ED Now

IEDC's Accredited Economic Development Organization (AEDO) program recognizes organizational excellence in the areas of internal and external operations, structures, and procedures. This series profiles recently accredited AEDOs, putting some of economic development's highest-performing organizations in the spotlight. This edition: Elgin (Ill.) Development Group.

Communities, developers, and real estate asset managers will continue to need to reimagine and reinvent shopping malls into mixed-use redevelopments. The availability of large amounts of land, building space, parking capacity, and typically superior access to roadway connections, provides the physical resources to transform malls from predominantly single-use spaces to a dramatically more varied mix of uses.

Aaron N. Gruen of Gruen Gruen + Associates—an urban economics, market research, housing and land use policy, and pre-development services firm—shares his annual economic and real estate outlook with ED Now.

What is the connection between outdoor recreation and economic development? How can having fun outdoors help communities prosper and grow? Communities, businesses, and states across the U.S. are both asking and answering these questions central to competitiveness and quality of life.

There has been a significant spike in labor union activity across the United States. Groups of workers at Starbucks, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Trader Joe’s have all orchestrated efforts to unionize in the last year and the movement continues to grow. According to Gallup, 71 percent of Americans now approve of labor unions—the highest Gallup figure since 1965, and up from 68 percent in 2021 and 48 percent in 2009. After decades of declining unionization rates, several factors appear to underlie workers’ decision to organize now. The resurgence is concentrated primarily among young—and sometimes college-educated—employees that hold low-paying service sector positions. In interviews, many union proponents ...

IEDC’s 2022 Annual Conference will be held next month in Oklahoma City. A few of our local conference speakers shared some exciting economic development projects happening around the state.

Hundreds of economic developers attended the recent Analyzing the Economic Impact of Recreation Spending webinar which demonstrated IMPLAN’s economic impact software on local tourism and recreation expansion using the Carolina Thread Trail in Huntersville, N.C., as an example. First, the webinar defined important terms for tourism and recreation spending, including the difference between tourism and recreation. Preparing a data plan is the next step in the process, according to webinar host Michael Nealy, who stated that estimating attendance, visit duration, and revenue increase would assist the software in calculating the impact of tourism and recreation expansion efforts. Similarly, preparing visitor surveys in a way that makes ...

IEDC recently held a webinar titled “The Retail Recruitment Opportunity: New Thinking for Successful Attraction in a Changing World.” The speakers discussed how economic developers can best attract new retail establishments to their communities given the latest trends in the industry. Central business district retailers will undergo significant transitions in coming years alongside changes in work culture and the generational makeup of urban areas, according to Michael Berne, president of MJB consulting in New York City. Berne said that the shift to remote work accelerated an existing trend of millennials moving to the suburbs, softening demand for many retailers in city centers. Berne characterized the present moment as a ...