LANSING – Economic development efforts for many years focused on bringing in new business: providing the tax incentives or the site, or both, for the new plant. But two separate presentations Wednesday said that focus on jobs could be misplaced in the new economy.

“Is it jobs first or quality of life first?” said Rep. Ed Clemente (D-Lincoln Park), chair of the House New Economy and Quality of Life Committee, on opening his committee for the session.

But presentations to his committee and later for the Michigan State University Land Policy Institute, indicated the focus should be on attracting people. If the right people come to the state, or stay here, the jobs will follow them.

Both John Austin with the Southeast Michigan New Economy Initiative and Adesoji Adelaja, director of the Land Policy Institute, said the new focus of economic development has to be on making attractive places where younger people and more educated people want to live.

“There’s a reason why economic development happens on the coasts and we have a beautiful one if we can clean it up and promote it,” Austin told the House committee. “The real money comes from being the center of choice people make where they want to live and do business.”

“In the new economy we’re talking about great places,” Adelaja said at the lunch event. “They’re not bound by that manufacturing plant. …People follow amenities and quality of life.”

The lunch in part was to unveil a new study by the institute, that will be released in full by the end of the month, that tries to quantify the effects of changes in quality of life on economic development.

Adelaja said adapting to the new economy will mean retraining those currently working in economic development at all levels. “A lot of us trained in economic development were trained in the old way of development,” he said. “We’re basically saying to the (Michigan Economic Growth Authority) and the downtown development authority person to do your job very differently.”

He said the MEDC could make a “tremendous difference” with a shift in focus.

But he said there is currently little information available to help those who are trying to shift their view because prior studies have looked at only limited topics of place-oriented development. He said the goal of a series of reports coming from the institute over the next year is to fill some of those gaps.

While jobs are important, he said attracting people will bring jobs, and attracting the right people will bring more jobs. “(Now) what you want to do is target those people who are most productive,” he said.

For instance, attracting 1 percent more young people back to the state, those ages 24 to 35, would mean 539 new jobs in addition to the jobs those young people would occupy.

One percent more college graduates would mean another 190 jobs and a $25 increase in per capita incomes. It would also attract 554 additional people to the state.

Austin said right now there are not enough communities to keep those who are most likely to generate new jobs in the state. “Michigan is a huge talent generator,” he said. “The problem is we lose them. They leave us.”

Michigan also suffers from a marketing deficit, Adelaja said. “Part of our problem in Michigan is we don’t know how to sell ourselves.”

Officials with the MEDC told the House committee they were hoping to have return on investment studies on the state’s relatively new business marketing program in the coming months.

Austin said the state also needs to be more attractive to foreign immigrants. “Immigrants will make you rich,” he said. “Immigrants do not suck the public dole.”

And he said immigrants to Michigan now are more educated than the average Michigan-born resident.

Education is important, but Austin, vice president of the State Board of Education, said the state needs to move ahead with trying to make some of its communities more attractive despite the schools. “We can’t let the fact that urban schools aren’t where they need to be frame economic development,” he said.

But he said work on the schools could continue while other improvements are happening, particularly as the largest amount of work needs to be done at the high school level.

“We’ve made some headway with K-8, but at the high school level we lose everybody,” he said.

He said Detroit Public Schools needs to make changes to its structure to see further improvement. “I would like to see DPS charter dozens of its own schools,” he said.

Rep. Gabe Leland (D-Detroit) argued the solution is for businesses in the region to come in to help those schools improve.

Types of development are also important, Adelaja said. Low-income housing attracts more people, but not many more jobs or income. High-priced housing means a boost in income levels, but not more jobs.

He said spending on the right types of infrastructure can also build jobs. Infrastructure like roads and airports will attract jobs, but so will parks and clean air, he said.

“Fifteen to 20 billion dollars will find its way into Michigan in the next couple of weeks. What will we spend those dollars on?” he said. “Think about 24 to 35 year olds, the infrastructure they’re interested in. The numbers are real in terms of returns.”

Place and infrastructure are also important to one other option for the state, Austin said: Michigan also has the opportunity to be a logistics hub for at least North America. “We’re right at the middle of this incredible binational hub,” he said, noting the commercial traffic that flows between Michigan and Ontario.

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