The key to transforming floundering communities into economic powerhouses is to “Find a wave and ride it,” the director of Chattanooga’s Office of Sustainability said Thursday.
Back in the 1950s, when North Carolina was suffering from a stagnant economy and high unemployment numbers, visionaries in the Raleigh-Durham area decided to try to transform their community into an internationally recognized research center, David Crockett told Rotary Club members.
They bought a chunk of land about the size of Enterprise South and set to work attracting researchers, educators and businesses willing to get involved in the effort to build a new research and economic development center that would – over time – play a key role in providing more opportunities for residents of the state.
“They anticipated an emerging megatrend and decided to become part of it . . . Today 50,000 people work in that park.”
Chattanooga is working toward a similar transformation, he said, centered around a newer megatrend: Sustainability.
But since the city's effort was launched 20 years ago, it has a head start on the dozens of other communities that have since jumped on the bandwagon.
“These days, green is what everybody’s doing,” he said. “Every city wants to be the greenest.”
Consequently, he said, cities as large as Seattle and as small as Syracuse are now working hard to achieve that goal.
“I hope Chattanooga will be a little different . . . We want to collaborate, not compete,” he said.
If everybody works together, he said, goals can be reached more quickly and benefits spread more widely.
“We don’t want to be Miss America, we want to be Miss Congeniality,” he told the crowd. “Miss Congeniality has 50 friends.”