By Nicole Morell, Director of Communications
Since 2018, the Taubman Center has been hosting the Economic Development Seminar, a yearlong, monthly seminar for students who are committed to public service and interested in state and local economic development. Through site visits, readings, and discussions with visiting economic development leaders from across the US, students learn about the field and its implications for policymaking and public administration.
Chris Gibbons, founder of the National Center for Economic Gardening, shared his insights with 33 seminar students at HKS this spring. Learn more about Chris’s experience and guidance for those interested in economic development below.
What brought you to the field of economic development?
I grew up in Wakita, Oklahoma, a small wheat farming town and I was very curious about what made places like my hometown thrive or die. Because of this interest, I went to school for urban planning, getting my professional start in Oklahoma City, OK. I worked several urban planning jobs doing Main Street redevelopment work but never had the title of “economic developer.
That changed when I went to work in Littleton, CO in 1987 as the city’s director of business/ industry affairs. At that time, Littleton’s big employer was Lockheed Martin, a defense contractor with two plants that employed 15,000 people. With the Cold War ending and the Berlin Wall eventually coming down, they laid off 7,500 people. That year city council told the staff to work with local businesses to create good paying jobs to make up for this huge loss. That's all the direction we ever got.
During that time, I went to an event and heard a speech by Phil Burgess, then CEO of the Center for the New West, a Denver thinktank. He was talking about trying to get companies to move to your town and called it “economic hunting.” His alternative idea to this hunting was “economic gardening” where you grow your town’s business through supporting entrepreneurship. We started to do just that in Littleton, and eventually grew our job base from 15,000 to 30,000 without recruiting a single business. I later launched the National Center for Economic Gardening. Its purpose is to give economic developers our tools and principles to help other cities have the same success as Littleton. I had planned to stay in Littleton for a short time and then start my own consulting firm. I ended up staying there for 25 years and somewhere along the line, I think I became an economic developer.
What keeps you up at night related to economic development?
There is a conundrum, I always called capitalism's conundrum, that you can’t have high wages and low prices. Although this issue rarely gets attention at the national level, I believe it’s central to the challenges facing rural communities. Many of these areas rely on natural resource production—wheat, corn, tobacco, mining, timber—and they’re struggling because they’re trapped in commodity markets. Wheat grown in Oklahoma looks the same as wheat from Canada, Argentina, or Australia, so producers are forced into a race to the bottom, competing solely on price. As a result, these communities continually cut jobs and replace workers with machinery. It is a “commodity trap” that devastates jobs, companies, and communities. But nobody talks about this. It’s something we try to address through economic development, but it really needs to be talked about more at the federal level.
What gives you hope about the field right now?
I think it's the fact that a lot of economic development agencies have recognized and incorporated entrepreneurship into their work as a major strategy. Thirty-five years ago, when we started, that wasn’t an option. We introduced entrepreneur‑led economic development and built an entire strategy around it. It is now a major element in economic development portfolios that includes recruiting, workforce, infrastructure, and Main Street revitalization. Today, there is a major focus on entrepreneurship in almost every major city and state. I feel good that the profession has changed in this way.
Why is it important for you to come to the Kennedy School and talk about economic development?
When I look at Harvard students, I see people who are going to be running major cities and states, people who are going to be governors and senators, and maybe even presidents, and perhaps working with the UN or speaking at Davos. They're going to be the people that are going to change the world. I think it's important for them to see the economy from the economic development end. I’m on the ground every day working with companies. I want the discussion not just to be about fiscal and monetary policy, but also an understanding of the ground level entrepreneurship that drives the economy. I want the national discussions to be more nuanced in the future with a clearer understanding about what is very important to all of these communities. That’s why it’s important for me to come to the Taubman Center and the Kennedy School and be with these students.
