Quality of Life and Place as Economic Development
5 Questions with Amanda Weinstein and John Austin
One of the four outcomes guiding the Reimagining the Civic Commons approach to public space investment is value creation, which we define as encouraging additional investments in neighborhoods so that they are better places for everyone to thrive. In a sense, we believe that civic infrastructure investments are powerful and meaningful to people and communities and should be prioritized as an economic development strategy.
A recent Brookings Institution research report on smaller communities seems to support our conviction, finding that investments in “quality of life and place” are more effective than many traditional economic development tools, including incentives and lower taxes. The report — authored by economist and University of Akron professor Amanda Weinstein and Director of the Michigan Economic Center John Austin — found that investments in things like schools, broadband connectivity and connections to larger metro areas helped boost smaller Midwestern communities. The research also points to the power of investments in culture and recreation, including the trails, parks, green spaces and other natural and outdoor amenities and activities that attract people and families to a particular community.
This conversation with Amanda Weinstein and John Austin has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Can you explain how and why investments in quality of life and place outperform more traditional economic development strategies in the smaller Midwestern communities you studied?
Amanda Weinstein [AW]: In the Midwest, our lakes and our rivers used to be how we transported goods, and they were instrumental in how our communities grew. As transportation costs decreased dramatically over the decades, other factors are driving the success of communities in the Midwest and around the country. Incomes have increased, which has increased demand for living in beautiful and interesting places. That means the places that are doing well economically are the places that can offer residents a nice, comfortable home and place to live in. This has been a long gradual shift away from focusing on business factors like transportation costs and towards making your community a nice place to live, which allows you to attract the skilled people that companies want.
John Austin [JA]: In the Great Lakes and Midwest region, we’ve got 10,000 miles of Great Lakes coastline, and thousands and thousands of smaller lakes and rivers. Leveraging these natural assets is a powerful economic development path. When you clean up the industrial waterfronts and create public access in multiple forms, it makes a wonderfully enjoyable community, a community that people want to live in. People want to walk along the river or the lakefront. It’s a very powerful engine for community revitalization, as our research demonstrated, to reclaim these former industrial areas and reconnect communities to the beautiful lake, the river, the waterfront.
One of the most important aspects of the research of Amanda, Michael Hicks and her colleagues is how it sheds light on our outdated, but still widely-used economic development approach. This outdated approach is all about wanting firms or businesses to locate in a particular place. It’s about being “business friendly,” having low taxes, and relaxing your business regulations. With great empirical rigor, Amanda and her colleagues have shown that if you care about things like population growth and more good paying jobs, you should care about the quality of life and quality of place attributes that make a community an enticing and attractive place.
Hopefully this research will help put the dagger in the heart of that traditional economic development mindset, which has been a dominant idea set for 50 years.
AW: That’s not to say that businesses don’t have a role to play in quality of life. It’s just a matter of a difference in focus. If you think about the businesses that make a place “nice” for us, you probably think of great local restaurants, a diner, a brewery or a winery that you love to visit. You think about the businesses in which you love to shop. We need to think about how businesses contribute to quality of life, rather than thinking about how to bring big businesses into a community and hoping that maybe quality of life will follow afterwards. It just doesn’t work that way.
Q: Reimagining the Civic Commons is working to increase investments in the design, operation and maintenance of civic infrastructure, which we define as the parks, trails, community centers, libraries and other public spaces that promote health and well-being, boost local economies and make communities safer. Can you give some specific examples from your work that help us understand why and how a network of high-quality parks, well-maintained trails and accessible greenspace make a difference to the local economy?
AW: If we look at some of the things that can contribute to quality of life, one is having more healthy days. Having more opportunities throughout our life to be healthy often involves things like parks, trails and green spaces. These are the places that allow us to be active. They also build a sense of community, something especially needed in the wake of the pandemic. These are people’s community spaces, where we can join friends and family or even meet new friends.
I have young kids. When I bring my kids to a park, it’s a place to play where we also meet people. This is a way that a lot of parents and kids make friends and get to know their community, because it’s one of the easier ways to make friends. Something that we lacked in the pandemic was this sense of community, where we could come together. Greenspaces, trails, libraries: they are the places where we can build that sense of community, which is becoming more important with our contentious political environment.
JA: I just went to an event that featured mayors from different communities. And we were talking about this very topic. Maureen Donker is the mayor of Midland, Michigan, an interior mid-sized community of 50,000 people that is the birthplace of the Dow Corporation. She talked at this event about trying to decrease their reliance on this one big industry, particularly after Dow has been bought. The Mayor says they are in a ‘war for talent,’ which is why Midland’s community leaders have worked together for years to make their community a more attractive place to live and work.
As part of this effort, they have done a whole host of things. Their public schools were always important. They have redeveloped their downtown. They have arts and cultural institutions. They have gardens, parks and outdoor amenities. In conjunction with nearby counties, they even rebranded their locale as the ‘Great Lakes Bay’ region. This is about promoting the identity of the community, the lifestyle. And it’s worked: they are a thriving mid-sized city that has managed to evolve in large part by layering in a lot of community amenities and attributes, including arts, parks, cultural institutions, libraries, and strong public schools. The sum of this makes Midland a very interesting and attractive place to be.
In the Midwest in particular, we have so many towns that were known for their one big industry. Midland is a chemical town. Grand Rapids was the furniture capital. Pittsburgh was the steel city. The evolution needed is to become a diverse, attractive, lifestyle community where people can do all sorts of things. A town’s economy can become robust when they are not relying on just one particular sector.
Q: Is there a community (or communities) you studied in your work that invested in quality of life and place, with significant improvement in economic outcomes following? What can other communities learn from them?
AW: We often think of economic development as just doing one thing. We think that if we build it, they will come. But it’s typically a lot of things. It’s broadband, it’s a great park, it’s restaurants and places to shop. It is a sustained effort to lean into the things that make a community unique. Some of the best examples are places like Madison County, Kentucky. Of the Midwestern small towns we examined, it was the smaller counties that had the highest population growth by percentage. Kentucky has a growing population. And when you start to look closely at what small Kentucky towns like Lawrenceburg and Richmond have done, it’s leaning into their unique identity. They have bourbon trails, they have leaned into distilleries, breweries, wineries, but they have especially emphasized the bourbon for which the area is known.
They are creating places around their culture. Lawrenceburg has a splash pad that has a ‘bourbon barrel’ spray water on the kids. It’s quite cute! Richmond, Kentucky has an extensive website recommending where to eat, where to shop, what to do with your kids, where to recreate, be it a lake or a water park. They will even tout places where you can shoot a gun.
Yet they started this work with leaning into this culture of bourbon. It’s what is unique to them. And these are the things that the current residents love about where they live. They have so much to do there.
JA: There are communities that thrive by integrating quality of life and place enhancements with efforts at purposeful inclusion. Communities like Troy and Hamtramck, Michigan and Fort Wayne, Indiana are thriving by being welcoming to immigrants and refugees while providing quality public services.
Troy is a small city in the economically vibrant suburbs north of Detroit, with the highest foreign-born population of any community in Michigan (more than 29 percent of all residents). The city is thriving, as a top-notch school system and Troy’s status as the safest city in Michigan make the city a destination for immigrant families, many of them highly educated. The city’s young people, whether first-generation immigrants or long-time Michiganders, benefit from growing up and attending classes with students from different backgrounds.
Marquette, Michigan, is another favorite of mine. It’s a small city, very remote, located on the shores of Lake Superior. A long time ago it was the trans-shipment point for the iron ore coming over from Duluth. It had a giant port and an historic downtown with great architecture and kind of old, cool look and feel. A long time ago Marquette wired the community for broadband, before we understood how essential that service was during COVID. The broadband allowed people to live, work, and run their businesses from Marquette.
Yet the main thing Marquette did was repurpose their long-abandoned industrial port into beautiful parks, a marina, condos, and a hotel. Today, it’s a spectacular, multiuse waterfront with so many opportunities for people. Downtown Marquette and Marquette city have been growing, just as Amanda’s research proves. There are new businesses, and more people want to relocate there because of the year-round outdoor lifestyle and great amenities. This shows that you can be a very remote community and evolve from past greatness in one sector in a new place, a place where more people are choosing to live.
Q: Do you think your findings scale up to larger cities, or is this a small community strategy? If yes, is your advice about investing in quality of life and place for larger cities the same?
JA: While it’s important for all communities, it’s particularly important for small- to medium-sized ones. Most of our bigger metros have kind of turned an economic corner, but a lot of the small- and medium-sized communities have lost their anchor employers. The investments we’ve been talking about put them on a path of opportunity to build out on their quality of life, of place as their economic development strategy, which is vital for communities that have lost their traditional employment base. They need to leverage whatever assets they have to find the way to create some new population growth and economic activity.
Q: Given the importance of civic infrastructure to local economies, why do so few policymakers prioritize these types of investments? How could more local, state and federal resources be allocated toward this?
AW: Believe it or not, these ideas are scary to many people. This is a big and dramatic shift in how we think about economic development. I’ve heard someone describe this approach as “catering to families.” Yet when most of us think about policy that caters to families, we don’t think of that as ‘economic development policy.’ Yet it absolutely is. And it is much more effective economic development than tax breaks or anything else policymakers do.
Another thing that makes this approach hard is that policy makers must get to know the people they represent, understand who they are, what drives them, and what makes their lives happier. That is more effort than just giving a business a tax break.
I hope communities can get over the “Superman” complex, where they are waiting for the company that will be the savior of the town, because that’s not what works in our economy anymore. There is not going to be someone who comes in to save your town — you are going to have to save your town. You can do that work by understanding what your neighbors like to do. It’s about making a lot of little decisions, listening to residents, focusing on quality of life. It’s on all of us already in a community to figure out how to save it.
JA: It’s also a big change from the traditional way we’ve funded economic development and government generally. Most of the time, we do not have tax dollars that can come back to a community with great flexibility, to build out a library system or to put in bike lanes or to focus resources flexibly in one area. That just isn’t the way we spend our money on infrastructure. Until recently, money for roads was money for roads and you could not use it for bike lanes or other things that people want. Moving to place-based, focused, flexible funding that communities can use based on their needs and priorities is a different way of running the public sector.
We have a colleague, Tim Bartick at the Upjohn Institute, who has demonstrated with his research that when you give away tax breaks and incentives, you’re just giving away your tax base instead of investing those funds in things that actually matter. Tim has a proposal for place-focused investments giving local communities flexible ability to invest in what they need. In Europe, they’ve had these kinds of flexible funds for years, what they call ‘cohesion policy,’ that focus resources on communities that have lost their economic anchors. In communities that have lost their traditional manufacturing employment and may be struggling, there is access to investments in place and quality of life that can help them become a more attractive community. Implementing flexible investments from the public sector that focus on communities that are in transition requires a whole new mindset.
Often it is really important for advocates of arts, parks, culture, libraries, etc. — particularly when you want to influence political leaders — to argue that investments are really about good jobs and business growth. Parks managers and librarians should grab this research and tell their leaders that “investing in us is more powerful at influencing the things you care about, like having good paying jobs and employment, and a growing population again.”
There’s a lot of creative ways to develop quality of life in place that provide multiple benefits at the same time. For example, when you lay green infrastructure, you can get a park as well. There are just all sorts of wonderful things people can do to remake the fabric of a community, to make it more attractive and have people enjoy it and love living there. This is such an important agenda and why I think a lot of people are interested in understanding it and doing more with it.
Reimagining the Civic Commons is a collaboration of The JPB Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, William Penn Foundation, and local partners.
