Chicagoland gives ‘regional cooperation’ another try. Will it stick this time?
For too long, the Chicago region has been held back by a “survival of the fittest” approach to prosperity. Municipal governments have shamelessly poached employers from neighboring communities, seeminglynever realizing that shuttling jobs from one town to another does nothing to improve the metro area’s overall economic trajectory.
Chicago has been one of the worst offenders. As mayor, Rahm Emanuel bagged McDonald’s, Kraft Heinz, Motorola and other big game from the suburbs, and then bragged about the city becoming a new mecca for corporate relocations, even though many of his trophies had only traveled a few miles.
“It’s just rearranging the deck chairs,” Lance Pressl told the Tribune in 2012, after he headed up research on cross-border poaching within the Chicago metro area. “There is no net gain.” Precisely.
There’s hope, however, that this cutthroat mentality within the region may be waning. On Wednesday, Mayor Lori Lightfoot, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and leaders from the collar counties and civic groups announced a partnership that touts a “no poaching” policy across the region, along with a commitment to data-share and collaborate on luring new businesses big and small to the Chicago area.
The idea has a name, the Greater Chicagoland Economic Partnership, a website, a modest
$1 million budget, and office space at World Business Chicago, the city’s public-private economic development agency. All good, but success won’t depend on how much money’s spent or how many hits the website gets.
What will matter is whether governments actually drop the bad habits of the past and genuinely embrace the concept of regional cooperation.
Why are we skeptical? We’ve seen this script before. Other iterations of “regional cooperation” with names such as the Chicago Regional Growth Corp. and the Alliance for Regional Development have come and gone without any change in the pervasive
every-municipality-for-itself mindset. Conferences were held, speeches were made … and poaching persisted.
That’s too bad, because a regional approach to economic development works. We know because we’ve seen it elsewhere.
The Denver region became one of the country’s fastest growing economies after it enforced an anti-poaching policy and pooled tax resources to build a major airport, fund cultural and arts institutions and revamp regional mass transit. The Minneapolis region has a tax-sharing strategy that helped pare down the gap between rich and poor communities.
In Toronto, Canada’s largest city, municipalities team up to pitch the region to prospective foreign investors, rather than going it alone. Communities don’t complain if a neighboring town gets a new factory, because they know it’s healthy for the region as a whole.
That’s smart urban planning. Chicago and its suburbs are far too interconnected to operate as islands. Workers and commerce symbiotically flow between communities.
For example, more and better paying jobs in Oak Park or River Forest means more weekend customers for restaurants in Chicago’s West Loop. And you need only look back at the philanthropic coalition that created Chicago’s magnificent Millennium Park to understand that many of the city’s biggest boosters have long been people who lived and worked in the suburbs, often in head offices. Dangling incentives to pull their workplaces downtown comes with no beneficial change. Yet the practice frequently adds great costs to taxpayers.
These days, many companies struggle to find the workers they need, and if they’re eyeing expansions, they have no problem casting a wider net to build their workforce. That’s especially important in the post-pandemic economy, when companies find themselves re-imagining how and where they deploy labor and employees, many freed from a five-days-a-week commute, feel more free to choose exactly where they want to live.
A dynamic, cooperative region that thinks and behaves collectively has a better chance at prosperity than one that functions as an amalgam of fiefdoms.
We know that’s hard for politicians to grasp. They want to be able to tout in news releases that they’ve persuaded a mega-firm to relocate its headquarters to their turf, and it doesn’t matter that those jobs and tax revenue have been lured away from a nearby community.
But it does matter, because it’s not a win for the region. Municipalities that compete among themselves may win some skirmishes, but they’ll win the war if they band together and compete as a region — against other regions in the country and globally.
Long ago, Chicago branded itself as a global city, and indeed, the Chicago metro area is well-positioned to compete. It boasts one of the world’s busiest airports, status as America’s freight rail hub, a diverse, skilled workforce, world class universities, easy access to a grand body of water and a cultural scene few cities can match.
What’s missing is the will to capitalize on those assets collectively, rather than selfishly.
Perhaps this latest attempt at regional cooperation will gain the traction that previous tries could not. For the sake of Chicagoland’s short-term and long-term outlook, we hope so.