Subject: Economic Development

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    Sustainable Revitalization For America’s Smaller Cities

    Andre Leroux, executive director of the Massachusetts Smart Growth Alliance, believes that New England’s smaller cities hold the potential to absorb much development that could help save the region’s countryside from sprawl. But it will take some policy reforms to…

  • Van Jones: The Green House, Redux

    The Spring 2009 issue of Shelterforce ran a brief about Van Jones’ being named White House special advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation for the White House Council on Environmental Quality: the “Green Jobs Czar,” to use a more…

  • Tracking Job Creation in the Nonprofit Sector

    Rick Cohen, a long-time Shelterforce contributor and editor of The Nonprofit Quarterly’s “Cohen Report” wrote last week on the importance of nonprofits tracking their own industry’s job growth as a result of additional funding from the American Reinvestment and Recovery…

  • Tracking the Recession and the Recovery

    The Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings announced today the launch of its MetroMonitor, a tool that measures the health of 100 of America’s largest metropolitan economies. The tools aims to look “beneath the hood of national economic statistics to portray…

  • Let’s Take Advantage of The Bad Times

    With city budgets shrinking rapidly, municipal governments are desperate to collect property tax revenue wherever they can find it. So they are moving to fast-track new, large development projects that can bring an infusion of new revenue, construction jobs and…

  • Vacant Storefronts: They’re Not Just For Ghost Towns Anymore

    From the City of Millville way down in South Jersey to Morristown up in the northern state suburbs, downtowns across New Jersey are approaching alarming levels of storefront vacancies. And why? Well, you can name any number of reasons, of…

  • Fighting Wage Theft

    Monday brought the announcement of a record 70,000-plus jobs lost worldwide, from drug companies to automakers and everything in between. Meanwhile each year millions of Americans who still have jobs are having their wages stolen from them, an under-recognized epidemic…

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    Parks For Revitalization

    The image in this post, which photographer Bill Lim has made available to us through the wonder of the Creative Commons, is of the beautiful Martin Luther King, Jr., memorial water sculpture in San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens. As we…

  • Will The Creative Class Fly Back?

    Perhaps this is a pointer to where America’s recovery will come from. Some of the less fashionable parts of the country may quietly get on with the business of growing. Places like Chattanooga. And like Buffalo, New York, which did…

  • Walt Weighs In On The Economy

    So this is weird: December 5 is Walt Disney’s birthday and I get these two separate Disney things in the e-mail from different people but not entirely unconnected—both relate to our precarious economy. The first to arrive was the blog…

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    Infrastructure Woes or Opportunities?

    Anyone who has wasted hours each day commuting to work, sat in traffic for an hour as a freight train inched by, waited endlessly for a bus only to have four arrive at once, or paid a week’s wages for…

  • Will Financial Crisis Lead to Hard Times for Nonprofits?

    With congressional leaders reaching an agreement Thursday afternoon on the president’s proposal to pump $700 billion into the country’s financial system, it’s not yet clear how corporations and foundations will change their policies in giving grants and gifts. However, if…

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    A Green Job Renaissance?

    Even decades after de-industrialization and outsourcing decimated the once-solid, well-paid, empowered blue collar union workforce of the Midwest, jobs are still being lost by the hundreds or thousands as industries tighten their belts or close up shop altogether—from the auto…

  • Investing in Communities Key to Obamanomics

    With the Dems convening in Denver, the New York Times Magazine offered us David Leonhardt’s review of ‘Advanced Obamanomics’ on Sunday, August 24. In light of the Obama campaign re-launching his urban agenda today, it is timely to consider economics…

  • Baltimore: What The NYT Didn’t See Fit to Print

    Editor’s Note: The sixteenth and seventeenth paragraphs of this post have been revised to clarify the controversy over the two research studies mentioned. Johns Hopkins has a complex and mixed relationship with the mostly black residents of the east Baltimore…

  • With Rising Property Taxes, Should Non-Profits Now Pay Their “Fair Share”?

    It’s tight here in New Jersey. And it’s because it’s crowded. With 8.7 million people, we are 11th in the country in population, but first in population density in the Union with over 1,100 people per square mile. We’re also…

  • The Governor’s Budget Non-strategy

    It wouldn’t be surprising to see non-Californians still do a double-take when the title “Governor” is applied to former on-screen cyborg Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was admittedly a lot weirder at the beginning here for us, but we’re mostly over it…

  • Tuscany, Barcelona, Croatia… the Rust Belt?

    This weekend, the New York Times suggested Pittsburgh as a destination (for at least 36 hours) alongside these locales, and as of my writing this post, the article remains the most popular in the paper’s travel section. This isn’t the…

  • Inclusive Growth, Identity, Poverty-Alleviation, and Freedom

    I am writing from India, where last week a small but significant convening took place. Some 250 experts (business leaders, academics, and other thinkers) from 25 countries came together for a two-day conference in Mumbai, India, titled The Responsibility to…

  • Crackdown Rocks Real-Estate Industry

    The Federal Bureau of Investigation announced today that the Justice Department has indicted more than 400 defendants in 144 mortgage fraud cases. The indictments, part of a sting operation that began on March 1, was designed to “combat the threat…

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