Over the past two months, we have been engaged in a conversation about the future of jobs with economic development practitioners at the TEDC and IEDC conferences.

Now, we’d like to create an open forum to continue this dialogue beyond the conference setting. In the comments section of this post, you’re invited to respond to the following questions, or pose additional questions for your peers.

How will the “future of jobs” change how you approach economic development?

What mechanisms have you created to support corporations and freelance workers in your community?

Below you’ll find a video of Jon’s recent IGNITE presentation from IEDC’s Leadership Summit in San Antonio. The IGNITE structure allows speakers 5 minutes total to present in the form of 20 slides, with 15 seconds per slide. A brief overview of the presentation follows the slide show.

The Future of Jobs from GIS Planning on Vimeo.

This is a discussion about the future of jobs. The idea of what a job is has changed throughout history (and continues to change). Farmers and craftsmen have always had trades, or livelihoods. Since the industrial revolution, a fundamental shift in the nature of jobs has occurred; individuals are employed by entities (corporations) and in return for their labor (9-5), they are compensated (wages) and receive benefits (healthcare, etc.). When unemployment is high, as it has been in the aftermath of the recent recession, we must ask ourselves who should create jobs: the public sector? the private sector? Can the economy continue to grow, even if jobs are not being created? (answer: yes).

The economy grows when value is created. Corporations can create value by increasing productivity (but not necessarily increasing employment), and independent contractors can create value outside of a traditional employee-employer relationship. If we take this thought experiment to its logical extreme, could there be corporations without people on the horizon? Will trade guilds become an organizing structure for independent contractors in a variety of professions?

If jobs are no longer the most useful or accurate measure of economic development success, how can practitioners best promote economic vitality in their communities? Are there mechanisms by which cities, regions, and states can offer resources to corporations and freelancers that will support their ability to create value, regardless of hiring trends or employment status?

We invite you to participate in this conversation in the comments section below.

via Morning Edition, NPR

As the Mayor’s Conference takes place in Washington D.C., city governments are dealing with severe problems at home — from high unemployment to funding cuts. Steve Inskeep talks to Mick Cornett, the Mayor of Oklahoma City, about how his city has managed to avoid some of these problems.

via NPR Planet Money


In his latest New York Times Magazine column, Adam Davidson writes, “mobility has reached its lowest level in recorded history…This suggests, among other things, that people aren’t packing up for new economic opportunities the way they used to.”

To continue the discussion, we asked two demographic experts on different sides of the debate – Joseph P. Ferrie of Northwestern University and William H. Frey of the Brookings Institution – to answer the following question:

Have Americans lost the economic incentive to move?

William Frey’s response:

In a recent campaign stump speech, Presidential candidate Mitt Romney testified, “I believe in freedom. I believe in liberty. I believe in an opportunity society.” I was waiting for him to next say, “and I believe in the right for Americans to move any place, anytime to achieve their goals.” He didn’t say that, but high migration levels surely have done much to keep our economic engine humming – compared with the more stagnant levels in Europe and Japan.

Of course, migration, both short distance and long, hit historic low points in the last four years (I summarized the trends here and here).

Does this mean that we are on our way to economic stagnation, which will keep large numbers of our work force perpetually stuck in place? I don’t think so.

Migration rates have certainly declined since the 1950′s, when we had a younger (and thus more mobile) population, and renters were buying GI-Bill financed homes. Since then, the population has became older, more settled into owned homes, and dual earner couples proliferated. The nation’s shifting demography made us a little more sedentary. But this does not mean that opportunities became less available to young people or that they were less likely to migrate to take them.

As late as 2005, a healthy 29 percent of twenty-somethings changed residences annually. Migration driven population booms occurred in dozens of Sunbelt metropolitan areas, attracting workers of all skill levels.

What happened next was the triple tsunami of a bursting housing market bubble, a financial crisis, and the Great Recession. Potential movers, especially young people, were unable to finance a new home, sell their old one, or obtain a job. Many young adults are stuck in place, living with their parents, putting off marriage, and remaining underemployed.

We are certainly in an economic mess, which may keep part of a generation from moving on with their lives. But when the economy does pick up, there will be a pent-up demand for migration among these young people and the next generation. It’s in our national DNA. And it won’t necessarily follow an education-based mover stayer divide. Hispanics and Asians of all skill levels will contribute mightily to our labor force, as they disperse around the country.

Still, it’s probably true that Mitt Romney’s unfettered capitalism will need some assistance from the government toward training this next generation for the jobs they move to take.

Have Americans lost the economic incentive to move?

Joseph Ferrie’s response:

In the 1830s, the extraordinary mobility of the U.S. population was noted by Alexis De Tocqueville: “[M]illions of men are marching at once toward the same horizon…Fortune has been promised to them somewhere in the west, and to the west they go to find it.” How did we get from there – a nation perpetually in motion – to here – a nation seemingly stuck in place?

The population’s movement peaked in the late nineteenth century. Why? The simple answer is the movement of the western frontier. It left in its wake nascent urban centers, sites that could process and ship farm products to the east and import manufactured goods back to the west. These communities ranged from small towns to great cities that sprang up almost overnight. Chicago is the most dramatic example: its population grew from 4,500 in 1840 to more than 500,000 in 1880. Population growth this rapid provided enormous opportunities for potential migrants. They easily obtained jobs in factories, warehouses, and city offices. At the same time, the U.S. was a place with substantial differences across regions in the products and industries, providing migrants a range of choices in destinations that modern movers no longer see before them.

One lesson that can be drawn from this look backward at past U.S. migration is that geographic mobility and economic mobility were closely linked for much of the nation’s history. The US had exceptionally high rates of economic mobility in the nineteenth century, compared to older European countries. The second is that going forward, geographic mobility will be less closely linked to economic mobility. The U.S. has become more economically homogenous. Americans now experience, if anything, somewhat less income mobility across generations than many Europeans.

This is unfortunate in at least one respect: it makes the route to economic mobility today considerably less forgiving than it was in the past. In the nineteenth century, an ambitious son or daughter could see their income rise simply through the act of changing location, an investment that could be made until well into their adult years. Today, by contrast, education is the route to advancement, but educational investments are already largely determined by the time individuals have reached their early twenties. Economic mobility and the “American Dream” of a better tomorrow are, if not dead, at least a great deal more elusive than they were in the past, when a train ticket to Chicago was virtually all it took to make a big step up the economic ladder.

via The Baltimore Sun


Baltimore Inner Harbor from Federal Hill – photo by ktylerconk on Flickr

Frustrated by Maryland’s high rate of health disparities, state leaders are proposing a new attack — one more commonly associated with economic development. Gov. Martin O’Malley’s 2012-2013 budget will include funding to create Health Enterprise Zones, where doctors and community groups in areas with large health disparities, such as Baltimore, could add medical and support services for minorities. Tax credits and other financial incentives would be available to spur interest.

The plan is designed to save lives and healthcare dollars, according to Lt. Gov. Anthony G. Brown, who last summer formed a work group on disparities led by Dr. E. Albert Reece, dean of the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

“Maryland has world-class hospitals, top medical schools and one of the highest rates of primary-care physicians per capita, and yet we continue to see disparities in health care and outcomes among Maryland’s racial and ethnic communities. It’s clear that a lack of access to primary care in many communities is a significant factor driving these disparities,” Brown said, adding that funding is in the governor’s budget proposal, which has yet to be released.

According to state and national data, the disparities are many: In Maryland, the infant mortality rate among blacks is almost three times that for whites, the incidence of new HIV infections among blacks is almost 12 times that of whites, and Hispanics are more than four times as likely not to have health insurance as whites. Moreover, nearly twice as many African-Americans suffer from diabetes as whites, and hospital admission rates were three times higher for blacks with asthma and 41/2 times as high for blacks with hypertension. Treating such illnesses is costly, according to the work group, which cited data showing nearly $230 billion in direct medical costs could have been saved from 2003 to 2006 if there were no racial and ethnic health disparities.

The proposed program would work something like economic enterprise zones, where businesses receive subsidies to create jobs and activity in certain areas. The health zones program would be a pilot, available in two or three geographic areas. New and existing primary-care practitioners could receive loan assistance repayment; income, property or hiring tax credits; and assistance in installing health information and other technology. Subsidies would be capped, likely in the tens of thousands of dollars. Local health departments might get involved in recruiting participants.

Brown said he would push to expand the program statewide if it proves successful in a couple of years — not a given, considering the logistical and cultural complexity of the problems. For example, residents of some neighborhoods don’t have easy access to grocery stores that sell fresh fruit and vegetables, or don’t visit the doctor until there is an emergency. Reece said many groups have tackled disparities, but the work group wanted to focus its attention on chronic diseases responsible for 80 percent of health costs. They drilled down to a few key maladies that often have “ripple” effects. They include diabetes, hypertension and asthma.

“We decided to identify … areas where we thought we could make an effective impact within a reasonable time frame,” he said. The health enterprise zones approach is unique, he believes. Work group members got the idea from a similar program built around children’s needs in the community of Harlem in New York City. Program applicants are likely to come predominantly from rural and urban area where disparities are most pronounced.

In Baltimore, studies show a 20-year gap in life expectancy between upper-income, predominantly white neighborhoods and poorer, predominantly minority neighborhoods. Recently, city health department officials began working with community leaders in 55 neighborhoods to identify the most pressing health needs and develop plans to tackle them. The state’s zones would complement these efforts, Reece said. His work group also proposed other elements to promote health and track outcomes.

The group suggested Health Innovation Prizes with small financial rewards and public recognition for individuals and groups that improve health and well-being in their community. The group also recommended tracking disparity data for programs that already exist for primary care physicians and hospitals. Incentives and penalties assessed through these programs could eventually be linked to disparities.

Reece said the prize and the enterprise zones are two things Maryland can do now to help reduce disparities in a few key geographic and health areas. If legislation to create the zones is passed during the current legislative session, the details will be worked out by the state Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
Already, Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein, department secretary, supports the move: “The creation of Health Enterprise Zones will help communities target resources to have the most powerful impact.”

meredith.cohn@baltsun.com

By Bryan Walsh
via time.com

The solar panels sparkle on the rooftop of HelioVolt’s 12,000 sq m manufacturing facility. Inside, an elaborate line of printing machines, lasers, chemical baths and ovens — with help from the occasional white-coated human being — transforms a sheet of glass less than a centimeter thick into a solar module in just over two and a half hours. The sheets are a far cry from the thick, polysilicon-based photovoltaic panels that still dominate the solar market. HelioVolt manufactures thin-film solar panels, so called because the modules are made by depositing an ultra-thin — a few micrometers at most — layer of the photovoltaic chemicals copper, indium, gallium and selenide directly onto a glass backing. Compared with conventional modules, the engineering and manufacturing processes are more complex, and thin-film panels are less efficient at converting sunlight to electricity. But their lower cost has many in the solar world — like HelioVolt CEO Jim Flanary — convinced that thin-film panels are the way to go as the industry matures. “If you can do this really cheaply and really quickly, you’ve got a winner,” says Flanary as he leads a walkthrough of HelioVolt’s pilot plant. “We want to scale up as soon as we can.”

It’s not just the how of HelioVolt that makes it unusual in the solar space; it’s also the where. The company isn’t based in southern San Francisco or Boulder, Colo., or the Boston area — the bright green regions that tend to lead the national conversation on clean tech. HelioVolt calls the Texas state capital of Austin home. B.J. Stanbery, the solar veteran who founded HelioVolt in 2001, is a native Texan who got his bachelor’s degree at the University of Texas just down the road from the company’s factory, but he kept his business in Austin for more practical reasons. “The manufacturing skills that workers have here are directly transferable to a thin-film solar company like us,” he says. “And the business culture is attractive here because people are used to taking risks in the energy space.”

Of course, when people think about the energy space in Texas — home to wildcatters and J.R. Ewing of television’s Dallas fame — they probably picture oil rigs and natural gas wells. The current governor of Texas, after all, is the far-right-leaning Rick Perry, who made it known early in his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination that he was a climate-change skeptic. “I do believe that the issue of global warming has been politicized,” Perry told voters in New Hampshire in August. “I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects.”

But as politically conservative as Texas tends to be, it’s kept an open mind on renewable energy, which is one reason more wind power has been installed in the state than anywhere else. And within Texas, Austin has always been an outlier: a fairly liberal college town that has managed to marry high tech with hipster culture. Now that’s paying off in the renewable-energy sector, as Austin contends with Silicon Valley as a top clean-tech hub. The city is home to dozens of green start-ups like HelioVolt, many funded by homegrown venture capitalists. Some 15,000 Austin residents are employed in the broader green economy, and the municipal utility, Austin Energy, has pledged to get 35% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020. Over the past eight years, the number of clean-tech jobs has grown more than twice as fast in the Austin metro area as it has in San Francisco. With its background in information technology, Austin is set to take the lead in one of the most exciting areas in clean tech: the marriage of new energy technology with the Internet. “Austin is already a high-tech city,” says Jose Beceiro, the director of clean energy at the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce. “Now it’s becoming a clean-tech city.”

Keeping It Weird

For Austin, high tech had to come before clean tech. The city has long been a science-and-technology hub, thanks to the presence of the sprawling main campus of the University of Texas, with a student body of 50,000. In the mid-1980s one of those students was Michael Dell, who founded his eponymous computer company in a University of Texas dorm room before moving Dell to a sprawling campus north of Austin. Around the same time, the federal government and U.S. semi-conductor manufacturers launched a research consortium — based in Austin — called Sematech, pooling public and private investment to compete with Japan, which was threatening to dominate the semiconductor industry.

Sematech and Dell helped create a high-tech boom in Austin through the 1990s, luring tens of thousands of talented engineers who came for the jobs and stayed for the Austin lifestyle — best exemplified by the metastasizing South by Southwest festival, an annual pilgrimage of the hip that brings together music, film and interactive media. “It’s a great place to live, and that matters in this industry,” says Brewster McCracken, the executive director of Pecan Street, a smart-grid research project in Austin.

So as clean tech began to heat up in the early part of the past decade, Austin was a logical place for start-ups and entrepreneurs to set up shop. An experienced technical workforce was already available, ready to shift from manufacturing computer chips to building solar panels. SolarBridge Technologies, which makes microinverters that improve the efficiency of solar modules, spun off from the University of Illinois, but when it came time to scale up, the company picked Austin over other clean-tech hubs like the Bay Area and Boston. “We like the entrepreneurial ecosystem, and there’s just a ton of talent here that you can’t get in Illinois,” says Joe Scarci, SolarBridge’s vice president of marketing. “It’s a great place to recruit.”

This is how industry clusters build: companies come for the employees, and they in turn attract more capital, more workers and more start-ups. That critical mass of innovation is one reason SustainLane Government, a network for green business, has ranked Austin the top city in the U.S. for clean-tech incubation. Austin-based green start-ups can also count on help from the University of Texas and the city government. The Clean Energy Incubator at U.T. supports young green start-ups, providing some initial seed money and holding networking events that can connect entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. The Texas Clean Energy Park — a public-private program in Austin — provides facilities and training for the smallest clean-tech start-ups.

Clean tech, however — much more than information technology — is still dependent on direct government policy, subsidies for renewable power and regulations that mandate energy efficiency and greener buildings. And that’s where Austin’s progressive-leaning politics — Barack Obama received 64% of the vote here in 2008, even as Republican John McCain handily won Texas — pay off. The presence of the university, the slacker subculture of the 1990s and the influential live-music scene has helped make the city, whose unofficial motto is “Keep Austin weird,” far more liberal than most in Texas. Austin has more 100%-green-powered businesses than any other city in the country, and all the municipal government’s electricity comes from renewable sources. Consumers and businesses can receive handsome rebates for installing more energy-efficient appliances and photovoltaic systems — all of which means that clean-tech companies can come to the city knowing there’s a built-in market for their products. “The city here does an excellent job of supporting green tech,” says Bill Sims, CEO of the biofuel company Joule Unlimited, which recently opened a pilot plant in Austin.

But perhaps the single biggest factor behind the greening of Austin is an institution that in most cities stands in the way of clean tech: the utility. Because the city of Austin owns its utility — and because politically progressive Austin residents have shown support for renewable power — Austin Energy has more latitude for experimentation than most of its counterparts around the U.S.

Nowhere is that clearer than in the Pecan Street project, a pioneering smart-grid research and demonstration program based in Austin’s historic Mueller neighborhood. Pecan Street is a collaboration between Austin Energy, the Environmental Defense Fund, the city of Austin and the university, with much of its financing provided by the 2009 federal stimulus bill. The study is detailing energy and water use at the residential level, gathering data that most utilities barely have a handle on. The Pecan Street project, which is also experimenting with residential solar energy and electric vehicles, aims to use that information to create a smarter and more efficient grid, one that is far less wasteful than the rickety power systems throughout the U.S. And it’s something that could have only happened in Texas, where deregulation has forced utilities to compete for profits by investing in technologies that help their customers use less energy. The transition hasn’t been perfect. Some consumers complain about higher costs, and there have been unexpected blackouts. But deregulation does free up utilities to experiment. “Getting this data is the first step to figuring out how to be really efficient,” says Pecan Street’s McCracken. “And Austin is the place where we can get that done.”

With its mix of high tech and clean tech, Austin is well positioned to take advantage of the next major phase in green development: the energy Internet. Ubiquitous digital connection has helped transform the way we communicate and the way we work, but most of us are barely aware of how we use energy. The energy Internet can change that. Green software start-ups like Austin-based Incenergy have developed online energy-management systems that allow building owners to remotely manage smart thermostats, reducing wasted heat and air-conditioning. Companies like Tendril are bringing that capacity to the residential level, creating home energy networks that will enable us to control our energy use as intelligently as we now control our digital video recorders. And the Pecan Street project is the perfect place to test some of these new technologies on a connected and greener-than-average populace. “A lot of my prospective customers are here,” says Jim Balthazar, explaining why he moved his clean-tech start-up Nuventix from Atlanta to Austin. “And he who has the money makes the rules.”

So what could go wrong? Austin faces the same challenges the larger clean-tech sector is confronting: a drying pool of venture capital, the forbidding cost of scaling up and the uncertainties around national climate policy. But the city’s biggest obstacle might be the man who lives in the governor’s mansion in the heart of Austin: Rick Perry. If Perry — or just about any of the other climate-change-doubting Republican candidates on the campaign trail — were to win the White House, it’s hard to see much support for clean tech surviving the budget ax. But even if that happens, Austin may well endure. This is a city that takes pride in going against the grain — and doing things itself. “I’m a native Texan, and I know about the entrepreneurial spirit here,” says HelioVolt’s Stanbery. “People believe that if you want to do well, you need to work hard.” That’s an ethic clean tech will need in the difficult days ahead.

By Adam Tamburin
via the Leaf Chronicle

The Industrial Development Board is working to send quality applicants to a job fair that could bring more than 500 jobs to Clarksville.

The IDB met Wednesday morning and spent some of the meeting singing the praises of Agero, a roadside assistance company that is planning to build a call center and hire more than 500 people in either Clarksville or Florence, S.C.

Agero is holding job fairs in both cities to assess the quality of the workforce before deciding on a site later this month.

The fair in Clarksville will take place Jan. 17 and 18 from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the Hilton Garden Inn. Florence’s fair attracted about 3,000 hopefuls.

Rod Kirk, IDB’s assistant vice president of economic development, said the organization is looking beyond sheer numbers.

“We’re taking a little different approach,” Kirk said. “I think South Carolina was more of a quantity approach.”

Kirk said some attendees will be prescreened through the Clarksville-Montgomery County Career Center to ensure a high quality of the applicants, while others would be walk-in attendees.

“We really feel like we’re going to touch a lot of folks,” Kirk said of the group’s attempts to publicize the event. “Hopefully we’ll get a great turnout.”

Kirk said 19 Agero officials, including 15 recruiters, would come to the fairs next week. Agero is slated to decide on a site by Jan. 24, Kirk said.

In other businesses, the board approved IDB Executive Director Mike Evans’ request to extend an agreement with Panattoni Development Company that gives it an option to develop on land in the Clarksville Business Park.

The market turned south soon after the option agreement was made, Evans said, making a new development harder to justify.

Now, he said, the company is doing an analysis that could lead to a final decision. “I’m of the opinion that, give us another 30 days to look at it and we’ll come back with a plan for this board,” Evans said.

The board also approved Evans’ request to enlist TIP Strategies to do an updated labor and workforce assessment that would provide a profile of the area’s workforce. That profile could be used to attract new businesses and developments, Evans said.

Evans said the $50,000 for the assessment would come from Aspire Clarksville, a foundation made up of private investments within the Economic Development Council.