In the Trenches of Economic Development

Richard Florida just sent this link out via his Twitter account -- http://www.onlineathens.com/stories/022110/opi_565570387.shtml

It's an article about a town in Georgia trying to overcome a negative image to kick-start a sluggish conomy in recessionary times. It's worth reading because it is true. I think Florida's point is that economic development is hard work. It's not a glitzy, easy-bake quick-fix. It's a hard slog that pays dividends slowly, if at all.

My favourite example of that truth is Sudbury, a city that found itself on the lip of an economic abyss in the early 1980s. Only those who were inside the crisis will ever know how close Sudbury came to losing it all in those frightening years. Federal industry minister Tony Clement can prattle all he wants about Brazil's Vale Inco saving Sudbury from a Valley of Death, but he will never know the sweaty stink of the real thing. He wasn't there in 1980-81 when nickel prices imploded, Inco and Falconbridge both danced with bankruptcy and the entire region tottered on the brink.

It was only a deep alliance of company, union and region (Wint Newman, Ron MacDonald and Tom Davies), along with a single-minded focus on survival, that pulled Sudbury back from the brink. That monumental struggle also laid an economic foundation that is helping the city surmount its difficulties today.

Sudburians of the 1980s attacked economic development as if they were a goal down late in the third, in the Gold medal game, with the honour of a nation on the line. They refused to accept defeat, they dug in, they fought back and they prevailed.

That's how successful economic development is done in the trenches, when the world is passing you by and the elites are writing you off as yesterday's news. It's not fancy formulas, or someone else's solutions, or intellectual constructs. It's just head's down, shoulder to shoulder, pushing together toward a single goal. It's street-by-street, house-by-house, hand-to-hand combat, in which inches are taken, then lost, then taken again.

Every job must be seized, every grant pursued, every program embraced and every possibility exhausted until the objective is realized.

It's hard, grinding work. But for those who find themselves on the wrong side of economic fashion, it is the only way out.