Posted on April 3, 2008

A periodic feature of this blog will be to scrutinize economists whose arguments are selling communities short. The subtitle for the series might be: "Hey, they don’t call it the dismal science for nothing."

This first installment focuses on Art Woolf, State Economist for Governor Madeleine Kunin of Vermont a decade ago and now an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Vermont. In a blog entry for the "The Vermont Tiger," Woolf discusses Vermont’s successfully luring Canadians to its ski slopes ("Buy Local, Eh?"). But his argument careens recklessly downhill from there: — read more 

Posted on April 1, 2008

In honor of April 1st... here's an actual quote from National Public Radio on March 12: Just after the NY Governor admitted that he had paid an estimated $80,000 for repeated dalliances with a high-priced hooker in Washington, DC, "Morning Edition" asked a madam of an escort service in Albany for her reactions. Even she was furious: "They're always talking about losing business in New York and business going to other states. It seems like he would have kept the business in New York State somewhere!" — read more 

Posted on March 1, 2008

An Open Letter to Jack Roberts & Bob Warren
Dear Jack and Bob,
Thanks for your Guest Viewpoint piece in the Register-Guard on 9 October 2007, in which you argued that, contrary to popular belief, "the bulk of [our] time, effort and, yes, money devoted to economic development is spent helping local business grow and expand here...." If true, this is wonderful news indeed—but only, alas, if it’s really true. To remove any doubt, let me offer a recommendation I hope you’ll support: Let’s ask the state to audit your programs and confirm your numbers. — read more 

Posted on February 19, 2008

Long before Oregon’s economic developers started to go global—a strategy that has wound up increasing the rate of poverty in the state—they prototyped a homegrown approach that is well worth reviving.

In 1983 the city of Eugene, Oregon, teamed up with a private bank and the Lane County Private Industry Council to help in-state purchasers and contractors find competitive in-state bidders. The operation came close to paying for itself by assessing a small finders' fee on every new regional contract. The initiative was so successful that in 1985 the state legislature appropriated a grant to a neighborhood-development corporation to find and train people to run 12 more offices in the state and link them by computer network. — read more 

Posted on January 28, 2008

Two weeks ago, Brian Carter, local legal counsel for DDR (Developers Diversified Realty Corporation), wrote an opinion piece in the Ukiah Daily Journal asking for a "fair hearing" about his client's proposed project. Decisions about whether to award DDR with a needed zoning change, he argued, should be made "on the basis of objective facts and actual dollars and cents rather than "speculative arguments."

I couldn't agree more with Carter. That's why I am inviting Carter or anyone else from DDR to engage in a debate next Tuesday evening, January 29. — read more 

Posted on September 30, 2008

Congress thinks it's about to "solve" the nation's deepening financial crisis with a $700 billion bailout of Wall Street. What's being overlooked is that one of the fundamental causes is the erosion of place-based investing. And a fundamental solution has to be an expansion of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA).

There's no shortage of villains here. Mortgage companies pushed predatory adjustable-rate loans on the gullible poor. Regulators loosened standards in the name of the free market. Finance companies created exotic securities and derivatives that effectively hid risk. And many of these players fraudulently misrepresented or withheld critical pieces of information. Yet, at its core, this entire mess is about the delinking of investment from place. — read more 

Posted on September 18, 2008

The presidential season usually brings silly proposals, but a particularly atrocious idea this year is to revive nuclear power. John McCain deserves an "F" for wanting to build 45 new nuclear plants, and Barack Obama no better than a "C" for failing to criticize McCain's position with any coherence.

Nuclear power is a disaster for community economies. According to the North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS), of 1100 industry categories a nuclear reactor is the second least likely to be small and locally owned. And every expensive reactor built will wind up slowing, distracting, and ultimately undermining our ability to roll out cost-effective local energy alternatives.

Nuclear power has become so costly that a U.S. utility has not brought a new reactor online for a generation. By the late 1970s the construction costs of a single reactor - once predicted to be several hundred million dollars - had, in fact, skyrocketed to several billion dollars. Projects were taking upwards of a decade to complete, an impossibly long time for a utility to predict exactly what its customers' demand would be. Utilities that bet heavily on nuclear - in New Hampshire and the Pacific Northwest for example - nosedived into spectacular bankruptcies, convincing utility executives, regulators, and investors was that nuclear power no longer made economic sense.

Nothing fundamental has since changed. — read more 

By Guest Commentator Patty Cantrell
Posted on July 18, 2008

It is 1974 in Springfield, Missouri, and they are still showing movies downtown at a theater on the city's Park Central Square. I am 10 years old, and my sister and I are thrilled to be out on that sweltering summer night with our very cool Aunt Robin and Uncle Romie. We're off to see Herbie the Love Bug Rides Again. The smash Disney hit is about a lovable, racing-striped Volkswagen Beetle who saves a little old lady and her historic home from the wrecking ball of "progress."

Bright colors, loud crashes, and daring escapes will make an impression on any kid. But it is the moral of Herbie's story—that people and place matter—that has kept the little VW zooming around my mind through the years. He roared in again just a few weeks ago when I sat down with some 500 hometown business leaders at the sixth national convening of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE).

The BALLE conference had both Herbie and me doing wheelies! I was thrilled to learn that so many people I met, representing many more folks back home, are starting a new kind of progress: rebuilding neighborhoods and local businesses in their own towns. — read more 

By Guest Commentator Amy Kedron
Posted on June 27, 2008

To be sure, many urban neighborhoods are in dire need of development resources. But there is a difference between "economic development" and "community economic development." The former is often driven by private interests, primarily for private gain; the latter is community-driven and aims to empower communities.

The Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) has long tried to walk the fine line between private interest and public benefit, as it has helped provide billions of dollars to low income communities. But at a recent Urban Forum I attended in April, LISC's invited speakers – and LISC itself – appeared to be veering far from community development. — read more 

Posted on May 28, 2008

I was tempted to fire off a letter to the editors at Fast Company, suggesting a better fact checker before they publish commentaries like Elizabeth Spiers' "Not So Fast: Neighborhoodlums" (June 2008, p. 128), the latest mass-media sneer at local-first campaigns. But it finally dawned on me that the piece actually contains no facts whatsoever.

I almost feel sorry for Spiers, a fast-rising blog queen who writes gossipy pieces about the New York business scene. Someone made her feel damn awful about not buying local – "I can't help but think that death and dismemberment are implied if I don't buy the sweater knit by area hipsters or locally grown produce" — and now she has decided to punish the rest of us for it. So a note to her follows. — read more