We are at a pivotal point in our history that compels a thoughtful assessment of centerpiece ED strategies (innovation in particular) and recognition and reevaluation of America as an actor in global politics and soon-to-be second-largest economy. The post-WWII age has exhausted itself. Its transition into a new world era has major implications for how we conduct state and local economic development.

As we have done in the past (several times), an extended debate/discussion needs to happen so we can talk through, reason together in order to develop new, resuscitate old ED strategies and programs–as well as close the huge gaps between (1) mainstream ED and community development and (2) the academic/think tank–Practitioner Worlds.

In this discussion, it is difficult to impossible to justify not including an understanding of how American state and local ED evolved, and how it came to be what it is today. The Journal of Applied Research in Economic Development, accordingly is expanding its mission to include a two-year commitment to provide a FREE online introductory course on the history of American State and Local ED.

Critical Times Require Critical Re-Thinking

My recent history of American S&L ED (As Two Ships) posits our two-hundred plus year history is subdivided into four distinctive “eras”. We have worked in the Contemporary Era since 2000. It has been a troubled Era. Several critically important Contemporary Era strategies were formulated during Transition Era (1975-2000), perhaps the most disruptive Era in our history. Deindustrialization, regional change, suburbanization, collapse of the auto industry, free trade, the rise –and stagnation–of Japan, fall of the Soviet Union. are just some of the lovely dynamics that shaped Transition Era ruminations.

Transition Era strategies/dynamics include clusters, metropolitanization, sunrise industries, technology replacing manufacturing, Schumpeter-based innovation and entrepreneurship, and knowledge-based ED. One may fear these strategies fight the last wars. New dynamics and and page-turning events make us wonder if these strategies have lost their cutting-edge and are proving less relevant in our clouded Contemporary Era world. I fear some strategies have been overplayed, and that the fast-moving an turbulent Contemporary Era (think Great Recession-President Trump) has reshuffled America’s S&L ED deck of cards. Business as usual is no longer helpful. Retooling may be in order.

In the sections below I discuss two prominent ED strategies (innovation and knowledge-based ED) and two underlying, and less appreciated dynamics (metropolitanization and the federal government’s shift from New-Deal to Great Society intrusion into S&L ED to domestic retrenchment/ED devolution to states AND the effect of Cold War/post-Cold War global economic policy on S&L ED). These strategies and dynamics have interacted, and unconsciously “jelled”, blended, and blurred, to create a pervasive background, a Paradigm, that has shaped our reaction to the Contemporary Era turbulence.

I do NOT argue the Paradigm, or its elements, are “wrong”; they are popular and used by nearly every state and city. I think they are overused and so pervasive their potential effectiveness is diminished–and worse–as a background prism they have impeded our willingness and capacity to understand the brave new world that is emerging, and restrict, trivialize and distort other strategies from being considered.

This metaphoric Paradigm cries out for reevaluation and outright rethinking. I honestly fear it may be collapsing under its own weight much like urban renewal did decades ago. This issue is devoted to making the case that Practitioners in particular need to step back, observe with as few blinders and prisms as possible, the current state of affairs. Instead of doubling-down on our Paradigmatic consensus we need to question it and seriously consider whether other strategies are called for.

The place to get great ideas

To help this reassessment and help those who wish to participate in it, the Journal is creating a new focus by bifurcating its mission to include not only bridging the gap between academics- think tanks (Policy World) and the on-the-street Practitioners, but by making available, free and open to all, in mid-March, summaries drawn from my two-hundred year history/on-going research. The object is to provide a historical context that allows us to make better sense of current events.

The final section will formally announce, i.e. “pitch”, the March grand opening for the new and improved Journal of Applied Research in Economic Development.

Impact of Metropolitanization, Changing Nature of Federal S&L ED Involvement,  and Innovation and Knowledge-Based ED Strategies:

THE PARADIGM

The Paradigm consists of four related, yet distinct S&L ED strategies or ED-relevant dynamics that have braided into each other to form a cohesive strand. Developed during the Transition Era s two-decade long “Great Reindustrialization Debate”, the strategies this Paradigm incorporated realities of global competition, comparative advantage of nations/regions, the end of the Cold War, and American regional/metropolitan change–and others–into new strategies which, with modifications, have been carried forward into our Contemporary Era.

Within the Policy World the Paradigm enjoys almost complete acceptance, to the point it is regarded as simple, self-evident “truth”. Innovation, for example, ALWAYS, whatever the time period or sector/ industry, creates more jobs than it destroys is one such “fact”. There are many other such “facts” around which our current Policy World accept without question. I want to briefly consider several issues and concerns that becloud each element to support my position that the Paradigm is beginning to hurt us more than it helps us as S&L economic developers.

Metropolitanism:  During the Transition Era our professional focus shifted from large central cities and their disruptive suburbs to metropolitan areas. Instead of fighting wealthy sprawling suburbs, major central cities were aggregated into one metro area. In time the basic unit of planning/analysis for the Paradigm became the metropolitan statistical area (MSA). From the perspective of my history that was a huge break from a two-hundred year jurisdictional and state-anchored policy context.

MSA has no roots that extend into the multiple jurisdictional ED-relevant policy systems and local economic bases. It relies on statistical indicators to measure its trends–and compares them to various national benchmarks. How well these indicators relate to specific programs and strategies is anyone’s guess. Measurement/ranking of metro areas benchmarked to national averages, sector/industry shares, or demographic medians prompted and facilitated a tilt toward a national reference point for evaluation and analysis, rather than attention to local policy systems and their concerns, priorities, culture, politics and dynamics which fell by the wayside. In its place a million or more useless and distorted “rankings” used only by self-serving business developers, ideologues, academics/think tanks, and media.

MSAs have become convenient receptacles for calling attention to national hot topics and justifying a one-size-fits-all ED strategy-solution. Given the sustained growth of innovation-laden geographies, MSAs have served our Paradigm well. Metropolitanism’s net effect has been American ED substituted data, databases, and data analysis for politics– and demographic statistical correlations and nation-wide solutions for nation-wide problems for political, partisan and policy-making processes. Economics and economic methodologies now dominate; urban politics and sociology imploded.

Fueled by any number of factors, cities and states copied, adopted and installed the elements of the Paradigm–but superimposed them on the vastly more important political initiatives and regional/ ideological rivalries characteristic of their respective policy systems. During the Contemporary Era the herd-like diffusion/adoption of the Paradigm by S&L policy systems meant (1) nearly all states and localities were formally following the same strategies, sectors, and programs, and (2) political ideology and self-interest differentiated executive administrations and legislative agendas, and (3) except for the largest cities, urban politics and policy lost Policy World interest.

Instead Policy World urban analysis reflected larger ideological concerns like the anti-neoliberal “Two Cities”, and governors launched a horrific incentive war for their electoral impact. Red States competed successfully against Blue States and Blue States doubled down on Paradigm strategies. Metropolitanism meant activities/policy processes of literally thousands of jurisdictions were viewed as either obstacles or role models for highly charged, sometimes ideological, oftentimes repetitive Paradigmatic-based analysis.

Practitioners, caught in the crosshairs of Policy World, Paradigm, and Polarization, kept their head down and stuck to their Paradigmatic knitting and politician’s agendas. states. That the Paradigm was enthusiastically embraced by Blue States, and only rhetorically adopted by Red States–the latter mostly in growth mode and the former less so–has meant the Paradigm exerted a disproportionate (and negative) impact on Blue States.  The drift of our “legacy cities” and rust belt, the startling reality that 75% of 1970 distressed neighborhoods remain distressed today,and the crisis of rural areas owes much to their falling into the cracks of the MSA-focused Paradigm’s one-size-fits-all statistically-determined S&L ED policies and politicization of ED.

Paradigm-heavy state and local ED policy systems often witnessed an extremely political surge of neighborhood-based actors and political leaders. While formally laboring with innovation and the like, the policy system’s hottest topics fell outside the Paradigm’s priorities; homelessness, affordable housing, gentrification, commercial (mall) redevelopment, gangs, and drug addition were unable to gain traction and lacking any clear solution served to further paralyze/polarize local policy-making.

Shifting Federal S&L ED Dynamics: The federal government has always been involved in S&L ED–and will always be involved in the future. The intensity and content of that involvement, however, has been quite varied. From FDR to LBJ the federal government deeply involved itself in domestic–hence state and local–economic development. Richard Nixon (1968) was the turning point in what As Two Ships calls the Thermidor of federal intrusion into S&L ED.

Since then the feds have been pulling back in terms of funding and leading with its own domestic policy agenda. They now seldom lead or push states and local governments into new federal programs/strategies. President Obama’s HUD initiatives for example did not take root and drew huge pushback from locals. The federal government during the Transition and Contemporary Eras shifted from a domestic S&L ED policy/strategy agenda, instead by responding to a new global politics, and the rise of environmentalism/climate control they generated a new set of profound intrusions into S&L ED.

The Cold War and its conclusion in the collapse of the Soviet Union witnessed movement from its long-standing “protectionist”, America First, economic foreign agenda toward facilitating its new role as leader of the “World” and the U.S. as its leading economy. In post-WWII global economy, the USA became the globe’s reserve currency, and chief fundor of a network of global organizations/treaties/trading blocs. American firms became global behemoths. Global trade evolved into “free trade” which rested somewhat delicately on competing comparative advantages and national foreign policy interests. Little noticed in all this is the battleground, or resting place, for all the transformations created by free trade, positive and negative, were our state and local economic bases. FDI became a new target for attraction and foreign–or American firms closed down shops and factories after mergers. Small wonder a host of S&L global/export (even redevelopment) strategies developed in reaction.

Beyond state and local influence were the chief beneficiaries of global free trade, the neo-liberal corporate global behemoths. Now we are treated to steel mills in Mobile, car plants in South Carolina, and  Amazon’s humiliating “offer” of a second headquarters, exposing still further how global concentration, sector oligopoly, and S&L weakness has created an entirely new world than that known in 1999. And what does the Paradigm have to say about this?

Transition Era globalism tolerated high levels of cross-border population mobility, which, through the prism of the Paradigm was looked upon as a cheap, often creative–innovative workforce (who worked disproportionately for global corporate behemoths), a solution of sagging rates of entrepreneurial starts up, and agents of disruptive innovation. The freer and unrestricted was trade and immigration, the better off we were. Growth was axiomatic. But when immigration transcended into morality, identity politics, and populist reaction, the debate changed–but the Paradigm did not.

The Paradigm responded it had the necessary tools to deal with immigration impacts: immigrant entrepreneurs, EB-5, FDI, H1B, startups/vc, internal relocation to good jobs, all sorts of K-12 education reforms/programs/facilities, ESL, skills retraining/STEM, cluster development, targeted sunrise sectors, community colleges, and university-driven ED complete with accelerators, certifications, and metropolitan-level regional plans. “No Problems Man”. Times Change, however. State politics, in places like Arizona, Texas and California were dramatically reshaped. Immigration in its various forms became the primary issue of state politics. Entire geographies, like Orange County–California itself–were demographically turned upside down. But the Paradigm persisted.

The Contemporary Era witnessed increased numbers of wartime/disaster refugees. Religious-driven civil wars in the Middle East, Africa, and even Southeast Asia mobilized huge numbers of refugees, in spasms, from countries new to the developed world; countries with different cultures/religions not easily reconciled with developed nation cultures and economies. Refugees carried with them, willingly or not, civil war loyalties, making their new homeland a potential battlefield. This was not your grandfather’s Transition Era cheap, entrepreneurial and innovative workforce immigration context.

Then environmentalism and climate control entered the global picture and we had a new set of sunrise ED targets–and obsolete sunset industries (think coal/fossil fuels vs. lithium batteries, electric cars), and a host of national regulations that penetrated deep into S&L ED. EPA became a major force in S&L ED. The reaction by S&L was always complex and diverse. Consider the western state Sagebrush Rebellion, and now sanctuary cities. Consider California’s leadership in climate change-related ED initiatives. Caught up in the swirl of creativity, innovation, and brave new technologies, the Paradigm now attempts to bridge the chasm once again between a new round of sunset and sunrise industries–and all that implies.

Environmental regulations, NEPA, and EPA in particular have become major players in state and local development and redevelopment. Infrastructure, traditionally the federal government’s most used and most effective S&L ED strategy, has lost its ability to provide short-intermediate term impact. Shovel-ready means seven to ten years before cutting the ribbon. Pipelines anywhere near an Indian tribe have circled their construction vehicles each night. Stimulus programs flow to planners, consultants, and universities–not to construction companies. Trump’s cornerstone infrastructure initiative is to reduce this regulatory intrusion-in Blue Paradigm States it will be resisted, yet, seized upon wholeheartedly by Red States. Guess who is caught in the crosshairs?

Innovation and Knowledge-Based ED: The rock star of the Paradigm was always innovation and its prerequisites: creativity, entrepreneurism, startups and knowledge-based ED. Certainly innovation was applied to manufacturing (excuse me, “advanced manufacturing”), but the various forms of technology (info, hardware, software, bio-life sciences, alternative energy) had replaced manufacturing as S&L’s prime and cornerstone industry. Innovation is linked at the hip to knowledge-based ED and entrepreneurism. This has meant, despite their distinctly different programs. constituencies, and sub-strategies, both have become flip sides of the same rubik-cube strategy. Cities and states mixed and matched the various elements usually in alignment with policy entrepreneurs and politician agendas.

That both innovation and education played very nicely in the statistical, data-driven metropolitan sandbox, doing their best to ignore the rude interruptions caused by immigration disruptions in their local economic bases, neighborhoods and school systems (not to mention fiscal capacity). Applying the Paradigm often came at the expense of non-technology/manufacturing jurisdictional business retention. Not being a gazelle meant your firm was top-heavy with “bad” jobs and occupations. The retail and service sector, even many elements of healthcare sector did not easily fit into the Paradigm. Unless you needed wi-fi, tech startup financing, or wanted to use an accelerator, one/two person firms were largely ignored. The Paradigm has unevenly affected the various sectors and industries in our local economic bases.

On the other hand, while “education”, essential to innovation/creativity so the literature tell us, did not prove very open to ED involvement. Not that it mattered. The chaotic politics/financing/effectiveness of local schools beclouded the application of any knowledge-based strategy. To make matters worse, statistical correlations of high school/college graduation rates and innovation indicators are high, we are no longer sure if knowledge itself is being transferred to students. An entirely different set of statistics, largely outside the Paradigm’s interest, suggest otherwise. That a degree increases earning power is likely true–but how it interacts with innovation and its associated strategies is unclear, but the link itself has become a truism not to be attacked.

The Silicon Valley and the pockets of innovation scattered throughout the nation capture Policy World and media attention. Growth and prosperity that accompany these geographies is real–but if San Jose is any indication, neither have solved a goodly number of social-economic problems that plague San Jose and much of the Valley. That growth/prosperity/high educational levels and innovation can hide, certainly coexist with a submerged emerging two class society and economy is only a very recent concern.

If everybody is chasing innovation and its gazelles, is that a problem in and of itself?  Do we flood emerging innovative sectors with “facilitative atmospheres, financing, accelerators, mentoring so that the supply of innovation exceeds the capacity to adopt it. Has Paradigmatic ED lots of cutsey innovation with terrible business plans, and spoiled entrepreneurs. Scarily, innovation–and the Paradigm–has diffused across the developed world, and the emerging world as well. Even the French are trying to jump start their own Silicon Valley. In following innovation/knowledge-based ED the USA and its states and cities has no known advantage save its head start–which also means it is maturer, self-satisfied, and increasingly dominated by Big Behemoth technology firms. Every American city of any size competes to develop or attract the same firms, sectors, industries, occupations, and an educated workforce (Read the Geography of Jobs).

That means Buffalo NY innovation competes with that of Beijing; the Silicon Valley faces new rivals like a projected French Silicon Valley, Dubai, Ireland’s Silicon Docks, U.K.’s M4 Corridor, and assorted Chinese cities and provinces. Venture capital, in amazingly ample quantities, sloshes across national boundaries, as do IPOs, and foreign technology workers. The first monkeys were cloned by Chinese. How much innovation does the world demand at any one point of time? How effective is it when everybody promotes innovation?

Perhaps the most unanticipated Contemporary Era shift regarding innovation was in how we described its chief purpose, and how we thought of innovation. Innovation always was synonymous with “change”–and that was fine–but then it became inseparably linked to “disruptive change“. Innovation became valued because it “disrupted”–and disrupted always meant eventual growth, new job creation, and prosperity–a potential Amazon in the making. Not to worry–more jobs will always be created than destroyed, somewhere, sometime. That cannot be questioned. But ….

The urban physical deterioration that follows is a slow-motion train wreck, with malls/car dealerships adding to our urban inventory of shuttered factories. Unemployment has never been lower in the last decade. Get an education and you’ve got a job. That the Paradigm’s success could provide fodder for a populist rebellion was off S&L ED’s radar screen. It still is. The old bromides (relocation, skill retraining, and education) remain constant as the remedies–only more so. As for disruptive innovation–let’s have more and create still more inevitable jobs to get us out of this.

So, as we disrupt still more with artificial intelligence, drones, driverless cars, and the day-to-day application of technology to job processes (digitized cash registers replacing cashiers), a new spectre has darkened that unfailing growth strategy. Forgive me for saying, is it possible that steroidal disruptive change in a period of political instability sounds a lot like pouring oil on a fire.

As Robert Gordon has amply demonstrated, however, the Contemporary Era sunrise industries are not likely to be job generators that compare with manufacturing, communication, and lifestyle-changing innovations of the 19th century. Alexa is not air conditioning. Uber, founding father to the gig economy, is what we used to call the “second job”, but have renamed it to fit into the Paradigm. One-day delivery is  “just-in-time” applied to retail. Solar panels are not electricity–they are simply another way to make it. BTW has anyone found a watch that measures “nanoseconds”?

       The Revolution Cometh

A key issue concerning innovation and knowledge-based ED is what it leaves out–and what it can embrace. “Trump Forgotten People”  was created by a variety of forces and dynamics, but the “hollowing” out of occupations and professions, even industries is nagging at our Paradigmatic-laden minds. Innovation embraced manufacturing. We call it advanced manufacturing now–with large dollops of robots, software, math, and export markets–but fewer jobs, lots fewer. But they are the “right kind of jobs”, great multipliers.

In part, innovation has yet to serve manufacturing well–at least as far as job creation and employment levels. Automation reduces the number of jobs albeit creating a smaller number of higher paid, sustainable jobs. What is needed is something like Steve Case’s Rise of the Rest that targets American Heartland “third-wave of technological change” that centers on startups that manufacture consumer-driven technology products with smaller markets that are unattractive to technology behemoths.

What innovation/knowledge-based didn’t embrace was service sector jobs–you know the ones that populate a predominately service-sector American economy. They are the “wrong”, dead-end, low-skill jobs, the ones that deal with people not ideas or information. For the Paradigm, these poor folk are the real “deplorables”–read Hillbilly Elegy.

Could it be that the Paradigm is a modern day version of social Darwinism, and the generator of a two-class American society?

Wrapping Up: 

To reiterate my core message. The Paradigm is not wrong, per se. Rather its overwhelming success has  hardened it into an inflexible and thoughtlessly applied strategy that, I fear, is not working as well as it ought, and to the extent it does create results, those results are proving harmful to society, if not to the economy. The assumptions associated with the Paradigm increasingly ring hollow. Fabricated twenty or more years ago in response to a host of problems and dynamics that damned near overwhelmed us, innovation has has not fared well since the 2008 Great Recession. It needs rethinking–so does metropolitanism. We need to close the huge gap between Practitioner ED and Policy World ED.

We have gone as far as our WWII victory could take us. We are now entering a new global order, even our reserve currency is threatened over the long-term, and the UN, World Bank, IMF, Doha and other major international organizations fabricated from that post-WWII Era are adrift, searching for financing, power and sometimes relevance. New international orders, trade blocs, treaty systems, and political alliances are emerging. The politics of oil is has turned upside down with American oil export. Africa, that hotbed of civil wars and dictatorships is increasingly being touted as the future factory of the world–even though it cannot feed itself nor care for its sick. Hmmm…they said that of China in the 1960’s–and India in the 1980’s. That is why I have titled my second volume as “the Twilight of American Growth“.

What I argue is not that American decline is inevitable, or even soon. Rather, it is clear that our State and Local ED was forged in a global and economic GROWTH context–and that period of unmitigated growth is now over. Decline is an option–it has been for seventy years or more. The task is for our former growth-biased strategies need to adjust to a less favorable global context, complex demographics, and that state and local solutions should be found at those levels–not from the national government although that level plays an important role.

We may have lost the keys to our past great success.

The Curmudgeon as Diogenes

Think about your reaction when you lose your car keys. Instinctively, you reconstruct your past. Where were you? ? What did you do? When did you do it? What clothes were you wearing? What was happening? What could have gone wrong? What can you do so you don’t do it again?

That’s your personal history.

Basic instincts when faced with a problem or crisis is to understand your past and look for clues. That is a role history has played for 3000 years. History hasn’t lost relevance because of the Internet, algorithms, or Donald Trump. Just the opposite. At this most critical time, American economic development history is critical to opening our minds to what was, how we got to where we are, and what we could be. It makes us aware of timeless questions and concerns that constantly reappear wearing different clothes.

It is time to add to, refine, the Paradigm, not to end it. Open the Paradigm to new, or to older strategies tossed aside. Time to review and to begin serious experimentation in new strategies and programs. It may be necessary to rediscover older programs and strategies whose importance has risen yet again amid this time of troubles.

This is not the first time in our historical experience that we have exhausted a paradigm, and frankly, the history suggests that unless we get smarter fast, the transition from one paradigm to another can create crises, result in system transformation, and in general great distress and very uneven economic growth. History, seldom repeats itself literally, but the same problems constantly reappear at intervals, demanding a return to older strategies tossed aside by dominant paradigms.

This Journal can’t do it all, of course, but our new niche is expand our mission to link Policy and Practitioner Worlds by making available (FOR FREE) in brief readable modules the two-hundred year history of cities and states in American economic development. We are going to offer an online course, developed serially over the next two years, consisting of shorter, non-academic thematic modules which will added to every three months. This it is hoped will provide context and historical foundation to the Rethinking. In any case, it will provide to any economic and community developer, Policy World and political world professional a readable background to one of the most interesting professional history America can offer.

In March we will post two themes with about fifteen modules. They will take us through, in an introductory fashion, the 19th century. Next month more information/table of contents will be provided.

Peace,

“Bob Dylan – The Times They Are a-Changin'” by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bob_Dylan_-_The_Times_They_Are_a-Changin%27.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Bob_Dylan_-_The_Times_They_Are_a-Changin%27.jpg

 Introduction

People who object to proposed real estate projects are often called NIMBYs (Not in My Backyard), and they can be the bane of economic development planners, elected officials, land owners and construction contractors. But highly motivated development critics believe they act as civic-minded residents seeking to fend off greedy and possibly politically connected investors.

Land use law in many jurisdictions offers abundant guidance on the boundaries between community interest and private property rights. Yet the process for approving projects typically also provides for public comment. And the ability to speak out about proposed developments is as sacrosanct in American public discourse as the First Amendment itself.

In some instances, proposals with a clear right to proceed have been crippled by vocal protests, however thinly based; in others, citizens with legitimate concerns have been dismissed as ill-informed fuddy-duddies. One man’s NIMBY may be another’s Jane Jacobs.

Perhaps the first reference to the term “NIMBY” came in a Nov. 6, 1980, Christian Science Monitor article (“Hazardous Waste”) about a proposed landfill, although no one appears able to identify who actually coined the term. Considering how apt neighbors are to annoy each other, it seems strange that a shorthand way to describe the phenomenon arrived so recently.

One purpose of this analysis is to offer a more useful definition of NIMBYism than the vague one advanced by Merriam-Webster—“opposition to the locating of something considered undesirable (such as a prison or incinerator) in one’s neighborhood.” The lexicographers here sought to remain neutral on whether NIMBYism is a positive or negative thing. But although the acronym may sound quaint and benign, it can signify much more than just a grouchy neighbor. NIMBYs can and do sometimes wreck worthwhile projects with years of planning and earnest commitments behind them based on little more than a whim or in the worst cases cultural animosity.

A better definition that distinguishes between legitimate and bogus opposition might read as follows: Opposition to a development that places an individual’s perceived interests above those of the larger community.

Another goal here is to help economic development professionals understand when opponents point out the down side of a project the developers have not considered, and when their complaints simply reflect a personal prejudice. The article will discuss a spectrum of cases that fit between these two poles. In doing so it will illustrate that the distinctions are not always clear-cut.

In one case, community activist Jane Jacobs certainly must have seemed to urban development juggernaut Robert Moses as the peskiest of all NIMBYs, but in the fullness of time she had a better argument against the Lower Manhattan Expressway than he had for it. A similar set of circumstances played out in the Los Angeles area when local opponents over several decades compiled a sloshing punchbowl of reasons not to conjoin two major roadways, but at the end of the day the project died because of the evolving Southern California urban landscape. In another case, protests that prominent Massachusetts waterfront residents have lodged against a proposed offshore wind farm serve as a flimsy, but well-funded argument against an infrastructure project with potential environmental benefits. Finally, the proposal for development at a Bay Area Rapid Transit station highlights the need for economic development professionals to get out in front of such projects with solid public education before NIMBYs tarnish them with rumor and misinformation.

The Lower Manhattan Expressway

An Original Moses Schema for Cross-Manhattan

Among the most powerful figures in shaping New York City in the mid-20th century was Robert Moses. His vision of building infrastructure to advance the city’s immediate physical requirements and future growth potential netted impressive results. They included the United Nations headquarters, Shea Stadium, the Lincoln Center and hundreds of thousands of public housing unit. But his primary mark on the development of New York City came in the form of key bridges, tunnels and expressways (Throgs Neck, Henry Hudson, Bronx Whitestone and the Verrazano-Narrows bridges, to name a few). Moses also was the guiding force behind the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Staten Island Expressway and Cross-Bronx Expressway. The project that may stand as his crowning achievement was the Triborough Bridge complex of spans that connected Manhattan with the Bronx and Queens.

Perhaps more important than the structures themselves was the Triborough Bridge Authority, which he headed and parlayed into a leviathan of political and financial power. Moses in large part controlled the tolls collected from the various traffic conduits and that gave him an outsized role in influencing what public infrastructure got built and where it was sited.

In light of history, Moses could be seen as responding with good intentions to the unprecedented impacts of vehicles on the urban landscape. Remember that the car itself had been invented less than half a century before Moses planned some of his most consequential infrastructure facilities. He regarded himself as dealing pragmatically with the need to move people and machines throughout a burgeoning city, to ease congestion, to serve the good of the whole.

Without debating the merits of Moses’s urban planning strategies, history has rebuked his arrogance as both a planner and decision-maker. He fought it out–and often won–with other New York power brokers and therefore saw little need for comment from or accountability to block-level interests. He became infamous for his reluctance to inform the public about his proposed projects and worked constantly to get them done without hearings or community input.

That autocratic streak eventually ran headlong into an insightful and persistent opponent–author and urban intellectual Jane Jacobs. A neighborhood resident, she led a grassroots campaign against Moses’s late 1950’s proposal for a Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would move traffic from the Holland Tunnel through Manhattan to the Williamsburg and Manhattan bridges. Not only would the 10-lane highway require the demolition of 416 buildings, it would barrel right through Soho and Little Italy. In addition, the network of roads intended to feed traffic into the expressway would cause significant disruptions in nearby neighborhoods, including Greenwich Village, where Jacobs lived.

Robert Moses, master-builder, and his proposed Battery Bridge

No doubt in Moses’s eyes Jacobs must have come across as the ultimate NIMBY–an angry middle-aged housewife, albeit one with respected credentials as a writer with her own defensible view of her community. She, working as an activist with her neighbors, was able to enlist the support of media and important public figures and eventually defeated the expressway project.

History’s verdict has upheld Jacobs and condemned Moses, as well as his heavy-handed approach to large-scale urban planning. It is widely understood that the expressway would have sliced up, paved over and ravaged much of Lower Manhattan. Many other neighborhoods that had no Jane Jacobs to fight off freeway builders have sustained long-term economic and social injury from similar projects.

What the episode established was the precedent–proof that citizens can stand up to powerful actors in urban development. Since then stronger requirements for adequate notice and opportunities for public involvement, particularly regarding larger development initiatives, have been enshrined throughout America.

State Road 710

California highway planners have been trying to tie together the two loose ends of State Road 710 and State Road 210 for more than 60 years. In recent months planners finally may have thrown up their hands due in no small part to the efforts of ever-changing sources of opposition, but also due to the evolving urban environment itself. Both of these major sections of Interstate terminate in residential areas, with 210 extending from the San Fernando area to Pasadena and 710 originating at Long Beach and ending abruptly north of I-10 just east of Los Angeles.

By Remi Jouan – Photo taken by Remi Jouan, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7245156

The two roads are essentially lined up to meet each other and need just a five-mile connection to provide a link between two of Los Angeles’s major east-west Interstate corridors. The absence of this final section of road has formed a bottleneck for truck traffic out of Long Beach and resulted in decades-long worries about air pollution and congestion.

The 710 project had its origins in California highway plans dating back to the 1930’s. Actual construction began in 1951. In 1964 the California Highway Commission identified a route to extend the road through South Pasadena, and the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) began acquiring properties along that route. After opening a new 1.3-mile section of the freeway north of I-10, the project stalled when opponents from South Pasadena objected. The project remained on hold for many years and in 1973, several groups, including the city of South Pasadena, took the issue to federal court, arguing for additional environmental study. The court subsequently issued an injunction that halted work on the freeway for 25 years.

A more recent proposal would have built the 4.9-mile connection as a tunnel. In 1982, Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation that would have countered attempts by South Pasadena to block the possible route. However, the legislation also called for additional environmental analysis, further delaying the project.

Gov. Pete Wilson pushed for the freeway in 1992 and federal highway officials approved an environmental analysis. But El Sereno activists filed a 1995 race discrimination suit, charging that the route through an ethnic Latino neighborhood did not include the same noise mitigation measures that had been promised to South Pasadena and Pasadena.

In April 1998 the Federal Highway Administration (FHA) reached a decision clearing the way for completion of the extension of 710. Later that year South Pasadena brought another federal lawsuit alleging inadequate environmental and historic preservation protections. U.S. District Judge Dean Pregerson in 1999 came down on the opponents’ side, ruling that Caltrans and federal agencies had failed to consider other options and may have violated the Clean Air Act. The decision again blocked progress on the freeway.

In 2000 the Pasadena City Council dropped its support for the project and in 2003 even the FHA backed off its long-standing position and told Caltrans its 1992 environmental impact analysis was out of date. Meanwhile, 11 more historic sites were added along the projected freeway route.

Support for the highway also was undercut when the LA Metro’s Gold Line, which runs through Pasadena, opened up. That relieved commuter pressure on the highway system in the region. Further, the Alameda Corridor freight line opened, and that also reduced truck traffic along 710.

Highway proponents in 2008 had instituted a half-cent sales tax measure that had raised $780 million to build the estimated $3.2 billion tunnel and had sought federal support as well. But after decades of wrangling, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) in May 2017 voted unanimously to pull its support for the project, effectively killing it.

The long ordeal of the State Road 710 project is a case study in how NIMBYism sometimes can delay action on a development until the circumstances around it obviate the need it was designed to meet. In the context of the lattice-work of highways that move goods and people throughout the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area, the proposed link-up of 210 and 710 could be seen as a logical component of the larger road network.

Yet the eventual extension of subway and freight rail service to the area, which had not been envisioned when the freeway was originally proposed, changed the facts on the ground. It meant the surrounding communities preferred the inconveniences that still exist in the area to the disruptions and expense of completing the development.

Cape Wind

At 4.5 miles out to sea, the proposed Cape Wind offshore windmill farm in the Nantucket Sound would hardly be close to anyone’s backyard. Like solar arrays, large-scale wind power generators hold appeal as an ecologically sound alternative to fossil fuels. But both technologies involve intensive networking and delivery systems in addition to the sizable structures themselves. They are hard to hide, though many don’t object to their presence and some find the windmills or solar arrays appealing as a manifestation of renewable energy.

Cape Wind Proposed Complex–Up Close

When Cape Wind Associates introduced the 130-windmill project in 2001, it had lined up financing for the $2.5 billion construction cost from the Bank of Japan-Mitsubishi UFJ. The facility would be designed to supply about 1,500 gigawatt hours of power annually–75 percent of the average electricity needs for Cape Cod, Nantucket Island and Martha’s Vineyard. Cape Wind notes that its generators would directly reduce carbon dioxide released by a million tons annually and offset the burning of 113 million gallons of oil currently used to generate electricity to the area it intends to serve. They would also avoid the hazard of oil spills, which had been a concern locally in the past.

The plan sailed through the initial certifications from state agencies. Cape Wind won approval in 2005 from the Massachusetts Energy Facilities Siting Board (MEFSB) to undertake construction. In 2007, it got the go-ahead from the Massachusetts Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs.

In October 2007, the Cape Code Commission, whose approval the project needed, decided not to green-light the proposal without further study of its impact. The MEFSB overruled the Commission in May 2009, issuing a “Super Permit” to Cape Wind that superseded all state and local approval requirements. Responding to legal challenges, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in August 2010 ruled the state has the authority to reject local opposition to the project.

Cape Wind anticipated relatively quick federal approval when it applied in 2001 to the Army Corps of Engineers for a permit. However, authority in such matters was shifted to the Interior Department’s Mineral Management Service, and that slowed down the process. Also, the National Park Service listed the area envisioned for construction on the National Register for Historic Places because of its cultural and spiritual importance to two Native American tribes. After years of hold-ups and objections, then-Interior Sec. Kenneth Salazar in April 2010 gave the federal government’s final go-ahead.

Cape Wind secured additional permits from the Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency in 2011 and won approval from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, also in 2011.

Cape Wind had reached a unique arrangement with National Grid, an investor-owned energy company, to purchase half of the wind farm’s electric production. It also signed an agreement in 2012 with NSTAR, now merged with Northeast Utilities, for another 27.5 percent of its production. Both contracts were terminated in 2014 after Cape Wind, beset by legal challenges, lost its financing commitments.

Among Cape Wind’s legal headaches was a 2016 DC Circuit Court order that vacated a 2009 Department of Interior Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS). The order called into doubt whether the sea floor could adequately support the wind turbines. The BOEM issued another SEIS addressing the Court’s concerns shortly after a two-year suspension of a lease with the Bureau expired in July 2017. Cape Wind had requested the suspension while it dealt with legal challenges.

Although prospects for Cape Wind remain in doubt, BOEM in September 2017 issued a decision on the sea floor issues and reaffirmed the long-term lease of the 46-square mile project area in Nantucket Sound.

Cape Wind has enjoyed support from regional advocates of alternative energy such as Clean Power Now of Hyannis, Mass. And it has the backing of the Sierra Club, Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council. But it also has had opponents, including fishermen, local towns and the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head.

From the beginning, however, the most concerted opposition formed behind a phalanx of powerful, wealthy and well-known personalities. It was a bipartisan group that included Walter Cronkite, Ted Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., John Kerry, Mitt Romney and William Koch. A scion of the Koch Industries empire, Koch donated $5 million to the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound and has been regarded as its ringleader.

The Alliance and others have raised many legal challenges to Cape Wind–concerns about environmental impact, effects on fisheries, desecration of traditional tribal areas, cost of the electricity. Yet the most high-profile issue from the beginning has been what the opponents believe is the proposed windmills’ high profile. The luminaries who formed the Alliance have contended the presence of the turbines would ruin the scenic views from their oceanfront properties.

Many of the issues have been resolved in Cape Wind’s favor, but it has cited the expense and delays caused by lawsuits as roadblocks to its success. Analyses of the Cape Wind controversy place much of the blame for its woes on James Gordon, who headed up the project. He has been criticized for his management and promotion of Cape Wind and for failing to deliver on promised outcomes.

Still, Cape Wind highlights the question of what constitutes “visual pollution” and whether such a subjective consideration should have a bearing on the approval process for major development projects.

Cape Wind was to be the first significant American offshore wind farm project. At least seven others have been under consideration, mostly along the Atlantic coastline. In May 2017 a much smaller wind farm off the coast of Block Island, RI, comprising only five generators, became the first operating American offshore wind farm.

The sorts of concerns expressed about the Cape Wind proposal appear not to have scotched offshore wind power in Europe. Windeurope, which tracks the wind electric generation sector, reported in a January 2017 analysis that 3,589 wind turbines in 10 European countries.

BART’s Ashby Station Development

Jane Jacobs became a hero and icon; her example has been followed by countless activists who also see their neighborhoods as under attack by over-aggressive developers. Whereas Jacobs’s cause related to a sprawling, multi-faceted project and its impact on a huge swath of Manhattan, many who emulate her appear to tilt against a single windmill (or apartment building) fearing projected harm made up of whole cloth. The urge to oppose can be so strong, it takes on a logic all its own; it can even override the objector’s own best interests and ideological tendencies.

Transit-oriented development (TOD) projects, a subset of the overall Smart Growth school of thought, emerged from a concern about limiting sprawl and improving access to often underused public transit facilities. More often than not, the TOD proposals came along well after the transit nodes themselves were built. That meant areas immediately adjacent to the stations often were zoned for lower-density land uses such as single-family housing.

Despite presentations touting the advantages of TOD, opponents piled into public hearings to protest the up-zoning proposals. They decried not only the prospect of increased traffic (the go-to complaint about every new development everywhere), but the scale of building designs, affronts to historic preservation, and that I’ll-know-it-when-I-see-it condemnation: “It’s ugly!”

The history of attempts to build environmentally friendly TOD facilities near Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) stations illustrates the contradictory arguments against the projects by residents of perhaps the most liberal-minded neighborhoods in America. Venting his frustration about Bay Area NIMBYs, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Chip Johnson in 2015 blasted opponents of the 300-unit Residences at Berkeley Plaza project at BART’s Ashby station: “Watching longtime Berkeley residents act like suburban dwellers when it comes to vital investment in its downtown district, makes you wonder just how Berkeley Berkeley resident are anymore.”

In addition to the 18-story housing facility, the plan included the rebuilding of an aging theater and a $10 million contribution to the city’s affordable housing fund. Mark Rhoades, whose company won the contract to build Berkeley Plaza, pointed out that from 1970 to 1995 Berkeley added only 600 units to its housing stock.

“We’ve gone through 36 public hearings leading up to (the project’s approval) and it seems like the people who came here in the 1960s and 70s have decided to freeze things just as they are,” Rhoades said, adding that the protesters typically were older, white property owners. “It became extremely apparent that all of the opposition, with the exception of two people, were over 60 and white,” he said.

Specific objections to building the Berkeley Plaza were that it was “bland and unattractive,” that it failed to conform to surrounding structures, that it threatened the landmark status of the nearby historic Hotel Shattuck and didn’t adequately take into account wind velocity. Further, opponents said, the plan didn’t properly account for effects on a nearby high school, including health impacts on students, traffic and even on faculty parking.

The Berkeley City Council approved the project in December 2015 and in October 2016 Alameda County Superior Court Judge Frank Roesch rejected petitions brought against the project, clearing the way for construction to begin. It is expected to be completed in 2021, at least 20 years after the city signaled an interest in developing the Ashby BART parking lot site.

Berkeley Plaza is hardly the only Bay Area TOD to encounter NIMBY opposition. Similar concerns have been raised about projects associated with the BART stations at the MacArthur and El Cerrito stations and several other stops throughout San Francisco. Local opponents also have tried to stop the redevelopment of the U.S. Navy base on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay, a mixed-use development project in Menlo Park, and a senior house facility in Palo Alto to name a few. (Similar instances of opposition to TODs have cropped up around some stations in the Washington, D.C., Metro system.) In each case, local authorities expressed a need to raise density in the interest of addressing sprawl and creating more affordable opportunities available for local residents.

Commenting on the trend in the Bay Area, Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti wrote in a Sept. 6, 2017, column in the New York Times that Silicon Valley “…has some of the most productive labor in the nation, and some of the highest-paying jobs, but remarkably low density because of land-use regulations. Surface parking lots, one-story buildings and underutilized plots of land are still remarkably common because of increasingly draconian zoning restrictions. Building anything taller than three stories, even on empty lots next to a train station, draws protests from homeowners.”

The Psychology of a NIMBY

Those who decry a proposed development tend to see themselves as defenders. Even if the defender, like Koch, is a billionaire himself, he assumes the role for public relations purposes of the crusading underdog. In reality the developer usually does have more economic wherewithal than a single aggrieved citizen or a small ad hoc group but hardly holds all of the political cards. Jacobs possessed superior skills at local organizing, enlisting support for her cause among key neighborhood residents, including Eleanor Roosevelt.

Jacobs Announcing Her Victory over the Cross-Manhattan

She also knew how to attract sympathetic publicity. “Jacobs cultivated the media in all its forms, garnering the support of independent press such as the nascent Village Voice,” according to a Guardian history of the Lower Manhattan Expressway. Not only small, alternative papers, but the sophisticated New York media broadly covered the matter.

In some cases, opponents may only need to win over a few key journalists. Local media employ reporters and editors who are savvy about the area’s real estate market and political players but have little training in urban planning or land use law. And a complaint against a developer often plays as a David versus Goliath conflict, regardless of the merits of the dispute.

When an anti-development activist complains to a newspaper about a proposed multi-story structure in the vicinity of a single-family housing area, the resulting story may focus on the contrasting size of the planned structure and existing ones; it fits with the theme of the common man confronting the moneyed interest. The headline often characterizes the prospective facility as “looming” over the neighborhood. (“Looming Target shakes up Queens shopping street,” New York Post, May 24, 2017)

Activists may well regard themselves as following in the well-known tradition of Jane Jacobs, even though the circumstances of the project they oppose are far afield from those facing Lower Manhattan in the late 1950s. Whereas a major highway project there certainly would have sundered several neighborhoods and sacrificed a thriving cultural Mecca to the needs of automobiles, today’s TOD projects may have the opposite effect.

Opponents imagine ruinous changes and fail to appreciate the benefits of increased public transit and walkable neighborhoods. A Jan. 20, 2006, report in the Berkeley Daily Planet (“Neighbors Oppose Ashby BART Project”) on a neighborhood discussion of the Ashby station proposal, which was still in the conceptualization stages, typifies the kind of group-think that can overtake such an initiative. The meeting attracted about 400 attendees, many of whom voiced a wide variety of worries about the mixed-use plan for commercial facilities and 300 housing units.

Most who protested had no specific concern about the project design, which didn’t even exist yet. They just didn’t like the idea of changing the landscape around the station. “…by the time the meeting ended, 220 of them had signed a petition calling for rejection of a CalTrans grant application that would provide $120,000 to develop a project plan,” the Daily Planet report said.

The complaints ranged from a fear of gentrification to the displacement of an informal flea market to back-room deal-making. One participant charged that local officials “want to demolish every historical landmark we have in South Berkeley.”

Another advocated the recall of a city council member, exclaiming, “I feel we’ve been betrayed.”

“I want a moratorium on any development at Ashby BART,” said another.

Among the least reconcilable conflicts for TOD opponents is the relaxation of existing height and bulk regulations. Taller buildings in particular appear to trigger the most fervid responses from activists, even if they are stepped back from single-story structures. They do cast shadows, after all, and they frequently are described as an imposing presence, even if they are only one story taller than the nearest structure.

Building height has become conflated in the minds of anti-development groups with an affront to the environment. The green space (or maybe the abandoned gas station) they revered is not just paved over, it has layers of steel and concrete stacked on top of it. As that formulation takes root activists often reject contradictory evidence that increased density, which comes along with height, actually preserves green space while reducing sprawl and its attendant insults to the environment.

Michael Lewis aptly described the syndrome in his book, “The Undoing Project,” about psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who revolutionized scientific thinking by demonstrating that people tend to believe things that reinforce their biases even in the face of facts to the contrary. To NIMBYs, tall buildings are a kind of metaphor for dehumanizing change; they bring to mind Joni Mitchell’s lyric: “They pave paradise and put up a parking lot.”

In Lewis’s book, Tversky noted that, “Because metaphors are vivid and memorable, and because they are not readily subjected to critical analysis, they can have considerable impact on human judgment even when they are inappropriate, useless, or misleading.

This may help explain why people with primarily progressive social policy instincts put up a fuss about a proposed apartment building. They may feature themselves as Jane Jacobs, but their behavior more closely resembles that of Orval Faubus.

Many also carp about prospective damage to their property values, further underscoring an exclusionary subtext to their arguments. Actually, the experience of TODs so far has been that they boost nearby property values.

Conclusion

Of the four cases presented here, the Lower Manhattan Expressway experience offers the best example of legitimate, grass-roots opposition to a top-down transportation plan. Jacobs and her allies were not just kibitzing about a moderate-sized project developers wanted to build on their own land. They were fighting the dismemberment of an already densely populated area that would affect perhaps hundreds of thousands of people.

The expressway would have split up entire communities that had long before formed personal and economic connective tissue. Ultimately, Moses needed a better argument than the necessity of moving cars from New Jersey to Queens and Brooklyn.

The opposition to the State Road 710 project bore similarities to the New York case in that it involved objections from many local groups and communities to a highway project that would displace families and change the urban landscape, all for the convenience of moving vehicles. The reasoning for the resistance in California was less coherent than Jacobs’s criticisms and it entailed some relatively trivial complaints that truly amounted to asking, “Why does it have to be right here?”

In contrast to the Lower Manhattan case, the State Road 710 plan probably had a stronger rationale in part because it had been on the drawing board at a time when that sector of the Los Angeles metropolitan area remained only partially developed. Still, the outcome may have been fortuitous simply because of other changes in the transportation grid that alleviated demands on the existing highway system. In short, the project may have been done in not by a visionary but by NIMBYism. Yet in this case the NIMBYs may have been vindicated.

The legal battle brought against Cape Wind represents an egregious example of NIMBYism. The Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound members expect public utility decisions to account for their aesthetic sensibilities, even if they run counter to much larger public benefits.

Anyone who dislikes a development has a right to have his or her say. Yet economic development officials can and should play a role in working with the community to explain the benefits of projects that have committed funding and that meet appropriate development and urban planning standards.

Too often this outreach function occurs far too late in the process, with development spokesmen in a defensive crouch before an angry audience. Instead of establishing a policy framework to integrate existing neighborhoods with plans for higher density development at intermodal hubs, governing bodies tend to simply react to events. A proposal posts on a city council agenda, skeptics raise criticisms and the leaders must choose a side. If they vote in favor of the development, they may be accused of selling out to campaign contributors (and of course those shenanigans have been known to happen).

But city halls that are not simply corrupt find it difficult to convince the public they can give balanced consideration to a development plan. Leaders like those dealing with the Berkeley Plaza proposal may see the long-range advantages of a design presentation, but the number of pro-development speakers at a hearing (often limited to the developers themselves) can easily be shouted down by an opposition group.

Developers rarely work ahead of time with the small community organizations that could be enlisted to back a project if they had a better understanding of it before it reaches a zoning board. In fact, municipal governing bodies should formulate a policy that enunciates the general type and scope of TOD projects they will consider before one appears on their docket.

Economic development professionals also should be prepared to make an honest argument that presents a full and realistic picture of expected outcomes. TOD projects often are sold as an urban renaissance. Their proponents note that they will limit the number of parking spaces at the new housing facilities, thereby attracting tenants who will commute by mass transit, walk, bicycle or telecommute. All of that may be true up to a point. But doubters will squint at projected traffic studies and predict the reality will be less utopian. Some of the data suggest they may have a point.

An analysis of Portland, Oregon’s commitment to Smart Growth resulted, as expected, in higher population density and reduced per capita use of vehicles. And yet, it also generated more auto traffic around the transit nodes because of the population increases. That hardly suggests Portland’s experience has been a failure; it is still in the early stages of its decades-long Smart Growth strategy. It does imply, however, that TOD should not be sold as all rainbows and no rain.

Economic development professionals should be aware that opposition to construction projects can take many forms and can have varying degrees of merit. It may be useful to consider these four examples to pinpoint the difference between complaints that are purely frivolous and motivated by personal bias from those that stem from concerns about material harm to individuals and communities. Planners need to understand that, like NIMBYs, they also can be subject to the syndrome described in “The Undoing Project” and interpret all objections as the gripes of dilettantes. In virtually all instances, reliable information, transparency and public education are the best safeguards against long-term strategic errors.

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Richard Cowden is a journalist and urban planner. He retired in 2015 as a managing editor who covered financial services and commercial real estate law at Bloomberg BNA.

Peter Cooper’s 1830 Tom Thumb. Image owned by the Baltimore County Public Library, Towson Maryland USA. http://www.bcplonline.org/

The race to break into the Erie Canal’s lock on Ohio’s Midwest grain and corn markets was already on. Pennsylvania State had committed to fund its public/private, canal/railroad alternative, and Ohio approved an 1837 (Ohio) Loan Law creating a state program to loan one-third of canal or railroad expenditures to private entrepreneurs. Like today’s Space X, the new frontier beckoned.

Baltimore, the nation’s third largest city at the time, committed to an unproven and horribly expensive mode, the railroad. Inventor/investor, Peter Cooper (former real estate developer of Baltimore’s  Canton neighborhood) and twenty-five local business investors led by Charles Carroll (signer of the Declaration of Independence) needed to raise venture capital (VC) for monies to finance design and installation of track, railroad stations new technology to compete in the race to Ohio. They had no track nor locomotive, just a hope and a prayer–and community support.

The investment group (1827) issued a 42,000 share “subscription” (a low-priced stock offering) to the Baltimore community. Like today’s crowd-sourcing, hundreds of Baltimore residents bought a share or two in a railroad with no assets or locomotive–$3mm (1827 dollars)–a substantial sum–to lay track between Baltimore and Ellicott City.

With the track installed (1830), the investors proposed a late summer race between a horse/stagecoach and Cooper’s new-fangled invention, the “Tom Thumb” locomotive–America’s first steam-powered locomotive. The hope was the race would motivated investors into a second VC round  to finance Tom Thumb, “the engine that could”, the locomotive that would power the Baltimore & Ohio and to open up Ohio’ isolated agricultural production to eastern markets.

The race was held.

Tom Thumb broke down.

The horse won handily.

VC flowed into the project, however.

The 1830 race triggered a City of Baltimore buy in. In return for board seats, the City injected $3m equity (proceeds from tax-exempt municipal bonds) into the private company, reorganized into a hybrid quasi-public city commission. Empowered to issue tax-exempt bonds and conduct eminent domain/tax abatement, that city commission/private corporation laid the track, built local stations and developed a working locomotive, complete with patents. B&O went on to win the competition with Pennsylvania. B&O built the first passenger station and profit-making steam locomotive, and the first to enter Ohio (1852). B&O went on to become today’s CSX.

The more things change, the more things stay the same!

Nearly 200 years later, innovation and VC still reflect hope, not actual performance. While Tesla’s Elon Musk got off to a better start, his Tom Thumb electric car already “worked” (selling for $100,000 with somebody else’s battery). Yet, despite no profits in sight, Musk’s “Tom Thumb”-equivalent electric car drowned in private/federal/municipal/state VC–like the 1830 B&O.

Tom Thumb provides a glimpse into our three hundred-plus year economic development history, a history that includes public VC for privately-owned technology innovation–not to mention crowd-sourcing. In Baltimore’s city commission one sees an early version of our quasi-public development authority, and a government VC EDO. What’s more this was not new in 1830. State equity capital to private firms began in the colonial period. Tom Thumb and the B&O were only one example of literally hundreds. BTW the commission was not the first public/private railroad EDO either, that being in 1817 New Jersey.

This Issue’s TAKE AWAY

Musk & Sen. Diane Feinstein at Fremont CA production plant. 2017

American state and local economic development enjoys a long, and meaningful history–a history that is almost completely unknown to almost every economic developer.   Arguably most of what goes on in today’s modern economic development was developed in recognizable form hundreds of years ago. Innovation did not start with the Internet or the knowledge-based economy.

Our history offers value to current economic and community developers. It is worth your time to understand it.

American economic developers often subscribe to a version of ED history derived from the three “WAVE” paradigm”. In that paradigm, modern” (post-industrial Third Wave) ED is a new era vastly different from anything previous–a brave new world. The First and Second Waves, characterized by Chambers, boosterism and heavily-laced with inappropriate, ineffective and immoral business incentives, passed into history. Third Wave economic developers prided themselves for discovering innovation, “the entrepreneurial city and state”, technology and gazelles, VC–and more. The great EDOs of the Third Wave were government, nonprofit and universities. The private EDOs were thrown into the dustbins of history.

President Obama and Musk at Space X Launch in 2010

The reality presented in the As Two Ships history is these strategies previously existed and government was a major player long before the post-industrial age. “Post-industrial” economic developers retooled/renamed several hundred year-old existing ED tools/strategies, formed new EDOs, and devised new jargon and thousands of pages of  legitimizing theory, concepts, and algorithms–to fit their  “modern” world view.

Those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it–mistakes and all.

The problem with a three-hundred year history

It overwhelms us. There is too much of it. Past economic developers wore different clothes and didn’t use the correct jargon. They were often politically-incorrect. Worse, our history is often not what we think it is; a lot of it doesn’t fit into our current perspective–and we usually don’t like that! How do we deal with these problems?

First things first, let’s break down the bulky history.

As Two Ships reconverts two historical realities into themes that “break down” the accumulated mass of history into manageable bites. The two organizing themes were (1) a temporal classification system called “Eras”–that included within each Era thematic sub-time periods labeled “Ages”; and (2) the recognition of America’s three macro-regions, North (New England, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest), South and “West”. Each were settled by different ethnic/racial groups in different time periods, possessed unique histories, political cultures and congruent policy systems, and evolved local/state economic bases during different stages in American capitalism’s evolution.

This Journal  issue focuses on ED’s four “Eras”, leaving the “Ages” to another day. The next issue dwells on each region’s evolution through our American state and local ED/CD history.

 As Two Ships collapsed time into four “Eras”:

• pre-Civil War “Early Republic Era” (1790-1870);
• Industrial “Big City”  Hegemonic Classical Era (1870-1975);
• Transition Era (1975-2000);
• and our present-day Contemporary Era (post-2000).

As Two Ships deals almost exclusively with the first three.  A second and third volume expanding on the Transition Era and Contemporary Eras, loosely sub-titled “Reinventing American ED” and “Twilight of Growth“, are well-advanced.

Early Republic Era (1790-1870)

The Early Republic Era is the least known. It is also perceived as the least relevant. That’s a major mistake. If the reader could only read one set of chapters in As Two Ships, I would urge Chapters 2-4 which dwell on the the Early Republic and development of northern industrial Big Cities. That’s where/when American state/local ED really started. A Chapter title, “As the Twig is Bent” captures why this Era is so important.  By the end of this Era, the framework and basic structures of our Contemporary Era’s fifty state ED system was established. The remainder of the history follows logically. In this article I elaborate more on this Era and future issues will flesh out the others.

Industrial capitalism developed during the Early Republic Era. During Washington’s presidency, there were only fourteen banks in America–all, save the Hamilton national bank, were state-chartered. There were no canals, steamboats, or railroads, and no road or bridge system to connect the states, or even the cities within the states. Salem Massachusetts was our seventh largest city (7900). Custom duties were 90% of the federal budget. Commercial goods got from one state to another principally through coastal commercial ships. States were isolated and trade/travel was a semi-hazardous, expensive and time-consuming affair.

The need for infrastructure was huge–and that turned out to be the primary task of American ED. To develop infrastructure meant fostering innovation and assisting Early American entrepreneurs, while mitigating the disruption caused to the dominant national agricultural/trade economy. Tariffs and protectionism were top issues on the national agenda. Sound familiar?

Their second task, to facilitate new gazelle-like sectors and industries developing in the post-1800 decades–loosely known today as “manufacturing”. Textiles (clothes, shoes, and machinery) were the first, but alongside were farming/food processing machinery, chemicals, machine tools, transport modes (Tom Thumb), energy and communication equipment, and steel (requiring coal). America, like modern day Japan and China, stole a great deal of technology from England.

Without an American domestic finance system however, England provided a great deal of American commercial financing–until the War of 1812. That largely unknown war jump-started American state and local ED. After it America needed to find new ways to fund its emerging expanding agricultural production, manufacturing and infrastructure-related technologies.

Two decades after that war, evident by our lead-in Tom Thumb tale, American ED had fabricated the first public/private partnerships, VC instruments, startups financing, tax-exempt bonds/loans to business, municipal/state attraction and retention through tax abatement strategies,. Developing shovel-ready sites, and competing state business climates were all in place. Why all this ED happened is simple. If growth and prosperity was to occur, America needed infrastructure. Infrastructure was the midwife of modern ED.

++++++++++++++++++++++

Nineteenth Century Quincy Market

The need to install/finance critical infrastructure to grow was the functional equivalent of today’s knowledge-based economic development. New cities needed (1) to be built and older cities (2) needed to modernize. Urban development (city-building) and redevelopment (CBD urban renewal) were pervasive. Boston’s first urban renewal project–redevelopment of a deteriorated waterfront, a 1742 marketplace building (Faneuil Hall), and adding Quincy Market–was in 1826–Mr Rouse’s was late to the game.

Equally widespread was yet another major ED strategy, city-building. In this Era most of our Eastern (and San Francisco) cities were established, the eastern Midwest was settled. Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, Kansas City, and even Minneapolis were founded. New industries, sectors, cities, infrastructure and industrial technology were the fuel for of Early American ED. These new gazelle sectors formed the economic base of the new cities.

Recalling the importance of political culture (topic of our previous issue) these early ED strategies were produced by policy systems created by a city’s (state) First Settlers, the authors of constitutions and basic laws/municipal charters. These First Settlers, the elite vanguard of a series of sizable ethnic/racial population movements that occurred during the Era, spread versions of Privatism and Progressivism to the Mississippi and cemented them into urban/state political structures. From these  policy-making structures poured the strategies, tools, and programs of American ED. These policy systems and political structures governed public/private relationships, “bending the twig” to forge what eventually evolved into our Contemporary Era Red and Blue State competition.

The Panic of 1837’s ultimate result.

Enter a Black Swan. The disruption to American ED caused by a crippling depression, the long-lasting Panic of 1837 (extending into the 1840’s) caused a popular opinion/policy system reaction that turned past ED strategies and tools upside down. The previously dominant EDO, the private/public charter (Baltimore’s commission), was linked to bankruptcies, conflicts of interest, legislative ineptitude, and serious corruption. It required huge tax increases to pay off their debt. A series of state”reform” laws spread across the nation over a decade. Today these laws are known as “gift and loan clauses“.

The uniqueness of these clauses to each state, shaped that state’s “style” of ED ever after. Why? Economic growth meant economic developers had to work with the private sector, and that meant not only ED strategies, but also developing EDOs that conformed to each state’s unique gift and loan clauses. These hybrid “quasi” EDOs were essential to public/private interaction–the prerequisite to economic growth. State “gift and loan uniqueness” precipitated a similar uniqueness in devising subsequent “bypasses” to the gift and loan clauses. These two dynamics evolved over the next 175 years to produce today’s decentralized, variegated and competitive fifty-state American ED–exposing, BTW, the centrality of First Settler political culture to contemporary ED policy and strategies.

John Forrest Dillon

The post- 1837 Panic reaction hardened into a policy cement when ,in 1868, an Iowa judge, John Dillon, decided that “cities were creatures of the states“–and the national Supreme Court decided to not challenge that decision, but rather to impose it (by default) on all the states. The cultural-legal legacy of each state insulated it from its neighbors–and allowed each state to define how, and for whom each ED strategy, tool and program would be used–or not used. ED strategies, tools, and programs with the same name or title were used for different purposes, favored different constituencies–or remained largely unused in the state’s quiver holding its “ED arrows”.

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By 1870, American local ED had developed into a state-defined/approved ED system, consisting of EDOs with state-authorized powers, tools and programs, as well formal policy processes and structures, and most of all, distinctive definitions of public/private partnerships. From that point on local economic developers cajoled the state to amend or bypass these laws to create EDOs that could legally employ tools (tax abatement, eminent domain, property development/ redevelopment, business lending, equity financing, and bond issuance) that met the state’s requirements. Each state did it in its own way, affected by its distinctive political culture, economic bases, and political/policy dynamics.

This multi-decade evolutionary adjustment poured the foundation for our Contemporary Era’s state business climate competition, and cemented what had been a confused and diverse set of state reactions to a severe depression into a decentralized and idiosyncratically varied fifty-state American economic development “system”.

The Industrial Hegemonic “Big City” Classical Era (1870-1975)

1916

The Classic Era has so far proven our longest. The starting point to understanding this Era is the “industrial Big City hegemony”. That hegemony rose out of the Union’s Civil War victory over the South. That “political hegemony” was augmented by the emergence of “industrial capitalism”, housed and headquartered in the economic bases of the Union’s “Big Cities”. That industrial capitalism grew these Big Cities and allowed them to dominate, i.e. control, the national economy. With a new cheap workforce, provided by a half-century of immigrants, those innovative firms and their Big Cities determined the “content” of American economic development–driving underground in the West and South the different forms of American ED (MED and CD) that would later emerge.

The Classical Era is characterized by “growth”–or in the case of the South and West, the quest for it. Classical Era policy systems/ED strategies reflect the primacy of growth. Economic developers chased people and businesses, not jobs, for status/prestige, local economic diversification, and economic security in a turbulent and disruptive Era. States were reluctant (and mostly missing) ED participants in this Era. Economic development was led by each state’s large industrial municipalities–the Big City.

Competition among cities was intense. The “WAVE” history is correct in that regard. Incentives were pervasive, but certainly not used to the extent they are today. WAVE history is also correct in asserting chambers were the Big City’s lead EDO–but chambers did a lot more than simply compete with incentives. Chambers dominated Big City policy systems. Chambers advocated for infrastructure, tourism, export, municipal home rule, increased government capacity and national business regulation. Hegemonic Big City Chambers by the turn of the century were Progressive (Boston, Cleveland, Detroit are excellent examples). Chambers were the engine behind the municipal-relevant Progressive Movement.

What was true for the hegemonic North/Midwest, was not true for the remainder of the nation: the South and West.

The hegemonic Big Cities faced little opposition from the much-smaller cities of the South and West. To the hegemonic Big City firms and industries, these regions were markets to be exploited and/or places to reduce the cost of production. Indeed, the Hegemony indirectly shaped much of economic activity in these cities–that is what WAVE history’s  “chamber boosterism” was all about. Hegemonic chambers competed against each other–New York vs. Chicago for example.

Philadelphia Exposition Main Building–the tenth largest building in the world.

But other non-hegemonic cities wanted in–and so they copied Philadelphia’s 1876 Exposition, and turned it into a seventy-five year plus “Exhibition/World’s Fair Movement that served as exhibits of local technological excellence and marking their entry into the nation’s competitive urban hierarchy. Contemporary Era derivatives of this Exhibition Movement are Olympics, big sporting and entertainment events, and sports stadiums (and technology conventions).

The Exhibition Movement did not resolve disparities among regions, however. In the eyes of many in the South and West, cities and local economies were reduced to something likened to a hegemonic colony. Northern insensitivity, if not imperialism regarding other regions frustrated many non-hegemonic economic developers. Throughout the entire Classical Era western economic developers used marketing/boosterism to attract northern investment–southern economic developers used ED incentives. The latter generated a shadow war that first appeared after WWI. The skirmishing erupted into a 1975 Second War Between the States–a war conterminous with the Fall of the Classic Era.

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Internally, Big Cities were growth machines. Big City policy systems installed the physical infrastructure and approved land use to accommodate incredible surges in population, and the constant tumult of  growing constantly innovative industrial sectors. In reaction to this, 19th community development (CD) rose–almost exclusively as a northern industrial immigrant-focused Big City approach. That shall be discussed in a future issue.

Mainstream ED (MED) practitioners could have cared less. By the turn of the 20th century they turned their attention to increasing the “capacity” of urban government, to remake municipal government into an effective partner in Big City growth. At the same time, America’s oligopolistic corporate elite shifted their attention to Washington and a new U.S. Chamber of Commerce–leaving Big City chambers to the local/regional business community managed by MED’s first professional association: the Chamber secretary and its primary EDO, the chamber industrial bureau. In the 1920’s the U.S. Chamber return the favor by creating as its subsidiary, a locally-based professional association exclusively focused on economic development.

Oldest Chamber of Commerce: New York City

But everything sooner or later comes to an end.

In 1920 the nation became more urban (51%) than rural. Immigration was halted and a massive internal migration, the Southern Diaspora and Great Migration, replaced it. The Depression and War Years brought the federal government deep into state and local ED (a future Journal issue). Creeping decline, in the form of metropolitan decentralization (some call it suburbanization) also appeared in the 1920 census; 17% lived in “suburbs”. That proved to be the statistic worth watching.  By 1960 31% lived in suburbs, 32% in the Big City. In 1970, 36.6% lived in suburbs and only 31.4% in the central city.

Between 1920 and 1970, hegemonic Big City economic and community development was tasked to counter this “decentralization” by capturing for the Big City the benefits of suburban “growth”. Without realizing it, however, northern hegemonic Big City ED strategies were dealing, for the first time, with decline.

These forces–the wars, depression, and dynamics of decline and a host of important other factors (deindustrialization, for example)–combined to form a “perfect storm” in the 1960’s and early 1970’s.

On a good note, that perfect storm generated a second, urban-based, professional association in the late 1960’s. But the forces unleashed on Big Cities by this perfect storm were not easily confronted (more on that in later issues) and symbolically, in 1975-6, the largest of the industrial hegemonic Big Cities, NYC, entered into fiscal default, taken over by its state. The industrial Big City Hegemony was revealed to be an “emperor without clothes”, an urban cemetery, or a playground for the unfortunate.

Caused by regional change, shift from manufacturing to service, deindustrialization, or just simply the not-at-all sudden rise of the Sunbelt, the Hegemony passed into history–taking the Classical Era with it.

The Classical Era was over.

the Transition Era (1975-2000)

I named this time period the Transition Era because that is exactly what these twenty-five years were.

During this period we discovered decline in so many new ways. Classical Era suburbanization picked up steam–by 2000 more Americans lived in suburbs than anyplace else combined. Suburbs left in their wake the so-called “legacy city” a fiscal, employment and demographic shell of the former hegemonic Big City. Not to be outdone, the Big city industrial base deindustrialized. Manufacturing already in the suburbs since 1940, left the region and the nation–worse, manufacturing redefined itself into “advanced” manufacturing and nudged us into something called knowledge-based economic development.

Hegemonic Big Cities, the site of most crushing deindustrialization, refocused its MED toward something called “job creation” (around the mid-1980’s), giving up on stopping population outflows. Classic Era population growth, the ED’s goal during the Classical Era, fell by the wayside–at least according to the academic policy world and legacy city mayors. The West and South paid little attention.

A new regional pattern developed from the vacuum created by the dead northern/Midwest hegemony.  The nation as a whole grew by leaps and bounds (demographically and economically) until the 2008 Great Recession. Sub-regional patterns developed like the New South alongside the Old South, Texas and the energy southwest, central states lost visibility, and mountain states discovered skiing and tourism.

Americans were still mobile in the Transition Age. After 1970, spurred by legislative reform, huge numbers of foreign born immigrants piled into our cities/states. California, Texas and New York (City) did especially well. A sizable generational migration, followed by succeeding generational migrations altered the regional cultural and demographic composition. This generational migration coincided with a new view of “growth”, growth management, quality of life, and something called “environmentalism” redefined–and some would say confused–the profession’s sense of direction and purpose.

Del Webb’s Sun City retirement community “model”.

City-building and simultaneous suburbanization differentiated the Sunbelt ED and demographic landscape.With considerable Big Sort population flux, city-building (retirement communities, master-planned communities, condo associations-Privatopia and unincorporated “communities”) created vast geographies composed of new types of policy systems–expanding the thematic focus of American sub-state ED. Nowhere was this more evident than in California–the mother-basket case of Contemporary Era’s sub-state ED.

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Beginning in the 1970’s, America engaged “a Great Reindustrialization Debate” a rapidly changing ED policy world. Initially, its chief enemy was Japanese manufacturing. Out of the Reindustrialization debate poured a host of new strategies ranging from workforce to radically shifting industry sectors targets and making a cult hero of “clusters”, the Silicon Valley and Internet. Taking their own sweet time, new strategies incrementally evolved and many formally “jelled  around the late 1990’s (knowledge-based economics, small business entrepreneurial innovation/ startups ecosystem).

Seemingly out of the blue, states gradually entered into sub-state ED in a meaningful way. Developing their own configuration of strategies and programs, some states rode herd over local ED–others simply joined with the locals, each playing in their own ED playground. A Sagebrush War had erupted, alongside a hyperbolic state-led incentive war for political correct targeted firms and clusters. Business climate competition was ever more intense. The old Classical Era “stuff” re-functioned as well. First/Second Wave chambers led regionalization efforts, one-stop-shopping and policy advocacy, as well as  CBD redevelopment, tourism, workforce.

Community development exploded. Several CD strategies caught on like wildfire in immigrant and Great Migration central city neighborhoods. Neighborhoods emerged as a primary site in which to conduct ED/CD–so did CBDs. States experimented to fabricate a CD agenda that fit addressed state needs and politics–displacing and modifying significantly the implementation of MED (and Privatist) strategies and tools.

CD and MED drifted apart into separate professional complexes. An immense gap opened up between practitioners and policy world economic developers. Never had Progressive and Privatist ED been so hostile to the other–and their strategies, tools and programs so zero-sum. The path to Contemporary Era Red/Blue polarization was blazed and bushwhacked during the Transition Era–a path that would transform the practice of American state and local ED maybe forever.

New strategies, tools and programs prompted a bewildering variety of CDOs/EDOs and professional specialties. The robustness and vitality was not all to the “good”, however. It led to “Siloization” the establishment of multiple professional associations, a consultant-NGO-think tank “complex”–all of which destroyed whatever coherence American state and local ED had as a policy area and profession.

Everybody, it seems was doing ED, but “their ED” was narrow, specialized, expert-rational–and those not in one’s own particular ED cubicle-niche–silo were often not thought of as professional compatriots.

The practice and the ED profession was revolutionized, bearing little resemblance to the Classical Era?

None of this had happened overnight–like the proverbial boiling frog it took its sweet time to affect American economic development.

And then abruptly, precisely at midnight December 31st, 1999, it was over.

American economic development had entered into “the Contemporary Era”.

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Transition Era change resembled in many ways the “end-product of our “boiling frog” metaphor. For better or worse, by the turn of the century the dynamic elements of the profession and policy area stabilized into a more or less durable professional/policy system “order” that while shocked by the Great Recession has persisted to the present.

Key elements of the current Contemporary Era include:

• A contested ED “landscape” emerged with CD and MED slugging it out, in a thinly-veiled Privatist-Progressive struggle with strong “growth vs. decline” undercurrents. Both wings lost almost all connection to each other with MED basically ignoring CD and CD contesting nearly all strategies and tools employed by MED practitioners. The almost-still-born Great Recession recovery so fragile it weakened the consensus supporting  (Great Reindustrialization Debate) economic theories that were the foundation for many Contemporary Era ED/CD strategies and programs.
• The Contemporary Era ED landscape exhibited a reluctant, grudging acceptance of suburbs and regional change as a fiat accompli. ED players redirected attention toward “metropolitan areas”, regional one-stop-shopping,  university-driven ED, and multi-jurisdiction (regional) clusters–some even talked of mega cities. These region-wide initiatives, however, could not escape realities of jurisdictional chronic decline (Great Lakes) and hyperbolic, “trees grow to the skies” Silicon Valley-ese new economy growth. Metropolitan areas quickly divided themselves into two more or less stable patterns of growth and stagnation (if not decline). The Contemporary Era strategy paradigm called for stagnant metros to copy the success of growth metros. Growth metros themselves were divided between Privatist (Red) and Progressive (Blue) strategies.
• In the Contemporary Era ED and CD flourished at the neighborhood, municipal, and even regional levels–each operating in its own strategy and program space. Above these levels floated a newly-energized state-level MED/CD apparatus. State ED/CD led (mostly) by gubernatorial administrations that incorporated MED/CD into their electoral coalition and policy agenda. This  politicization of state-ED was best expressed in the constant and pervasive incentive wars among states, with locals as junior partners.
• CD’s rise and downtown fragility fostered a host of new sub-municipal EDOs that autonomously operated beneath the city-wide/regional governmental/chamber arena. In many jurisdictions, these sub-municipal entities were where the action was, bringing citizens and activists into the MED/CD policy-making process. New municipal level policy systems emerged. At the municipal level many government EDOs developed hybrid CD/MED strategies. In many “Blue” states municipal government EDOs embraced Progressive CD strategies, while private city-wide EDOs autonomously pursued Privatist MED strategies–each oblivious to the other.
• Contemporary Era strategy robustness also meant policy complexity, fragmentation, as well as professional siloization and incoherence. CD/MED divergence triggered an associated gap between “on the street practitioners” and the theoretical-ideological policy world. The two dynamics reinforced by successive generational changes, more-often-than-not resulted in a endless parade trendy strategies and programs divorced from actual performance and reduced to rhetoric and data-driven analysis that floated way above the policy process. For all practical purposes, economic developers rhetorically chased the same “correct” industries, sectors and occupations/skills–using their version of the acclaimed strategy/ program du jour.
• In the process we discovered yet new unsolvable problems such as legacy cities, Two/Luxury Cities, gentrification, social justice as now “white privilege” and anti-corporate resistance, and what used to be poverty was now an impossible to define–or alleviate–inequality–an inequality that recently included “white non-privileged” Forgotten People. In essence, the end-goals of MED/CD had become hopelessly politicized, tied to the fortunes of media-hype electoral politics.

This last section will be so easy to criticize. All this bombast sounds so negative–in part because I “lead with my chin” and have deliberately selected the Contemporary Era’s controversial and contested features, not where it has worked well. But there is no mistaking America’s state and local ED was no longer your grandfathers’ ED–and it has its problems …

And yet had American ED departed from its past heritage?

Or built upon it?

Will that heritage reassert itself?

Will history repeat itself?

Isn’t it time we assess our current realities by rediscovering who we are as a profession and policy area?

But we cannot–we have no real history, no past on which to reconstruct a present-day context and frame our future. Our professional/policy area past has been collapsed into a vaporous and ideological-laden WAVE history that reinforces our polarization and misinforms us concerning the substance and value of our three hundred year heritage and professional experience.

See You in the (October) Next Issue:

“The South and West in American State and Local Economic Development”