Economic development keeps chasing tourists. The research says we’re doing it wrong.

June 27, 2026

Let’s talk about economic development, because every city in America plays the same game.

Public money usually goes to the things visitors see – stadiums, arenas, convention centers, entertainment districts. The pitch is always the same: tourists will come, spending will follow, and the benefits will trickle down to everybody. Meanwhile, the neighborhoods two miles away wait on streetlights, sidewalks, decent housing, and a grocery store.

It’s the same trickle-down economics crap we’ve been sold for 40 years.

Look – economists disagree about almost everything – but not this. In one survey, 85% of American economists said governments should stop subsidizing pro sports facilities. A University of Chicago panel that included seven Nobel winners hit 83% agreement that stadium subsidies cost taxpayers more than they return. Researchers went through 130 studies covering 30 years and found the same thing. The spending doesn’t create new growth.

Now here’s what the evidence says about the opposite bet.

Some of the strongest economics research of the last decade tracked millions of kids to answer one question: does the neighborhood itself change a child’s life?

The answer is yes, and it’s not even close. Every single year a kid spends growing up in a better neighborhood – safer, more stable, better resourced – raises what that kid earns as an adult. Kids whose families moved to neighborhoods with less poverty before age 13 went to college more, earned more, and raised their own kids in better places. The neighborhood is the intervention.

People who feel good about where they live invest in themselves.

And Memphis has already proven this. In Frayser, the community development corporation there analyzed its own work fixing blighted houses. $1 million spent on blight removal raised the surrounding tax base by an estimated $6 million. Six to one. Show me the stadium that returns that.

So the position is simple. Stop measuring economic development by what it does for visitors. Start measuring it by what it does for the people already here.

The biggest flexible money neighborhoods get from Washington comes through a few programs – block grants that fund sidewalks, housing repair, and small business support, the HOME program that builds affordable housing, and Choice Neighborhoods, which rebuilds distressed housing and the blocks around it.

Last year the administration’s budget proposed eliminating Community Development Block Grants and HOME entirely. Congress restored the funding. That fight comes back every single year.

Then there’s the money a member can steer directly.

Every member of the House gets to request community project funding for their district, every year – including freshmen. It’s one of the only tools in the building where seniority doesn’t decide who eats. Steve Cohen has delivered nearly $69 million of it since 2021 – senior housing, home repair for low-income seniors, youth facilities, housing for homeless veterans, and $2.6 million to start reconnecting the North Memphis neighborhoods the interstate cut apart.

Andy Ogles has declined to request any of it. That’s his stated position – he opposes the earmark process itself. So the seniors, the flood-damaged roads, and the neighborhoods of this district lose access to the congressionally directed funding other districts compete for. Not because he asked and lost. Because he won’t ask.

Well, I’d ask. And I know what I’d ask for first, because in one area – they already told me.

At a meet-the-candidate event SCORE CDC held in South City, I asked what the neighborhood actually needs. The answer came back without a pause: a grocery store.

The Kroger at Southgate closed in 2018 and people have been improvising ever since – a farmers market, a mobile grocery trailer, corner stores charging double for milk. Nobody at that event asked me for a stadium. They asked for somewhere to buy food. And that’s a fundable request – the Healthy Food Financing Initiative exists specifically to help bring grocery stores into neighborhoods the chains abandoned.

Now I can’t zone land, and I can’t pick which corner gets the store – that’s city and county work. What the seat I am running for controls is whether the neighborhood money exists, who fights for it when the budget knives come out, and what gets requested by name for this district.

So here’s my economic development plan in one sentence: ask the neighborhoods what they need, request the money by name, and publish every request so you can check my math. South City already gave me the first item on the list.

Sources

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