Always the Bridesmaid, Never the Bride

By Matt Tarleton, Project Manager.

Some of my earliest and fondest childhood memories were set in Brunswick County, North Carolina: fishing with my father and grandfather, learning the art of developing “drip castles,” and discovering what it feels like to swallow a mouthful of saltwater. Since those early days as a child, Brunswick County, and more specifically Ocean Isle Beach, has become an incredibly special place in my life. Having moved throughout North Carolina and Georgia occupying more than ten different houses along the way, my family’s place in Ocean Isle has been the single constant “home” throughout my 29 years on this earth. It is where I discovered the ultimate recipe for tranquility: equal parts rocking chair, crossword puzzle, and ocean view.

Brunswick County is the southernmost county in North Carolina, located between Wilmington and Myrtle Beach, and occupying a stretch of coastline that actually faces south. If you’ve ever had Calabash-style fried shrimp, you’ve tasted Brunswick County. The county’s full-time resident population has tripled in the last thirty years, placing it among the fastest growing counties in the country. While the county relies heavily upon seasonal travel to its beaches, its economy is more diverse than one might assume. The southeastern portion of the county is directly adjacent to the Port of Wilmington and as a result, wholesale trade, warehousing, transportation, and manufacturing activities have complemented travel and tourism. As much as the county has changed during my lifetime, it still looks and feels the same to me. Aside from the aforementioned proximity to the port, there has been little to signal to me that the county is a major player for large economic development projects. I was wrong.

On your way down to Ocean Isle from Raleigh, you’ll hop onto highway 17 outside Wilmington, just barely bypassing Leland, a small community of roughly 2,000 residents. I knew little (okay, nothing) about Leland until last week when I heard the news that Caterpillar had chosen Athens, Georgia as the site for a new manufacturing facility that will bring 1,400 jobs. Caterpillar chose a site on the border of Clarke and Oconee counties that has been undeveloped and marketed to manufacturers for over 30 years, ever since IBM withdrew plans to construct a major computer manufacturing facility. Thirty years! While I am delighted that Georgia has secured such a large project at such an important time, I was saddened to hear that Brunswick County was the runner-up.

Brunswick County’s two largest employers are the County and its school system. There are no private employers with more than 1,000 employees and only two private employers with more than 500 employees (Wal-Mart and Progress Energy). But in the span of two short months, Brunswick County has lost two major projects that would have brought a combined 3,000 jobs to the county. The fact that Brunswick County was even in the running, and incredibly the runner-up, was due largely to the incredible investment made in ready-to-go industrial sites and shell buildings in Leland, that little community that I always bypassed and never gave a passing thought.

Between the Leland Industrial Park, the International Logistics Park, and the Mid-Atlantic Logistics Center, Brunswick County was able to offer these two prospective companies an incredible package. Combined they were able to offer roughly 2,500 acres of industrial land, including two vacant 1,000 acre parks already serviced with water, sewer, natural gas and fiber optics. Brunswick Community College operates a satellite campus at Leland Industrial Park to meet the needs of employers on site. How incredible is that? Unfortunately it wasn’t enough for the two prospects.

The first project that Brunswick County lost was a Continental Tire facility employing 1,600 individuals that ultimately went to South Carolina. Brunswick County lost that project due to bickering at the State Capitol regarding the appropriate level of incentives. Apparently North Carolina’s lawmakers are suddenly wary of large incentives after granting Google an incentive package valued at $212 million for 210 data center jobs (yes, more than $1 million per job) in 2007. This followed the $242 million package that the state alone provided to Dell Computer in 2004 (Dell closed its facility four years later). Continental Tire wanted $45 million in upfront cash incentives to support its initial capital investment, lawmakers balked, and South Carolina won the project by providing the winning county (Sumter) with a $33 million grant to develop the site that Continental Tire chose.

The second project that Brunswick County lost was the aforementioned Caterpillar facility. Caterpillar executives and site selection consultants indicated that the Athens site was chosen over the Brunswick site due to confidence that the Port of Savannah would secure channel deepening to 50 feet. Both the Port of Wilmington (just a few miles from the Brunswick sites) and the Port of Savannah (more than 200 miles from the Athens site) are currently at 42 feet, but access to a deep water port that can accommodate much larger “post-Panamax” cargo chips. This time around, North Carolina lawmakers were apparently poised to offer up to $90 million in incentives to secure Caterpillar, more than the roughly $77 million offered at the state and local level in Georgia.

Leaders in Brunswick County are undoubtedly disappointed and frustrated. Projects like Caterpillar and Continental Tire are incredibly rare and the county did everything it could to secure both. Decades of investment positioned the county to compete for these two projects but in the end items outside their control resulted in the projects going elsewhere (or so we’re told). And while Brunswick County is probably experiencing that “always the bridesmaid, never the bride” feeling, they have positioned themselves well and should be optimistic that opportunities will continue to come. I’ll never look at Brunswick County the same. Hopefully the same is true for the site selection community.

A Forest of Food

By Stephanie Allen, Project Assistant.

As an avid baker and cook, I find little more satisfying than harvesting my own ingredients. I have been fortunate enough to hide out from the Wisconsin winter for the last few months in Los Angeles with friends who have a huge garden in the backyard of their Echo Park home and a neighborhood full of fruit trees (isn’t telecommuting wonderful?). I basically feel like I’m in heaven.

So, imagine my excitement when I heard about a seven-acre food forest in the works in Seattle. The Beacon Food Forest, in Seattle’s Beacon Hill neighborhood, is just 2.5 miles from the heart of downtown Seattle. Developed on land owned by Seattle Public Utilities and adjacent to the neighborhood’s Jefferson Park, which is home to the neighborhood community center as well as a number of other amenities like a golf course, tennis courts, community gardens, and lawn bowling, the Forest was designed to be an oasis of fresh, quality, public food.

The Forest will feature large chestnut and walnut trees in the overstory, fruit trees in the understory, and berry shrubs, herbs, and vegetables closer to the ground. There is space set aside for community gardening plots; there are thornless edibles by the playground; and there are exotic persimmon, asian pear, and Chinese haw trees surrounding a sheltered classroom designed to host community workshops that will teach community members how to grow food and how to care for and manage the food systems in the Forest.

It’s certainly a very exciting idea for the foodie in me (Need some walnuts for your pesto? Just run down to the park. Heck, get your basil while you’re there.), but it’s even more exciting for the urban planner in me. We’ve heard a lot recently from the public health community about the necessity of fresh fruits and vegetables; of safe, walkable environments; of exercise; and of the importance of being involved in a community and how the design of our urban environments should take all of these things into account.

Well, here’s a food oasis that helps to build the community by teaching them to work together to care for it. It’s accessible; it’s full of large trees that will help alleviate air pollution, making this large park and the community surrounding it a better place to breathe; and gardening, while not the most strenuous exercise, can be very fulfilling exercise. Walking to the park every day to check on your tomatoes, now that’s a little more exercise. Talking to the gardener with a plot next to yours, that’s a great way to begin to involve yourself in a community.

This is edible landscaping writ large and it’s a huge community asset for a place looking to retain and attract creative and environmentally minded young professionals who are choosing where they want to live first and finding jobs when they get there (or, like me, bringing their job with them). I do have a friend in Seattle who has been begging me to visit… maybe I’ll head up there next month.

A Forest of Food

By Stephanie Allen, Project Assistant.

As an avid baker and cook, I find little more satisfying than harvesting my own ingredients. I have been fortunate enough to hide out from the Wisconsin winter for the last few months in Los Angeles with friends who have a huge garden in the backyard of their Echo Park home and a neighborhood full of fruit trees (isn’t telecommuting wonderful?). I basically feel like I’m in heaven.

So, imagine my excitement when I heard about a seven-acre food forest in the works in Seattle. The Beacon Food Forest, in Seattle’s Beacon Hill neighborhood, is just 2.5 miles from the heart of downtown Seattle. Developed on land owned by Seattle Public Utilities and adjacent to the neighborhood’s Jefferson Park, which is home to the neighborhood community center as well as a number of other amenities like a golf course, tennis courts, community gardens, and lawn bowling, the Forest was designed to be an oasis of fresh, quality, public food. 

The Forest will feature large chestnut and walnut trees in the overstory, fruit trees in the understory, and berry shrubs, herbs, and vegetables closer to the ground. There is space set aside for community gardening plots; there are thornless edibles by the playground; and there are exotic persimmon, asian pear, and Chinese haw trees surrounding a sheltered classroom designed to host community workshops that will teach community members how to grow food and how to care for and manage the food systems in the Forest.

It’s certainly a very exciting idea for the foodie in me (Need some walnuts for your pesto? Just run down to the park. Heck, get your basil while you’re there.), but it’s even more exciting for the urban planner in me. We’ve heard a lot recently from the public health community about the necessity of fresh fruits and vegetables; of safe, walkable environments; of exercise; and of the importance of being involved in a community and how the design of our urban environments should take all of these things into account.

Well, here’s a food oasis that helps to build the community by teaching them to work together to care for it. It’s accessible; it’s full of large trees that will help alleviate air pollution, making this large park and the community surrounding it a better place to breathe; and gardening, while not the most strenuous exercise, can be very fulfilling exercise. Walking to the park every day to check on your tomatoes, now that’s a little more exercise. Talking to the gardener with a plot next to yours, that’s a great way to begin to involve yourself in a community. 

This is edible landscaping writ large and it’s a huge community asset for a place looking to retain and attract creative and environmentally minded young professionals who are choosing where they want to live first and finding jobs when they get there (or, like me, bringing their job with them). I do have a friend in Seattle who has been begging me to visit… maybe I’ll head up there next month.

Arts on the Go

By Kathy Young, Director of Operations.

I'm still pretty excited about the food truck movement, recently blogged about with savory enthusiasm by my colleague Evan Robertson, so you can imagine my delight upon learning of Dance Truck, an Atlanta-based organization formed in 2009. I stumbled across Dance Truck while facilitating a focus group for a good friend and founder of another innovative Atlanta dance troupe, Zoetic Dance Ensemble, during an outreach project they've begun. Our dialogue led us into a discussion about other cutting edge dance companies and arts organizations, which led me to add "Dance Truck" to the group's list of peer organizations as we filled up several flip charts. This entry gave me pause, as I was wholly unaware of what was being referenced. So then,  in the company of a diverse group of arts professionals and enthusiasts, I dared to ask, "What's Dance Truck?" The answer was embarrassingly simple... "like food trucks, only with dancers."

Brilliant.

If you're like me - you value new cultural experiences but don't always make the time to seek them out, let alone carve out time to actually go to new venues or check out new groups - the idea of having art being mobile is quite intriguing. In the case of Dance Truck, over the course of the first two years, the organizers presented programs by more than 50 local artists at festivals, museums, galleries, and roadside gathering spots using the back of a rental truck as a stage platform. *I should note here that its reflects much more on me than the Dance Truckers that I haven't encountered them in the past couple of years. Clearly, they are out there, I am not.

For some of us, our first exposure to mobile arts and culture may have been the time-honored bookmobile... for hard-core bibliophiles, I would venture to suppose that the arrival of the bookmobile was not unlike the excitement churned by the jingle of the ice cream truck. Now, there are more and more opportunities to experience varieties of mobile art. Several communities have programs that bring art to children, but my current favorite is Art Feeds, based in Joplin, Missouri. In addition to delivering program onsite in schools, churches, and other locations, the Art Feeds folks can also serve up to 15-20 children inside their mobile art center. The Mobile Arts Program is another interesting idea operated by artists in the San Francisco Bay area. To quote from their website, "In essence, we build a temporary, creative microcosm where community and creativity can intersect and flourish. In a world where we are becoming more insular with advanced technologies our events hope to bring residents together through positive interactions with neighbors and their neighborhood."

For communities seeking to build their arts community as a benefit for residents,a draw for tourists, and a memorable experience for prospective residents, business owners, investors, and the like - supporting low-cost, highly flexible mobile arts organizations seems like an easy win. With mobile arts, a little investment can go a long way, and lead to a number of unexpected collaborations. Or, somewhat expected... recently, Dance Trucks teamed with The Good Food Truck to double the delivery of quality "truck-based" enjoyment.

What’s in a Name? The Answer Can be Tricky

By Alex Pearlstein, Director of Projects.

In our client communities, we very often work with regional organizations to develop strategic plans for their areas. In most cases, these regional organizations – be they chambers or economic development corporations (EDCs) – represent broad geographies with multiple component cities and counties. They also – more often than not – contain a central city or cities that hold most of the population and employment concentrations for the overall region. Either that or they contain a city that may not be the largest in the metro but has the most “name recognition.” For example, our client community of Coachella Valley in Southern California contains the city of Palm Springs, even though Indio and other cities have larger populations.  

This is all well and good. Regions can be big and diverse, but are often known for their most populous city. Where it gets squirrelly is when issues of pride or the need to bridge demographic, cultural, or economic differences to bind relationships lead regional decision-makers to market the metro area with a brand that may be familiar locally but is a mystery everywhere else. Case in point; if I hadn’t told you that the Coachella Valley housed Palm Springs, would you have known anything about it? If I mentioned the “Upstate Alliance” would you know where it is? How ‘bout if I called it the “Greenville-Spartanburg region?” Makes a difference, no? However, both the Coachella Valley and the Upstate Alliance brand themselves without naming their most well-known component communities. Having worked in both of these regions, I can attest to the fact that changing the current brands to reflect the communities that are most widely recognized was untenable. Politically, it was just a no-go. Does it hamper these regions’ marketing viability? Probably yes. But without these branding compromises there wouldn’t be the resources or partnerships to do any marketing at all.  

Sometimes political reality trumps logic; we learn that every four years when we elect the U.S. president. So too does the reality of regionalism often trump the logic of what would be the most effective marketing strategy for an area. I don’t think there’s necessary a hard-and-fast solution for this “mystery” region dilemma other than to continue making the case that aligning branding with the “name” community works best and seeing where that gets you. What I find most interesting is that – almost universally and even in regions that don’t brand according to their most widely known community – stakeholders still identify themselves with this core city when telling people where they live. It comes up all the time in focus groups. “I may live in Littleton, but I tell people from out of town that I’m from Denver.” (We’ve never worked in Denver, by the way; I’m just using that as an example.) Funny that when hundreds of thousands of marketing dollars are involved, the same logic doesn’t always apply.

Going Home

By J. Mac Holladay, founder and CEO. 

Earlier this week I had a chance to return to my roots in North West Tennessee. After flying into Memphis (my hometown) we drove north to Dyersburg. I was addressing a nine county economic development group started by the local developers and Chamber Executives. They had worked hard on a regional plan and had engaged the state in reviewing and continuing to work on the plan. 

There are no big cities in that part of Tennessee. My two grandfathers are from there. One was a 6 foot 5 inch country lawyer named Landon Erie Holladay, nicknamed Lake Erie. The other was a circuit riding United Methodist preacher named Elmer Finch McDaniel. Lake Erie was from Dresden in Weakley County and the Reverend McDaniel had churches across the region in the towns of Milan, Newbern, Humboldt, and Covington. My father was born and raised in Dresden and my mom graduated from the University of Tennessee at Martin. My Aunt Eula taught the 6th grade in Brownsville for nearly forty years and my Uncle Harold McDaniel was the dentist in Alamo for 40 years as well. My Uncle Harold died two weeks ago at 90. The whole town came out as the Mayor of Crockett County reported to me on Wednesday. A lady came and said that Aunt Eula had been her favorite teacher. I was truly home.

These people have had a hard time in The Great Recession. They have lost many manufacturing jobs that were the backbone of their region. Young people are leaving and the budget challenges are real at the state and local level. But they are not giving up; they are coming together to work on a great new website, a regional accelerator, incubators, an existing business program, new branding efforts, enhanced educational efforts, and a new port in Lake County up on the Mississippi River. Wednesday morning nearly a hundred elected officials, education and business leaders joined the economic and Chamber staffs to review their strategy and discuss how to move ahead. Top officials from the Department of Economic and Community Development were there as well. It made me very proud to see them together putting aside past differences and understanding that they are all in this economic reset together. 

They call themselves Tennessee’s Northwest Passage. And so they are. Using a historical reality to launch them into a new economic future. They are committed to a new path, a new strategy and a new partnership. It made me proud to be home again and perhaps help in some small way. I am reminded of the title of our regional strategy for the South I had the pleasure of working on in 1986 – “Halfway Home and A Long Way to Go.” Yes Northwest Tennessee has a long way to go but they are on their way. I believe they will make it all the way home.

What’s Up With the Housing Market?

By Stephanie Allen, Project Assistant.

Here’s something we haven’t talked about in a while: the housing market. For years now economists have been saying we’ll need a recovery in the housing market before we see significant economic recovery. So, what’s up with the housing market? The truth is not a whole lot. Last week CoreLogic released theirhome price index with year-end numbers from 2011. Homes prices fell 4.7 percent from 2010’s year-end prices (0.9 percent if you don’t count distressed sales) making 2011 the fifth year in a row that housing prices have fallen. It seems we have yet to hit bottom.

This morning the New York Times reported that five of the nation’s largest banks have agreed to a $26 billion dollar settlement that could provide relief to homeowners and could help the housing market begin to turn around (or at least to stabilize). But it’ll take more than homeowner relief to shore up the housing market according to Christopher Mayer, a housing expert at Columbia’s business school: “if you don’t do something to help the foreclosure process, it’s not going to help the housing market.” 

All of this has some people asking whether we really need to right this ship. It has people from all walks of life questioning the policy of promoting and subsidizing homeownership in America. From the growing number of renters to the baby boomers who have paid off their mortgages to the libertarian-leaning right to New York University business school professors people are beginning to ask whether it’s good national policy or whether we mightn’t be better off as a nation letting this ship sink.

To be sure, homeownership is part of the American dream, but bad policy and lack of oversight has turned that dream into a millstone around our necks. Is it possible to reconceive that dream? What would an America with a lot more renters look like? Would it spur a move away from the suburbs to central cities? Would it free us up to invest our money in other sectors of the economy? How might a move to a more renter-heavy society change the way we do economic development? 

It will be interesting to see where this housing market crisis will take us. For the last five years we’ve been trying to stop the hemorrhaging. Once we finally hit bottom, which path will we take?

Seeking Integration – an Economic Development Imperative

By Jonathan Miller, Project Associate. 

The Wall Street Journal ran an article on January 31st (“Segregation Hits Historic Low”) that addressed a pattern of increasing black-white integration in American cities since 1970. Using a common measure called the dissimilarity index, the authors measured how evenly or unevenly dispersed African Americans and whites were distributed in a given city. The index measures the percentage of one group (e.g. African Americans) that would need to move neighborhoods to create an equal dispersion among the two groups. Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston were the most integrated cities and Atlanta, while not the most integrated, showed significant gains in integrating neighborhoods.

Since the dissimilarity index can be used for any demographic dichotomy, and since I learned the technique in grad school (and thus am worthy of being published in the WSJ), I decided to do my own short-hand investigation and see whether other groups were becoming less segregated. I looked at patterns in the core 10 counties of Atlanta for Hispanics v. non-Hispanics, those with a bachelor’s degree and higher v. those without, and those in poverty v. not in poverty, between 2000 and 2010.

Index scale: 0 to 100; 0 is an even distribution (perfectly integrated) and 100 is perfect separation, everyone in the group would have to move. For example a score of 75 indicates that 75 percent of the group would have to move neighborhoods to reach perfect integration.

Results:



Perhaps most notable is that in 2010 each of the previous demographic categories shows a higher degree of segregation, than the figure of racial segregation (African American v. whites) reported for Atlanta in the same year (score of 54.1). While it’s no surprise that segregation is not exclusively synonymous with race, it’s interesting to see the degree to which segregation does still exist for groups of people not necessarily in the crosshairs of segregation study. Of course, segregation for these groups does not occur in a vacuum, but is impacted by housing prices, income, and self-sorting. It is encouraging to see decreases in segregation across the board, but it will be quite a while before this is a non-issue.

As economic development is ultimately a war for the best talent, it is increasingly important to understand what draws and what will retain young people. As young educated professionals can decide where they want to live first, and then find a job, it is vital to ensure that activity centers are vibrant, diverse, and open. High levels of segregation, along a variety of demographic attributes, works against creating the best and most desirable kinds of places.