How a Colorado Town Planted the Seeds for a Secret (Economic) Garden
Every day, a city or town somewhere ladles out a fat financial incentive to get a big employer from somewhere else to open a factory, office, warehouse or store that will supposedly bring hundreds, if not thousands, of jobs with it. What they should be doing, according to Christian Gibbons, is taking care of their own.
Gibbons heads up economic development for Littleton, Colorado, a town with 41,000 people and an unemployment rate that seesawed between 6.8 percent 7.2 percent through the recession. That's lower than most of the Denver metro area, which has weathered the turmoil better than most. And considering that the national rate has been just under 10 percent for most of the last couple of years, what Gibbons is doing deserves a look.
Littleton has done things differently. Since 1987, the town and Gibbons have been prime exemplars of a form of development called economic gardening, which provides information and assistance to entrepreneurs, and local companies, tries to create a city where people want to live, and eschews payoffs to out-of-towners. "We haven't offered one penny of incentives in 23 years," Gibbons says.
The Debunker wanted to know more so we posed these questions:
Q: What are some of the major misconceptions of conventional local economic development?
A: The biggest objective is to go out and get an industry to move into town, the idea being that if you bring money into town, that's the source of wealth. I essentially believe that. But if you're chasing a company that says we need a lower-cost place to do business, you're chasing a commodity business. They're only going to stay in place as long as you're cheaper. And the only way you can win doing that is to drive down your standard of living. We looked at that 20 years ago and said, 'Why would you want to do that?' We quit talking about the need to be the cheapest place to do business.
Q: So what do you talk about?
A: Part of what entrepreneurs want is a nice community to live in. Part of that is being able to provide through taxes not only the basics of good police and fire protection and streets but also a community that looks nice. So we invest in our downtown and planting flowers and putting up holiday lights. That's the kind of community high-growth entrepreneurial companies want to live in. They don't want a bare-bones community.
Q: What do you to do help local entrepreneurs specifically?
A: There's a whole set of information supports built around database research and SEO and geographic information systems -- a bunch of very corporate-level tools that we bring down to the smaller growth company. Usually if you have 20 or 30 employees you've probably never used those or even heard of them, but [entrepreneurs] can use these high-end tools to do competitive intelligence and identify markets like big corporations.
Q: What risks or limitations does economic gardening present, if any?
A: We always tell people this is not a quick answer or a silver bullet. This is not for if you lost a textile factory and have to put people back to work in six months. If you're not committed to 20 years, don't go down this road. The payoff is not going to happen in the political cycle. If people want to get elected in two years and have to create some jobs, this is not going to help.
Q: Will traditional economic development be replaced by economic gardening?
A: My personal belief is that more and more people are going to come to look at entrepreneurial support as a major portion of what they do. I'm not sure recruiting will ever go away, but it'll be a portfolio approach where you do some of each. You'll spread your bets and this will continue to grow. And I think that's the ultimate answer to our economic problems.
Mark Henricks has reported on business, technology and other topics for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, and other leading publications. Follow him on Twitter @bizmyths.
Image courtesy of Flicker user Jann Kuusisaari, CC2.0