By/ Adel AlAdlani *
For decades, our economic playbook has had just one page, the call to attract the giant. I was reminded of this recently in a conversation with a friend. “What if we could bring in a big company?” he asked. “That would bring jobs.” This idea feels like common sense. It is the story we have been told for decades. We have all seen the headlines. A major corporation announced it is building a new facility in a town, promising an influx of jobs and tax money. Local leaders celebrate, dreaming of a wave of prosperity. This idea that economic salvation comes from attracting big outside companies has long been the main plan for local governments. Yet research by scholars like Haegi Kwon shows this constant outward focus often makes communities ignore their greatest strength. That strength is the people, culture and existing businesses already rooted in their soil. For places like Michigan, a state with a famous history of booms and busts tied to outside industries, this old approach has repeatedly shown its limits. It urges a shift toward nurturing the assets we already have.
Kwon finds a key flaw in standard economic development. It looks at a narrow range of assets and is often outward facing. Professionals spend huge energy trying to guess what hypothetical outside firms might want. Sometimes they even propose reshaping whole city areas to create ready to build sites for them. We see this in Michigan’s past and present. For years, the state’s fortunes rose and fell with the auto industry. This model left towns vulnerable to corporate decisions made in distant boardrooms. More recently, the eager chase for large projects, like the often promised but hard to get big sites for electric car battery plants, continues this tradition. While such wins are celebrated, this strategy treats the local community as a passive container waiting to be filled by outside money. It is not seen as an active garden to be cultivated.
This chase overlooks a difficult truth. When a major corporation arrives with tax breaks and fanfare, the primary benefit often flows to the company’s executives and its billionaire shareholders. As the economist Joseph Stiglitz has observed, the growing gap between the pay of chief executives and that of average workers illustrates how corporate wealth increasingly concentrates at the very top. In Michigan, this can be seen in the large incentive packages offered to major manufacturers. While these deals promise jobs, the wealth created by new productivity and profits is extracted from the community. It flows to global investors and corporate stock buybacks far more than it flows to the pockets of local workers, especially low-income individuals who rarely see a meaningful change in their economic prospects.
This outward look creates a blind spot at home. It makes communities undervalue their own people. Kwon’s research finds that even when local entrepreneurship is supported, it often narrowly targets a stereotype. It overlooks entrepreneurs of color and women who are already building businesses in their neighborhoods. In the same way, the talents of people in historically overlooked areas are frequently ignored. In Detroit, for example, the story of blight in certain neighborhoods long overshadowed the vibrant informal economies and community networks that existed there. As the urban thinker Jane Jacobs famously said, cities work for everybody only when they are created by everybody. An economic plan that does not actively seek to include and lift up everybody is not only unfair. It is also wasteful, leaving huge pools of local talent and innovation unused. This stands in stark contrast to the promise of creating low wage jobs for outside corporations, a promise that rarely leads to genuine wealth building for the poor.
The good news is that a different approach is growing across Michigan. It fits with what economist Michael Shuman calls building a local living economy. Instead of just chasing national chains, this model focuses on supporting homegrown businesses that keep wealth circulating locally. In Grand Rapids, the Start Garden venture fund and the Local First movement have spent years carefully nurturing a wide mix of small local businesses. These range from restaurants to tech startups. They understand that these enterprises are more connected to the community. They employ local people and help create a unique town identity. Crucially, the profits from these businesses are more likely to be reinvested locally, supporting the family next door, not a billionaire’s portfolio.
Perhaps the most powerful change is learning to see historical disinvestment not as a failure, but as an undervalued asset. Kwon points out that disinvested areas are often seen only as blighted. They are not seen as places with existing cultural and economic strength. In Flint, community land trusts and resident led development groups are now working to stabilize neighborhoods and support resident owned businesses. They are building from the social makeup outward. In Detroit’s Islandview neighborhood, the Fitzgerald Revitalization Project chose not to clear land for a single big developer. Instead, it renovated existing homes, created green spaces from empty lots and supported local builders. This capitalized on the community’s existing assets. This reflects the core idea of asset-based community development. As experts John McKnight and Peter Block note, it starts by identifying and using the gifts, skills and capacities of local residents.
For true sustainability, this internal focus must be paired with better bridges between education and jobs. Kwon notes the weak connection between workforce programs at community colleges and local employers. In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the MTEC SmartZone in Houghton works closely with Michigan Technological University and local industry. This ensures training matches the needs of the region’s mining, tech and forestry businesses, creating a talent pipeline that retains graduates. The impact is measurable. In 2024 alone, the businesses supported by MTEC generated over $105 million in sales, secured $32 million in new investment, and created more than 50 new local jobs. Furthermore, they helped launch a dozen new companies and served 127 unique local businesses, proving that investing in homegrown enterprise builds local expertise and circulates wealth far more effectively than supplying cheap labor to distant corporations.
The lesson for our communities is clear. My friend’s question about bringing in a big company is not wrong, but it is incomplete. The conversation about growth must move beyond the simple attraction of the outside savior. As economist David Fleming wrote, the future is local. Lasting economic health is not about winning a lottery ticket from a big corporation, a prize whose wealth mostly enriches people who do not live here. It is the harder, more rewarding work of believing in your own people. It is investing in your own entrepreneurs in all their diversity. It is seeing the inherent value in the neighborhoods you already have. For Michigan, a state built on grit and ingenuity, the path forward does not lead out to the global market alone. It winds through the main streets, community colleges and kitchens turned businesses of its own resilient towns. The real growth was inside us all along.
* Adel AlAdlani has a PhD in Public Administration from Western Michigan University
