “Internal” structural budget conditions and established fiscal concerns filtered and mediated “external” shocks of the GFC and the COVID-19 pandemic.