Nichola Lowe, Meenu Tewari, and Bill Lester

We present North Carolina as a working laboratory for agency within a new political economy. North Carolina has gone through a significant political transformation in recent years, threatening key institutions and channels for promoting inclusive forms for economic development. But this shift has not meant a wholesale loss or retreat of progressive actors and actions. Progress is still being made by planners and practitioners, though often in new forms and through alternative channels and partnerships. This paper presents three examples of continued efforts by planners to promote living wage standards, extend job-centered training opportunities, and upskill and upgrade legacy industries. It demonstrates the ways that planners can redirect policy goals and collectively articulate a vision of a more equitable form of economic development.

Thad Williamson

The City of Richmond, Virginia has recently embarked on an ambitious effort to reduce the city’s 26% poverty rate, encompassing multiple policy areas from education to economic and workforce development to housing. This innovative plan was developed via extensive input from citizens and strong support from Mayor Dwight C. Jones, who in 2014 established the nation’s first Office of Community Wealth Building to lead implementation of the plan. This article summarizes the key components of the initiative, identifies ongoing challenges to its successful implementation, and offers brief lessons for planners and policymakers in other communities from the Richmond experience.

Alison Lingane

The growing low-wage service sector in our economy, combined with overall wage and wealth gaps that are especially concentrated in communities of color, means many working adults don’t make enough money to cover basic needs. Businesses that are owned and run by their workers offer a different way of doing business that benefits workers, businesses, and society. Worker coops are a key component of a “new economy,” and as such, Community Economic Development efforts should incorporate worker cooperative development into their strategies. This paper describes a project in the Bay Area of California to create a local action plan for moving towards scale and impact of worker cooperative development by engaging multi-sectoral actors. It includes a framework for assessing the opportunities in a local region to increase worker coops to benefit low wage workers, and takeaways for other regions that want to apply a similar approach.

Gregory Claxton, Matthew Dugan, and Larry Schooler

Austin, Texas exemplifies many challenges in planning for fast-growing Sun Belt cities. The process to create the recently adopted Imagine Austin Comprehensive Plan shows the difficulty in matching the tools of traditional comprehensive plans with interrelated New Economy issues and best practices in community engagement.

William S. Fischer, Katherine Keough-Jurs, and James Weaver

The City of Cincinnati, Ohio recently completed it first comprehensive plan in over 30 years. Developed through a highly collaborative community-driven process, Plan Cincinnati aims to “re-urbanize” the depopulated Rust Belt city and strengthen its economy. Alongside goals to increase industrial recruitment as well as homegrown small businesses, a key economic strategy of the plan is focusing investment geographically in the City’s established neighborhood centers.

Ben Hitchings, Rodger Lentz, Lance Hight, and Jenny Mizelle

Carolina Planning regularly publishes a feature highlighting projects from members of the North Carolina Chapter of the American Planning Association (NC-APA). This year’s submissions focus on community planning initiatives that address changing demographics, industry, and infrastructure needs.