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Let the Market Decided...
By Teasha Cable
It's the line every economic developer reaches for when they don't want to do the harder thing. It sounds humble.
It's the line every economic developer reaches for when they don't want to do the harder thing.
It sounds humble. It sounds like restraint. Mostly, it's an excuse to do nothing and call it philosophy.
Abraham Salinas, Economic Development Manager for the City of Pleasanton, California, says he believes in that line too, zoning sets the boundaries, then brokers and entrepreneurs fight it out inside them.
But look at what he's been able to accomplish first in Brentwood and now in Pleasanton, and the line falls apart.
The market doesn't decide anything. It picks from options the city already worked within years in advance. And when the city rigs it wrong, "the market" doesn't come back and fix it.
Somebody has to go in and force the correction. That somebody was Abraham.
The City Let a Corridor Die, but Refused to Let it Decay
Here's the corridor that got left for dead, the trapdoor sitting under one of the strongest local economies in California, and the excuse that doesn't survive five minutes of scrutiny.
Brentwood built its entire commercial plan around one road, Brentwood Boulevard. Then a highway got rerouted into a freeway on the other side of town, and every big-box store chased the freeway instead. Walmart. Target. Home Depot. All of them.
Brentwood Boulevard, the street the whole plan was staked on, got gutted.
A city that actually believes in "let the market decide" shrugs at that. Writes it off. Calls it evolution. That's not what happened.
The city bought a dead big-box lot and sold it to a medical provider. It let the county buy the land next door for public services. A Chipotle, a Panda Express, and a grocery outlet moved in around them.
A corridor the market had already voted to kill got dragged back to life, on purpose, using the city's own land as a weapon.
That's not hands-off governance. That's a government admitting its own plan failed and fixing it with force. Every dead corridor in every city that "let the market decide" its way into blight had this option available and didn't take it.
The Trapdoor Under Pleasanton's Economy
Pleasanton looks unstoppable right now. Workday employs 3,500 people there. 10x Genomics just sank $30 million into expanding its campus. Office vacancy sits at 12%, less than half the Bay Area average.
It's the kind of resume every economic developer in the state is jealous of.
It's also a single point of failure wearing a nice suit. Concentrate your entire tax base in a handful of employers and you haven't built an economy, you've built a bet. Abraham says it out loud, which almost nobody in his job does: if one of these anchors leaves, the city has a real problem.
His answer isn't crossing his fingers. It's stacking new bets underneath the old one before he needs them, robotics and AI hardware, a medical sector already expanding with Stanford Division of Hospital Medicine groundbreaking and Sutter Health Plan's 300,000-square-foot purchase, manufacturing space sitting under 5% vacancy, even fusion energy and nuclear battery production coming online next door in Livermore and Sunol.
Compare that to the standard playbook: chase one Fortune 500 headquarters, put it on the homepage, call it a win, and hope.
That's not economic development. That's a lottery ticket with a press release attached. The budget excuse is a lie Every under-resourced economic development office has the same alibi: we can't compete, and/or we don't have the budget for the tools or the consultants the big cities have.
In Brentwood, Abraham needed expensive foot-traffic data. Instead of asking for new money, he found three other departments; police, parks, traffic engineering, that needed a piece of that same data, and split the bill four ways.
In Pleasanton, instead of paying a consultant for a business directory and site-selection map, he built one with the city's own GIS team and a spreadsheet, saving roughly $10,000 to $20,000 a year. Read that 2x.
Nobody wrote a grant for that. Nobody hired a firm. It took someone willing to walk down the hall and ask what the city already owned. Most offices don't have a budget problem. They have a curiosity problem, and a habit of protecting silos nobody in charge actually asked for.
It took someone willing to walk down the hall and ask what the city already owned.
Who should read this:
Listen to the whole episode if you're an economic developer, city planner, or municipal leader who keep hearing "we don't have the budget to compete" and have started to believe it, especially in wealthy or anchor-dependent cities that assume their current strength is permanent.
It's also for commercial real estate professionals who want to understand why some corridors get rescued with public money and others get left to rot, because that decision was never really the market's to make.
The assignment Before your department signs off on one more tool, dataset, or consultant contract this quarter, pull a list of every subscription and dataset your planning, parks, IT, and public safety departments already pay for.
Check it against what your economic development team thinks it's missing. You will very likely find the thing you were about to buy is already sitting in someone else's budget, waiting for you to ask for it.
For the full conversation, listen to the #DynamicDecisionsPodcast episode, and follow Abraham Salinas and the City of Pleasanton on LinkedIn.