The Hampton Roads Playbook is grounded in work led by Bruce Katz and New Localism Advisors, who brought a data-driven and market-informed approach to defining where the region’s competitive advantages truly lie.
Download Bruce Katz’s Diagnostic Report on Hampton Roads:
*NEW* Katz provides his insights on the playbook in Hampton Roads and the New National Imperative
Katz’s team conducted a comprehensive diagnostic of the Hampton Roads economy, mapping its industrial base, federal spending flows, and emerging opportunities across a number of high impact industries. Their findings were unequivocal: Hampton Roads is one of only a handful of metropolitan areas in the country positioned at the intersection of national security, energy transition, and global trade.
Katz’s analysis identified four core pillars that anchor the region’s economic power: Defense, Energy, Aerospace, and Logistics (DEAL). These sectors not only define Hampton Roads’ legacy but also shape its future. His research showed that more than $15 billion in annual federal contracts and grants flow into the region, 90 percent of it from the Department of Defense, making Hampton Roads the nation’s fifth-largest metro for DoD spending. Yet, the report went further than cataloging assets; it revealed how these industries are converging around new technologies, innovation, and workforce pipelines, positioning the region as a leader in advanced production, autonomy, and clean energy.
Katz framed this convergence as part of a new economic order, one defined by re-militarization, re-shoring, and re-energizing. In this global shift, regions that can link industrial capacity with innovation and talent will capture the next generation of federal and private investment. Hampton Roads, he concluded, possesses that rare alignment: a powerful defense manufacturing ecosystem, a deep-water port connected to world markets, emerging clean energy hubs, and a network of research institutions and military facilities that can translate invention into production.
The resulting Hampton Roads Playbook builds directly on that foundation. Rather than dispersing resources across dozens of small initiatives, the strategy prioritizes a focused portfolio of transformative, investable projects that align with the DEAL framework, leverage federal funding streams, and catalyze private co-investment. It shifts the region’s posture from reactive to proactive, from waiting for opportunity to arrive to designing and delivering it.
Through Katz’s model, Hampton Roads now has a clear roadmap for how to organize its assets, attract capital, and execute projects that strengthen the national economy while advancing local prosperity. It is a strategy built not just on analysis, but on alignment, turning the region’s constellation of strengths into a connected system of growth.
About Bruce Katz and New Localism Advisors:
Bruce Katz is the Co-Founder of New Localism Advisors. The mission of the firm is to help cities design, finance and deliver transformative initiatives that promote inclusive and sustainable growth. Katz regularly advises global, national, state, regional and municipal leaders on public reforms and private innovations that advance the well-being of metropolitan areas and their countries. Katz is the co-author of The New Localism: How Cities Can Thrive in the Age of Populism (Brookings Institution Press, 2018) and The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy (Brookings Institution Press, 2013). Both books focus on the rise of cities and city networks as the world’s leading problem solvers.
