Economic development in its place – Brookings

Report on Integrating Land Use and Economic Development to Advance Sustainable Development Goals

This report analyzes the critical linkage between land use policies and inclusive economic development, framing the discussion within the context of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It extends previous work on equity impact assessments to demonstrate how local land use tools can be upgraded and integrated with other policy instruments to foster economic change that aligns with key SDGs, including SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth), SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities), and SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities). The objective is to inform a new generation of local economic progress that is both effective and equitable.

Current Challenges and the Urgency for an SDG-Aligned Approach

Local and state governments face converging pressures that intensify the need for economic development strategies grounded in sustainability and equity. Understanding these forces is critical for achieving inclusive growth without exacerbating existing inequalities, a core tenet of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Key Pressures on Local Economies

• Housing Affordability Crisis: A significant mismatch between wages and the cost of living undermines progress toward SDG 1 (No Poverty) and SDG 11. This crisis fuels gentrification, displacement, and skepticism about development projects, challenging communities to ensure that growth benefits all residents.
• Shifting Federal Policies and Fiscal Strain: Changes in federal spending and tax incentives, such as the Opportunity Zone program, have had mixed results in promoting equitable job creation in distressed communities. With cuts to federal support for housing, justice, and education, local governments face increased fiscal pressure, making sustainable revenue generation essential for maintaining public services.
• Intensified Competition for Development: In a climate of economic uncertainty, conflicts over large-scale, land-intensive projects like stadiums, casinos, and data centers are re-emerging. These projects raise significant questions about their alignment with SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth) and SDG 13 (Climate Action), particularly concerning public subsidies, job quality, and environmental impacts like energy consumption.

These challenges highlight the necessity of integrating economic development with land use planning to create resilient local economies that can grow revenue, reduce long-term social costs, and advance human well-being in line with the SDGs.

Re-Evaluating Economic Development for SDG Alignment

To chart an inclusive economic future, it is essential to address fundamental questions about the purpose and practice of local economic development, ensuring that strategies are explicitly designed to achieve sustainable outcomes.

Core Debates in Economic Development

1. Economic Growth vs. Mere Development: A critical distinction must be made between development that expands a region’s economic base (growth) and that which merely shifts activity (real estate development). True progress toward SDG 8 requires focusing on export-driven, value-creating sectors that generate sustainable local employment, rather than projects with questionable long-term public benefit.
2. Defining Success: Job Quality and Holistic Well-being: Success must be measured not just by job quantity, but by job quality—a central target of SDG 8. This includes fair wages, benefits, and worker dignity. Furthermore, success metrics should expand to include environmental sustainability (SDG 11, SDG 13) and broader indicators of human flourishing, moving beyond purely economic measures to encompass community well-being and social capital.
3. Governance and Benefit: Who Decides and Who Benefits?: Achieving SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities) requires addressing who shapes development agendas and who reaps the benefits. Inclusive governance processes are paramount. Policies must be intentionally designed to expand opportunities for disadvantaged groups, including through equitable procurement practices that support diverse local business ownership and wealth creation. Despite political backlash against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, efforts to ensure that economic gains are shared broadly remain critical for fulfilling the promise of the SDGs.

An Integrated Framework for Equitable and Sustainable Development

Conventional land use planning is an insufficient tool on its own for achieving equitable outcomes. A more powerful approach requires upgrading land use tools and integrating them with a broader suite of economic development instruments. This integrated framework focuses on shaping four key areas to align local action with the SDGs.

Four Pillars of an Integrated Strategy

• Defining the “Game”: Establishing holistic, areawide plans with clear goals and metrics for inclusive and sustainable development. This provides a normative framework, similar to the STL 2030 Jobs Plan, to guide decisions and ensure they contribute to overarching goals like SDG 8 and SDG 10.
• Determining “Who Plays”: Actively expanding participation to include historically marginalized players. This involves building the capacity of community-based organizations and ensuring diverse stakeholders can co-lead development processes, fostering local ownership and alignment with SDG 11.
• Structuring the “Rules of the Game”: Implementing policies that embed equity and sustainability into the development process. Examples from Austin, Texas, include living-wage ordinances, affordable housing bonds, and transit funding, which collectively change the conditions under which development occurs to better support SDG 8 and SDG 11.
• Directing Investment: Mobilizing public, private, and blended capital toward projects that unlock value, access, and ownership for all. This involves strategic investment in priorities defined by the community to ensure that plans translate into tangible, equitable outcomes.

Strategic Imperatives for Advancing the SDGs in Urban Regions

To operationalize this framework, particularly in high-cost cities facing acute inequality and affordability challenges, several imperatives are clear. These actions can help localities systematically embed SDG principles into their development practices.

1. Adopt Meaningful Economic Development Plans: Create and adopt broadly supported plans that define success with clear goals and metrics for inclusive growth, providing a benchmark for assessing projects and policies against SDG targets.
2. Establish Transparent Rules for Equitable Benefits: Attach clear, enforceable public benefits—such as job quality standards and local hiring—to publicly subsidized projects and contracts to ensure development directly contributes to SDG 8 and SDG 10.
3. Develop Scorecards for Tradeoff Analysis: Use rubrics or point-based systems to transparently weigh competing objectives in development proposals, helping decision-makers prioritize projects that deliver the greatest social, economic, and environmental value.
4. Embed Inclusion in Sector Development Strategies: Modernize strategies for growing key industry sectors to include tangible mechanisms for workforce linkages, local supplier development, and community wealth-building, ensuring that growth in high-value industries advances economic mobility for all residents.
5. Empower Local Actors for Neighborhood-Level Co-Creation: Invest in the capacity of hyperlocal organizations to co-envision, co-invest, and co-lead planning and development, fostering the asset-based community development essential for achieving SDG 11.
6. Mobilize Aligned Capital for Inclusive Projects: Strategically align public, private, and philanthropic capital behind well-defined priorities to ensure that inclusive and sustainable projects are financed and implemented, turning plans into reality.

Conclusion: Beyond False Choices Toward Sustainable Progress

This report advocates for rejecting the false choice between economic growth and inclusion. By integrating land use policy with a comprehensive suite of tools for equitable economic development, local governments can advance multiple Sustainable Development Goals simultaneously. This integrated approach, grounded in holistic planning, inclusive governance, and strategic investment, offers the most promising path toward creating local economies that are not only prosperous but also just, resilient, and sustainable for all residents.

Analysis of Sustainable Development Goals in the Article

1. Which SDGs are addressed or connected to the issues highlighted in the article?

• SDG 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth: The article extensively discusses the need for “expanding good jobs,” improving “job quality” beyond mere quantity, and growing “small and midsized businesses with local and diverse ownership.” It critiques economic development that fails to provide decent wages and benefits, directly aligning with the goal of promoting sustained, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment, and decent work for all.
• SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities: A central theme of the article is promoting “racial and social equity” and ensuring economic development does not “exacerbate inequality by race, class, or other traits.” It advocates for equity impact assessments, inclusive decision-making processes (“who decides and who benefits”), and strategies to close the “racial wealth gap,” all of which are core to reducing inequality within and among countries.
• SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities: The article’s focus on “land use policies and practices,” “rezoning,” the “housing affordability crisis,” and preventing “displacement” directly connects to making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable. It highlights the importance of integrated and participatory planning, as seen in the examples of Chicago and Pittsburgh, and the need for affordable housing and sustainable transit.
• SDG 13: Climate Action: The article links economic development to climate resilience, mentioning the need to make local economies “more resilient to… losses from extreme weather and other impacts of a changing climate.” It also points to “green growth” and the development of “climate-smart technologies and services” and a “climate-adaptation-focused Resilience Tech Hub” as key economic development interests, connecting directly to taking urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.
• SDG 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure: The discussion on upgrading “infrastructure,” developing “critical industry sectors” like advanced manufacturing and biotech, and fostering “technology innovation clusters” aligns with the goal of building resilient infrastructure, promoting inclusive and sustainable industrialization, and fostering innovation.

2. What specific targets under those SDGs can be identified based on the article’s content?

• Target 8.3 (Promote development-oriented policies that support productive activities, decent job creation, entrepreneurship… and encourage the formalization and growth of micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises): The article directly supports this target by advocating for policies that “expand good jobs” and “grow small and midsized businesses with local and diverse ownership.” It emphasizes creating local business “ecosystems” and expanding contracting opportunities for small businesses.
• Target 8.5 (Achieve full and productive employment and decent work for all… and equal pay for work of equal value): The article’s strong emphasis on “job quality” over quantity, defining “good jobs” by “good pay, measured against the local cost of living,” and mentioning local “living wage” ordinances and efforts to raise the minimum wage directly corresponds to this target.
• Target 10.2 (Empower and promote the social, economic and political inclusion of all, irrespective of… race, ethnicity… or other status): The article’s core argument for “inclusive and effective economic development” that generates “shared gains, including racial and social equity” is a direct reflection of this target. The focus on “who decides and who benefits” from development speaks to promoting political and economic inclusion.
• Target 11.1 (Ensure access for all to adequate, safe and affordable housing): The article identifies the “housing affordability crisis” as a major issue and highlights solutions such as Austin’s voter-approved bond for “building affordable housing” and zoning reforms to “balance housing supply and demand” and bring rents down.
• Target 11.3 (Enhance inclusive and sustainable urbanization and capacity for participatory, integrated and sustainable human settlement planning): The article advocates for upgrading and integrating “land use tools” with economic development. It praises cities like Pittsburgh for organizing “comprehensive planning” with stakeholder engagement and Chicago for its plan to guide “land use, but capital program and other budget prioritization as well,” which are examples of integrated and participatory planning.
• Target 13.1 (Strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards and natural disasters): This target is addressed through the article’s call for making local economies “resilient to shifts in… losses from extreme weather and other impacts of a changing climate” and its mention of a “climate-adaptation-focused Resilience Tech Hub.”

3. Are there any indicators mentioned or implied in the article that can be used to measure progress towards the identified targets?

• Indicators for SDG 8: The article implies several indicators. For job quality (Target 8.5), it mentions measuring wages against the “local cost of living” and refers to the “Economic Policy Institute’s Minimum Wage Tracker” and a “workforce survey of job quality.” For entrepreneurship (Target 8.3), it suggests tracking “business ownership and performance disaggregated by race, gender, and other traits.”
• Indicators for SDG 10: The article explicitly points to the need for specific indicators to measure inclusivity (Target 10.2). It praises the “STL 2030 Jobs Plan” for offering “specific indicators of whether economic progress is inclusive or not,” such as “Employment indicators as well as indicators of business ownership and performance disaggregated by race, gender, and other traits.” The “racial wealth gap” is also mentioned as a key measure of inequality.
• Indicators for SDG 11: To measure progress on affordable housing (Target 11.1), the article implies tracking rental prices, citing that policy changes helped “bring Austin rents down.” The balance between housing supply and demand is another implied metric. For planning (Target 11.3), an indicator would be the adoption and implementation of “comprehensive land use plans” that integrate equity goals and the use of tools like “racial equity impact assessment” in land use decisions.
• Indicators for SDG 13: While less specific, the article implies that progress on climate resilience (Target 13.1) could be measured by investment in and growth of “climate-smart technologies and services” and the establishment of entities like a “Resilience Tech Hub.”

4. Summary Table of SDGs, Targets, and Indicators

Source: brookings.edu