Deindustrialization—the mass disappearance of manufacturing jobs in the Midwest and Northeast during the 1970s and 1980s—defines the field of urban economic development in ways both silent and explicit. The core tools of the discipline emerged from the frenzied experiments of cities that were desperate to slow the gutting of their economies. Industry and occupational targeting, workforce development, industrial retention initiatives and tax increment financing all began as efforts to make mobile capital “sticky,” and to the extent that economic development retains a focus on economic equity in addition to economic growth, it does so because the stark inequalities of deindustrialization mandated as much.