How city branding can quietly redirect investment

A branding shift in Denver helped attract restaurants, higher-income residents and a growing arts scene—but it also pushed Five Points toward heavy gentrification. Across the U.S., cities are increasingly treating narrative as “economic infrastructure,” using

When people talk about building a local economy, they usually reach for what they can point to: roads, sewer pipes, broadband, parks. But there is another kind of infrastructure—one you don’t see.

It’s the story a city tells about who belongs, what talent looks like, and where value can be found. Those narratives shape which businesses feel investable, where capital flows, and what partnerships form around a community’s future.

In Denver, that power was tested with the renaming of a historically Black neighborhood. Five Points—known as “Five Points”—was rebranded through an intentional branding campaign as River North. or “RiNo. ” with the hope that it would spur a local arts community. The shift worked. It brought in economic development, restaurants, and higher-income residents.

But the campaign’s results came with a sharp second effect: it helped Five Points become the second-most gentrified place in the country.

The lesson is hard to avoid. Even fabricated narratives and relabeling can prove effective at pulling investment in and changing a neighborhood’s trajectory. The difference. as the argument goes. is whether the story is built with intention and tied to inclusive growth—or whether it moves faster than residents can meaningfully consent to what’s happening to their home.

Narrative as economic infrastructure doesn’t start with a slogan. It means treating storytelling as something you can operationalize—like policy and funding—so it influences real-world outcomes.

In practice, narratives can become local history and pride: Pittsburgh is described as “Steel Town USA,” and Austin’s “Keep Austin Weird” slogan helped brand the city as a creatively rich, innovative place, supporting its rise as a tech hub.

When investment capital aligns with the perceptions shaped by these narratives, the stories don’t just describe reality—they start to steer it.

The work is often broken into three components. First is shared language. In cities that manage to coordinate investment and inclusion. economic development officials. lenders. philanthropy and community partners use a unified way of describing value. risk and who counts as included. The shared language becomes a tool for action. making it easier to identify opportunities in the same places and move resources in the same direction.

Second are shared decision rules. The cities that translate community stories into policy. programs and investment design tend to rely on repeatable methods—criteria. guardrails and questions embedded into RFPs. loan committees and city council deliberations. The aim is to ensure projects advance shared ownership or incorporate known resident priorities.

A concrete example is Nashville, which developed a streamlined process and checklist for responding to local government RFPs to support the growth of local suppliers.

Third are shared performance signals. Cities that monitor what kinds of businesses receive funding. which neighborhoods see new investment. and how quickly capital is deployed can better connect the narratives they promote with measurable impact. To keep performance data credible. some communities build a shared measurement framework and partner with a third-party evaluator to preserve integrity.

That structure matters because narratives can lag behind reality—especially where communities have long faced systemic exclusion.

In the Twin Cities. Black and Indigenous communities were left with limited wealth-building opportunities even as new investment dollars flowed into the region. In response. the work described here partnered with Youthprise to launch cooperative entrepreneurship cohorts. placing young founders of color at the center of the city’s economic story. The cohorts gave young entrepreneurs room to explore co-ownership models.

Instead of organizing the city’s narrative around individual enterprises, the approach centered cooperative enterprises. The goal was to build ecosystems that were both profitable and equitable.

Co-ownership models mentioned include worker cooperatives, community land trusts and shared-equity enterprises. They are presented as a way to build a locally rooted economy where ownership, decision-making and prosperity are held in common by the people who live and work there.

Even though these were small businesses—young and often first-time entrepreneurs—they were not treated as inherently risky investments. They were framed as critical to community fabric, and therefore important to building a resilient economy.

That narrative shift is tied to measurable follow-through. In the Minneapolis-Saint Paul region. the described partnership is credited with beginning to shift public will. policy appetite and investor perception alongside concrete support for cooperative. community enterprises. Since the original partnership. approximately $2.5 million in private funding has been secured for a multi-use development anchored by youth cooperative housing.

The broader argument moves from story to policy to capital. Stories are often treated like reflections of what already happened. But cities, it argues, can also tell future stories—naming new opportunities and placing different assumptions into the world.

If cities anchor narrative language in assumptions about entrepreneurs. sectors or neighborhoods. they can limit how far the growth they seek can go. But in a period marked by disruption and widening inequality. the claim is that cities that intentionally build narrative infrastructure won’t just tell better stories. They will build more inclusive. resilient local economies—and then try to prove those stories true through the policies. funding decisions and performance measures that follow.

Joe Scantlebury is president and CEO of Living Cities.

narrative infrastructure city branding Denver RiNo Five Points gentrification economic development institutional capital cooperative entrepreneurship worker cooperatives community land trusts shared-equity enterprises Minneapolis-Saint Paul Youthprise RFPs investor perception performance signals