Foundations of contemporary practice and policy emerge

In Bluestone and Harrison gave the disease with no name a name: deindustrialization. The concept, following closely community development principles, arose out of the Great Reindustrialization Debate which had been raging through the seventies and which would continue well into the nineties. The debate revolved around our third competitive hierarchy: global comparative advantage/free trade. In many ways the debate attempted to reconcile place-based economic development with a capitalism whose capital was mobile and whose firms, sectors and industries seemed locked into the profit cycle. Foreign competition and the rise and fall of sunrise and sunset industries demanded state and sub-state policy response. The incredible and diverse strategies (ranging from clusters, small business, entrepreneur, innovation and knowledge-based economics, and corporate strategy and others) that emerged from the debate transformed economic development and developed its agenda for contemporary economic development. The long-neglected jurisdictional economic base was finally getting some attention it needed so badly. The chapter takes a final look at the federal government, reviewing the Clinton’s administration’s awkward dance with community development, and the development of new approaches such as New Market Tax Credit. It also looks again at regional change and the arrival of the New South that demonstrates the reality of a “vanishing Sunbelt†as each region moves along its own economic development path. Strategies such as these pushed the States into State and Sub-State economic development. A major characteristic of contemporary economic development is the powerful, often lead role of the state in sub-national economic development. Indeed, one could say we have developed into a 50-state American economic development system. It hasn’t been all good, some would say. The states have brought with them a steroidal “let’s make a deal†approach to attraction and recruitment, along with arguably their most commonly used economic development strategy: casino gambling (along with other forms). Using Massachusetts as a case study, this chapter demonstrates how states responded by innovation and sheer politics to form hybrid economic/community development policy systems. With new approaches to capital formation, reliance on distressed geographic targeting, pioneering innovation with Centers for Excellence, skills-based workforce systems and support for sunrise sectors, Massachusetts had it all in place by 1985. The final and concluding theme is Big Sort population mobility which, when combined with attitude and culture change of generational cohorts, has created more or less homogenous policy systems composed of a majority of like-minded and economically similar voters that has frozen in place a polarized, politicized new world of economic development. Big Sort population mobility has produced the underlying basis for our contemporary economic development Blue State/Red State politicization. Exploring the dynamics of each of those topics, the chapter uses the example of San Francisco’s hyper-pluralism as a Weberian ideal type to expose the elements that have politicized contemporary economic development.