A Conversation with Sammis White, Co-Founder of Economic Development Quarterly

Well, Richard Bingham and I were working together here at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, at the Urban Research Center, and we saw major changes in the regional economy due to deindustrialization. The double recessions of 1979 and 1981 hammered Milwaukee. Milwaukee lost, initially, about 100,000 manufacturing jobs. We started looking at Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit and they were all severely hit. We wondered what we could contribute to turning the region's economies around.

We didn't think that any of the existing journals had a particular interest or focus on economic development. The region's poverty rate was on the rise and people were suffering. Closer to home (Milwaukee), the economic crisis was hitting the region's academic community as well. The University of Wisconsin was asking for reduction in salaries and staff.

As we looked deeper into the economic crisis, we found laid-off workers did not have the skills necessary to compete for the fewer number of jobs being created. It was a very different market for the workers that had been laid off, many of whom were illiterate. In 1985, I gave 2,000 unemployed workers in Milwaukee a reading test: only 15% were fully literate, 30% were fully illiterate, and the others had between a 5th and an 8th grade education. That just compounded the challenge. What can you do?

The results also expanded our view of what the world of economic development is. It's not just creating jobs, which we knew was central, but it was also creating a competitive workforce.

When I was in graduate school in 1968, a group of faculty and grad students was hired to evaluate the federal poverty programs, known as the War on Poverty, in Baltimore. We worked initially on defining poverty and looking at where the federal dollars were being spent. We concluded that these programs were only 6% to 7% of the anti-poverty budget and not worth our focus. We then focused on housing because it was receiving by far the largest governmental subsidy for low income. But [then] it became clear as well that the driving issue was not housing but employment. If you want to get out of poverty, employment is the way.

I then got involved in the employment side. We decided to explore whether creating a program of subsidized job creation would have appeal in either the private or public sector. That became the subject of my dissertation. We interviewed 100 employers in the city of Baltimore, from one person who ran a rock polishing shop to Bethlehem Steel's Sparrow's Point plant that employed approximately 30,000 workers. The only person out of those 100 firms who liked the idea of a subsidy for job creation was the rock polisher. He was a World War II vet, and he could train and hire other vets through government subsidies. But nobody else really liked the idea of government getting involved, dictating who and when and where, and what they paid for hiring workers. Even the City of Baltimore's Department of Public Works, which wanted to hire more workers, decided that it did not have enough supervisors to train and oversee novices, declined the idea.

That experience was when I started to focus on employment and economic development. Looking at the community studies we completed, I turned my focus from adding jobs to better preparing workers through workforce training, literacy programs, and increasing the output of schools. I spent a lot of time working on schools, K-12 education, and then pre-K. In passing I think Tim Bartik's (2014) work on the importance of preschools is a critical element but very hard to publicly fund.

I would preach then, and still do, that better pre-K education is key. Studies on the earliest publicly subsidized private K-12 education in the country have shown that many of the private schools were doing as badly or worse than the public schools. More importantly, public and private schools all had the same problem: They were getting the same low-income, ill-prepared kids in their classrooms, causing disappointing results, except in cases where the schools had exceptional leaders and teachers.

After years focusing on these topics, I moved on to research on employment incentives and entrepreneurship to try to create jobs. The big companies are gone; therefore, we must get more new companies. I did a study with a compatriot from Marquette. We talked the Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority into making its first expenditure on economic development. All it did before was reduce the price of mortgages modestly for the lower-income populations it could help without being too expensive. We received a $250,000 grant to look at who was doing what in terms of entrepreneurship. One of the articles we wrote is still among the top 1% of most cited articles of any research that ResearchGate tracks.¹

The tagline of the journal has always been “the Journal of American Economic Revitalization,” which I always wondered if that aged the journal. The 1979–83 manufacturing crisis happened decades ago. But at the same time, having just read “Paper Girl,” which chronicles the author's visit to her hometown of Urbana, Indiana, revitalization is still up there as a worry for many communities across the country (Macy, 2025).

We were initially focused on the Great Lakes states, because that was the region with which we were most familiar. Moreover, in addition to starting the journal we created the Great Lakes States Economic Development Researchers (GLEDR) group, which was a group of individuals that worked together for some 17 years. Members came largely from universities and Federal Reserve Banks.

I remember many of the meetings and most of the places that we viewed as we traveled around the Great Lakes region. We went to Toledo and toured the Willys Cherokee plant, the first-generation Cherokee, and saw its extensive assembly line. In fact, we learned at the time that plant was closing, and it was going to move production to a different plant for greater efficiency. For example, where the old line required 123 pieces to assemble a car door, the new line would only have 20 pieces. The plant was incredible, production started on the fourth floor, went to the second floor with the line going up and down and around with the complete vehicle driven out the first-floor door.

In Cleveland we went to steel mills. One, the old-type steel mill with the big pour, we'd watch the steel going down and then being pounded by these huge weights, and then slowly mashed together, and finally you get a 2-inch sheet coming out the end. Afterward in the afternoon, we went to a new continuous-pour plant where the thinner slabs came out, cooled off, were ready to put on the trucks, and out the door.

Remarkable experiences. But anyway, these activities encouraged researchers to explore and write about the economies of all these cities and their various initiatives, which really helped move this whole thing along. We produced some books and several articles with members of this group.

Revitalization may be a term that may have some historical reference, but it's still a big issue, isn't it?

Yes. Milwaukee is still struggling, and we see manufacturing plants still closing, particularly in the last year. But it is an issue, and we need jobs, and we also need a lot more done on the workforce end, and education.

Well, it's very hard to say how tough it was. We were just committed to getting it done. It took a little while to find a publisher, and that was a big concern. We needed somebody that would have faith that the topic would generate a sufficient sized readership. Moreover, the publisher would have to trust us with being the doorkeepers to accept only quality papers.

I will say that we reviewed papers published in economics and planning journals and could not find much being written on economic development, as we defined it. Honestly, we were just worried that we would not get enough submissions. And we worried about the potential readership: we wanted both academics and practitioners, and that was a key. We asked Gail Garfield Schwartz to be one of our first co-editors with the hope of attracting practitioners to read the journal.

Who was the intended audience?

We thought, of course, that the academics we knew in the Great Lakes’ states were going to be interested because we met with them regularly, they wanted to get published, and they liked the idea. And practitioners were searching for evidence-supported policy recommendations. I mean, a lot of them were struggling. The 1979–1983 double economic recession was something that they never had to confront before. Nobody had to worry about job development, economic development just occurred, and Milwaukee was really flourishing before 1979. Employers were hiring minority workers who were paid well, and many of the region's manufacturing workers could and did send their kids to college for the first time. But then the double recession hit, the jobs and income disappeared, and we began to not only have employment problems, but housing problems, because the unemployed didn't have the income. It was just very hard to come back from all of that. Milwaukee is still struggling with housing as well as jobs and a better-trained workforce.

I always wanted the journal to be the bridge between academia and the practitioner: that bridge, in my opinion, has never been constructed. EDQ is a journal that publishes papers by academics for other academics, who are concerned more with methodology than policy. It's very difficult to get researchers to make recommendations. They're much more comfortable talking about methodology.

We probably never really wanted to look at that issue. We could see, looking at subscription lists, that practitioners were, in fact, subscribing, or their institutions were subscribing, which was a plus. But we really didn't have any way of judging, other than subscriptions, just how useful the journal had been, and if we could point to specific initiatives that had begun because of some articles in the journal.

When I looked at the first couple of issues, there seemed to be an outreach effort on your part to try and develop a space where practitioners could write about their experiences. Was that a goal that unfortunately fell by the wayside? Could you talk more about that as to your original hopes?

Yes, again, we wanted both sides of this equation to participate. We had hoped that they, the practitioners, would be able to take the time and offer their insights given their experiences. And, it was, as you saw, harder to make that happen than we had hoped. But it was our intent, because they should ideally work together.

Well, in fact, what I think happened was two parallel tracks in research publications. The IEDC has its “Economic Development Journal,” but current research activities are limited to its membership. The Council for Community and Economic Research (C2ER) still provides information on ongoing economic development research.

Trying to tie in with professional groups makes a great deal of sense, but it isn't always easy.

No, it wasn't. It was certainly looked at by the Great Lakes Economic Development Researcher Group, some of the visits we made were to job training centers. But we did not go beyond just citing what cities and regions were doing, highlighting and learning about programs in places like Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, and maybe even Milwaukee, although we have struggled.

If you were to do it again, what would you do differently? Would you partner with trade associations?

My recollection is no. We had thought a little about professional organizations. But I don't remember any explicit efforts to engage, but Dick (Bingham) might have done some of that.

In all honesty, the journal was kind of a side gig for you, right? You had your research agenda, which all the researchers have, and there's never enough time in the day, and now, tacking on to that, you have this journal.

Yes, I'm afraid that's very true. We have lots, lots going on. Dick and I traded roles. I became director of the Urban Research Center, which gave Dick more time to be the lead editor.

It seems that more areas of research are finding their way under the umbrella of economic development. We've got environmental and planning studies, network analysis, spatial econometrics, and political decision-making studies. How should the journal respond to these types of studies? If you could be on our advisory board and witness all these different activities, what should be the journal's focus?

Yes, this is a tough question, as you've been wrestling with. I look back at my career, and my research areas kept broadening. Environmental issues are certainly a major topic in economic development. We just had protesters for one of the region's big data center projects get handcuffed and escorted out of a meeting. Many are worried about water availability, electric utility rates, and the amount of power that data centers will require. It is estimated that one center, which is going in just 20 miles south of us, will draw more power than the rest of the state of Wisconsin combined. It's just mind boggling. And then we've got three or four others that have already been approved, and Meta and others have already done preliminary work on certain sites in various parts of the state. It is a very hot issue.

One of the few large-scale AI projects that came through our planning program is in nearby Mount Pleasant. The “big” project is the subsequently abandoned Foxconn project. But its site and others have now been picked up by Microsoft. Microsoft is building a huge data center there. Its design for this data center promises that the used water will be cooled and properly recycled. Still, people are very concerned. Some of the other data center designs haven't been reviewed, and many residents are very worried that they will consume great amounts of water and power production. In fact, at this point the local utility is suggesting it is going to build two new standard gas-powered power plants to meet the huge new need.

If researchers can make the connections between economic development and environment issues or social networking, it should be considered by EDQ.

There are not any red lines about what an economic development concern should not be.

Well, I need it proved to me. Jobs and incomes are critical to communities, but so are other elements like water availability, air quality, natural areas, personal safety, and so forth.

One of the red lines that has been established by the journal is that its focus is the United States. Most of the papers that we receive are on economic development issues facing developing countries.

That domestic focus is what we had in mind. We thought the lessons here would have a much higher chance of being useful to readers in the United States; that was our target. At that time the economic development articles on other countries were largely confined to their third-world settings.

Again, I was taken aback at the very start of this conversation with your focus on workforce development, which, of course, is a major concern with the Upjohn Institute. In 2013 we changed the journal's mission to include workforce development. Why wasn't that part of the original mission statement? Did you feel like there were enough research outlets for workforce development papers?

I don't think we initially thought about how critical workforce development was for economic development. We didn't think about what the growing mismatch of jobs and skills would be. When those manufacturing jobs disappeared, we'd still had people, but they didn’t have the skills required for new jobs. So, then I certainly started moving further into the workforce development area. One of the things that has been discouraging, as kind of an aside, is I would do these studies identifying the new demand of different types of engineers and the number of such engineers being graduated each year in Wisconsin, for example, and policy makers would just ignore the data. We were late to the game.

My tenure as co-editor has generated an ample supply of guilt. More can be done to market the journal to a larger audience, and encourage stronger research, more and better papers. Did you feel the same?

It certainly was a challenge at the outset to get submissions and to get readers. Between the two, I think you should spend your energy getting more good papers.

Modestly, yes. We had the Urban Research Center, and we had a very good secretary, who, when we didn't have her working on research projects, could work on the journal, so we had that flexibility. And I recall we did receive some financial support for hiring a graduate student assistant to work on EDQ. But I don't think there was much more than that.

The Upjohn Institute allowed us the opportunity to hold conferences in association with the journal, which, personally, I found extremely beneficial. We were able to partner with the Federal Reserves and with other organizations to host these meetings in many locations. Did you consider having conferences associated with EDQ?

Conferences were a GLEDR activity, and they generated greater research interest in the journal. We had wonderful interactions. We also had several conferences sponsored by the region's Federal Reserve Banks. They had a substantial interest in economic development and research on approaches used in the region.

It's happened to several programs. They've been downsized; they've been changed where they're housed in efforts to save administrative monies. I know University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has downsized its urban planning department, and it didn't have anyone after I retired who could do economic development until it hired someone this past fall. So, it will come back here, but it's been several years since we've had anyone able to teach it.

Locally, UNC-Chapel Hill's public policy planning department has changed drastically. They have lost several good researchers in economic development. Do you wonder why the field seems to be in decline?

Well, in part, it is because some of us are aging. And universities are under tighter financial constraints than before. Departments are being asked to teach their core topics and need approval for related subjects and faculty.

Is economic development losing its presence because decision-making is made on the corporate level? Corporations and companies have a lot of expertise as to what is the best place to locate their facilities. So economic development, per se, doesn’t seem to be that important because companies have the strongest interest in doing their homework. It is in their interest to make sure the labor force is there, the transportation's there, make sure that their markets are there. And so, you know, economic development is just incorporated in your MBA program. How do you respond?

I'm afraid you're pretty accurate. A real tell-tale is the location of the new data centers. The largest creators know exactly what they want and what locations best offer those ingredients. The fights today come in communities that are more concerned with environmental impacts and electricity cost increases than in more jobs.

The larger companies are very well equipped to make those decisions. Smaller ones, I sometimes wonder, because they move into areas that do not make sense to me. The state of Wisconsin is giving away an enormous amount of money still to attract firms. It doesn’t need to for data centers, however, data centers are coming. And yet, citizens are going to spend $100 million each to get the data centers into our state. It makes no sense. I wish policy makers conducted analyses to recommend what ought to be done so that we can use money where it really is helpful.

I'm not on top of the data centers, and I did not know Wisconsin was being inundated by them. That's news to me. I wonder if economic development is still a thing because, as Adam Smith said, of all commodities, humans are the most difficult to move. We don't want to move from our towns, even though the economic purpose of the town may have disappeared. That's why we have economic development: Regions don't want to die, and they will spend money trying to develop some avenue for their success, even though economically there might not be one.

Yep, I think that's accurate.

Give me some hope here!

You're going to find ideas from others out there. That is why you should continue to offer others a vehicle to share their insights: EDQ!

Well, just to wrap up, is there anything that you wanted to be asked, or anything that you wanted to make sure that came across?

I guess one of the things I didn't stress: We were trying to fill a large economic development knowledge gap in terms of lessons learned, in the hopes that successes and failures could inform others. I still think there is a large need for information on successful and unsuccessful economic development initiatives.

It's interesting you say that. One of the papers we're working with is an author's top 10 lessons learned. But I don't know if we ever learned any lessons or not. I mean, we're still throwing money at firms.

Yes.

We're still subject to fads.

Yes. Data centers.

I still wonder why the bridge between academics and practitioners is so difficult to build. I will say, one thing that we don't appreciate is the advancements in modeling. It has drastically improved from the old days of location quotients and shift-share approach analyses that I grew up with. And so, in some respects research on the academic level is being incorporated. So maybe the bridge has been built, it's just that it wasn't an activity between researchers and practitioners. It was researchers coming up with interesting statistical methodologies to measure, and the practitioners just taking it and running with it.

I think that's true, and that's one of the things that I noted. I certainly helped develop a data source that others had not previously used, and I could get access to the state of Wisconsin and some others in other states, but not many. It's detailed employment and service data. And that gave insights that many people hadn't previously had. So, part of my hope is that over time, others would come up with similar types of improvements in data that give us insights that we could not otherwise have.