Through the IRA, Congress committed substantial money to fostering federal-local clean energy partnerships: The Center for Public Enterprise, in a recent report, found that direct pay (the provision in the IRA that allows nonprofit utilities to receive federal grants) could make otherwise unattractive or break-even projects very enticing.

“There is this common conception that the public sector just regulates the market,” said Paul Williams, executive director of the Center for Public Enterprise, a nonprofit in New York that encourages greater public investment in the economy. “But in Montgomery County they’ve realized they can play in the market, too, and bring more public benefit than the private sector is structurally capable of.”

The Center for Public Enterprise, a group that advocates for the public sector, sees an opening in the new two-track system of direct pay and transferability. Executive Director Paul Williams argues that green banks, a growing form of public finance that received its own cash infusion in the IRA, should be able to buy private companies’ tax credits and claim direct-pay reimbursements.

There’s also an opportunity to rebuild the public sector. As Paul E. Williams, the executive director of the Center for Public Enterprise, told me, “Decades ago, state and local public agencies built all kinds of things: housing, transit, energy, infrastructure, utilities, but a lot of that capacity has gone away. Direct pay can create an engine for building capacity within the public sector itself, especially as they get the funding and get in the business of making things again.”

Paul Williams, the founder and director of the Center for Public Enterprise, a recently launched think tank, has been leading efforts to promote the idea of state and local public housing developers.

It’s not an immediate fix — “getting out of this mess will take no less than 20 years,” he wrote in an essay last August on solving the housing crisis — but it’s one of the only viable solutions he sees.

“The tight link between housing production and the business cycle is a tremendous drag on growth,” says Paul Williams, executive director at the Center for Public Enterprise. “If we are going to confront not just the housing shortage, but broader economic stability, we need these kinds of public programs that can smooth construction across cycles.”

"No state anywhere is doing that," said Paul Williams, the founder and director of the Center for Public Enterprise, who praised the "unique and bold" approach to addressing the housing crisis.

When market actors such as grocers divest from a community, policymakers turn to incentives to lure them back. Now is the time to rethink this approach.

An op-ed by Paul Williams, with Ameya Pawar of the Economic Security Project, in the Chicago Sun-Times.