ED Now

Aaron N. Gruen of Gruen Gruen + Associates shares his 2025 Economic and Real Estate Outlook with ED Now.

As part of our EDA Atlanta region grant, IEDC created a workforce housing strategies primer for a series of workshops developed in partnership with the Eastern Carolina Council, a nine-county regional economic development district in North Carolina. Learn about missing middle housing and availability, affordability, and funding solutions, and explore case studies from communities of all sizes.

Unaffordable for-sale single-family housing is no longer a problem confined to coastal urban markets. With homebuying out of reach for about one-third of the U.S. population, cities should encourage more apartment development, which will increase needed housing supply and do well for long-term investors.

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: Avondale (Ariz.) EDGE.

After a natural disaster, while news headlines concentrate on immediate search and rescue efforts, the critical leadership work for economic developers and local officials is to address recovery challenges. IEDC, in partnership with ICMA (International City/County Management Association) and with funding from FEMA, has developed a series of in-depth case studies to highlight successful recovery strategies. Even in the first 24–48 hours of the response to California’s 2017 Santa Rosa Tubbs fire, then city manager Sean McGlynn asked his leadership team, “What gets us to recovery?” The consensus was that debris removal was a top priority because recovery cannot begin without it. Since 3,000 homes were lost and most ...

The California Supreme Court ruled in March that the University of California, Berkeley must cut its undergraduate enrollment by nearly 3,000 for the 2022–23 school year. The ruling came only three weeks before the university had planned to mail acceptance letters, forcing it to send 5,000 fewer offers. The university had been sued by Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods, a local anti-density group, under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods successfully argued that the university had insufficiently assessed the environmental impact of increasing its enrollment. However, the group’s leader publicly stated that he sued because higher enrollment would increase the city’s ...

In recent years, many U.S. colleges and universities have downsized or closed as a result of declining enrollment and financial hardships. Between 2017 and 2020, the number of higher education institutions nationally decreased by 8.7 percent, and experts predict that 500 more could close in the near term. Consequently, more campus real estate is now up for sale, particularly in highly sought after urban areas. While most opportunities involve partnering with a school that will remain open to develop new buildings for additional revenue, there are some institutions selling substantial sections of land or their whole campus. However, despite their attractive locations, many college campuses have historical designations, zoning limits, and ...

The housing affordability crisis is likely to continue for low-to-moderate income households and people of color, according to a recent annual report from the Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies. As the crisis has intensified, people and groups opposed to new housing developments in their neighborhoods have come under increasing levels of criticism. Such opposition is often characterized by the acronym NIMBY, short for “not in my backyard,” and the term NIMBYism. The San Francisco Bay Area has been plagued by a severe affordable housing shortage since the 1990s. In recent decades, anti-density activists have been elected to positions of power in Marin County, Palo Alto, and Cupertino, entrenching opposition to ...