When a Town Struggles, Can Economic Gardening Be the Solution?

Turns out, Colorado is cultivating more than aspen trees and kick ass snowboarders.
For the past 25 years, the town of Littleton, Colorado has been using the concept of economic gardening to grow its businesses and economy with amazing results.
The idea came about in 1987 when missile-manufacturing company Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin) pulled their business out of the Denver suburb, leaving 7,800 people without jobs and one million square feet of abandoned industrial and office space.
So Littleton’s business director, Chris Gibbons, decided to work with a Denver think tank, the Center for the New West, to implement this experimental theory developed by MIT economist David Burch.
Instead of being dependent upon just one major company, economic gardening involves identifying State-2 businesses — those that employ 10 to 100 people and have an annual revenue of $1 million or more — and giving them additional resources to expand.
Implemented in the late 1980s, 25 years of economic gardening turned a crippled Littleton into a booming town. The population increased by 25 percent, the number of available jobs tripled, and the city’s sale tax revenue increased from $6 million to $21 million.
Inspired by these results, Gibbons left Littleton to help start the National Center for Economic Gardening, which is sponsored by the Michigan-based Edward Lowe Foundation. Its mission: to spread the word and the tools to implement economic gardening in other cities and states. So far, it has established programs in multiple locals, including Kansas, Florida and Michigan, among others.
The newest state to join these economic gardeners is Maryland. Advance Maryland, as the program is called, began in 2013. So far, five businesses have been accepted at a cost to the state of $5,000 each.
Littleton’s success with economic gardening demonstrates that while unique, this business strategy is a viable and sustainable option. Perhaps, it is time for other cities and states to roll up their sleeves, put on their gardening gloves and grow their economy.
MORE: These Towns Show What Even Temporary Urban Renewal Can Bring

How Baltimore Successfully Moved Residents Out of the Inner City

It may surprise some to hear, but it takes a fair amount of convincing to get impoverished families to move to a middle-class suburb. Good schools, safer streets, and larger accommodations seem tempting, but many studies show that when given the chance, people tend to relocate to similarly disadvantaged, racially segregated areas.
But that’s not the case in Baltimore — anymore, that is. Two-thirds of the 2,000 families that moved to predominantly white, middle-class neighborhoods in 2005 are still living in their suburban neighborhoods up to eight years later. Those urban migrants kept their jobs in the city, sent their children to better schools, and somewhat miraculously, have experienced almost no racial friction in their new surroundings. So what did Baltimore do right? And what can other cities learn?
A new study in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management lays it all out. After tracking those 2,000 families for the past eight years, it discovered how a lawsuit eventually created an act that not only turned the tide of resistance in Baltimore, but ensured permanent, content residents outside the city’s notoriously gritty corridors.
It all started with a 1995 ACLU lawsuit, which charged that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and Baltimore’s housing authority were running a program that didn’t encourage those on federal housing assistance to move.  It wasn’t until 2005, though, that the court finally sided with the ACLU and created of a new voucher program.
The updated program required participants to move from hyper-segregated, hyper-poor neighborhoods to majority-white, suburban ones.  Those neighborhoods had to be less than 10 percent poor and less than 30 percent black. But the inspired part of it all, and likely the portion that ensured its success, is that counseling was provided from move-out to move-in to picking a new school.
So while leaving behind family and friends and moving to unknown suburbia was intimidating, it seems that the counseling helped residents adjust and realize the benefit from leaving behind the neighborhood they knew. “These women had never experienced safe neighborhoods or good schools,” Stefanie DeLuca, associate professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins and fellow at the Century Foundation, says. She studied the families and did in-depth interviews with 110 of them to get a better idea of their experience. “They were so segregated from mainstream opportunities.”
Realizing their new potential, the new residents of suburbia could see the value in relocating. As Atlantic Cities reports, one originally hesitant women, Kimberley, says in retrospect that “it’s only in leaving that I started growing and wanting to do different things, learn different things and be something different.” In fact, DeLuca and her associates found that the families that did return to the city were the ones who were most hesitant to leave.
The case of Baltimore proves how a willing government and available funds aren’t enough to solve the problem of hyper-segregation; the problem is often cyclical. But with time, patience, and counseling resources, the cycle can be broken.