Latest news with #post-GreatRecession
Technical.ly
25-05-2025
- Business
- Technical.ly
Economic development has something to learn from — and teach — ecosystem building
Traditional economic development hunts for economic winners and big infrastructure, while ecosystem building focuses on stitching together many disparate parts, yet practitioners increasingly note they have much in common. The two approaches are converging under 'entrepreneurship-led economic development,' with certifying bodies adding courses and professionals code switching between the terms to build broader coalitions. Tensions persist — some grassroots efforts are dismissed as 'nice to have,' and some ecosystem builders scoff at 'fusty' marketing — but history suggests new disciplines mature by setting standards and proving outcomes. → Read on for details and join Chris Wink's weekly newsletter for more Rob Williams remembers an unusual family dinner-table debate from his childhood. His botanist father insisted that ecosystems were strictly natural phenomena. His small business-advocate mother argued that economic development could learn deeply from nature's interconnectedness. They each had a point. Today, Williams is the founder and director of SourceLink, a category-defining nonprofit software platform spun out of Kauffman Foundation research. It is among the first in a constellation of tools that introduced the 'ecosystem building' metaphor to traditional state and local economic development, a big, boring and quietly influential discipline around creation of jobs, business and regional output. Williams has an unusual balance. He's among the earliest definers of entrepreneurship ecosystem building, and he also has traditional economic development training. 'We can't thrive as economic developers without placing entrepreneurship and innovation at the heart of our strategies,' Williams said. Williams is part of an industry transformation, and like other professional and academic changes before, it takes time to sort out standards. In the 1830s, sociology emerged from political philosophy to better understand the 'social physics' of how culture shaped individuals. In the 1980s, behavioral economics began as a splinter group before later shaping the entire field. In both and many other cases, individuals obsessed over a narrow set of differences within a larger, more established discipline long enough that those differences became their own field of study. Local entrepreneurship boosters who identify as 'ecosystem builders' are attempting something similar. In the 2010s, community organizers, startuppers and post-Great Recession economic activists formed coalitions around the country. Stewarded by funders led by the Kansas City-based Kauffman Foundation, these business and economic types took hold of the ecosystem metaphor. Then the post-COVID entrepreneurship boom gave ecosystem building its primetime moment. 'The pandemic showed us the fragility of some of our systems and the power of local entrepreneurship to build resiliency,' Williams said. Today about 1,000 people list ' ecosystem builder ' as a job title on LinkedIn. Overwhelmingly they are entrepreneurs, small business advocates and self-identified connectors. In 2010, published the word 'ecosystem' about 100 times. Last year, we did so over 1,000 times, a 10x increase in 15 years. A similar, if lagging, surge followed in books. Dating to those childhood debates between his parents, Williams understands better than most the nuance of the ecosystem metaphor: Many overlapping, differently-sized, independent species interact in unexpected ways to support each other. Traditional 20th century-style economic development focuses on economic winners (established businesses) and top-down investments (industrial policy and big infrastructure projects). As set down by the Kauffman Foundation, ecosystem building focuses on nascent entrepreneurs and stitching together many disparate parts of a local economy. Economic development is the big-game hunter storming the bush. Ecosystem building is the botanist carefully handling a butterfly. These differences can present discomfort. Politics are an obvious one: standard economic development has been a bastion of American-style conservative capitalism, whereas ecosystem building adopted progressive concepts of mutual aid and, quite literally, environmentalism. Rather than an obstacle, Williams and others see this as an opportunity for coalition building. One of the only ideals that unites Americans across the political spectrum also unites progressive ecosystem builders and conservative economic development leaders: entrepreneurship. 'Entrepreneur-led economic development' The work of integrating ecosystem building into the larger and more-established economic development can now focus on terminology and process. The International Economic Development Council, the trade's primary certifying body with more than 4,500 members, is a natural leader, introducing courses and certifications. The group received more than 100 applicants for its director of entrepreneurship position, according to LinkedIn, a role that Williams's own mother held. IEDC CIO Dell Gines, who spoke this month at the Technically Builders Conference, is a long-standing ecosystem-building champion, dating to his time at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. He has helped incorporate ecosystem building tenets into established economic development. Williams too. For example, Williams adopts IEDC's preferred phrase of 'entrepreneurship-led economic development' (or ELED in the industry jargon) when speaking with more establishment economic development leaders. Other times, he relies on the 'ecosystem building' term. Insiders cite subtle differences but on the whole, they're becoming interchangeable. 'We have so much in common that it's more about language differences,' Williams said. 'You're code switching depending on who you talk with.' The merging isn't complete. At our storytelling-focused Builders Conference, one longtime ecosystem builder sneered on-stage at fusty economic development marketing. On the other side, a traditionally-trained economic development leader confided in me earlier this year that much grassroots 'ecosystem building' seems like 'a lot of Millennial bullshit.' For her, the small gatherings and resource mapping strike her as nice to have but not critical in her budget-constrained reality. The lesson from past discipline changes is that both approaches have something to teach, and to learn. Ecosystem building can sound faddish, and so years of establishing best practices and outcomes are welcome. Williams credits the 2017 book ' Beyond Collisions' as an example. Inspired by this, Technically has put forward a data-backed case for the economic outcomes of storytelling, another demonstrably important but squishy-sounding concept. Likewise, though, traditional economic development can overlook the real-world actions of individual humans. Entrepreneurs don't choose places to start companies. Entrepreneurs choose places to live and then start companies there. Place-based economic development needs humanity. 'It's like a Venn diagram but there's a lot more in the middle,' Williams said. 'There's no entrepreneurship-led strategy that's sustainable without a healthy ecosystem around it, and no ecosystem-building initiatives can work sustainably without critical economic development-led supports.'
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
As the Fed devises its new strategy, Powell sees an economy with ‘more volatile' inflation
In discussing the outlook for the U.S. economy Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell said he saw a future with the possibility of ups and downs in inflation. He added that he also saw an increased likelihood of 'supply shocks' that could disrupt American businesses. Every five years the Federal Reserve reexamines the framework it uses to ensure its keeping the U.S. economy on a path of full employment and stable prices—a congressionally mandated double goal it must achieve with just a few tools, while keeping stock of evolving macroeconomic conditions, the labor market, and GDP growth. The strategy informs how exactly the Fed will achieve both its goals, which are the bedrock of a stable economy. On Thursday, as the Fed began a conference to discuss how it would maintain maximum employment and 2% long-term inflation, the prognosis was: more turbulence. 'We may be entering a period of more frequent and potentially more persistent supply shocks, a difficult challenge for the economy and for central banks,' Fed chair Jerome Powell said during the conference's opening remarks. Powell did not discuss in detail the current state of the economy, instead focusing on its evolution from the post-Great Recession recovery to today. During the recovery period interest rates were extremely low, while the Fed's benchmark rate now sits between 4.25% and 4.5%. Rates are higher because inflation could be more unpredictable going forward, Powell said. 'Higher real rates may also reflect the possibility that inflation could be more volatile going forward than during the inter-crisis period of the 2010s,' he said. In looking back at the past five years under which the Fed's current framework informed monetary policy, Powell discussed the COVID-19 pandemic, which hit the world shortly after the current strategy was implemented. At the time the U.S. economy had been stuck in over a decade with low growth, low inflation, and low interest rates. As a result, the plan had been for monetary policy to try and achieve an 'intentional, moderate' overshoot of the 2% inflation target in periods when it was below that level, Powell said. Then the pandemic hit and completely disrupted those plans. 'There was nothing intentional or moderate about the global inflation that arrived a few months after we announced our changes to the consensus statement,' Powell said, referring to the Fed's name for its five-year plans. Annual inflation eventually rose as high as 9.1% in the summer of 2022. To curb the soaring price increases, the Fed started raising rates. What happened next was also unexpected. As rates rose and inflation came down, unemployment didn't spike, as conventional economic wisdom dictated it would. Instead unemployment remained at its historically low levels of around 3.5%. 'In a welcome and historically unusual result…this disinflation has come without the sharp increase in unemployment that has often accompanied a campaign of rate hikes to reduce inflation,' Powell said. Those changes will factor into the Fed's new strategy, Powell said. 'The economic environment has changed significantly since 2020 in our review, which will reflect our assessment of those changes,' he said. However, one thing that will remain consistent is the need to ground what the Fed refers to as 'long-term inflation expectations.' 'While the framework must evolve, some elements of it are timeless,' Powell said. 'Policymakers emerged from the great inflation with a clear understanding that it was essential to anchor inflation expectations at an appropriately low level.' Inflation expectations is a critical measure because it describes how the Fed, investors, economists, and businesses believe inflation will be in the future. Even if price increases tip up or down in a given monthly report, if businesses and consumers expect them to stay steady in the future, they generally still keep spending. Businesses are more likely to make major capital expenditures and consumers won't hunker down in anticipation of a downturn if they believe the economy will be ok in the long run. During the rampant uncertainty and market tumult of April, Powell regularly pointed to the fact that long-term inflation expectations had remained steady. Keeping inflation expectations level was key to the U.S.'s post-pandemic recovery, Powell said. 'Since the Great Inflation, the U.S. economy has had three of its four longest expansions on record,' Powell said. 'Anchored expectations played a key role in facilitating these expansions. More recently, without that anchor, it would not have been possible to achieve a roughly five percentage point disinflation without a spike in unemployment.' This story was originally featured on Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Business Journals
22-04-2025
- Business
- Business Journals
Big box retail closures spark creative leasing in Portland
By submitting your information you are agreeing to our Privacy Policy and User Agreement . As major retailers shutter their doors across Portland, landlords are getting creative with unexpected new tenants to fill those empty big box spaces. Closings of big box retail spaces have painted a grim picture on the state of retail. Forever 21 announced it would wind down operations after filing for bankruptcy at the end of March. Kohl's Corp. made the decision to close 27 underperforming stores by the end of this month, including a Portland store at 10010 N.E. Halsey St. Craft retailer Joann Inc. will auction off its 790 stores and five distribution centers across the country later this month. GET TO KNOW YOUR CITY Find Local Events Near You Connect with a community of local professionals. Explore All Events And that's just in 2025 alone. In response, big box landlords are having to get creative by repositioning these vacant stores to more resilient uses, helping to lease these large spaces more quickly. Briana Mathias, a broker and CPA with Macadam Forbes, said landlords have particularly eyed fitness concepts, entertainment venues and indoor recreation operators to take over large vacant spaces. expand Briana Mathias is a broker with real estate firm Macadam Forbes Courtesy of Macadam Forbes The scenario has already played out around the Portland metro. Jumbo's Pickleball opened eight courts inside a space at the Lloyd Center while a former Bed Bath & Beyond location in Tigard is set to become a Pickleball Kingdom. A Fun City Adventure Park could fill the former Dick's Sporting Goods space, according to the market report from Macadam Forbes. 'My outlook is hopefully we'll start to see more of these spaces absorb,' Mathias said. 'I think rents are going to be stable and I do think some landlords are going to have to take a chance on some new tenant concepts, but I think it's going to activate many of these areas.' Data from CoStar found that retail vacancies and available space across the Portland metro area remain relatively high. Director of market analytics for CoStar John Gillem calls the movement a largely supply-side trend as the area hasn't logged much new retail space construction in the last decade or even post-Great Recession. expand John Gillem is Director of Market Analytics for Portland at CoStar Group. Kate Gillem 'We have also demolished a large amount of space in the past five years to make way for other developments, such as apartments,' Gillem said. 'So, while leasing has pulled back ever so slightly over the past two years, there just isn't enough competing space coming online to cause the vacancy rate to rise substantially.' President and CEO of Schnitzer Properties Jordan Schnitzer said retail properties can be split into three categories: strip malls, big shopping malls and boutique tenants. He said the boutique tenants are 'doing pretty darn well' with quick turnover when a business vacates the space. As are strip malls, particularly if they're anchored by a grocery tenant, because 'they are all placed in very strong demographic locations,' Schnitzer said. Portland's retail market started the second quarter of the year in a state of balance. CoStar data found that despite a slightly sluggish demand, minimal new speculative construction and a pullback in tenant move-outs prevented the market from softening dramatically. Tenant move-out activity hasn't shifted dramatically across Portland, sitting at about 20% below the pandemic-era peak and 12% below the historical average. Gillem said the lack of viable space in suburban shopping corridors plays a factor. Gillem also added that much of Portland's retail space has been demolished, creating an even tighter market environment. Nearly 1 million square feet of unoccupied retail space was demolished, he said, largely due to the strong demand for apartments and housing. Among the new retail assets delivered over the last year that totaled around 500,000 square feet, 10% of that space remains available for lease. Mathias said recent property sales and repositioning of big box spaces is an indication that out-of-state investors are still interested in Oregon and in Portland. 'I don't see any signs of people giving up on retail at all as an investment,' she said.
Vox
07-04-2025
- Business
- Vox
I can't afford a house right now. Am I screwed?
is the host of Explain It to Me, your hotline for all your unanswered questions. She joined Vox in 2022 as a senior producer and then as host of The Weeds, Vox's policy podcast. 'Should I buy a house?' That's the question that a listener, Miranda, brought to Explain It to Me, Vox's weekly call-in show. 'I think that's always been the go-to investment for past generations,' she says. 'You buy a house and that's kind of your retirement plan, and that just doesn't seem realistic or even attainable.' Miranda is far from alone in questioning whether homeownership is still the reliable engine of building wealth as it was for past generations. The US is in the midst of a housing shortage as millennials and Gen Z reach their prime home-buying years, but many are locked out of the market. Gone are the low post-Great Recession interest rates, all while the net worth of homeowners eclipses that of renters. Explain It to Me The Explain It to Me newsletter answers an interesting question from an audience member in a digestible explainer from one of our journalists. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. It's a complicated calculation, one that Mandi Woodruff-Santos knows well. She's the host of Brown Ambition, a wealth and finance podcast. 'I bought my house in 2018, which feels like a thousand years ago,' she says. And initially, she wasn't completely sold on the idea of homeownership. 'I didn't realize how little I desired to actually own a home until my husband was like, 'Get me out of this concrete jungle! I want to touch grass.'' Eventually, a house just outside New York City won her over. 'We were able to find a home in a great neighborhood that was within walking distance of the train. I saw this little house, and I thought, 'I want that house.' And that's how I ended up here.' How do you determine if homeownership is right for you? And if it isn't, what are other ways to build wealth? That's the topic of discussion on this week's episode of Explain It to Me, which has been edited for length and clarity. You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you'd like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@ or call 1-800-618-8545. We've been told for years that buying a home is this important milestone for adulthood and the first step to building equity and wealth. But with the current prices and interest rates, the barrier to entry feels especially high. What do you make of that advice about home buying? It's kind of like when you become a new mom: Don't get any of your parenting advice from someone who hasn't been a mom in like the last two years. You need fresh intel, and the reason is that so much changes. If you're getting advice from your parents, relatives, and, frankly, journalists, too — we tend to be a little bit on the older side — if you're getting advice from people who are not in the current market, it's not as applicable because they bought in an entirely different environment. Related How young people can avoid the financial pitfalls of previous generations There are choices I made in 2018 that I definitely wouldn't tell anybody to make now. I think it's really smart to ask for opinions and to be open to other points of view, but just understand the context from which they are giving you that advice. What do you make of the question from our listener? Is buying a house something she should be working toward? If you understand maintenance, if you understand property values and how they can be impacted by things like development and weather patterns — if you understand all these things and you still really want to buy a house, then yeah, go get your house! The ultimate thing is — can you afford it? If you're getting advice from people who are not in the current market, it's not as applicable because they bought in an entirely different environment. Now there are all sorts of different trains of thought about if a house is a good investment. I think you have to understand why you're buying a house. Are you buying a house for your family to live in for the next 10-plus years? That's a very different equation to me than if you're buying a home that you're hoping to fix up and flip on the market in a year or two, where you want to see a much higher return on investment. But if you're someone like me who's like, 'I want a place where my kids can grow up' — that is less about the ebb and flow of the current market and more about if this is a good long-term decision for me. So what I would look at today if I'm thinking about buying a house are mortgage rates. They aren't cute right now. Very ugly right now. But they're not as ugly as they could be. In the '80s, people were just walking out the door with double-digit interest rates. So interest rates aren't great, but they're not the worst they've ever been. What's more difficult these days is inventory. I wouldn't just buy whatever's there because you want to buy something. If you can wait, wait until you find a home that you really like and fits all your needs. It's worth it. Speaking as someone who is stuck in a starter home, I got my cute little 2 percent interest rate, but I'm in the tiniest little house in my neighborhood and we are busting out of the seams. Also, look at your lifestyle. At the end of the day, it's your choice. You're going to be living in it. Get clear with yourself on what you want. So if you sit down and you find out where you are emotionally, where you are when it comes to lifestyle, and you determine that buying a house is for you, what are the first steps? What do you suggest that a person do? Your credit score is going to determine how expensive that mortgage is going to be. I would say six months before you think you're ready, you want to look at your credit and take an assessment. Mortgage rates right now are around 5, 6 percent, 7 percent. They'll be even higher if you have poor credit. You want to avoid taking out additional loans six months before you apply for a mortgage because mortgage lenders don't like to see new debt right before they're going to potentially approve you for a loan. If you can wait, wait until you find a home that you really like and fits all your needs. Ideally, you're not going to have a fluctuating income. So if you're going to get a new job, that's fine, but it can make it a bit more complicated. Your lender wants to see a couple of years' worth of income, and they like to see it from one employer because this is about them wanting to pick a candidate for a loan who's pretty reliable. So for my freelance girlies, my solopreneurs, like me, it's not impossible, but you may want to talk to an accountant about how you can structure your business so that you are paying yourself as a W-2 employee. Also, saving up beyond that down payment. There are these things that pop up, and there's nothing worse than realizing you don't have the money in the bank for these extra expenses. If you're a first-time homebuyer, I would absolutely spend time researching first-time homebuyer programs. There are some through the federal government — and Lord knows what's happening with them right now — but check out the Department of Housing and Urban Development's website. Check out the Federal Housing Authority. See if you qualify for a first-time homebuyer loan. There's also a program called NACA, based in homeowner education. So if you go through their education program, they help buyers who are not maybe the most marketable candidates for a mortgage access to homeownership. There are credit unions, local banks — you may find state programs. Related Why buying a house feels impossible right now So that's if you want to buy a home. But say you can't buy a house or just don't want to. How do you build equity? What can you do? Yes, a home can be a vessel for increasing equity and building wealth. But it is not the only game in town. Ever heard of index funds, mutual funds? You can absolutely invest in the stock market, invest through your 401(k), and max out your Roth IRA. Also, invest in yourself. I don't mean go get a brand-new degree. What do you value in life? And if that's travel for you, if that's helping to care for family members, if that's moving to the city you've always wanted to move to, or just taking a chance on yourself and investing in an experience that aligns with what you value and what you want. At the end of the day, you can look back on that and say, 'Yeah, I did that for me and I have no regrets about it.' Who's to say that's not a wise financial decision? Maybe a calculator or an economist, but at the end of the day, you've got to live with yourself. I love that approach because there are all these different methods to finances, and I don't think that there's a 'right way.'
