Twenty-five years ago, when I first started writing about economic development, the governors of seven states went on The Phil Donahue Show — the premiere daytime talk show of its time — begging General Motors to build the assembly plant for its brand-new Saturn brand in their state.

It was, to put it bluntly, a pretty pathetic excuse for an economic development campaign. Even though auto assembly plants don’t literally have smokestacks, this was a pretty stark example of politicians trying to find a short-cut to economic success through the standard technique of “romancing the smokestack” — wooing some out-of-town business in hopes that they will come to town. I always counted the Donahue show as the lowest point in the history of American economic development — especially since none of the seven states got the plant.

At least the Donahue show seemed like the low point until earlier this year, when Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland made a YouTube music video begging basketball star LeBron James to re-sign with the Cleveland Cavaliers. The YouTube music video managed to trivialize both the economic development goal and the means by which that goal is pursued. Somehow a talk show seems almost statesmanlike compared to a music video. And have we sunk so low that the holy grail of economic development is not an auto assembly plant but an individual basketball player? Not that it much mattered. In the end, making a music video didn’t work any better than going on a talk show. The Saturn plan went to Tennessee — at least until GM killed the brand last year — and LeBron went to Florida.

If the humorous failures listed above teach us anything, it is this: There is no magic bullet for prosperity. You can’t just romance the smokestack and hope to succeed, especially in the long run. But there are ways to maximize the chances of enduring success.

The fact that some communities are prosperous and some are not is hardly an accident. In large part, success is the result of deliberate effort on the part of business organizations, nonprofit entities such as research institutions and universities, and — yes — government agencies to nurture the growth and sustainability of particular businesses and particular types of economic activity in particular locations.

There’s nothing new about this. For thousands of years, cities and regions have prospered when they have grabbed emerging economic opportunities and found ways to make sure the economic benefit flows toward them. Sometimes these efforts have been mostly private — as when the Columbian Rope Company, in the midst of the Depression, set up a research lab in my home town and hired my grandfather, a chemistry professor, to run it. Sometimes these have been mostly public — as when the Erie Canal was built by New York State and the interstate highway system was financed by the federal government. And sometimes these efforts have been a combination — as when Congress subsidized the private construction of the transcontinental railroad.

But in the last couple of decades, the activist role of local and regional players has become more evident. Silicon Valley is part of a worldwide economic elite largely because of the presence of Stanford University and the way entrepreneurs have leveraged Stanford’s presence. Dallas and Denver are major cities largely because civic and political leaders built enormous airports — what one former Dallas mayor called “the port to the ocean of the air” — at a time when nobody else was doing so. Pittsburgh continues to prosper — despite the departure of its steel mills and a steady decline in population — because it has reinvented its economy over and over again.

These places are prosperous specifically because they have not tried to romance the smokestack into town. They know that prosperity isn’t dependent on one company or one plant or one person. Prosperity — especially the kind that endures for decades — emerges from a carefully constructed ecosystem that nurtures and sustains skilled labor, innovative entrepreneurs, research breakthroughs, and well-capitalized start-ups. In other words, great cities, large and small, are powered by great prosperity, and the smartest cities — just like the smartest businesses — understand that they have to continually plow the fruits of their prosperity into sustaining and reinventing themselves.

It’s a mysterious process, but it’s pretty miraculous when it works. And it’s a lot more sustainable than pinning your hopes on a basketball player.

William Fulton is the Mayor of Ventura, California, and a principal in the planning consulting firm of Design, Community & Environment (www.dceplanning.com). This article is excerpted from his new book, Romancing The Smokestack: How Cities And States Pursue Prosperity [http://www.cp-dr.com/]

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For half a century, Americans have been pounded with the message: “To get a good job, get a good education.” For people like me, who came of age in the Rust Belt in the ’70s, this meant only one thing: Go to a four-year college, get a white-collar job, and get out of the factories. This was a big change from the world of our parents. For them, economic security meant unionized semi-skilled factory jobs. For us, economic security meant bailing from the factory before it shut down and joining the white-collar workforce.

But now it’s 2010, and white-collar jobs aren’t the ticket any more. Every day, more and more college-educated workers in America lose their job to “outsourcing” –especially to India, Ireland, and Eastern Europe, all of which have an abundance of highly educated English speakers capable of doing white-collar work.

So do you still need a good education to get a good job? Yes. But what is a good education? And what kind of good education will lead to a good job?

Forty years after my generation grappled with it, this question is being revisited–especially with President Obama’s emphasis on strengthening community colleges. And the answer appears to be this: Academic learning still matters, but it’s not enough. To get a good job, a lot of people need a good technical education as well. They need to have practical, problem-solving knowledge that they can put to use in the real world.

There are still factory jobs around–10 percent of all American jobs are in manufacturing–but factory workers today are highly skilled employees who work in a fast-paced environment where they have to be able to think on their feet. The same is true in what might be considered the factories of the service economy–hospitals, for example, where nurses and their aides must make decisions in real time that could have life-or-death results.

Even America’s innovation factories–the research institutions that generate new products–require highly skilled personnel with technical training, not just the research superstars that everybody’s always talking about. For example, at Amgen, the largest biotech company in the world and also the largest private employer in the county where I now live, it takes many skilled lab technicians to support each superstar researcher.

The “green-collar” jobs at places like Amgen are especially important. Every city and state wants an Amgen–a large and profitable research-oriented company spinning off products, profits, and wealth. But this kind of “creative class” economic development strategy falls apart if the research superstars don’t have a well-trained, hard-working cadre of technical employees to help them out.

Technical education is also especially important to people of color who come from families with modest backgrounds–a group that makes up the majority of people entering the American workforce today. Technical jobs requiring a high level of technical education provide the best hope for well-paying, stable jobs for the emerging workforce.

In other words, the path to economic security no longer leads to college–at least not the traditional four-year college that was supposed to deliver you to a white-collar job. The path to economic security, especially for the working class and children of immigrants, leads to a community college, where you can get a combination of academic education and technical jobs skills.

Yet the academic education that produces white-collar workers remains highly valued, while the technical education that offers people the knowledge and skills to take the new jobs is still looked down upon. Major state universities get lots of money; community colleges, which provide most of the technical training, don’t. This may be a vestige of the 1970s, or it may simply be the result of the fact that virtually all people involved in higher education themselves are products of the white-collar, four-year-degree factories.

Obama’s emphasis on community colleges is welcome, because this is where technical education is best provided. I myself went to a community college, and now I’m proud of our local “Ventura Promise” program, which provides one year of free education to any high school graduate from Ventura who goes to Ventura College, our local two-year institution. But in most places, money remains an issue. Given the struggles that states have today, it’s hard to imagine how they can give priority to both major research universities and community colleges.

Increasingly, big employers, frustrated that the public education system can’t deliver the workers they need, actually are funding technical education through community colleges. Bluegrass Community College, for example, has a campus on the grounds of Toyota’s big assembly plant in Georgetown, Kentucky. As a technical training center, it looks a lot more like a factory floor than it does a conventional classroom.

The future of education will probably look more like Toyota’s idea of a classroom than a state university’s idea. Or at least it ought to—if American educators follow the economy and focus on technical education as well as academic learning.

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Portland is often held up as such an outstanding model of urban planning–and one that is so difficult to replicate–that you might think it’s somehow different from other cities. But let’s face it: Portland is like any other U.S. city. There are freeways and subdivisions and confusing arterials and big malls and stupid little strip centers.

But there is also a remarkable downtown, a fabulous set of close-in neighborhoods, a remarkably large and diverse transit system for a city Portland’s size, and an emerging ethic that is comfortable with being an urban place.

Rather than simply thinking there’s no way to copy Portland–or that all cities must slavishly follow the Portland model–it’s worth thinking about Portland’s DNA. Why does Portland do things–and do them successfully–that a lot of other cities can’t seem to do?

After a visit to Portland last week, I’d say there are six important lessons to learn from Portland. The important thing is to apply the lessons to your own town, and not try to recreate Portland.

1. Portland has great raw material

Although it’s only a half-million people, Portland has a huge downtown core, a large industrial area now being revitalized (the Pearl District), and all kinds of civic endowments from the wealth-building years as a timber capital–such as, for example, many older parks in the central part of the city and a fabulous stock of older buildings. The lesson here is not to try to create buildings or neighborhoods like Portland’s, but to understand what your raw material is and use it to your best advantage.

2. They’re not afraid to just build stuff

Portland’s aerial tramway.
(Photo courtesy of CA Planning & Development Report)

Since my last visit seven years ago, Portland has built the aerial tramway from the South Waterfront (the flats just to the south of downtown) to the Oregon Health Sciences University campus on Marquam Hill. No other city in the United States except New York has ever even tried to build such a tram, and the Portland project was plagued by secretiveness, political controversy, 1,000% cost overruns, and neighborhood opposition. In the end, they built it anyway–and it is now the key to keeping the city’s largest employer in Portland and an anchor for a series of condo and office towers in the South Waterfront area (also proof that they’re not afraid to build stuff). Sometimes you just have to build stuff and see what happens.

3. They never stop thinking about the actual walking experience

If you look carefully at both Downtown Portland and the celebrated Pearl District, you’ll realize that, although both are built on small grids: we are not talking about the typical New Urbanist wet dream of four-story neoclassical boulevards. For every two or three handsome ’20s downtown midrise, there’s at least one mid-century modernist monstrosity. Yet even these behemoths have created totally walkable places. Never, ever overlook how it feels simply to walk down the street.

4. They keep reinforcing the connection between development and transportation

One of Portland’s many streetcars.
(Photo courtesy of CA Planning & Development Report)

In Portland, the additions to the transit system operate seamlessly with each other–and reinforce the development pattern, even when (as with the tram) it seems like a pipe dream. An even more dramatic example is the Portland Streetcar, which connects a variety of dense activity centers in downtown Portland, including Portland State University, the Pearl District, downtown, and the South Waterfront (where it connects with the aerial tram). The streetcar is so slow that sometimes you can beat it just by walking. But it may be the best urban collector system ever created. If the streetcar didn’t exist, a bunch of useful but inefficient little buses would have to run around Portland connecting things–similar to L.A.’s DASH buses. The streetcar pulls together all the collector systems into a distinctive “brand” that’s integrated into the entire TriMet system. Other cities don’t have to build a streetcar–but they do can find ways to brands the collector experience as unique, fun, and just a part of the experience of being in the town.

5. They keep strengthening the informal aspects of city life

Food cart vendors selling goods to pedestrians.
(Photo courtesy of CA Planning & Development Report)

Here’s just one example: You have never seen anything like Portland’s food carts. They line up by the dozen in parking lots, facing the sidewalk, creating an instant streetside food court of amazing and inexpensive culinary choices. This is not urban planning, exactly–or, at least, it’s not about building higher density and more public transit. Rather, it’s about strengthening the quirky, interesting, and sometimes even necessary little human-scale things that make up urban life. And that’s one of the things that seems to underlie Portland’s success: there are so many people in town who love urban life and want to make it work in a mid-sized city.

6. They’re not holding out for perfection

Don’t ever forget that most of the Portland metro area is just like anywhere else. But part of the message is that you don’t have to transform your whole city–only those parts of your city that are ripe for the transforming. There is no better advertisement for creating more walkable cities than…well, than creating just one walkable neighborhood in your town.

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In the age of climate change, California is once again on the cutting edge of environmental policy, busy figuring out how to implement its nationally-hailed new greenhouse-gas emissions reduction law. A big new question: how can “smart growth” be part of the answer?

There’s little question that California’s growth and development patterns will have to change significantly if the state’s greenhouse ambitious gas reduction goals are to be met. Technological fixes will only take the state so far, and even Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s own experts agree that “smart growth” must be part of the answer. But state officials are reluctant to dictate development patterns from Sacramento, so they’re trying to figure out whether incentives alone will do the trick. As Schwarzenegger’s chief planning deputy, Cynthia Bryant, puts it: “We need a carrot so big it’s a stick.”

The “carrot stick” is likely to be a requirement for a smart growth regional plan in every metropolis in the state, with the flow of transportation funding officially tied to implementing the local plans. This could be a national model of how to promote smart growth — if it passes the legislature without being watered down too much.

Two years ago, Schwarzenegger signed California’s AB 32, a sweeping bill that called for a 20 percent reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2020 — the most aggressive state policy in the country. Since then, the state’s policy wonks have been trying to figure out how to actually implement the new law. The state has already enacted a new policy to reduce the amount of carbon in fuels. Schwarzenegger is engaged in a battle with the Bush Administration over higher fuel economy standards for California only. And now the state is on the verge of passing a law that would implement the requirement for smart growth development patterns at the regional level as well.

This is nothing new. Big enough to be a country — and innovative enough to be one of the world’s most powerful economies all on its own — California has led the nation in cleaning up the environment since the 1970s, starting with requirements for more fuel-efficient appliances rather than building more nuclear power plants. Californians’ per capita use of electricity has been flat or declining for 25 years. On tougher tailpipe standards that the United States followed (at least until the Bush administration balked), on measures to reduce the carbon intensity of gasoline, on new “green building” practices and other measures, it’s consistently led the conservation parade.

But now comes the smart growth challenge. Everyone agrees that all technological breakthroughs are likely to achieve only 85-90 percent of the reductions required to meet the targets in AB 32. Some kind of change in growth and development patterns is required as well — one that can permanently reduce the overall amount of driving in the Golden State.

Attorney General Jerry Brown — the odds-on favorite for governor in 2010 — jumped out front on this one, claiming that new state law requires local governments to measure and minimize emissions from new development. Brown sued San Bernardino County — the largest county in the country, and one of the most conservative in the state — to make his point. The county settled out by agreeing to inventory its greenhouse gas emissions and revise its General Plan to minimize the increase in emissions.

But the law Brown sued under — California’s version of the National Environmental Policy Act — only requires local governments to undertake “feasible mitigation measures” in protecting environmental quality. So while it’s likely that Brown’s action will mean that new development will cause the emission of less greenhouse gas than before, it’s not likely that actual emissions will go down as a result.

Meanwhile, Darrell Steinberg — one of California’s most powerful state legislators — has been working for two years on a bill (SB 375) that would tie state transportation money to regional smart growth plans to reduce driving. All four major metropolitan regions in the state are already working on such plans but the Steinberg bill would provide a powerful incentive to actually implement those plans by directing transportation dollars toward infill locations and transit-oriented development projects. (In California, the regional planning agencies, not the state Department of Transportation, make most decisions about how to spend transportation money.)

In order to keep the bill alive, Steinberg has had to insert all kinds of caveats protecting local governments’ power over land-use planning. Nevertheless, the bill is likely to move to Schwarzenegger’s desk this month — and the governor will have to sign the bill in order to show he is sticking to his word on climate change. If California moves forward on a smart-growth approach to climate change, it will be a powerful precedent that reformers in other states can capitalize on.