When I was born in 1979, Oklahoma City was the 37^th-largest city in the United States.  Today, we are the 20^th-largest. Across the span of that half-century, our population, our GDP, our quality of life, and our economic diversification have soared. But first, we experienced a 1980s economic depression. What then followed is perhaps one of the most dynamic comebacks in U.S. urban history. I could write books about this story (and people have!) but the high-level takeaways are pretty simple:

1. As it turns out, jobs follow people, not necessarily the other way around. Our economic success and diversification came through a less direct approach than business recruitment. Sure, we do that as well, but primarily, we intentionally invested in our quality of life to establish Oklahoma City as a place where people wanted to live. The jobs then followed the workforce.
2. This leads to the second point – a city has to invest in itself. Constantly and consistently. We didn’t always do this, but beginning in 1993, led by bold mayors working in partnership with business leaders, OKC’s city government has put 15 tax votes in front of the voters proposing to invest in capital projects. Since the first such vote in 1993 and including the most recent vote in the fall of 2025, we are 15-0. Not even adjusted for inflation, the total dollar amount of those commitments is just under $10 billion. These investments dramatically improved our quality of life.
3. Your community has to work together and ignore the political extremes. Local politics are not necessarily immune from the ideological noise in American politics, but most mayors are not elected in a closed partisan primary. That frees us to do what has to be done – bring people together, forge compromise and seek outcomes acceptable to the 70% of us in the middle. (If only our state and national governments could figure this out.)

Of course, we are also pro-business and pro-development, at both the local and state levels. And our city government and chamber of commerce have created robust economic developments teams, equipped with the best tools of the trade, from TIFs to incentives.  But all of this is for naught if you don’t have a solid product to sell. 

Thanks to our ability to work together, we have made historic investments in our quality of life. The results speak for themselves. As it turns out, this is the best economic development strategy of them all.