Place plays an important role in shaping the economic outcomes of residents. Place-based strategies have long been used to address employment and mobility barriers in lower-income communities. However, evidence on the effectiveness of such initiatives has been mixed.

During this seminar, presented by the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta and Philadelphia on August 12, 2026, researchers examined the impact of workforce development programs, shared ideas to strengthen their effectiveness, and offered insights to help inform future place-based strategies.

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Place-Based Strategies: Strengthening Local Economies Through Labor Market Policies (video, 1:27:49).
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Transcript

Whitney Felder

Good afternoon, and welcome to the third seminar in the Federal Reserve’s 2026 Community Development Research Seminar series—Place-Based Strategies: Strengthening Local Economies through Labor Market Polocies. My name is Whitney Felder. I’m the marketing and communications at Fed Communities.

Today’s seminar, hosted by the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta and Philadelphia, will focus on place-based research strategies to tackle employment and mobility barriers in low-income communities. During today’s 90-minute session, there will be a panel discussion and you will have the opportunity to ask questions during the Q&A portion.

Now, just for a few quick housekeeping items: please keep in mind the views shared during this event do not necessarily represent those of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors or the Federal Reserve System. This session is being recorded and will be accessible on fedcommunities.org within two weeks of today.

Also for logistics, we will be muting all microphones, and so we’ll be taking questions throughout portions of today’s conversation. You can submit those questions using the Q&A feature. Now, I will turn it over to Karen Leone de Nie. She is the community affairs officer and vice president of Community and Economic Development at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta for a brief welcome and a few introductory remarks. Karen, take it away.

Karen Leone de Nie

Whitney, thanks so much, and thank you all for joining us today. It’s a real pleasure to be here. As Whitney said, I lead the community and economic development team at the Atlanta Fed, and I think this is going to be a really important discussion to really think about how different programs and policies can work together to achieve economic growth and opportunity across the country. So we know place plays a really important role in the economic outcomes of people who live there, especially employment opportunities, ultimately income, and subsequent economic mobility.

Place-based policies have long been used by federal, state, and local governments to uplift distressed communities by seeking to increase place-defined economic activities and financial investments that are both publicly and privately originated. Today, we’ve brought together four speakers who are going to discuss the path forward for place-based policies and associated workforce development programs and policies that are going to be based on lessons learned from existing efforts.

Today’s discussion will illustrate how place-based initiatives rely on sometimes blunt tools, major investments, tax incentives, to stimulate labor demand, with sometimes little attention to local residents’ ability to secure the resulting jobs. In contrast, local workforce development programs take the opposite approach. They’re about increasing labor supply and labor quality through initiatives tailored to the workers themselves within a specific neighborhood or labor market. It is these differences in the approach of the efforts, general economic growth versus economic opportunity, that makes bringing today the experts together in a really interesting and valuable way that can help us think about how these efforts can best work together.

So our first two speakers will discuss traditional place-based policies that target economic activity and labor demand in a region by providing financial incentives to large employers to locate within a geographic area. Think industrial recruiting, as well as approaches like empowerment zones, enterprise zones, opportunity zones. So on this topic, you’ll be hearing from Brett Theodos, who is the director of the Center for Local Finance and Growth at the Urban Institute. He researches mission finance, small business outcomes, place-based development, and wealth-building tools, with an aim to support practitioners and policymakers to expand greater prosperity for all. You’ll also hear from Matthew Freedman, who is the Dean’s Professor and Chair of the Department of Economics at the University of California, Irvine. He is a co-editor of Regional Science and Urban Economics, and he does research in urban economics, public finance, and labor economics, as well as environmental economics and the economics of crime.

Next, I’m going to move on to our second set of speakers, and they’ll share how place-based programs can fund and support a range of activities such as job creation, infrastructure, real estate development, and workforce development. Today, we’ll focus on the role of workforce development in place-based work, which can be used to: one, train and attract new investment; and two, train or retrain workers who have lost their jobs or who are economically disadvantaged. These second two speakers will build on these themes, and we’ll explore policies that focus on increasing the labor supply of an area through training and upskilling local workforce.

So today you’re going to hear from Laura Peck, who is an associate professor at Rutgers University and principal faculty fellow at the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development. Her primary area of expertise is environmental and impact studies and how best to measure impacts across varied settings and populations. Next, you’ll hear from Ashley Palmer, who is an associate professor at the Texas Christian University Department of Social Work. Her research focuses on promoting healthy development and well-being among youth and young adults. Her recent scholarship centers on the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, examining the effectiveness of federal youth workforce development policies.

So finally, before we transition into our presentations, I want to thank my colleagues, Alex Ruder of the Atlanta Fed and Adam Scavette of the Philadelphia Fed, for conceiving of this session and bringing together these experts to help us learn together about how to make place and people policies and approaches more effective. Thank you all again for joining us. And Whitney, I’m going to turn it over to you again before we have our speakers jump in.

Whitney Felder

And actually, I’m going to turn this right over to Brett, our first speaker. He is the director at the Center for Local Finance and Growth, Housing and Communities Division at the Urban Institute. Brett, take us away.

Brett Theodos

Great. Thanks so much. Good to be with you all. I’m going to give a bit of a whirlwind tour, mashing up probably more than two dozen different studies to zoom out to give some broader reflections on where we’re at. So let’s jump in.

First thing that I think we need to know, next slide, is where we’re at, next slide, in terms of wage growth. So we have seen strong wage growth at the top, top quintile, 20%. However, next slide, we have not seen wage growth, inflation-adjusted, in the bottom 20%. And so what that means when we’re thinking about place-based policy is that we’re swimming upstream, that we’re not seeing ability to spend more on rent or other things that would support a place-based economy coming at the bottom end. So that just makes the work of place harder.

Next slide. What it means when we look at it comparatively is the US is really an outlier with respect to inequality. We can look at that by wealth, we can look at that by income, or a number of dimensions. This might seem like only bad news. The good news, silver lining here, is there must be choices that we can and could make to have different outcomes, as other countries have.

Next slide. That shows up in place. So we have some places, we can look at the MSA level, but here picking states, Utah and Colorado, zooming ahead in terms of median household income change. Next slide. You can see that at the MSA level, where we have meaningful growth in some of these places. Next slide. But others are really falling behind. So for example, West Virginia has had no income growth in the last five decades. So it’s very hard to think about what place-based tools work when we’re not capturing growth that’s already happening, we’re trying to entirely create it in a place as big as a state. Just above that: Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri, a lot of the de-industrialized places in the Midwest.

Next slide. And we can see that showing up in rural areas, especially in rural parts, but also within some MSAs. Next slide. We can look at that at the state level, and the patterns become clear. What’s also clear is it’s not just mapping onto population. You can have a place like Nevada that’s grown a lot in population, but not income, and we think of the job mix that’s there versus in other places.

Next slide. But overall, the story is one of rural falling behind, and that’s seen very clearly. Interestingly, that’s really just in the past two decades. Before that, it was tracking more closely.

Next slide. Okay. First, now that we understand our context, do place-based interventions work? And if so, how? So let’s go through a couple of examples. Next slide. Here’s a study that we did, this is online, looking at the economic effects of EDA construction projects. We look at a range of outcomes. Here it’s showing effects on job creations in neighborhoods.

Next slide. Looking at a different program here now, the New Markets Tax Credit, we look at projects that have delivered across different typology of projects types. And here’s an outcome for job-creating projects with job-creating potential and what indeed results.

Next slide. This is a different study. We have linked looking at a different place-based program, the Community Development Block Grant. And this outcome looks at predicted home price increases. And you can see indeed they are there, and they also then taper off with time.

Next slide. And here’s Choice Neighborhoods, which is another place-based program. And we can see that with this example, Yesler, where we are picking up an income effect. So I’m deliberately picking examples where we show an effect just to illustrate to you that indeed there are results of it can make a difference.

Okay, next slide. Let’s go one more. Here’s an example that’s not purely federal in nature. This is a comprehensive community initiative that we did a paper on looking at East Lake in Atlanta. And so we can have these place-based efforts that combine funding across a range of different programs. And so here’s an example of one having an effect.

Next slide. All right. How does this get funded? Next slide. First thing to understand is that we can actually look at that. And I have been looking over the past decade plus at investment flows into cities. Dramatically different results: a 21X spread between the bottom and the top, even among the 50 largest cities on a per capita basis. What do I mean when I talk about capital flows? I mean multifamily. I mean single-family. I mean commercial and non-residential, small business, federal subsidies, mission finance.

Next slide. That shows up even starker as a spread among small and mid-sized cities, again, scaled per household. Next slide. And we can look at that spatially. What places are accessing capital? And we can map that back to our economic growth indicators. Is capital chicken or egg? Of course, the answer’s actually both, right?

Next slide. What stands out as predicting where capital does and doesn’t show up in communities? One dimension is size. Even controlling for size of a place, we see a penalty to being small, rural places accessing less capital. Next slide. And there’s a lot of factors that are reinforcing about pipeline development and the conditions that enable both the demand for capital and the supply of capital, and there’s a cycle.

Next slide. Of course, it’s not just population that matters. It is things like income itself. Poverty is a driver in how much, and there’s a steep penalty to accessing capital by income or poverty rate. Next slide. And we can map that spatially. And this is important in understanding place-based interventions, which are often trying to mobilize capital. So here’s a map of single-family investment by census tract in Chicago. Can see a real concentration on the north and northwest sides of the city.

Next slide. How do the feds try to change this place-based work? Okay, here’s how the landscape is getting funded. Next slide. Overall spending, and we’re working to update this right now, has grown over the past decade plus. Next slide. Where has that growth shown up? On the tax side. That’s where we’re seeing the growth, tax expenditures. Next slide. We are not seeing growth on the grant side. Obviously, there was a bump up with the COVID stimulus response, but overall, not keeping pace with inflation.

Next slide. And we can look at that really program by program. Where have we seen the growth? Especially in the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. Also then in Opportunity Zones. New Markets Tax Credit has held steady. And then others have zigged and zagged, especially on the grant side of things. All of these things I’m showing you are different publications. They’re linked on the web. You can go and find and click around.

Next slide. Here’s an example just picking one program by way of illustration. Here’s the Community Development Block Grant. So the implication is we’re spending a lot less through the appropriated side of the house, not keeping up with inflation. Next slide.

Okay. How do we then take those national numbers and try to understand them within a place for a place-based context? Next slide. So here’s a look at where New Markets Tax Credit investment goes by state. Next slide. We can do the same for different programs. Here’s a picture just of the Economic Development Administration. Next slide.

And here’s a look at community development financial institutions. So CDFIs are agencies chartered by the federal government and Treasury and financed with federal and non-federal sources. And so they’re not a federal place-based program, but they are a tool, an avenue for accomplishing place-based investment and development. Here’s an example of where CDFI lending goes across the US.

Next slide. And how does that show up within place? Well, we’ve already seen before there’s a real penalty to rurality. Is there any difference for some of these other types of investments? Let’s go next slide. Well, CDFIs actually are doing better with respect to rural investment, not as much of that erosion as we saw with mainstream capital sources. And what about federal investment? Actually, very much more showing up in rural places on a per household basis. And so that might seem like good news that we’re balancing out some of the capital deserts out there. Next slide.

Challenge is the federal and the CDFI lending is just so much smaller than mainstream capital. And so it’s not really in the end shifting the overall narrative, even though of course it is nevertheless important. Next slide. How does that look by income or poverty rate? Same dimension. Next slide. For mainstream capital and then what we see for market-rate and for federal capital is a very different story.

Okay. An important story here is where funding is going and concentrated. So we need to keep in mind when we’re talking about these federal programs, often we’re talking about very few investments per place. Here’s an example of just two programs: New Markets, and then also EDA. Next slide. However, that doesn’t mean the funding is equally spread. So here’s a study I did in Ohio looking at where Opportunity Zone investment is going, and nine single census tracts in Ohio got more than half of the investment, whereas a third of Opportunity Zones got no investment at all. So just because a place is designated doesn’t mean it’s accessing those federal resources, and that’s why we need to look at it closely. Next slide.

Okay. I’ll wrap with some summary reflections. Let’s go. Next slide. First, we’ve had a wandering road with respect to federal place-based supports. You can see the acronyms and how they’ve evolved over time. One takeaway as we zoom out is we’ve had increased privatization of decision-making, both about what’s done and about where. And that depends program by program, but as we look over time.

Next slide. We’ve seen that CDFIs and other mission investors do help fill market gaps. On the right is the map of mission investment in Chicago relative to single-family, for example. But we know that those investment trends are small.

Next slide. So in terms of some overall takeaways, we’ve seen examples of positive effects, federal place-based programs. We’ve seen a doubling of spending since 2010. Again, increasingly privatized, small relatively to need. The spread is inconsistent. Many geographies are left out. There’s high transaction costs for many of these tools. There’s alignment issues with local government, philanthropy, state government, CBOs, CDFIs, and others, CDCs that are active locally. As a whole, there’s relatively little potential or a little input for local control, and these programs are difficult to measure.

Next slide. There are some assumptions that are driving place-based work. These are not all wrong, but they’re also not all right or not entirely right. First is that distressed communities adversely affect the lives of their residents. Is that true? Of course, on one level. On another level, it really depends. For example, the MTO results depend on the age of the person who moved, not just yes or no. Assumptions around one size fits all doesn’t work. Local voice is needed. Solutions need to cross domains. That this work can be coordinated locally, that you can overcome global, national, regional challenges, that neighborhoods have tipping points. And this is a key one: that residents stay in place long enough to benefit and that place-based efforts don’t lead to substantial displacement. You can see examples where these have been true and where they haven’t.

Next slide. But in terms of how we should think about entering into place-based work, first we need to keep in mind this takes a lot of money. We’re talking about a billion dollars per neighborhood and a long time, 20 to 30 years when we think about not just delivering a project, but really transforming a place. And that very much depends on, are we talking about a highly disinvested place or a place that’s at an acceleration point already? As hard as it is to build buildings and roads and such, that’s easier to do than changing people’s lives. And that’s much more harder in terms of economic empowerment. We have to ask ourselves: what share of relocates returning is sufficient to justify an initiative? And even apart from relocation, we have to understand that people are mobile. Neighborhoods can fail to connect with market capital. On the other hand, there are examples where market trends take over, and we need to plan for that.

Okay, next. There we go. Thank you all. And I will pass it over to Matt.

Matt Freedman

Thanks a lot, Brett. That was really great. So I’m excited to be here. With my limited time, I’m going to discuss central design considerations with place-based policies and some lessons learned. Next slide.

So Brett set the stage really well, but to build on his discussion, I think this conversation matters really critically now for several reasons. First, as Brett also noted, we’ve seen diverging fortunes across geographies in the US. So to add just one more figure to illustrate, this shows the distribution of per capita income across counties in the United States in 1980 as well as in 2024, both shown in 2024 dollars. So besides the general shift to the right, as the country has become richer, the most notable thing here is the flattening of the distribution that’s occurred over time, with the longer tails implying greater inequality across space. Next slide.

So related, Americans move less than they used to. So this shows the share of people who lived in a different residence a year earlier, and we can see that that’s declined over the past 20 years across all households. And although households with low income more in general, the decline in mobility for those with income below the poverty line has been even sharper. Which means that individuals and families may not be moving in response to economic opportunities like they used to, and that treating places is, in fact, increasingly equivalent to treating people in those places. Next slide.

And finally, as we heard earlier, we know that place matters for long-run economic success. There’s a rich literature now showing that where people are born, where they grow up has meaningful consequences for their life trajectories. As one illustration based on Opportunity Insights data, this figure shows how much children from equally poor families have an income in their 30s, depending on which Philadelphia census tract they grew up in. So by age around 35, these children’s incomes differ more than threefold across the city, from as low as around $17,000 at the low end to about $57,000 at the high end. Next slide.

So for these reasons and others, we’ve seen bipartisan support for place-based interventions to try to strengthen local economies. Where there tends to be disagreement is often in the design and implementation of these programs. Next slide.

So turning to this design question, given the theme of the panel and the focus of my past work, I’ll focus here on place-based policies that target businesses and have job creation as a core goal. And at a high level, every such place-based program really has to make three core choices: Where to target geographically, what incentives to offer within those targeted areas, and then how to actually allocate benefits that are provided within those targeted communities.

So I’ll take each in turn. Next slide.

So on that first design dimension, where to target: of course, place-based job creation programs, like state enterprise zones, federal Empowerment Zone program, New Markets Tax Credit, more recently, Opportunity Zones, have tended to target more economically distressed communities. Both on equity grounds, but also because these places may suffer more severe market failures that could act to stifle investment and limit job creation. Especially given how, as Brett alluded, funds allocated to place-based programs tend to be very limited, this might on the surface argue for drawing very tight boundaries around the most distressed communities to try to concentrate help as much as we can.

At the same time, though, it’s important to recognize that boundaries are porous. And indeed, evidence suggests that many place-based policies that target smaller geographies like census tracts can just reshuffle economic activity as much, if not more than, they create new activity. So for example, in some settings, it may be possible for businesses to locate on one side of a street instead of the other to claim benefits, but still ultimately access the same suppliers, the same workforce, and even serve the same customers.

One related lesson learned is that if targeted areas are viewed as good substitutes for other areas by businesses, or for that matter, households, the greater the risk that activity is merely reshuffled in space. And in turn, the lower likelihood that any benefits reach the intended recipients, which are more often than not the preexisting residents of these targeted areas. But as I’ll come to later, if targeted areas are not viewed as viable options for many firms, for example, because of the lack of an available skilled workforce, it may call for a more holistic approach that thinks about institutional capacity and workforce readiness as well. Next slide.

So on the second dimension, what to offer: in the past, we’ve seen place-based job creation programs in the US offer a wide array of different incentives, with many programs in fact bundling several kinds of incentives together. So this word cloud shows the frequency with which words appear among the list of incentives offered as part of a number of states enterprise zone programs, as well as a handful of federal programs that I and a co-author surveyed in a recent chapter. So perhaps the most common incentive offered is tax credits for hiring new employees, but other forms of tax and regulatory relief are quite common as well.

Now, a key challenge with these forms of incentives is avoiding so-called “windfalls,” that is, paying firms to do things that they would’ve done regardless. So this was identified as particularly problematic in the context of hiring credits that could be claimed retroactively for past hires. In the context of, for example, California’s now defunct state enterprise zone program, hiring credits were also structured in a way that induced churning of workers to try to maximize tax benefits. But we’ve seen more recent programs endeavor to minimize windfalls by, for example, setting employment or investment milestones to claim incentives, and also including provisions to recover incentives if businesses fail to follow through with or maintain promised investments, which I’ll come back to. Next slide.

So a final dimension is who qualifies. So in traditional state enterprise zone programs, benefits were in effect an entitlement in that all businesses located in the zone were eligible. Which of course ensures high take up of the benefits, but also may mean that we’re giving incentives to many firms for hiring workers that they would’ve hired anyway or making investments that they would’ve made regardless.

Now, an alternative approach involves discretionary or competitive awards. Which, in principle, might allow us to target firms for whom the incentive can actually change behavior, that is more marginal firms. But to do that effectively, it requires transparent criteria and public reporting and potentially higher administrative costs. So the question really comes down to whether the screening value exceeds governance risk. Next slide.

So as an example of a more recent program that incorporated lessons learned from past experience, California replaced its enterprise own program, a program that was deemed ineffective at promoting job creation in the state, with the so-called California Competes Tax Credit or CCTC program in 2014. So the CCTC program offers tax credits to businesses that plan to locate in or expand in the state, and the CCTC office screens applicants. Awardees of these tax credits can only claim the credits themselves after achieving negotiated employment and investment milestones. Otherwise, they can’t claim the credits. And in that case, of course, there’s no direct cost to the state. The program also prioritizes businesses with proposed investments in high poverty and high-unemployment parts of California.

So what evidence we have on the CCTC suggests that this program produces strong job creation effects, especially relative to its predecessor enterprise zone program. And today, the cost per job created is a fraction of that observed in more traditional enterprise zone type place-based programs generally. Promising for sure, but of course this is only one program and only one state. And it’ll only be with wider adoption of these kinds of program features and ongoing evaluation that we’ll know the extent to which the results might generalize to other settings. Next slide.

At the same time, a number of states have left their traditional enterprise zone programs largely intact for many decades, and recent federal initiatives have also incorporated design elements arguably less conducive to supporting the disadvantaged residents of the areas that they’re targeting. So for example, recent work on Opportunity Zone program in which there’s relatively limited screening or monitoring of investments to date, at least. The program itself seems to create some new jobs among businesses located in zones, but research suggests that the new jobs themselves are predominantly held by residents of non-targeted, higher-income areas who can commute in. And to the extent that we’ve seen increases in resident employment in Opportunity Zones, those effects tend to be smaller and driven by in-migration of higher-income households rather than increased employment among existing lower-income households in those areas. Next slide.

So to conclude, we know that design choices and place-based programs matter. They can affect whether jobs are created at all, but also which workers get any newly created jobs, and how benefits are distributed more broadly. To the extent that lessons have been learned around program design, the application of those lessons in modern place-based policymaking has been somewhat uneven, say.

One thing that is clear is that disadvantaged residents of targeted communities do not automatically benefit from place-based interventions, especially if those interventions strictly involve incentives for firms to engage in hiring and investment. So this of course suggests that we should be thinking about people living in the places that are targeted and the degree to which they’re positioned to benefit from new employment and other opportunities, which is where the kind of career pathways programs that we’ll hear about next from Laura come in.

So with that, I’ll hand it off to Laura. Thanks.

Laura Peck

Great, thank you. And I’m really thrilled to be here as well to share some insights from a meta-analysis that I conducted with a whole team of people when I was working at Abt Associates. And so I’ll jump right in if you want to go to the next slide. The descriptive and analytic project, the Career Pathways DNA Project, was funded by the Department of Labor. And one element of it was to conduct a meta-analysis of career pathways programs to understand how this approach works and what characterizes more effective programs. A meta-analysis is an empirical synthesis of the impact numbers that come from the slew of reports and studies. And what’s distinctive about this project in particular is that we also coded from across implementation reports a lot of implementation details that in those reports were qualitative, and we quantified them so that we could drop them into analysis to figure out the contributors of impact. Next slide.

So we started with 123 published reports, whether journal articles or in the gray literature, and focused on those that were impact evaluations in particular that had a counterfactual, whether a randomized control or high quality quasi-experimental design that would allow us to draw causal conclusions. So in the end, the 46 studies that are part of this are ones where in and of themselves they can support causal inference. And so we think that for the quantitative, the main part of the quantitative analysis, we stand on good causal ground to make some claims about this approach. Next slide.

So a little bit more details about what it means to be a career pathways program. Well, this is a model for job training and workforce development that involves thinking about successive iterations of education, training, and work to help people move up a career ladder. And it generally involves supports and wraparound services to provide what’s needed for otherwise low-income, low-skilled groups and non-traditional students to gain access to educational pathways. Also distinctive about the approach is that it tends to focus on sectors, if you want to click again here, which really is the place-based hook to this conversation, which is to say that focusing on local employers and building partnership with those employers and understanding local demand and employer needs is really a hallmark of the career pathways approach. And so what it aims to do is provide the education and supports and training needed for better labor to supply to feed into the industry and what they need and offer employment as a way to help this population move forward. Next slide, please.

So the 46 programs that are part of this meta-analysis, this slide provides some descriptive characteristics of what they are, and I will highlight just a couple of them here, which is to note that the lead agency in almost half of the studies that are part of this analysis were community and technical colleges. And it’s also notable that at the bottom of that column, 43% of the trainings were less than six months in length. So at least what we’re capturing in this analysis are short-term programs commonly offered through community and technical colleges. You can see there in the middle that they cross many sectors and many programs provide training in more than one sector, which is why those don’t add to 100. And lots of other features to these multifaceted programs that really try to provide holistic support in propelling people into work. Next slide.

So the big question here is how do these programs work? Click, please. And from this meta-analysis, well, first let me tell you, I’m going to show you a couple of these little graphics here where the top lighter color gray bar reflects the controller comparison group level from these reports. The bottom darker bar is the treatment level, such that the difference between those two is the impact estimate, and then the arrow will indicate the relative size of that impact. So for this first example here, we can see that the career pathways approach increased educational progress. And here we have measured this as earning a credential. It increased it by a large amount, 28 percentage points or a 150% relative increase in the treatment over controller comparison group. Next slide.

We also learned that this approach increased overall employment by a small amount, as you can see in that top graph, but it increased industry-specific employment by a relatively larger amount, 19 points or a 72% increase in the treatment over controller comparison group. Next.

We also learned that the approach increased short-term earnings by a very small amount, but did not increase meaningfully medium or longer-term earnings. And for all of these findings, because these are based on high quality experimental and quasi-experimental designs, we have a relatively high level of confidence that we can interpret these findings to this point as causal. But one of the things that’s really interesting is that bottom point that I note there, there are widely varying impacts. So what I’ve reported here is the average impact, but that hides the fact that there’s a lot of variation here. And this variation exists not only in impact, that is some programs have much smaller and others much larger impacts. But we also observed in that implementation data that we coded that there’s a lot of variety there, too, and that is really going to propel us into the next part. And I think the juicier part of this presentation, which is what characterizes more effective programs.

So if you want to go to the next slide, I will share that we have 46 studies here, so this implies that we are constrained by this number of evaluations. And across the studies, we coded 78 distinct measures related to program design. That is what are the components of these programs? Program implementation, how do they implement, the local economy and program context, and participant composition measures? And so from across these 78 measures of study and program characteristics, we used a meta-regression approach to relate those characteristics to educational progress and labor market impacts. And we did so iteratively to identify those things where there was some, I guess you could say, signal through the noise of the impacts.

So I will highlight in the next slide the main findings from that study. Though, I also want to note that these findings we do not interpret directly as causal, but instead as suggestive. And so as such, I think that they are informative, but not necessarily prescriptive. Though, from all of this, I feel like we have this interest and tendency to want to make prescriptive statements. But for most of these, I think that they’re suggestive and will imply some ideas and maybe some future research directions.

So let me say that from this analysis of characteristics across these particular 46 programs, we found that programs had larger educational progress impacts when employers provided input on curriculum and program design or when staffing agencies are partners. Click.

And we know from qualitative evidence out there that employer connections seem to be a key aspect of program success. And so since we know this from descriptive and qualitative research, it’s I guess reassuring that this first quantitative study of this relationship found that it rose to the surface as well as potentially an important contributor. And this also, I guess, relates to the place-based hook here and that these aren’t job training programs operating independently from employers, but in ways where there are opportunities for them to connect together, there might be stronger opportunities for labor market success.

Next, we learned that there are smaller educational progress impacts, though still positive, when those community or technical colleges are the lead agencies or partners. Click.

And this I think is really interesting because the flip side of that is to say that programs that are maybe nonprofit-run and highly selective with a small group of people, they have tended to show more favorable impacts. And so what’s the implication here? Well, it could be that community and technical colleges lead to smaller impacts, but they’re doing so in accordance with their mission to serve a larger swath of the community. And so I think there’s a place-based lesson here that we hope we can think about together.

We also learned that programs that had larger labor market impacts were those that had a larger share of African-American participants. And if you want to click here again, I think this is a really interesting finding because these are, of course, study-level results where we’re looking across these 46 programs, and they stand in conflict with some individual-level results that we’ve seen in this area of research where some individual programs show the opposite. So I think this flags an area for future research.

And then finally here on the slide, you can see this analysis taught us that there are smaller labor market impacts when programs offer flexible sequencing of courses or offer tuition or other financial assistance. And this to me goes back to that point where I was making the first set of findings, I feel comfortable in making causal claims. In this case, I don’t. So if you want to click, I’ll share my little nugget of insight here about what I think is probably a bit of selection bias. It very well could be the case that programs that offer flexible sequencing or tuition and other financial assistance do so because their program participants are especially needy of those program components, and it is the participant characteristics that maybe associate with lower labor market impacts. So I think there’s a lot to disentangle here, and this research is really a first step in trying to disentangle.

So if you want to click twice, I guess, to the next slide, I will share on the next slide still some quick implications in my remaining time, which is to say that I think that as we step back and think about what have we learned from this analysis of these particular 46 programs operating this particular career pathways model in a sectoral setting, that it is really important to think next about how these kinds of programs can convert what seem to be quite favorable educational progress and industry target employment gains into earnings gains. And I think that a couple of the ways to think about how they might do so is through greater focus on mid and higher level trainings rather than only entry and short-term trainings, and thinking also about the role of the sector and occupations within that sector that might be more inviting that allow people to move up rather than simply have jobs in a sector that in the end aren’t really necessarily any better than the jobs the comparison or control group would have had in a standard service sector or other kind of entry-level job.

I think there’s a lot of implications for research, too, but we’ll highlight just one of these if you want to click, but I think it’s really important that we think about the role of setting and understanding in particular how community and technical colleges, which really do play an important role for this population and in communities aiming to meet employer needs with entry-level workers, how can they learn from the seemingly greater successes among smaller selective programs to bring those larger impacts to the larger populations that community and technical colleges serve?

So I think that is all I wanted to share today. If you want to click a couple slides forward, I also want to be sure to end on two more. I think they put the links in the slides, but I wanted to, again, in closing, acknowledge my small village of research partners. I’m just the messenger here. I happen to be the co-PI for this study and the lead of this meta-analysis, but it took all of these people to make this work happen. So many thanks to them and thanks to all of you for listening. And now I’m going to turn it over to Ashley.

Ashley Palmer

All right, thank you, Laura. And I think that is a good segue right into mine, which is focused on the local setting. So place-based strategies sometimes focus on specific populations. And I’m going to be talking about workforce development programs that target youth. It’s one of the programs that sometimes you might see these targeting. And particularly, I’m going to be talking about youth-funded programs through the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. Next.

So I’m going to be talking about study one. I have two studies on here, but that was ambitious and I’m not going to have really time to get into that one. But study one was the focus from the beginning. It is taking down to that local level some of the things that Laura was talking about is looking at the local implementation context in a large metropolitan area. And so I did this study in 2021. It’s when I was recruiting and gathering data, and I was able to recruit 12 direct service providers who represented five different programs that were targeted at youth workforce development in that area. And then I also recruited seven young adults who were part of one of those programs. So again, this is a qualitative study, and it was really focused on understanding those implementation contexts and the experiences. Next.

So when we think about programs that are serving youth, there’s oftentimes a lot of different barriers for implementation. You have program funding and organizational capacity limits. Some of the funding that Brett was talking about, the Community Development Block Grants, a lot of times those fund social service programs and other important community programs. And with the funding really not staying with inflation, you can see that in how different community programs are funded and also in the community infrastructure. So childcare, healthcare, mental healthcare, things of that nature. Most of the social work services, I’m a social worker, really rely in a lot of areas on funding such as that.

And then you have complex individual and family circumstances because most of the young people who are eligible for these programs are impacted by living in low-income neighborhoods and households or experiencing poverty. So I’ve got a couple of different quotes. You’ll see quotes in yellow boxes as we go through here, but all of these things, all of these barriers to trying to implement these programs can really affect recruitment, retention, and completion.

So one of the central implementation challenges that I found in my study, which is similar to those that have been found in other studies that focus on youth-serving programs, is that it is difficult to get young people into your program. A lot of these programs focus on reconnecting youth who are out of school. And when youth are no longer in a setting where you can get to them, how do you locate them? Really thinking about there’s just not a place that young people who might be eligible for your program are congregating. And when you do find them, how do you gain trust and buy-in, particularly for young people who have probably been burnt by adults in the past or by different organizations or in different settings?

So this was a very common thing. A lot of the techniques that were the most successful were really the hardest, which is word of mouth. You can’t go really large scale with word of mouth, but oftentimes providers would talk about how it was a young person who was in the program or who graduated from the program telling their neighbor, their cousin, someone they ran into about the program. Next.

And then there’s after people enroll. So maybe you recruit people, but then there’s a lot of reasons that people struggle to finish. In this particular study, providers and young people talked about just the inability to consistently meet basic needs. So if you don’t have access to safe shelter, food, clothing, love and belonging, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it’s difficult to ask someone to prioritize coming to a program that requires quite a few hours a week for potentially several weeks or even several months. And so it’s a prioritization.

The other thing is that a lot of times young people who are unable to meet basic needs have a survival mindset. So if you are focused on surviving, being part of a program that’s asking you to plan ahead for what you might be able to experience in six weeks, three months, six months, a year isn’t natural. You’ve not ever really had the luxury of being able to think about what you might want to do or where you might be going. There’s oftentimes people have unmet physical or mental health needs. Sometimes those are related to trauma experiences in this particular metropolitan setting. Even though it’s a pretty large metro area, there was really only one mental health provider that offered a sliding scale, and it could take months for someone to get an intake and actually start receiving services. So if you’re struggling with mental health symptoms, it might be really difficult for you to remain engaged in a program.

Reliable transportation was definitely something that came up, along with childcare. Transportation was something that came up both for young people and from providers. This area had really spotty public transportation. So some areas of the metro area have no public transportation. Others might drop you off a mile from where you need to be. So it’s difficult for young people who don’t have a driver’s license or a vehicle of their own or a reliable person to take them places to consistently get to programs. And then another one I think is just thinking about the messaging that sometimes as adults we give to young people, whether we intend to or not, that can really affect their feelings of self-worth, feeling like they don’t deserve better or they’re not good enough, or, “Why should I try this? It’s probably not going to work out.” And so those kinds of things, you’ve got the individual, the family, the community level, all of these are mixing together. Next.

Some of the things that are the most important facilitators are some that oftentimes I think get overlooked. Community resources are really important. You’ve got to have community infrastructure outside of programs and within them to be able to combat some of those barriers that we were talking about. Probably one of the most key things is relationships. And so that’s relationships between the directors of these programs and employers and education and training institutions so that you’ve got a clear pipeline. It’s connections between people who work within these programs and people in other areas of the community so that they can work together to make sure their resources are received.

But really what young adults and direct service providers talked about the most was the relationship that they have. So young people, you can see I’ve got three quotes from young people over on the screen, were really talking a lot about how having someone that was real with them that they could trust really was one of the things that sometimes kept them going when everything felt like it was too much. And staff talked about how they’re very intentional about that relationship building. They recognize that they’ve got to build that trust if you want to gently challenge someone and push them, but also provide that encouragement to keep going. So the relationships are really, really key. They’re a key piece of that infrastructure, and it came up across the board. Next. Next. And next.

So one of the things that when we’re thinking about these barriers and some of these facilitators from this study, combined with some other research I’ve done and others have done, I think I want to focus on maybe three areas for potential. The first of those is that you’ve got to make participation possible. And this is specific to youth, but this likely applies to other populations as well if you’ve got a population-specific program. So if you’ve got people who are struggling to meet their basic needs, Laura kind of pointed to this a little bit, maybe we see smaller labor market gains in these areas where you are offering tuition assistance or some sort of financial assistance, but likely it is because people need it.

So one of the most successful youth programs is called Year Up. It’s a privately funded program and it’s successful for a lot of different reasons. But I do think an important point is that they offer stipends to their participants and they’re fairly generous stipends, and they even continue to give stipends when people have paid internships. So these public workforce programs oftentimes do not do that. And that is important if you’re trying to think about how to help people meet their basic needs.

Another thing to consider is creative solutions. So one of the things that I talked to some of the providers and the directors of these programs about after the study was over was, “How do you think through creatively? If mental health services are an issue, is there some way to hire someone part-time or full-time that’s offering onsite counseling? Can you work with a local university that has a social work program or a counseling program and people need internship hours? And could they be offering some sort of services to supplement things?” So participation is impacted by so many things. The more that you can do onsite, particularly when people don’t have reliable transportation, is probably going to be beneficial.

There’s also this piece about building trust and continuity. So I talked about how the staff and youth relationships are so critical, and they are, but there’s high turnover among staff in these positions. And that’s partly because of poor compensation, but it’s also because there’s oftentimes very little support. It’s a very difficult job to provide intensive case management. And so thinking creatively about how you support people is important. Another thing to think about is hiring former participants. Recruitment is tough, but you might have more luck if you are using people who have lived experience. They’re going to be seen as legitimate and they might know where to or how to locate people.

And finally, I think that the other point, which definitely links to what Laura was talking about, is we really have to think about improving the destination. Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act programs are often providing those on that job ladder she showed, the unskilled job or the semi-skilled job training for young people, more so the unskilled oftentimes. And so while people may finish a GED or a certificate, it’s not necessarily putting them into jobs that are going to translate into careers or better economic circumstance. And so it’s really, I think, very important in these local areas to be talking not only about high demand jobs, which I think we’re really good about, but talking about high demand, high wage, and low churn jobs. And I think that I’ll stop there. I’m probably at time. I’m going to pass it over to Adam and Alex for the discussion.

Adam Scavette

All right. Thank you very much, Ash. Actually, so I’m going to get us started with the panel discussion. Have a couple questions for the speakers, but just a reminder to drop any questions you have into the Q&A box, and we’ll try to get those answered live in a few moments.

So my first question is about a recent working paper. So Gordon Hansen and his co-authors found that the success of place-based policy often relies on a local supply chain of public and private intermediary organizations. So these can be community colleges, financial institutions, or economic development agencies, and these tend to be the weakest or even absent in some of the most distressed regions to get targeted with these policies.

So I have a two-part question here. How can future policy design address this capacity gap across these different regions? Should policymakers focus on building local institutional capacity first, or should the programs themselves be simplified to fit existing community infrastructure?

Brett Theodos

This is the question I would say that I’m wrestling with right now. And what I’m trying to do now is not just map where capital is going, but where capacities exist. And can we actually measure capacity across different key sectors, be it CDCs, developers? Because I think it means something different if you have a developer who can do a LIHTC or a Choice Neighborhoods project in your place, or you import that once and you leave.

I did a qualitative study looking at Memphis a few years ago, and an interviewee who knew both Memphis and Detroit said to me that Memphis was 10 years behind Detroit in its ability to attract and deploy community development capital. And on paper, these cities are similar size, they have similar-ish demographics, they have similar poverty rates, so what’s so different? Is it that the Ford Foundation, or is it that the Kresge or Kellogg Foundations, or is it JP Morgan? Is it the city itself? Is it the state that’s showing up in a different way?

Of course, the answer’s all of the above, but in an era where we’ve really hollowed out CDC capacity, we have CDFIs left standing, but they fill one specific role well, and that doesn’t mean they fill every role. And so largely we’ve created segmented programs that can deliver a building. I say in a slightly snarky, but slightly sincere way. We’ve gotten pretty good at putting a building in a poor place. We have not developed a policy architecture to actually do place-based development. So we have isolated, atomized buildings going into different places that don’t really build onto one another.

There are exceptions like the Purpose-Built Network that try to cultivate that, but they’re in the dozens of places, not in the thousands of places. So yes, to the question behind the question, what we need, again, are place-based tools that actually make operating support investments into communities. And I would include local government in that, too, not just the NGO set, because largely what we just have now is project finance and not institution finance.

Matt Freedman

Yeah, I completely agree with Brett on all dimensions. I would add that just looking back on our prior experience with place-based programs, one program that stands out to me when you ask this question is the first round of the Empowerment Zone program that did attempt to combine what we think of as more traditional incentives to firms for hiring with block grants to communities that were intended to help with this kind of thing: building institutions and capacity, and potentially trying to position the workforce itself of these communities to be able to take advantage of the benefits that flow from these programs.

So that evidence on that particular program around Round 1 of Empowerment Zones was pretty positive, and some people credit the combination of the pairing of the block grant and that institution building that came with that with traditional incentives for contributing to the success of the program. So I think that this part of things is really important. And what evidence we have suggests that indeed we should be thinking about that side of things on top of the traditional incentives.

Adam Scavette

Thanks, Brett and Matt. Does anyone else have any points about that? Or I can move to the next question.

So my next question is, how can federal initiatives better integrate sector-specific workforce development programs into the core design of place-based policies?

Brett Theodos

I’ll start, I guess, while everybody’s warming their thoughts. I think what I want to validate is that this is hard, that it’s easy to say and to know that people nest within place, and therefore we need to do something. And it’s easy to know that people need jobs and they need income. And so there’s a natural desire to make those things interlock. And the ways that they do so are very hard.

In part, what do we mean by place? Do we mean the Mississippi Delta? Do we mean West Virginia? Do we mean a single neighborhood? We don’t need a workforce center in every single disinvested neighborhood, but we do need a way to get from a neighborhood to a center. So I think what I like for interventions to think carefully through is, to use my colleague Marge Turner’s language, what needs to be place-based and what needs to be place-conscious?

When we think about a place and what it offers and delivers, what are the services that we can provide there and should be providing at a place-based level? And so workforce is an example to me that goes a little bit more into the place-conscious than often to the truly placed-based. But that said, there are some scenarios where we really do want it to be.

And sometimes that’s charged to a very large public investment or Micron moving into outside upstate Western New York and creating 50,000 jobs. There’s a real need within a place to have enough people with this skill at this trade, at this stage, at this level. And so sometimes the private sector or the public sector will force a level of place-based activity or investment that would necessitate a response within a place to actually be able to capture some of that momentum in your sales rather than just let it come in and go back out when the site is built out.

So I think there’s the question of, one, understanding what the need is, and then two, thinking of what the opportunity is. And whether it’s a big stadium or a big infrastructure project or whatever, how do we help people in a place connect to the opportunities that exist there?

And all of that absolutely has a sectoral lens because these are specific jobs in specific places, not generic jobs that we hope will emerge. And we are seeing that also somewhat in the climate space, climate response space with very specific types of jobs that are bubbling in certain places. And I would say we’re talking about a jobs lens, but actually a lot of this is the same with the small business lens. We’re talking about contractors and suppliers and the small business preparatory advisory and capitalization systems. So it is a lot of the same challenges and opportunities on the workforce side and on the small business side.

Alex Ruder

Thank you, Brett. This is, I think, a good, the sectoral work is a good strategy, of course, to the career pathways programs we talked about earlier.

And Laura, I’d like to direct this question to you. And I’d like to think about in the context of some recent paper from Matt and his colleague, David Neumark, where he talks about that some place-based work does try to focus on business recruitment, job creation, but some of these programs focus on really higher wage, higher skill jobs, for which that local population may not be ready for them because of a lack of workforce development. Well, it seems to me that career pathways is a possible solution here, given the industry focus you talked about before.

However, my question is really about some of your research or some of these programs suggest that the career pathway program does a pretty good job training people for those initial jobs, the shorter term credential, the short-term certificate, but not always to the higher skilled roles that require maybe more education. I was wondering if you’d talk a little bit about what you’re finding about that pathway and what, if anything, could get those workers into those higher skill, higher wage jobs.

Laura Peck

Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. And I think that at least the first decade and change of these programs really have been by and large for short-term credentials for entry-level positions. And I think it’s the maturation of these programs that need to then focus on the mid-level and higher-level trainings.

I mean, let’s just take the healthcare sector as a concrete example. What is needed of a particular worker to move from an entry level to a higher step on that, higher rung on that ladder is actually quite a lot. In theory, the healthcare sector offers this opportunity to move up through additional credentialing, but the, I guess, science and technical academic skills needed also tend to be potentially out of reach, at least easily for those entry-level workers. And so I think that it’s a matter of thinking about how to build out programs that have supports for people to go up into the next level.

A couple of the other obstacles really for this population are financial. And Ashley mentioned this, too, that it could be that thinking about work-based learning and contextualized learning and incumbent worker training as a way into the next rung of this ladder might be successful. And when I mention that, it also makes me think that a model like apprenticeships could be really successful because they help to solve the financial obstacle that is so pervasive, but we don’t quite have enough research on that to be able to say explicitly what the right model is. But I completely agree with you and think that being deliberate about the mid and higher level and how to get people from an entry level there is the challenge for the next phase of these programs as they evolve.

Alex Ruder

That’s right. And Matt, I did reference your paper and I do want to offer an opportunity to contribute. When you were doing your research, did you see any explicit discussion or tension between this job creation for the higher wage work versus just the availability of the workforce development ecosystem locally to provide workers for those jobs?

Matt Freedman

Yeah, and I think… The short answer is yes. But I’ll also just add related that it cuts both ways in an interesting way, which is that some place-based programs that have existed and can currently still exist will do things like tie hiring credits to hiring folks very locally, hyper-locally. And so in an effort to try to ensure that disadvantaged residents of the communities that are targeted are the ones that are getting the most opportunities.

But that has in the past had some unintended consequences as well in that it tilts the composition of employers who are actually interested in taking up the program towards, for example, employers that need the particular skills of that local workforce, which may be, for instance, retailers as opposed to healthcare or high-tech industries that the program maybe envisioned targeting in the first place. So there’s a tension there that I think some of these career pathways, programs, workforce development can potentially alleviate. So I think that’s a key tension.

And I think more generally, I think there is a desire to try to tie workforce development and institutional capacity to incentives for firms. But as I think Brett alluded, workforce development is often at a scale, a geographic scale, and also involves different government and non-governmental actors than providing tax credits. And so there’s often a very difficult coordination game that needs to be played, and it’s just a more complicated thing to achieve. So I think we’re hopefully moving in that direction, and I think there’s a lot of thought being put into this, but to date, I think it’s been hard to conceptualize.

Alex Ruder

And I mean, perhaps it’s an open question then. Would the higher wage, higher swill firm be more confident taking on that requirement to hire locally if they felt confident in the local workforce ecosystem to produce those jobs?

Matt Freedman

I think that’s absolutely right. And it’s building that confidence because these are, as you’re alluding, can be very large investments. It can be very risky if they’re banking on that and it doesn’t follow through. So having a plan, a concrete plan in place to develop the workforce for the employer is good.

Laura Peck

Yeah. And I think the other evidence, too, that Ashley alluded to from the Year Up program is the poster child for that program where there are really strong employer connections. And so it’s not just that the employer is sitting back and crossing their fingers that the workforce system will produce something that will work for them, but that they are actively engaged in identifying what that means and what elements of the training are prioritized so that when people get through their training, they really are primed for that particular employer and sector and occupation.

Ashley Palmer

Yeah. And I think the thing that I would add, too, is thinking about in these areas, thinking about workforce development, you really need a backbone. You need someone who’s a partner, an actor who is the backbone. Some of the people I’ve been talking to recently, we’ve been talking about could a workforce development board be that backbone and how they should be in many ways.

And in some places the state board is the local board, but someplace like Texas and actually many other states, Texas has 28 workforce development boards. So you have the ability to be a person who is the thing that holds the education, the K through 12 education, the post-secondary education, community college, and four-year. You have the ability to be those employers. Your board has to be made up of employers. And so you do have some real opportunity, I think.

And then we really haven’t talked too much about rural workforce versus suburban versus urban, but I think it is different. The rural area I’ve been talking to, they actually have really strong connections with their employers because their employers want to keep local talent local. In the area that I was doing my study that I talked about, they really struggled to get employers who would take youth. They saw them as a real risk taking them for paid or unpaid work experience, but they maybe were connected better to education institutions.

And so how do you be both? How do you connect those things? I think it’s going to be really important when you’re trying to think about bringing people in or using existing employers who will help create those career path ladders.

Alex Ruder

Thank you, Ashley. I was hoping you can build on that for one additional question is I think we’ve heard, or at least we learned that as the funds and the incentives flow into community, that local implementation context is key. And of course, that’s where your study gets to a lot. And what I like about the study is it highlights for this key population, disadvantaged youth, just the barriers they face to accessing these opportunities.

And what I was wondering is particularly in the qualitative work you do, is were you able to get a sense of, even just in terms of awareness, to what extent are both the youth and even the staff aware of these connections to the place-based opportunities, either in the retail space as Matt alluded to before, or even the higher wage, higher skill jobs that maybe a Year Up graduate would be well-positioned for? What is the awareness even of these?

Ashley Palmer

I mean, for these particular programs, again, a lot of them are that they’re really focused on the unskilled jobs. They’re not necessarily… I mean, I think that they probably are aware of different types of opportunities. I’m not sure the young people are. To be fair, thinking about the young adults in this particular study, I think that if someone’s not telling them about it, they don’t necessarily know what they’re looking for. Or if they don’t have someone in their life who knows about those things, they don’t necessarily… I don’t know that they would be aware of it.

I actually remember asking them about what resources were important or what resources they thought were the best to use or most helpful to them in the community. And it was like they didn’t understand my question because for them, they were like, if someone doesn’t tell you about it, then you don’t know about it. I mean, that was the message that’s taken away. And I think that people who were working in these programs, the staff working in the programs, I honestly don’t know how aware they are. I mean, it wasn’t something we particularly talked about.

I think that they know that there are certain things that would help promote success within the community, both community infrastructure, but also programming and other things. But they had a really hard time. Actually, two of the programs, one of the programs was supposed to feed into the semi-skilled program. So it was actually supposed to be a career ladder on the career pathways ladder. And they had a really hard time getting people to go from that lower step to the next step.

But for them, it seemed like… It wasn’t that young people weren’t aware of it, and obviously the people who worked there were aware of it, but they just weren’t ready or able at that point to be able to think about that persistence that it would take, not earning money for another six months to be able to do that thing. I don’t think I really answered your question very well, but I think that there is some awareness, but probably not of a lot of the things that Brett and Matt were talking about.

Adam Scavette

Thanks, Ashley. So I’m going to pivot and ask a couple questions from the audience.

So the first one asks, why is there a more recent investment in providing workers for the workforce? Is there a historical context or reason for national interest?

Laura Peck

So Adam, I read that in the Q&A, and I actually feel like I need some clarification on it. More recent investment in providing workers relative to some other investment or… Not sure I’m totally understanding.

So whoever that is, I don’t know if that person can come off mute and explain or if you can help interpret so that we can try to answer.

Adam Scavette

My interpretation of it is that traditional place-based policies were more about providing the incentives so that firms could basically want to hire more people. And then the workforce development is more focused on actually making sure there are the people with the skills needed. My interpretation was why the pivot to focusing on labor supply rather than labor demand?

Matt Freedman

I can chime in. I think there’s a few things. One is that we’ve got better and better evidence that these programs, at least under some circumstances and some situations, can work and can build workforces that can take jobs.

I think another is some of the demographic trends and broader macro trends that Brett and I alluded to, which is that historically, Americans moved a lot. They moved to economic opportunity and essentially arbitraged differences across local economies in a way that they’re just not doing anymore. And that’s a whole other issue why they’re not moving. There’s lots of stories around housing costs and other mobility costs that people face these days.

But because people are not moving as much to take advantage of economic opportunities in other places, I think there’s an increasing appreciation that there may be large returns to trying to develop local workforces in a way that may help them uplift these communities. So I think that’s one reason, at least for more academic. And I think policy interest is an appreciation that people are staying in place more now and that we need to focus on folks living in these places if we want to improve economic conditions there. So I think that’s one explanation. I’m sure there’s others, maybe others want to chime in.

Ashley Palmer

I think it was the Brookings Institution that did a really good report on this probably last year, detailing the history and the flow of workforce development policy in the United States, which I understand is not the exact same thing as place-based, but they get at the connection to place with the workforce development. I can’t remember what it’s called, and I wasn’t able to find it just now.

I mean, I would say that there actually has been a long-standing focus on workforce. I think we’re hearing about it differently. There’ve been different executive orders and there’s been different things. Since the 1930s, there’s been an ebb and flow. And there’s been a real tension, which the report talks about, between do we just try to get people employed as quickly as possible so that our unemployment rate goes down and we’re stable in that manner? Or do we do these focus sector-based policies and invest a little more, a little differently? The way employers are involved and the way you used to do work-based learning and training, that shifted.

So, I would encourage you to look for that particular report, but I think it feels a lot now, but it’s partially because I think it’s a primary policy point for the current administration really, and because so many big moves have been made. The combining of agencies and different things have really made it to the forefront. But Biden’s administration did a lot of sector-based things. Obama’s administration, there have actually been for many, many, many years, a real focus. But the ebb and flow of where the focus is and who it’s focused on, I think has shifted a lot.

Alex Ruder

Great. Thank you, Ashley. Everyone, I’m going to now move us toward our conclusion. I want to thank all the panelists for this very interesting discussion. I want to thank all the attendees.

Hopefully, everyone was really following along on really the overall goal of this session was really to start thinking about place-based investment, the efforts for job creation, the efforts to support workers with barriers to employment that flow into a very specific geographic place. And then the other side of it is, well, really what local programs are going to be there to train the workers to take advantage of these jobs? We really wanted to focus on both sides of this challenge, and that’s what we sought to do today.

So I want to thank everyone for joining us and listening along and asking questions in today’s session. I’m going to pass it on to Whitney, and she’s going to conclude our session for us. Whitney?

Whitney Felder

Thank you, Alex. And thank you, panelists. It’s been a great conversation.

Before leaving today, I just want to leave you all with a couple quick notes. You will be sent a survey after today’s session. We’re asking that you fill that survey out. Your feedback is very important. We want to get as much good feedback as we can so we can continue to inform our sessions and make the program even better.

As we mentioned, this session will be available on fedcommunities.org in the coming weeks. If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to check out our upcoming Connecting Communities in September: When Every Dollar Counts: Worker Perspectives on the Economy. And that, again, is Thursday, September 3rd. So that registration link is available on fedcommunities.org.

And finally, be sure to subscribe to the Fed Communities newsletter. You can stay connected. You’ll click the About Us tab on fedcommunities.org, and there’s a subscribe button right there for you.

So thank you all again. We appreciate the conversation, and we hope that you have a fabulous afternoon.