Like Most Americans In London, Bruce Katz has been to see a show-in his case, it was Billy Elliot. But in the daytime, while his compatriots are taking holiday snaps outside the Houses of Parliament, Katz is nearby, meeting government officials. In fact, Katz spends most of his time on his quarterly visits to London with "the government folks", as he calls them. Katz has become a regeneration guru to the government. Before that he was the chief of staff in the US department of housing and urban development in the first Clinton administration and has the ear of the ODPM and the Treasury. In April he hosted a visit of Whitehall civil servants to the USA to see the Hope VI project which, since 1992, has replaced large tracts of failed public housing with mixed-income communities. By then he had already impressed the ODPM with the idea, to the extent that it pledged to try out the approach on sites across the UK.
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