Editor’s Note: This article appeared in the September/October 2023 issue of the Michigan Planner. The Michigan Planner magazine is delivered six times per year to members of the Michigan Association of Planning, the Michigan Chapter of the American Planning Association.…
There’s a lot of attention right now on the state’s population. We’re not attracting and retaining enough young people, our workforce is aging, and our economy is sputtering. In response to these challenges, the governor has formed the Growing Michigan…
Now is the time to make fundamental change in the state’s economic development playbook. What we have been doing has not worked. Michigan's per capita income has fallen from around the national average at the turn of the century to…
Conventional wisdom has it that big cities are dead. This time the cause of their predicted demise is the pandemic. It is widely believed that since you can now work from home combined with a long-lasting fear of crowded places…
For years we ended our presentations with a slide that said Michigan must get younger and better educated or we will get poorer. Where younger meant a place where Michigan was retaining those who grew up here and attracting mobile…
The 2010s were a great decade for America's big cities. The 2020 Census found that each of the top 25 cities in the country gained population. 14 of them had population growth of more than 100,000. New York City led…
More than a decade ago we asked if the state's economic development strategy worked, what state would you want Michigan to look like? Our answer was Minnesota. At the time the most prosperous state in the Great Lakes. And cold…
The Atlanta BeltLine is explicitly deigned to both improve the quality of life of current city residents and to attract new residents to the city, particularly mobile young professionals. This dual purpose is how placemaking should be done everywhere. The…
This post is about what good-paying jobs focused economic development should look like. About what it takes to grow, retain and attract high-wage jobs. It draws lessons Michigan can learn about winning in the 21st Century from our posts on…
One can make a strong argument that Denver is the American region that has understood best the new reality that talent attracts capital. And because it has Denver is one of the regions best positioned to win economically in the…