My old – but-not-so-old friend Bill Lutz wrote to me recently about his perceptions of how local governments should pursue community engagement, and as usual he brought a perspective and ...
Hi. My name is Della, and apparently I look like this: About every other week I discover that I have totally confused someone with my business. Yesterday it was a ...
We finally have the second podcast up in our mini-series on Sustainable Economic Development, produced in partnership with MIT’s Community Innovators Lab (CoLab). This series features 14 professionals who participated ...
I’m delighted to announce a new partnership with PlannersWeb (the new online incarnation of the Planning Commissioner’s Journal) to share interviews with people who are leading us into the future of public ...
It might have something to do with me still being young enough to relate to the vibrant lifestyle of 20-somethings, but it has occurred to me that the field of ...
“This is not the planning profession John Nolen built. A century later, our great recession has sparked a full re-evaluation of what a city’s urban planning department should be ‘doing’ ...
People in Ohio tend to point to the Columbus suburb of Dublin as one of those places that has everything going for it: big houses, wealthy people, lots of high-paying ...
Just a quick note for you planning types that I’ll be doing two sessions (read: I am an idiot) at the American Planning Association’s annual conference next week in Chicago. ...
In a true display of democracy, a town hall meeting held at the New Bedford High School auditorium Monday gave the crowd of approximately 550 residents the opportunity to publicly ...
I wrote the following as a response to an ongoing debate on incentives that has been occurring on one of the LinkedIn groups that I follow. There’s been a strong ...
I’ve got a new item in the Workshop that I’d like your feedback on. My friend and collaborator Pete Mallow took an initial stab at trying to identify the types ...
Sometimes you have to force yourself to walk with your ghosts so that you know who they are. And who you are, too. I always say that I am ...
As we rethink how we do economic development, we need to give up the idea that the primary way to grow a local economy is through business recruitment. As much ...
Yesterday I wrapped up with an assertion that the speed of change in the world means that the kind of resistance to change that Aaron Renn noted in how economic ...
Ask any civic leader the number one thing they want for their town and “jobs,” economic development, is what they … http://pulse.me/s/jhGdU If you are not reading the Urbanophile, I ...
Matthew Tuerk (@matthewtuerk) tweeted at 10:15 PM on Wed, Mar 13, 2013: old, white guys http://t.co/8DpPe4nclQ #econdevREV #mansplaining Economic development as an industry has known about its “old white guy” ...
This annotated presentation comes from a training I did for the Introduction to Economic Development course hosted by the Ohio Economic Development Association last week. I had the session on ...
I’m excited today to introduce a new guest blogger, Peter Mallow. Pete’s a one of a kind. Really? Really. How many people do you know who have developed subdivisions, fought ...
I wanted to share with you a great essay from CEOs for Cities that gets at one of the issues that worries me the most: our tendency to oversimplify our ...
It’s no secret by now that Piqua, Ohio, is one of my favorite examples of a little city that consistently figures out How To Get It Done – thanks in ...
Good LinkedIn discussions are like sitting in on a dinner with bright and insightful people from all over the world (without trying to decide how to split the check). ...
I’m delighted today to launch a new podcast mini-series with MIT CoLab’s GEDI (Green Economic Development Initiative). In 2012, CoLab hosted 14 Mel King Community Fellows, mid-career professionals from across ...
One of the ongoing challenges for anyone involved in online public engagement is determining which comments on an online platform warrant a response, and which ones… well, don’t, for whatever ...
I’m delighted to introduce you to a new blogger who will hopefully be submitting to the Wise Economy. Matthew Buccelli is a recent Georgetown grad who has impressed me with ...
I’ve been looking forward to doing and sharing this interview since back before I started podcasting – and the timing couldn’t be better, because this community just won the American ...
This week’s posts are going to primarily reflect what I heard at last week’s IEDC Leadership Summit, which I think has the potential to turn out to be a sea ...
I promised a couple of folks that I would write some blog entries trying to capture what I am hearing at the IEDC Leadership Conference in Orlando. So what follows ...
This podcast features one of the speakers that I have most enjoyed lately — Kathleen Norris of the Cincinnati-based, world-oriented retail real estate consulting and brokerage firm Urban Fast Forward. ...
I’m delighted to invite you to my third training session with Mark Barbash and Jim Kinnett: Creative Financing to Help Create Economic Development. We hope you will join us for an ...
OK. So we know that economic development incentives can have some benefit, but we also know that easily become too reliant on them. We have too often viewed economic development ...
We have this deep-seated desire to believe that experts can hand us answers. We spend huge sums on consultants (the ones who claim to have 937 years of combined experience) ...
Oy. Trying to craft a cogent and fair assessment of the incentives issue and the responsibilities of those of us who care about communities is feeling like the Gorgon’s knot…you ...
We’ve been picking up the ongoing debate over economic development incentives this week, starting with insights from Bill Lutz on analyzing the results of incentives and from Kathy Dodson on ...
As I noted earlier this week, the debate over the use of incentives in economic development has been hot and heavy for most of the past month – across publications, ...
I have an longstanding obsession with understanding how decisions get made in complex environments, and how we can make better decisions in local government, non-profit and business settings. (Hey, I ...
In our first Wise Economy podcast of 2013, we’re sharing excerpts from a presentation by Ed Starkie of Urban Advisors. This presentatation was given at the Plan Build Live Neighborhood ...
2013 is starting off pretty well for Northwestern University alumni like my husband and myself. For those of you not in the US, Northwestern is a relatively small, private, intensely ...
We’re delighted to announce that our partners at Northlich, LLC won a Public Relations Society of America Blacksmith Award last week for our community engagement effort around Plan Build Live, ...
The great fun of blogging is always the feedback. But when you have thoughtful critical thinkers for readers, the way I do here, sometimes their comments shine a bright and ...
At long last, here are the annotated slides from the presentation that Peter Mallow and I did on deciphering an economic impact study and finding the key assumptions and trigger ...
Sometimes when you put your ideas out there in the world, the responses take on a life of their own. My post about the damage done to communities when we ...
Talk about fascinating… One of the most successful community development corporations in the country once has a balance sheet of zero. What do you do to help an organization like ...
![Consultant as wizard: [expletive deleted]](http://wiseeconomy.com/wp-content/themes/UltraBusiness/functions/timthumb.php?src=http://wiseeconomy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/wiz-of-oz.jpg&h=120&w=120&s=1)
It’s very hard to type and pace around fuming at the same time. I just left a session at a national conference that shall remain unnamed. I left because I ...
We have a big sleeper challenge when it comes to building small business ecosystems: for many of our communities’ most valuable workers, the very nature of being employed looks nothing ...
Peter Mallow and I did this presentation last week at the Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana regional conference of the American Planning Association — and I thought the audio might be useful for you. ...
Nothing. I’m a diehard Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn user. I know some people have ambivalent relationships with this stuff. Not me. A day without checking my Twitter feed anymore feels like a visit ...
I am so grateful for the opportunity about aweek ago to speak on strategies for building a small business ecosystem to ICANny. I was speaking to small business owners in ...
What a treat it was to interview Rebecca Maclean, mastermind behind the blog Food Me Once and editor of the Digging Deep Campaign. We had a great chat during my ...
Not sure if you can hear my own bouncing up and down through this podcast – my old friend Lara Fritts, the Executive Director of the Annapolis Economic Development Corporation, ...
Just to let you that we’ve added some speaking engagements this fall — including a special presentation next Monday, September 10 in lovely Pittsburgh, PA. Click here to see the ...
After an interesting excursion into technical wizardry over the past few weeks, the Wise Economy Podcast is finally launched. You can listen to or download mp3s here, or you can ...
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about our need to rethink how we do economic development in a world where small businesses play an increasingly pivotal role — in ...
Deep in December, it’s nice to remember Without a hurt, the heart is hollow. - “Try to Remember” (from The Fantastics) Loss sucks. We’d all rather just go on ...
A week or so ago I wrote about the tactics I used to manage a public question and answer session for an agency that was putting on this event as ...
I have the honor of being asked to become a regular contributor to PlannersWeb, the updated and interactive successor to the popular Planning Commissioners Journal. While the column I wrote for ...
Wow. As I am writing this, more than 1,500 people have read the article on strategies for managing public meetings – blowing the previous record for this site way out ...
I did an interview with WhoHub recently, which was pretty interesting… and probably tells more about me than I planned on. But you might find it fun… or even ...
We’re getting ready to launch a new addition to the Wise Economy Workshop — a podcast series that includes both readings from blogs and interviews with people who are doing ...
The other night I served as moderator for a panel discussion and audience Q&A that is part of a local organization’s efforts to update their comprehensive plan. Like many planning ...
Fall is coming, and that means…it’s time to book hotels. Here’s the current schedule of speaking gigs, conferences and other assorted fun-ness in the last quarter of 2012: ...
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. -George Orwell, Animal Farm. That might be the most uncomfortable quote many people remember from high school English. ...
Hi. My name is Della, and I work with engineers. I also married one. Anyone know of a good support group? Engineers have a unique handle on the world, ...
What is it about human character that makes it so easy for us to judge one another? It is so easy, dangerously easy sometimes, for us to assume that we ...
To continue where we left off last week, talking about small business ecosystems: When you grow a garden, you don’t build the plants out of rocks and plastic. You create ...
Writing has a funny way of not going where you planned on it to go. Yesterday I wrote about communities as human ecosystems, and the need to change how we ...
What does a community ecology need? I have been musing a lot lately over what I think is one of the most critical challenges of this era: what can we ...
I see usability. That was my dad’s favorite saying. Dad was a dedicated junk collector, a man with no hesitation about pulling things off the curb in front of the ...
Damn movie. There’s another one on the list. I learned a long time ago that I am way too good at buying into what theater people call the willing suspension ...
Just a short note today: 20 years ago, I married the best man I have ever known. We were barely out of college. Kids, almost literally. As the years go ...
This post is adapted from one titled “Salt of the station street pig and chicken” that originally appeared on the blog of a dear friend and a woman I admire. ...
Crocuses…lovely little sentiment for a blog post. But come on… how does that relate to a community? How can we actually build places that have resiliency? I’m proud to count ...
One of my favorite pictures in a plenary presentation I often give is a stock photo of a yellow crocus blooming through a melted patch in the snow. Growing ...
One of my clients found itself this week at one of those standing-on-the-precipice moment: In this project, are we creating an evolution, or a revolution? This community is well into ...
Don’t loan me a book. At least, don’t loan me a book unless you’re willing to get it back with pencil scribbles all over it. Just ask my husband. In ...
It’s a tough challenge that I keep laying out with this Wise Economy thing. If you share my belief that the realities of the world and communities around us require ...
Over two years ago I wrote down something that I called the Wise Economy Manifesto (first draft). The purpose of that statement was to try to capture the sea change ...
This article is not one of my usual sources (I hate to sound like a snot, but pink type and multiple exclamation points are usually a cue to fast forward ...
Last summer I did a webinar for Heritage Ohio on making economic arguments in favor of public policy decisions to support historic preservation and downtown revitalization. We focused primarily on ...
When you’re a woman who writes and speaks her opinions about issues, there’s a certain voice in the back of your head that pushes back any time you’re inclined to ...
The blog seems to be taking a turn toward the…I don’t know, motivational? Metaphysical? lately, with a lot of posts about making the choice to be a force for change ...
This post is edited from a musing written by my good friend Bill Lutz, who has show up in these pages before here and here. I was deeply impressed ...
Just when you think maybe you’ve been shouting into the void, it’s always great to find out that someone else gets it. J.M Goldson wrote a lovely post on her ...
Readers of this blog know that I have a deep admiration of Umair Hacque, an economist and a great writer who has done one of the best jobs I have ...
The file at the link below is an annotated version of a presentation that Craig Gossman of MSI |KKG (newly re-branded as MKSK Studios) and I gave at the Heritage ...
One of my ongoing frustrations within the public engagement practice of the Wise Economy Workshop is the assumption in some corners that good public engagement means letting people recommend or ...
I have had the privilege for the past couple of years of writing a regular column for Planning Commissioner’s Journal, a publication geared toward citizen planners and the professionals who ...
In the “Good Ideas Directly Lifted from Someone Else” Department:” Just came across these principles from the United Kingdom’s Government Digital Service. The agency makes very clear that this is ...
The following blog post from www.businessinsider.com hit my inbox a couple of weeks ago during an intensely busy period. We talk a lot in the Wise Economy world about the necessity ...
As longtime readers of this blog may recall, I have an awesome friend named Bill Lutz who is the Development Program Manager for the city of Piqua, Ohio — a ...
When I give a presentation, my slides anymore usually have more words than pictures. That’s what the presentation experts say you should do, but it means that when you download ...
I am getting ready to speak at the American Planning Conference in Los Angeles about two of my favorite topics: downtown and retail district revitalization, and online tools for public ...
For those of you attending the Ohio City-County Manager’s association presentation today, here is a link to the presentation, in case you want to follow along. Gold star for you! ...
I’ve referenced a guy named Umair Hacque on here before, and if you haven’t taken the hint and started reading his stuff yet, you should. If anyone is thinking and ...
I wanted to draw your attention to a great blog post from Otis White… As I have grappled over the years with the question of how to help communities become ...
For those of you who attended my session on public participation at the workshop, I promised to post the links to the various online public participation and planning tools that ...
I put a post on my Google+ profile this morning calling attention to an article Richard Florida did for the Atlantic. Florida does a nice job here of summarizing ...
Q: What is this flower? A: An apple blossom. It’s also the state flower of Michigan. Q: What’s this second flower? A: A Hibiscus. It’s also the state flower ...
Ah, July… I’d like to say that I haven’t blogged lately because I have been working so darn hard, but there’s too many pictures of me at a U2 concert ...
First, we need to change how we think about communities, businesses, organizations and governments. We need to understand that economic vitality depends on the health of a community, and that ...
Wise people and Wise communities make conscious choices, rather than letting circumstances make the choices for them. As people, we all allow some decisions to get made by default — ...
A wise person doesn’t only think ahead, he or she also anticipates and prepares to deal proactively with the unintended consequences of a decision. That sounds like an oxymoron – ...
A few months ago, I received a wonderful invitation from the publisher of the Planning Commissioner’s Journal to start writing a regular column. The first one appears in the Spring ...
One of the items that I have been struggling to define over the last few months is what I mean by a Wise Economy, and how that approach fundamentally differs ...
I am getting excited about the prospect of meeting you all at the Michigan Small Town and Rural Development Conference at Crystal Mountain in Thompsonville April 18-20! As I said ...
Stop it. Just stop it. Are you trying to sound like children squabbling on the playground? I know you’re going to say the other side started it, it’s not my ...
We all know that most of our local economies are in some form or another of mess. Draw the border around your town, your county, your region, your state, doesn’t ...
This post breaks all the Blogging 101 rules by actually having two purposes (ooh….don’t tell on me…). The first purpose is to encourage you to read this blog entry by ...
It’s that time of year when even the most laissez-faire of us get hit with the Set Goals bug. We all resolve (myself included) to lose more weight, eat better, ...
The article on retail incubators at the bottom of this blog entry is not new, but it’s in the file of “interesting stuff to write a blog about when it feels ...
I am delighted to announce that I am starting a new firm, which will be known as the Wise Economy Workshop. WEW will help local governments plan for bright economic ...
This post is NOT mine…. I get no credit except maybe a little editing. My friend Bill Lutz, the Community Development Director for Piqua, Ohio, has a tendency to raise ...
My post last week about whether comprehensive plans are worth doing and what goes on with them generated a lot of very thoughtful feedback, both in the blog comments and ...
Comprehensive planning gets a bad rap- one that it has partially, although not completely, deserved. In the past few years I seem to encounter more and more clients who are either trying to avoid ...
Vacations are a wonderful thing… it’s a rare occasion for me to finish a book anymore (reports, yes, books… a different situation), but thanks to a long flight I was ...
After my last post, I have been thinking a lot about how being a parent relates to planning and economic development and vice versa. For either amusement or edification (you ...
Last Saturday my kids set up a lemomade stand on the street in front of my house. I wanted to encourage them to do it for all the usual good ...
Last week, the Sacramento Bee took the city council to task for turning down a “more ambitious proposal with greater potential to transform downtown” in favor of a more modest proposal ...
I am writing this from a conference, listening to the keynote speaker, and feeling pretty discouraged. The speaker’s premise is one that I defintely support: Locally-grown businesses are critical to local ...
There was another sign yesterday that our local economies are undergoing a significant shift: Colliers reports that the market for development of new retail facilities has come almost to a standstill, ...
“Clustering” is one of those magic wizard ideas in economic development. Everyone knows that business clusters are good things, that somehow they make economies work better, but when someone asks ...
I’ve said here many times that a wise economy requires building on your assets, finding and capitalizing on the things that make your community unique, and using the precious resources ...
As the National Main Street Conference continues, I’ve been talking a lot with Eric Model of Journeys Into on SIRIUS-XM about some exciting, inexpensive opportunities to promote the things that ...
This article highlights two counties in Florida that have found a way to continue their traditional public input systems, using chat and video streaming, in a way that not only ...
Another sign of the general oversupply of retail space in the US — and the opportunities this might provide. This article highlights a couple of retail real estate developers who ...
First, thanks again to everyone who participated in the session on sustainable economic development at the APA National Conference in New Orleans. I am still shocked so many of you ...
A blog post from the Harvard Business Review (always worth seeing what the smarties are up to) makes a point about managing a job hunt, but it’s also relevant to ...
Planning Commissioner’s Journal usually finds something interesting and relevant to say, and this 2006 article by Hannah Twadell that was recently reposted remains relevant: Corridors link communities. And sometimes the ...
Joe Borgstrom of Michigan Main Street Center is one of the people that I increasingly look to for insight into what makes communities economically successful. In this blog post, Joe ...
I have become increasingly convinced that microenterprise is one of the most effective low-cost ways to build the business base, especially in disadvantaged communities. Microenterprises can make a little money ...
Here’s an idea that’s beautiful in its simplicity. Won’t work everywhere, and not a magic bullet, but it’s one of the hundreds of small good ideas that make a healthy ...
I took a couple of weeks off from the blog (and from work) to enjoy the family, spend a lot of time in the car and catch up on reading. ...
Sometimes the universe just seems to be on the same page for once. This post from the Michigan Main Street Center has been circulating the Twittersphere the last couple of ...
After my last post about the OKI Fiscal Impact Model, I received several great comments. One of them reflected on past experience with a per capita fiscal impact model in ...
We all live in boxes. We all operate on the unspoken assumption that the options available to us are constrained, are limited by something or someone. And those constraints limit ...
http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2009/11/clevelands_euclid_corridor_pro.html Truth in advertising: even after 20+ years out of the region, I am still a huge Cleveland fan (the city, I mean — I gave up on the Browns ...
My biggest difficulty in Christmas shopping (other than trying to remember which Bakugon the 7-year old said was the really wonderful one, and which one was lame), is trying to ...
Agenda 360, the Cincinnati-area initiative to catalyze regional growth, has announced a goal of creating 200,000 net new jobs in the next 10 years. A description, and a link to ...
OK, a short one for Thanksgiving eve. This graphic from N-Judah Love Song says it all — and this applies both to us individually and to our communities. Sometimes you ...
http://www.biztimes.com/news/2009/11/13/a-new-corporate-umbrella An interesting article out of Milwaukee. Not every community can have a sort of Daddy Warbucks like these three gentlemen, but what I think they have really done goes ...
I spent way too much time writing this response on ULI’s LinkedIn group to my post on seeking opportunties to not put it here, too! Charles Brenton of Brenton Associates wrote: “Seeing ...
Last week, in my Wise Economy Manifesto first draft, I wrote that a Wise Economy Looks constantly for new opportunities — and particularly seeks the unexpected ones. This idea probably comes from ...
Just found out that I’ll be speaking on sustainable economic development at the American Planning Association National Conference in New Orleans in April! Yahoo!!
Just a brief thought: I really hate having my plans disrupted — I have a sick kid right now, and the last 24 hours have been a mad chase to ...
As I discussed in this post, I have spent most of my adult life thinking about how to deal with the impacts that economic change has on the health and ...
This editorial from South Carolina’s News & Observer advocates an idea that isn’t new but is still radical: that financial incentives to recruit businesses aren’t worth it. The author, Dr. ...
My last blog post focused on one of several points made in an article at www.newgeography.com that discussed issues around Detroit’s post-industrial environment. In addition to an interesting insight into ...
This article from newgeography.com is more dense with information and ideas than I can cover in a blog post (especially a Friday night blog post!), but — and I say ...
Last year I chaired a work group focused on urban entrepreneurship for Agenda 360, a Cincinnati-region strategic planning effort. One of the issues we struggled with was, what urban communties ...
Regional government is a touchy subject at best in most places — and one likely to get you chased out of town with sharp implements in others. In Kentucky, however, ...
This link takes you to an abstract that summarizes (in nothing resembling clear language) a study that indicated a high correlation between a higher level of amenities and choice of ...
As I outlined in the last post on this topic, OKI’s Fiscal Impact Model was designed to provide every community in the OKI region with an off-the-rack option for fiscal ...
I spent a huge amount of time over the past year working with the Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana Regional Council of Governments and the University of Cincinnati School of Planning and Center for Economics ...
ICSC Latin America finds that commercial developments do better when they are “authentic.” But what does that mean?
Wow…. This article claims that more than 50% of businesses are home-based. Imagine how that changes the game for planning and economic development: How do you retain your businesses and ...
One of the biggest challenges in local government economics, and I would say one of the most important ones, is understanding the fiscal impacts of the kinds of things that get built ...
From the Downtown Idea Reporter — sorry, I don’t have the full story, but the following bit is intriguing. Who knew that the USDA would help fund a downtown parking ...
This is an interesting idea from a nonprofit planning process in Maine. I think the call-in telephone number and the boards in public places are a great idea – excellent ...
Another presentation today… this one in Indiana for APA (it’s been a very long fall!). Topic du jour was fiscal impact analysis as a tool for sustaining local communities. I ...
Here’s the link to the presentation that I did for the National Trust for Historic Preservation last week on innovative and effective public participation methods (read: no grandstanding, minimum boredom, ...
For my Ohio friends — a good training opportunity on one of the very valuable resources available to owners of historic buildings. One of the single best tools for conserving ...
This article from the Center for Rural America demonstrates a key challenge in small city redevelopment — and in any place, urban or rural, that is having trouble attracting redevelopment: ...
I get NO credit for this list… this was created by contributors to the Indiana APA listserv last Friday.. too good not to publicize! : Top 9 reasons I am ...
I am not a very dedicated “greenie” (as evidenced by amount of petroleum tied up in Legos in my house), but I think the Midwest governors might be on to ...
I started my professional life as a cultural resources consultant in northern Wisconsin (ok, that wasn’t quite the start, but it’s a long story…). During that time I had the ...
How can a place like this be fixed? That is the question that has driven my career. I grew up in a Cleveland suburb watching the rippling impacts of closing ...
