Council of Urban Economic Development
EDA’s top leadership assigned its chief of urban projects, Andy Bennett, to develop an urban constituency and a non-rural role for EDA. To this end, through the late 1960s EDA played the role of godfather to what became the Council of Urban Economic Development (CUED). CUED’s midwife was Ed de Luca, head of Baltimore’s Development Corporation, who, informally encouraged by Bennett, on February 10, 1966 sent a letter to 20 Big City mayors and their development chiefs inviting them to Baltimore to brainstorm.12 The letter’s opening lines exposed the motivation behind this initiative (deindustrialization/suburbanization) and those behind it (Big City mayors and their young ED czars): “A few weeks ago you expressed interest in the formation of the ‘HUB CLUB’ which we proposed as a concerted effort by cities to combat the loss of industry to suburbs” (Kysiak, 1992, p. 4).
In 1966, in the midst of what would be five years of central city riots, few had any doubts the exodus of business from central city to suburbs was going to accelerate even more dramatically. Something had to be done. In response to the February 1966 letter, Big City economic developers from 15 cities arrived in Baltimore, all paid for and coordinated by de Luca.13 There followed a series of meetings (Washington, Pittsburgh and Chicago) over the next year. In April 1967 the Helping Urban Business Council (HUB) was officially incorporated in Milwaukee. By that time, additional cities such as Toledo had joined the group.
Like AEDC in its formative years, HUB restricted its membership to cities of over 250,000; in fairly short order the population requirement was reduced to 100,000. By 1967, 15 cities had joined. HUB’s central mission was to address the “industrial and commercial problems of the central cities, with a major emphasis on industrial development” (Kysiak, 1992, p. 5). In its earliest years the “cult of manufacturing” was an integral strand of HUB’s DNA. The initial laundry list of programmatic priorities included tax incentives, downtown/CBD redevelopment, preserving industrial land, incubators, manpower and “negro entrepreneurship.” In 1968 EDA funded a two-year grant to HUB (the first of a series through the 1970s; the first HUD grant came late in the 1970s) and an executive director was hired. By 1969, 21 cities had joined HUB and its first annual conference was held in Philadelphia. In 1970 executive offices were moved to Philadelphia.
The move to Philly, however, was short-lived as:
- HUB became convinced a strong presence in Washington DC was needed to acquire the Nixon administration’s support for urban, central city involvement.
- The organization’s name was changed to the Council of Urban Economic Development (CUED).
- The headquarters—with a new executive director, founding member Ken Fry from Milwaukee—was moved to DC where it remains to this day.
By 1972, CUED had about 150 members and a second EDA grant. Early CUED priorities were technical assistance to its members (including on site), networking and, above all, “making its presence known to Congress” (Kysiak, 1992, p. 6). CUED during the Nixon administration, however, could not access or consistently affect its decision-making while maintaining support of a Democratic Congress.
AEDC during this period also was active—but in a substantially different fashion. In 1964, with headquarters in Boston, the first class of the Industrial Development Institute graduated 19 economic developers. In 1966 the first issue of its journal, the AIDC, was published and membership exceeded 1000. In 1967 the first accredited “Basic Industrial Development” course was held at Texas A&M University, and in 1968 three such courses (intended for American Indians) were held at Arizona State University. In that year, the first survey of member activities and salaries was released: The Industrial Development Practitioner: Profile and Study. AIDC’s crowning achievement in this period, however, was its 1971 establishment of the profession’s first certification program, its first certified developer exam from which 58 developers were certified. In 1973 the headquarters moved to Kansas City (Shelton et al., 2001, pp. 28–9).
By 1970 economic development has developed two separate professional organizations. AIDC and CUED were not only separate, they were also quite different in their membership, functions and priorities, and in their core mission as professional associations. AEDC continued its inward focus on networking and developing the skills of its members in the practice of their profession; its more open enrollment made it eight times larger than CUED. Its publication tied its membership to economic development, and its development of a curriculum for a basic introductory course in economic development, followed by a professional certification program, meant that it had developed a body of knowledge reflective of its approach to economic development.
CUED’s priority was to maintain a focus by an activist federal government on economic development. Its technical assistance programs, for the most part, were intended to assist members in developing programs whose purpose was to retain central city manufacturing—firms that were targets of industrial recruitment by AIDC members. Tension between the two organizations was constant. The irony in all this was that both organizations, so different in their conception of economic development and their inception 40 years apart, had developed from leadership provided by the city of Baltimore. The difference in their godfather organizations was quite telling: AIDC the US Chamber of Commerce; CUED, the Economic Development Administration.
Ron W. Coan 