Although evaluations show that state and local economic development programs have few effects on economic growth or redistribution of economic activity, explanations for the failures are incomplete. Technocratic explanations have dominated economic development research but cannot account for many program activities. Based on evidence from a Minnesota program, the best explanation emphasizes a perspective of bureaucratic and political imperatives. Economic development programs are not designed and implemented in ways that can achieve their goals, principally because of important politicalforces. Administrators must run a program to garner support of legislators, a governor, and opinion leaders for program survival. State and locally elected officials need economic development programs to deliver quick, visible projects in their efforts to solve their districts' economic problems, manage business climate politics, and achieve other aims. Achieving implicit goals means that programs only occasionally undertake activities likely to achieve explicit aims.

The University of Michigan's Detroit Community Outreach Partnership Center generates faculty-student teams who work on community development projects with Detroit's community organizations. Projects are designed to enrich students' experiential learning in community settings and to help build communities' organizational capacity. This relationship has exposed a culture clash between universities and community organizations in at least three major areas: the style of work, social justice understanding, and power relations. Further, although the COPC is committed to a community-driven planning model, the nature of the community-university relationship tends to push the work toward a consultant-driven model. Improving community-university collaboration will require restructuring of university pedagogy.

The population of the United States will likely grow by 40 percent by 2050 with the growth concentrated in eight to ten megaregions, connected networks of metropolitan areas. Planners in the United States have begun to plan for these large regions. Their work raises four persistent questions: what is a megaregion, and how does one determine where a megaregion exists? Why plan at the scale of megaregions rather than at metropolitan, state, and national levels? What are appropriate methods and useful data for megaregion planning? When is the megaregion a useful scale for policy and planning?

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Tax foreclosure offers an opportunity to investigate processes of disinvestment in the city. Prior research has not considered how tax foreclosure administration protects or further damages neighborhoods where foreclosure occurs. Detroit's loss of households led to disinvestment in housing and demolition of structures. In addition, at each of the three stages of property foreclosure and disposition, implementers took actions that promised to encourage disinvestment in property by facilitating the spread of blight and encouraging negative externalities. This occurred because (1) foreclosures took many owner-occupied properties; (2) the sale of properties to government entities was small and did not promote reuse; and (3) the foreclosure auctions disadvantaged purchasers who would become owner-occupants, channeled properties in strong neighborhoods to investors at low prices, and sold properties disproportionately to destructive buyers.