Sustaining Economic Growth

Keeping A Good Thing Going: Sustaining Economic Growth in Our Cities

By Carly Berke

On Wednesday, October 2nd, the Initiative on Cities welcomed Alan Harding, the Chief Economic Adviser to the Mayor of Metropolitan Manchester, and Midori Morikawa, Director of Business Strategy for the City of Boston, to discuss sustaining economic growth in cities and maintaining momentum while prioritizing inclusivity.

Alan Harding has spent the past three years as Chief Economic Advisor to the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, a relatively new metropolitan authority that has brought together the 10 boroughs that constitute Greater Manchester.

The formation of the regional authority is new because former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who generally opposed strong local government, had abolished local authorities. Ever since, according to Harding, Manchester has functioned primarily on voluntary rule, more recently on a statute basis. Local authorities have been working together for over 30 years, but for the past two and a half years, the city has been governed by a directly elected mayor, which is relatively uncommon in the UK, save for London.

“We are slowly recreating a metropolitan approach to our major cities,” said Harding.

Manchester, a highly integrated metropolitan area, has been in development over the course of more than a century, with an urbanized center and several surrounding townships that now fall within jurisdiction of the Combined Authority. The city currently holds nearly 3,000,000 people, with projections of adding around 250,000 people every 10 years. 

Greater Manchester is a major region of service and industrial development. The economy is bolstered by higher education institutions and a large student population. There’s been major investments in healthcare businesses and hospitals, and budding technology and broadcasting industries.

One industry that has spurred economic growth in Manchester is sports – after losing a bid for the Olympic Games, Manchester was awarded the British Commonwealth Games, which led to the construction of a new football stadium and began to attract investment from all over the world. Manchester’s sports status has enabled the city to connect to a global market without going through the state of England, and it has attracted a flurry of investors and businesses to the region. 

Harding then turned to ideological divisions within the Combined Authority, and how he works to increase the reach and influence over party division and ensure policies are as evidence-based as possible, addressing issues that all 10 of the borough authorities find important.

“What we do in Manchester is draw together different elements of public service to deliberate in a way which makes us look bigger and more important,” said Harding, citing the fact that the national government holds a tight grip on the amount of power granted to local governments. “What Greater Manchester has managed to argue to the national government is that we should be thinking of ways in which we can jointly improve service delivery of a whole variety of types.”

One project he’s seen succeed is the devolution of health and social care services, which redirects authority over health and social care budgets to the 10 individual authorities of the Greater Manchester area.

“If you have flexibility, you can begin to achieve something to economies of sale, in terms of clinical service deliberating, and you can start to make some major inroads to major challenges we’ve got around public health,” said Harding.

The national government agreed to delegate these functions to the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, who now controls £6 billion spent on health and social care services in the 10 boroughs and has an extra £450 million to transform public services. Harding emphasized that the devolution deal is not just about creating economic growth, but also about public service delivery and trying to strengthen the economy by improving the labor market, picking up on business opportunities, and addressing social and public health issues.

Midori Morikawa heads Boston’s Office of Economic Development, a department created by Mayor Marty Walsh after his election in 2014. Morikawa’s job, as she briefly explained, is to bring new business into Boston and incentivize collaboration between the public and private sector to create more opportunities for Boston residents. With $9 million currently invested in commercial development with $6.8 billion in the pipeline, there’s a lot of development happening across the city, much of which can be bolstered by economic policy that accounts for inclusivity and diversity.

Morikawa holds a B.A. from Clark University and an M.A. from the Heller School of Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. Before joining the City of Boston, she served as the Director of Planning at Action for Boston Community Development, and Program Performance and Evaluation Manager at YWCA Boston. In the four years she’s worked at the City of Boston, she’s also served as Deputy Director of Workforce and Policy Development at the Office of Workforce Development. In this role, she pioneered several initiatives, including the development and implementation of the Mayor’s Tuition-Free Community College and the development of the city’s first Neighborhood Jobs Trust Impact Report. 

Boston is a city of roughly 700,000 people, 60% of whom are people of color. It’s also a highly educated city; 50% of the labor force has a Bachelor’s degree, one of the top percentages in the United States. Sectors with a major presence in Boston include finance, education, and healthcare, with life science, biotechnology, and startups also beginning to develop in Boston. Morikawa noted that the prime location of Boston Logan International Airport, less than 20 minutes away from downtown Boston, is key to attracting new businesses.

Morikawa cited the Seaport District as an example of economic growth within Boston. The neighborhood was fundamentally underdeveloped until 2011, when Vertex Pharmaceuticals, a Cambridge-based pharmaceutical company, moved their operations from Cambridge to Boston Companies quickly followed Vertex’s move, and within less than 10 years the Seaport transformed into a prosperous and lively home for a cluster of finance and pharmaceutical companies. While several new jobs have been brought to Boston, with several more being created in the next several years, the revitalization of Seaport is critical to Boston’s economic growth – but Morikawa emphasized the importance of making sure Boston residents reap the benefits of said growth. Several of Seaport’s workers, for instance, commute into the city, and few are actually residents of the city of Boston.

Morikawa’s priority is to design policy that accounts for all Boston residents and uplifts low income households and minority communities in economic growth. She provided a brief overview of some of the economic initiatives currently underway in the Mayor’s office, including the Neighborhood Jobs Trust Fund, which was created in 1987 to ensure low income residents benefit from large-scale real estate development in the city. It collects “linkage fees”  of about $1.70 for every square foot over 100,000 square feet that is then directed into job creation or job contribution. This program is critical for including Bostonians in economic development, like in the Seaport, where Amazon is currently breaking ground to open a new office. 

“Employers have a choice when it comes to hiring,” said Morikawa. “Our goal is to make sure that these companies are coming in, developments are happening, and how we can get Boston residents in there.”

She also highlighted Boston’s Summer Jobs Program, during which students from Boston public schools are matched with big companies for a unique and comprehensive internship experience. The program is meant to open up talent pipelines for students coming from nontraditional pathways, and it helps expose students from low income households and marginalized communities to the business industry and set them up for a strong career. While the program itself was initially launched nearly 50 years ago as a violence prevention program to keep kids off the streets, it has turned into a critical vehicle for career mobilization in Boston’s public school youth.

Now, the City of Boston is partnering with Northeastern University to evaluate the effectiveness of the program, during which they’ve approached program outcomes from several different angles. For instance, the propensity for violence and crime in youth who participated in the Summer Jobs program decreased by 57% within seven months after the program ended. Attendance and graduation rates were also much higher for students who participated in the program.

“As a city, we have these policies in place, some are new and some have been around for a while, but we have to be intentional about making sure that these policies and programs actually make an impact for people,” said Morikawa. “Every dollar we have needs to be spent or invested smartly.”

Morikawa isn’t alone in her sentiment; several private sector actors have expressed interest in engaging with the public sector to address rising income inequality, affordable housing rates, and inclusive economic growth. Several large corporations are doing so through the addition of a Chief Diversity Officer or the opening of an Office of Diversity and Inclusion.