I’ve spent most of my career in local government, so when I hear infrastructure, my mind goes straight to streets, bridges, pipes, and buildings—the physical systems our communities depend on every day.

Participating in the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative reminded me there’s another kind of daily infrastructure that matters just as much: relationships.

I serve as assistant city manager for Eugene, Oregon, and was privileged to participate in the ninth cohort of the initiative alongside our mayor and colleagues. The yearlong program—a collaboration of Harvard Business School, Harvard Kennedy School, and Bloomberg Philanthropies—combines instruction, peer learning, leadership coaching, and hands-on work tackling challenges each city brings to the program.

Extended teams participate in a deeper learning track focused on data, innovation, or cross-boundary collaboration. Through the collaboration track, we tackled two of Eugene’s biggest needs: new housing production and a thriving downtown.

Eugene has a severely constrained housing market. Wetlands, steep forested hillsides, and surrounding farmland make expanding difficult. At the same time, our downtown isn’t yet the vibrant neighborhood we know it can be. Downtown business vacancies and too few residents—plus broader community challenges around homelessness, unmet behavioral health needs, and perceptions of public safety—all need to be addressed.

Adding housing won’t solve everything, but more people living downtown can bring consistent activity, a greater sense of safety, and a more vibrant neighborhood, while providing badly needed housing at all levels of affordability.

Slow Down Before Speeding Up

The program instructed us to start by slowing down. We brought together seven action-oriented people who were used to solving problems in their domains. Our natural instinct was to start identifying solutions. Instead, we initially spent time understanding the problem together.

Our cross-boundary team included myself, our planning and development director, our community development director, and four community partners: a market and workforce housing developer, an architect, an affordable housing developer, and the board president of a local pro-housing nonprofit.

We mapped and remapped factors affecting downtown housing to explore complexities and interconnections. Financing, construction costs, regulations, development processes, market conditions, perceptions of downtown, and even how our own organization operates all play a role.

Working through issues together mattered. We learned frameworks and tools from the Bloomberg Harvard team, heard perspectives we wouldn’t necessarily hear inside city hall, better understood each other’s constraints, and built trust. The question shifted from “What can the city do?” to “What will it take for our community to make progress?”

Find the Right Place to Start

One Harvard research-backed concept that resonated with me was entry points. Rather than trying to solve a complex problem all at once, we learned to identify smaller strategic actions that are meaningful, actionable, acceptable to the parties involved, and provisional enough to get started and learn from. Our team identified three:

1. Helping downtown housing projects in the pipeline get across the finish line.

2. Looking for the next catalyst project.

3. Continuing to build an organizational and community culture that supports housing production.

None solves the entire challenge. But each gives us somewhere to start, learn together, demonstrate progress, and build support to take on more.

Leadership Across Boundaries

The hardest problems communities face don’t care about our organizational charts. We can’t order a developer to build, tell a lender to finance a project, or make another organization adopt the city’s priorities.

When authority, resources, and decisions are spread across organizations, leadership has to look different. This program helped me see that leadership starts with asking better questions, listening more, getting genuinely curious about what others need to succeed, and sharing ownership of both the problem and the solution.

Build Capacity for the Next Problem

Our goal is more housing downtown. But the work has shown me another important measure of progress: Are we building a community better equipped to solve the next hard problem together?

The Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative is committed to accessibility. The program is provided at no cost to participating cities and many of its case studies, research, tools, and learning resources are freely available online. I encourage you to explore those resources.

We put a lot of care into maintaining our physical infrastructure. We owe that same care to the relationships, trust, and shared capacity that let us tackle hard things together.

Relationships are infrastructure, and that infrastructure needs investment, too.

MATT RODRIGUES is assistant city manager of Eugene, Oregon.