Citiwire.net

WITH MANDY BURRELL BOOTH

For Release Friday, August 3, 2012
Citiwire.net

If you want to understand the global economy, look at an aerial photo of the world at night. It is, quite literally, enlightening: Unlike typical maps, delineated by so many politically drawn boundaries and pastel tones, the world after dark sheds light on what unites us, beyond the city or suburb or state in which we live.

At night, the mega-regions of our global economy — areas like greater New York, Boston and Philadelphia in the U.S., or London, Paris and Lyon in Europe — are aglow, thanks to their interconnected cities and suburbs, highways and train lines, businesses and industries.

Along the western and southern shores of Lake Michigan, you’ll see a band of light connecting Milwaukee, Wis., Chicago, and Gary, Ind. In March 2012, the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development released a competitiveness analysis of the regional economy encompassing these three cities and their 21 surrounding counties, 470-plus suburbs and 11 million people. Their scope was informed by global investment decision-makers who view this mega-region — our region — as an economic whole.

Curiously, that’s not how we’ve traditionally seen ourselves. For many public and private sector leaders in the tri-state area this perspective — and OECD’s 300-page, tri-state review, the first analysis of its kind they’ve published on a U.S. mega-region — was a revelation, almost like seeing our region lit up, at 3,000-feet, for the first time.

Historically, we’ve bickered over stolen slices of the pie — a headquarters that moves from Milwaukee to Chicago for a tax break or a company wooed from Chicago to Indiana for similar reasons. What’s promising is that our mega-region’s leaders are starting to realize it’s not only counterproductive to snitch from a shared pie, but that we could be spending our economic development energy to bake a bigger pie to feed us all.
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WITH MANDY BOOTH

For Release Friday, July 22, 2011
Citiwire.net

At a time when all levels of government are looking to cut, cut, cut, the scarcity mindset is poisoning America. Far too many municipal, county, state and federal agencies have lost their way fighting over crumbs, wasting time, and distracting everyone from the ultimate goal: planning for the next economy.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Instead of breeding competition, scarcity is the platform from which creativity is flourishing in several clusters of Chicago suburbs. Still reeling from the housing crisis, these groups of neighboring communities are demonstrating a more optimistic and effective approach to their problems by working together across borders to rehabilitate, revitalize and re-imagine the local housing stock. They are flipping the script on scarcity by collaborating, which is allowing them to do more with less — and, in so doing, provide greater opportunities to more people in their communities.

Their collaboration is paying off — literally and figuratively. On July 11, the state of Illinois awarded $6.6 million to the Chicago Southland Housing and Community Development Collaborative, some 20-plus suburbs working together to target limited foreclosure recovery funding to areas near job centers and rail lines. Read More »

For Release Sunday, December 19, 2010
Citiwire.net

For nearly 100 years, through the 1980s, Chicago’s south suburbs were rich with opportunity. Steel mills and rail yards powered metropolitan Chicago’s economy, putting the local workforce in high demand. As the nation transitioned to a service-based economy — decades before the current Great Recession — signs of economic struggle were everywhere in the Southland: pockmarked commercial strips, abandoned factories-turned-brownfields, whole neighborhoods decimated by foreclosures.

Times were bad — but today, the Southland’s future looks brighter.

How did things turn around? Dozens of communities put aside differences, came together around shared assets like criss-crossing freight lines, and got to work on an economic revitalization strategy with support from local, state and national public and private sector partners. Read More »