Economic developers and planners can use more than anchor tenants and place-bound anchor institutions to secure development, but not all anchors are equally durable. Place-bound, or place-rooted, anchor institutions are unlikely to relocate in response to changes in settlement patterns or business consolidations, providing a strong foundation for community development. However, anchor institutions are scarce. In contrast, most community development investments are tethered to more plentiful, but more ephemeral, anchors: anchor tenants, third places, and managed or naturally occurring third spaces. Ensuring that the right anchor is used on a particular water's bottom—the specific land use and geographic scale of a project's impact—requires understanding which anchor best secures a development or regional economy. A survey of agricultural extension agents revealed that the strength of an anchor comes from its community and economic VALUE: visibility, authenticity, loyalty, utility, and engagement.

This commentary critiques common definitions of economic development (EcD) that wrongly assign political and economic agency to communities while overlooking regional EcD asset markets and business outputs. The authors argue that communities are socially constructed and are not economic agents. As an alternative, they introduce a framework based on the five developments— economic , site , workforce , community , and housing —that, together with productivity gains, drive gross regional product. The model distinguishes between EcD outputs (goods and services) and politically desired outcomes (jobs, income, taxes), and explains how labor, site, and housing markets intersect to define economic regions. Economic developers are portrayed as market-making intermediaries who reduce information and transaction costs, while community developers support neighborhood development, including workforce and site development. Two structural obstacles to effective EcD practice are identified: mismatches between political and economic geographies and between long-term asset development and short-term business decisions. The commentary concludes that EcD can positively impact low-income neighborhoods when practitioners use market-aware intermediaries to connect assets with regional employment and product demand.

This study examines how a multicity initiative supporting minority-owned or women-owned businesses organizes inclusive entrepreneurial ecosystems to address persistent market failures. Using a triangulated qualitative research design, the study asks what configuration of problem recognition, organizational motivations, and partnering pathways explain engagement, and with what returns. Findings show that organizations participate based on both mission alignment and anticipated benefit, structuring their efforts through existing relationships and coordinated roles across management, capital, and market access. Partnerships serve as delivery mechanisms and as settings for institutional learning, yielding ecosystem level outcomes alongside internal adjustments toward inclusive and culturally responsive practice. The study advances a market failure approach to ecosystem design and identifies the mechanisms that connect organizational intent to sustained engagement. The findings inform flexible design strategies, role alignment, and culturally grounded implementation for policy makers, funders, and ecosystem practitioners.

Tax increment financing (TIF) is a widely used tool that bridges economic and community development, especially in Midwestern states. This study examines how TIF relates to school districts’ property values in Nebraska, using difference-in-differences and event-study designs with 2010–2023 data from a balanced panel of school districts. The authors find that, while TIF use is not significantly associated with property values on average, associations vary by district socioeconomic status. Specifically, TIF use is positively associated with property values in advantaged school districts (lowest poverty or highest income), whereas in disadvantaged districts (highest poverty or lowest income), property values either remain unchanged or show negative associations. Although these effects are modest in size, their distribution is highly uneven, suggesting that TIF may exacerbate rather than reduce existing inequalities. The study has implications for how TIF is deployed to benefit communities.

Many factors contribute to growing inequalities in the United States. This commentary identifies three common assumptions inherent to economic development practice that may contribute to these dynamics within cities and regions. By looking beyond the economic development literature, the author presents a framework that prioritizes equitable outcomes for economic development: looking in, leveraging, and locking (3Ls). Looking in refers to a process whereby stakeholders assess existing formal and informal assets to address economic concerns. Leveraging refers to how stakeholders may collectively draw from existing assets to garner additional resources to achieve shared priorities. Locking refers to ensuring that economic development activities benefit residents, particularly those most marginalized and economically vulnerable. This commentary then compares the 3L framework to others, assessing how each may be useful in advancing more equitable economic outcomes in the United States.

This commentary describes selected revitalization initiatives in Atlanta, Georgia and Baltimore, Maryland to illustrate the challenges and opportunities local policy makers face when linking economic and community development. The authors draw on more than 30 years of observation and research. Fragmented power, complexity, conflict, mistrust, and resource scarcity make policy coordination a daunting challenge. The cities studied have faced these challenges by creating organizations and intermediary institutions to plan and execute local revitalizations initiatives with mixed success. The authors discuss the challenge of coordinating economic and community development (Ec&CD) policies and then compare the economic context of Atlanta and Baltimore and summarize several efforts to coordinate economic and community development policy making. The authors review the cases to discuss their commonalities and differences and conclude with advice for local leaders who hope to pursue a coordinated Ec&CD policy agenda.

This study evaluates business closure rates in minority neighborhoods within a metropolitan area and extends this analysis across six U.S. metropolitan areas during the COVID-19 pandemic. Utilizing business and demographic data at the census-tract level, the authors develop a comparative research strategy to explore variations in closure rates among racially diverse neighborhoods. This analysis employs both global and local models to examine spatial interactions among variables associated with business closure rates. The authors use ordinary least squares multivariate regression to identify broad patterns at the metropolitan level and geographically weighted regression to assess local variations and interactions within specific spatial units. The findings reveal diverse dynamics between racial composition and economic outcomes, highlighting uneven closure rates across the metropolitan areas. This study enhances our understanding of the economic impacts on urban neighborhoods during the COVID-19 pandemic by providing detailed comparison analysis and spatial analysis, offering valuable insights for economic development and policy making.