Quote Originally Posted by emu steve View Post
One thing about economic activity at say the state level. Population in Michigan is pretty stagnant. That means there is little real growth. Without robust growth what we have is city A trying to grow at city B's expense [[or vice versa). Kind of a zero sum game.
Just so. The region needs to work together to attract talent from elsewhere, and then jobs will follow the talent. It isn't like it was fifty years ago, when you built a factory and people flocked to your town to work there. So the question is, how do we attract talent? Couple facts to feed such a discussion:

1. It's easier to try to attract young talent than older talent, just because younger adults are more portable. A forty year old is likely to have family or other commitments and be much more anchored to a community than someone who is twenty-five.

2. It's easy to gather data about communities that are successful in attracting young talent. The difficult part lies in determining which data are relevant. I have always felt that our cultural amenities were a strong positive [[arts, sports, the river, Canada, coney dogs) but our transportation and segregation were strong negatives. But I could be entirely wrong about this. Anyhow, once you figure out what your positives and negatives are, trumpet the positives to the skies, and work on the negatives.

By the way this doesn't work if we try to improve and market Detroit as one thing [[or two, or many) and Oakland County as another thing and Macomb as yet another thing and A-squared as another. We need to improve and market the whole area to be successful. Nobody [[in leadership) seems to be on the same page with me about this, though.