The Job Nobody Can Explain and Every Community Needs
The Economic Developer's Paradox
Ask an economic developer what they do and you’ll rarely get the same answer twice. That’s not because we don’t know what we’re doing (usually). It’s because the profession resists a tidy definition and our work stretches across so many established fields. We might be working to attract a small tech startup and a Fortune 500 business, advise on a new workforce development training program with a local college, navigate a zoning question for a prospective business, expedite a permit in a building department, and strategize on public policy and political dynamics...all in the same week. That breadth is what makes the role difficult to summarize and essential to understand. It’s also what makes it one of the most consequential leadership positions in any community.
At its heart, our work is about understanding why businesses go where they go and making the case for why they should come to our community. That’s rarely a simple pitch. A startup and a Fortune 500 company are asking fundamentally different questions, and we have to meet both where they are. That means pulling together municipal departments, community assets, workforce data, infrastructure, and incentives into a coherent story. We are, in the truest sense, subject matter experts on being generalists, and that connector role is what drives broad-based prosperity.
Economic developers work closely with departments like Building, Community Planning, and Public Works. Each has a specialized lane -- inspecting buildings, reviewing site plans, maintaining infrastructure -- and each does that work well. But those lanes don’t always connect on their own. That’s the job of an economic developer. We act as the bridge that ensures Public Works has infrastructure ready for commercial growth, that Community Planning offers a clear path to entitlement, and that Building isn’t a bottleneck on permitting. That doesn’t require knowing building codes as intimately as an inspector or designing utility schematics like an engineer. But it does require conversational fluency across all of it. Just enough to ask the right questions, flag the right problems, and get the right people in the room. Other departments may cross functions when needed. Economic developers do it by design.
A valuable trait of any good leader is vision. The ability to see the big picture and connect disparate parts into something coherent. A good CEO, for example, doesn’t need to be an expert at producing the company’s product, but they need to understand how the pieces fit and where they’re headed. That’s the essence of visionary leadership, and it’s also an accurate description of what we do every day. Our job requires pulling back from any single domain to see the whole board. That instinct toward synthesis and the broader goal is what makes economic developers natural community leaders.
The defining goal of policymakers and public agencies should be to enhance the quality of life for their residents. That goal should transcend any particular department or field of expertise…except for one. That exception is economic development, which by its nature can’t be confined to one. Quality of life metrics span unemployment rates, labor force participation, median wages, and poverty rates. But they also include health and safety outcomes, arts and entertainment, and infrastructure quality. Those feel like separate domains. They’re not.
The connection between economic development and quality of life isn’t an abstract one. Communities that successfully attract major employers see ripple effects well beyond job creation. For example, a 2023 Oxford Economics study found an 8% drop in violent crime in communities where major business attraction projects landed. Financial stability, as a National Institute of Health study found, is a key driver of positive health outcomes independent of other socioeconomic factors. Public safety. Community health. Infrastructure. Arts and entertainment. All of these hinge on a strong economic foundation, and economic developers are the ones helping to build it.
Political leaders, city administrators, and economic developers ourselves should never lose sight of what the profession actually is and what it isn’t. It’s not a support function. Not a liaison role. It’s a discipline in its own right. Other departments have lanes and work them well. Economic development’s lane is the connective tissue between all of them. The mortar between the bricks. That connective role is community leadership, and the ability to understand enough about everything to move the community forward isn’t a consolation prize for lacking specialization. That is the specialization.
Sam Blatt is a certified economic developer with over a decade of experience in the field. This piece is a personal opinion and does not reflect the views or policy positions of his employer, or any of the organizations with which he is associated.