HR&A Advisors Adds Former Biden White House Aide David Eichenthal to Sharpen Public Budget Practice

HR&A Advisors has brought on David Eichenthal, a veteran of the Biden White House, the U.S. Treasury and city finance offices from New York to Chattanooga, as a senior advisor focused on public sector budgeting at a moment when Bay Area cities are confronting deficits that stretch to the end of the decade.

City budgets have become the quiet hinge of urban real estate. Whether a downtown recovery plan gets funded, whether a housing incentive survives a budget cycle, whether a public-private partnership pencils, increasingly depends on how well a municipality manages a shrinking margin between revenue and spending. HR&A Advisors is betting that the firms advising cities on development need people who have balanced those books themselves.

“Too often, budgets are treated as a numbers exercise, disconnected from policy,” said Jeff Hébert, CEO of HR&A, who worked with Eichenthal on New Orleans’ budget as that city’s chief administrative officer. “Fiscal pressure, made worse by federal funding cuts, is one of the biggest tests cities face today, and it won’t ease anytime soon.”

Eichenthal brings more than three decades of experience in and alongside government. Most recently, he served in the Biden White House as senior advisor for policy implementation and delivery, helping turn federal legislation into programs that reach communities. At the U.S. Department of the Treasury, he led outreach on Inflation Reduction Act tax credits. That experience gives HR&A a senior voice on how federal dollars flow, or fail to flow, into local projects.

Before that, he built his career in city halls, holding senior roles in New York City government and serving as City Finance Officer for Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he also chaired the Downtown Redevelopment Corporation. The credential most relevant to his new role may be his time leading the National Resource Network, a federal initiative that supported more than 60 cities. The program sent technical assistance teams into economically distressed municipalities to tackle fiscal turnarounds, operational reform and economic development strategy. He led it as a managing director in PFM Group’s management and budget consulting practice, putting Eichenthal at the center of some of the country’s most difficult municipal finance problems. He has also served as president and chief executive of the Ochs Center for Metropolitan Studies and as a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program.

At PFM, he advised the City of New Orleans on its budget for several years. During New Orleans’ recent mayoral transition, he joined an HR&A team helping the incoming administration confront the city’s budget crisis.

HR&A plans to build a fiscal strategy practice around Eichenthal within its Inclusive Cities and Equitable Governance studio to help public leaders use budgets to make their cities more equitable.

“I’ve worked on budgets from city hall and from Washington, and the cities that come through fiscal stress in good shape have one thing in common,” Eichenthal said. “They treat the budget as a multi-year plan, not a once-a-year fight. They make the hard choices early, while they still have options.”

Founded in 1976, the employee-owned firm advises real estate owners and investors, universities, hospitals, cultural institutions, community development organizations and governments from seven offices, including the San Francisco Bay Area. Much of its work involves fiscal and economic impact analysis and public-private partnership structuring.

The timing aligns with a fiscal squeeze that has reached nearly every major city in Northern California. San Francisco’s March 31 budget update put the city’s projected two-year General Fund shortfall for fiscal years 2026-27 and 2027-28 at $642.8 million, an improvement of $293.8 million from December, driven by stronger hotel, sales, transfer and business tax collections. The city controller projects the structural deficit could exceed $1 billion by fiscal year 2029-30.

Across the bay, the picture is starker. Oakland’s Finance Department projects annual budget deficits of roughly $115 million to nearly $130 million through fiscal year 2029-30 absent corrective action. Policy analysts at SPUR have traced much of the region’s chronic imbalance to Proposition 13 and to the state’s 2012 dissolution of redevelopment agencies, which cost Oakland about $28 million a year that had funded affordable housing and infrastructure.

Those gaps carry direct consequences for the commercial real estate industry. Cities under budget pressure tend to slow permitting, revisit development fees and transfer taxes, delay infrastructure spending and scrutinize incentive packages more closely. Developers pursuing public-private deals, from affordable housing to downtown conversions, increasingly need partners who can read a municipal budget as fluently as a pro forma.

Eichenthal’s arrival positions HR&A to advise on both sides of that equation: helping governments close structural deficits without starving the investment that drives future tax revenue, and helping private clients understand where public dollars and policy are likely to land. With federal funding streams in flux and local governments facing years of tight budgets, the market for that kind of fiscal expertise is likely to grow.