Wichita off to good start on reversing fortunes

Though trash-talking Wichita is a local tradition, outsiders who do it risk bodily harm. So it’s to everyone’s credit that the response to a 2015 portrait of Wichita’s decades-long economic decline largely has been receptive and productive.

It surely helped that nationally known analyst James Chung, who drew from a variety of data in his Focus Forward presentations last fall for the Wichita Community Foundation, grew up in Wichita and obviously cares about its future. When he explained how Wichita is out of step with its history and peer cities in income levels, population growth, degree completion, startup density and other categories, people got upset but also got to work.

How that bad news is now fueling action became more clear at Chung’s updates last week, as did the importance of getting Wichitans to feel and speak more positively about their hometown.

If those who know Wichita best are down on it, why should potential investors, employers and young professionals be drawn to it?

Conquering that stubborn “perception” challenge will take some doing, and more community wins like the Advanced Learning Library’s recent groundbreaking and downtown’s other signs of new energy, Cargill’s decision to relocate within the city, and Wichita State University’s rising Innovation Campus and other bold initiatives.

But eight long years after the waves of aviation layoffs began in Wichita, the city is still having “talent leakage,” Chung said. It will be easier to stop the migration and expand the “talent ecosystem” if more Wichitans are upbeat and vocal about their city’s attributes.

Other hurdles are no less daunting, including the dearth of venture capital funding available and, it follows, the lack of local reinvestment as businesses find success and perhaps buyers.

Chung noted how he’d heard from former Wichitans interested in following and perhaps investing in the city’s entrepreneurial aspirations, and said Wichita is well-positioned to be on the leading edge of fast-growing categories such as agricultural technology and digitized manufacturing.

Crediting Wichita with “the will and the capability,” Chung declared himself “cautiously optimistic” that it could join the cities with gross domestic product growth at the 80th percentile or higher by 2025.

Entrepreneurial-minded efforts by WSU, the Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce and the Greater Wichita Partnership are at the forefront of what Occidental Management CEO Gary Oborny characterizes as “strategic doing.” But lots of people, many of them millennials, are working on ventures and projects with the potential to help reverse Wichita’s fortunes.

“Team Wichita,” as Chung called it, is off to a good start.

This story was originally published July 17, 2016 at 12:07 AM with the headline "Wichita off to good start on reversing fortunes."