Not all shopping this first weekend of December is being done in retail stores or online.

Mayor-elect Kim Ecklund has about a month to put her team together before January’s inauguration day – and perhaps the toughest item to find for the longtime City Councilwoman will be a development director. It’s hard to find anyone happy with seeming listlessness when it comes to economic development in the city.

Housing has been a nagging issue for years – though substandard housing and unkempt properties are only part of the issue. The city needs to be proactive in adding new housing, particularly decent housing for low- and middle-income city residents. There is only so much that can be done demolishing homes too damaged to save. At some point the city needs to find developers to create new housing.

There are a mix of organizations involved in downtown development, but is anyone happy with the continued stagnation downtown? In our opinion, there needs to be more vitality downtown and reasons for businesses to be open additional hours. Additional vitality may give reason for building owners to freshen their storefronts and finally fill some underutilized spaces that have been underutilized for years. But that means the city and its partners have to do something other than wait for people to come to them.

And, let’s not forget the new industries that find reasons to locate in Ellicott rather than vacant industrial space in Jamestown. It’s long past the time to see renewed push to fill some of these vacant spaces or, for the spaces that are too far gone to have another life, see progress creating shovel-ready sites where the city can begin to attract new life to its lagging industrial core.

That’s a lot for one person. And perhaps that’s the problem. Housing is a problem that demands full-time attention. Economic development demands full-time attention simply to attend all of the development-related meetings in the city, county and region. It’s easy to say the city needs additional staff to deal with all of these issues – the challenge comes in finding appropriate staffing without spending additional money the city may not soon have. That may mean repurposing existing staff or positions to tackle new challenges or empowering employees in a way that frees the development director to have time to address bigger issues.

Jamestown has had the same economic development structure for decades. The old ways aren’t working as well as they used to.

In our view, Ecklund not only has to have the right development director on her transition team’s shopping list, but a new way of thinking about the city’s development and housing issues, too.