Many smaller cities and towns have suffered the loss of vibrant downtowns, but I can't help but wonder if we are misidentifying the causes.
Over the last half-century (probably more) we've seen a big part of the economic base for these small cities and downs either disappear or move away. Agriculture used to play a much bigger role in the economy as a whole, and a particularly large role in the economy of many small towns. And manufacturing used but much more distributed across the country in smaller cities and towns. But a lot of those factories have closed down.
As a consequence the tax base in may of these towns and cities didn't go away simply because retail businesses moved out of the city limits. They may have gone away because the entire GDP of the surrounding area dropped.
And yet, if either my hometown (population 6,000 when I left), or the small town where I went to college (35,000) had retained their downtowns and their walkability, I might still live in them. I don't farm, I don't work in a factory. But I do telecommute, so I can set up shop pretty much anywhere. And I do have a soft spot for the kind of small town full of character that I spent my childhood roving semi ferally with my friends and our bikes, popping in and out of ice cream shops, chalking up the sidewalks, buying trinkets at the variety store, playing in the town playground, etc.
I'd like for my kids to have something like that.
The closest approximation I can find seems to be a city with a population in excess of 1 million.
Or at least, that's where the sidewalks and community playgrounds are.
Those kinds of communities aren’t created by towns full of telecommuting programmers — they are created by diverse economic activity and people out on the street doing their jobs.
Kind of. I live in a town with a population of 3,000 which has a town playground, kids whizzing around on bikes, a handful of little local shops (plus four pubs), etc... and yet it's full of telecommuting programmers.
The main disadvantage is that property prices are high, largely caused by the real commuters rather than the telecommuters (we have a mainline railway station); and that's meant a slow decline in the number of local shops simply because conversion to residential use is much more lucrative. But we've pretty much stabilised now.
This is in the UK, and it's not rare over here - there's quite a niche for slightly boho, close-knit small towns. Hebden Bridge, Stroud and Frome are the best known (populations 4.5k, 12k, 26k respectively) but there are plenty more.
Hebden Bridge I always got the impression was a bit touristy (as well as being the lesbian capital of the country). A bit further south to Marsden, also on a rail line into Manchester and Leeds, is remarkably cheap
Well assuming those people out on the streets doing their jobs want to "import" goods, the town needs to "export" something. Code is one possible export.
No, but if you’re trying to balance your imports and exports get to g some telecommuters certainly helps.
Part of what kills small towns is all the money draining out. Big box stores accelerated that because nothing but the retail labor and utilities are local.
Hmm nothing says it can't be created by telecommuting programmers. Get 10K people to pitch in 10K a pop and that's 100 mil to buy land and start a town
It’s been in my head for a while - finding an area with good weather and a farm landowner willing to sell. I would love to find a developer with core competencies - we used to build cities because of common interest. Why can’t we do it today?
Historically those towns were most likely built around a common economic interest; intersection of trade routes, mining, logging, etc. The town was created because the people were already there. As far as I know artificial communities don't seem very resilient. I guess 10,000 telecommuting programmers could support a pretty robust economy, but it sounds like a bit of a pipe dream, honestly.
I think a set of programmers seems like a common economic interest. At 10,000, that’s enough that it won't only be telecommuting at some point. You would likely need a fair amount of additional labor.
The alternative is finding a struggling city with good bones that is willing to take a chance, but that can introduce all sorts of hostilities.
The Bay Area, for all its faults, is full of downtowns like this. Get a bike or a Clipper Card and visit all the little downtowns between Mountain View and SF. You may need to search a bit — the real downtowns are often hidden a couple blocks away from El Camino. And the populations are (individually) far, far less than 1M.
As long as you stay out of Palo Alto, you can even find housing for merely crazy prices instead of ludicrous prices.
I'd like to toss in Campbell, CA and Cambridge, MA into this mix in terms of walkable downtown. Shelter-pricing aside, walking and transit gets you a good mix of places in each.
> real downtowns are often hidden
You're not kidding. This is part of why I explore around an area, often on foot. There is no counting how many times I've found That Awesome Place Literally Around The Corner by just walking around that corner that's been "off my radar" for however long it's been and then lamenting that I didn't do that sooner due to the auto-pilot many of us use.
When I read the article I thought it was describing Sunnyvale — with a once-large downtown, replaced by a mall (now failing) while the sliver of a downtown remaining is a popular spot for evening meals, walks.
I haven't been in the area recently but I believe they were planning on razing the mall and putting back a downtown.
Re kids: did curfews and age limitations exist in your childhood? I'd love to allow my child to go out for an ice cream all by herself, but at 9, she's not yet legally allowed to be alone on the streets.
I remember biking around town when I was 8. My son is 6, I find it hard to imagine that in two years I (and others) would let him bike around freely.
I wonder why this changed. Is it that people have become more aware of dangers? Or perhaps parents are having fewer children and being more protective?
You should let him ride his bike freely and not give into your fear-based biases. I'll bet if you look up crime statistics, your town is probably safer now then it was then.
So why would you keep him from exploring and learning how to take care of himself alone and with friends?
Definitely. Car injuries have stayed roughly the same per capita.
And it seems like many communities have quietly lost pedestrians (it seems like baby boomers are atypically car-dependent compared to the generations before and after them but they're a huge generation and the biggest one in many places).
And now they're in their 70s are far more likely to be involved in in-town crashes (while highway crashes may be weighted towards young men at high speed, residential crashes tend to be old people pressing Gas rather than Brake, or Reverse rather Forward)
More aware of dangers? More likely, more afraid of perceived dangers which are actually very small - and I admit that the same happens to me, even if rationally I know that I should be less worried.
It seems to be a common occurrence for people who grew up in a denser, more kid-friendly post-war suburb next to a walkable downtown, but are now raising kids in a new, barren, sprawling suburb surrounded by stroads and next to a 7-11.
it’s because from internet you immediately and constantly get bombarded with millions and millions of news every single day about what happened in far away places
Wow, you have to be 14 to be home alone for a lengthy period of time in Illinois? That's stupid. Maybe like, overnight, or for any meals that require substantial cooking, but my parent left me home alone with my younger brother way before then.
It's not very hard to make breakfast or lunch, and any issue that would need a parent to solve is probably something they would have to call 911 or bring us to the hospital for anyways.
“any minor under the age of 14 years whose parent or other person responsible for the minor's welfare leaves the minor without supervision for an unreasonable period of time without regard for the mental or physical health, safety, or welfare of that minor;”
Actual text of the law implies a lot worse neglect than the website interprets. In fact if you turn it around it seems shocking. A guardian can leave a 15 year old without regard to their health & well being.
The trouble is that the law is initially interpreted by social workers with a rather sour attitude. Thus "without supervision" could be that you were inside and they were on the lawn, and "unreasonable period of time" could be 5 minutes, and the rest of the law is also met if you assume that there is a pedophile around every corner trying to snatch a kid.
Utah recently had to redo some similar laws to prevent them from being abused.
The pedophile around the corner is a very rare case, the majority of abuse happens inside the family. Best way to fight this is of course social care and support.
Europe has hundreds of options for small towns that are walkable. For example, the below has a population of 4,000, and it's going to probably have 50 restaurants, 50 stores, a school, church, town square, football stadium, market, cafes, marina, and park all within a 5-10 minute walk.
Piran/Portorož in Slovenia. It's certainly not a typical town but rather a tourist town.
A bit like Venice, which has 20 million tourists a year for a population of 200k. Portorož probably isn't far off from this population to tourist ratio, but with a population that's 100x smaller.
That having been said, it's true that Europe has many walkable cities and they don't even have to be small villages.
This is a significant part of what attracted us to Fort Collins, Colorado. It's not as small as you're describing, but much of the city is walkable, including the downtown area and dozens of surrounding blocks, along with multiple paved bike paths, etc. It feels more like a city built for humans than most of its size in the states.
>The closest approximation I can find seems to be a city with a population in excess of 1 million.
You must not have put much effort into the search. I have been in many small towns that have had thriving downtowns and vibrant communities. But I've also been in many dead ones, where the local economy was decimated with the demise of a major employer. Maybe that's more the rule than the exception where you're from.
And yet, if either my hometown (population 6,000 when I left), or the small town where I went to college (35,000) had retained their downtowns and their walkability, I might still live in them. I don't farm, I don't work in a factory. But I do telecommute, so I can set up shop pretty much anywhere
Yeah, but really sucks to have to run up frequent flyer miles for interviews.
> the tax base in may of these towns and cities didn't go away simply because retail businesses moved out of the city limits
Cupertino is my hometown. Despite rising incomes and tax receipts, the city has repeatedly failed to cultivate a downtown. Every 10 years, a City Council member decides the reason downtown Cupertino isn't a thing is because it's in the wrong place.
So they proceed to open, to great fanfare (and profits, for their buddies in development), a new one. Always disconnected from the old ones. It is a darling for a few years. But then the lack of density kicks in and we end up with another strip mall.
In our go-go tech economy, these disparate "downtowns" can inch along. The true pains of this political incompetence won't be felt until the next downturn. By that time, unfortunately, the offending politicians will be in a new job and developers retiring.
Local political incompetence has a big part to play in the downfall of America's small towns and small businesses.
I'm not sure Cupertino is a good example, because until the 1960s it was all orchards and fields, and the entire town was built in blocks of subdivisions like your usual checkerboard suburb like Henderson or Chandler. Sunnyvale was the closest real town, with a real main street, a train station, and businesses.
Anyone can build 'fake' downtowns. They sort of work too. That's not the issue here at all, though. Cupertino had no commercial core that was left to decline.
You could argue that Cupertino has a long, narrow "downtown": Stevens Creek Boulevard between the new Main Street complex and the Oaks.
One limiting factor is that political downtown (City Hall and the library) is off on its own in what was traditionally a business office complex neighborhood, with no nearby commerce per se.
The Orchard shopping center at Bollinger and Blaney was, unsurprisingly, an orchard I played in as a kid.
StrongTowns has developed an extensive body of work investigating that problem. I'd highly recommend reading/following then, especially as urban development issues gain more traction. Having followed StrongTowns for the last two years, and now seeing the rise in frequency and intensities of discussions around livable communities, mixed use, high density housing, etc, I get the feeling their message is finally starting to be heard and adopted by wider audiences.
I'd also personally suggest a recurring donation, even if it's small. (I donate monthly but have no other affiliation with StrongTowns). It's an apolitical movement founded by a civil engineer with the intention of developing stronger communities and fiscally sound towns and cities across the country. It's not solely about urban issues - they actually focus on small towns, though cities play a prominent role. It is also not against suburbs or urban sprawl, though they do describe the issues that those methodologies are hampered by.
I think if anything will bring Americans back together, it will be a focus on building stronger, fiscally stable communities under a visionary movement that appeals to any political viewpoint. StrongTowns is a strong contender for that role. For that reason I believe they are worth contributing to.
I half-agree. You are correct that, if all of the stuff is made or grown elsewhere, local retail will not be enough to keep the local economy in decent shape. But, that does not mean that the process of consolidating retail into remote (mall) chains that are loosely committed to that community, is not also deeply flawed.
But if we don't consolidate retail into mall chains that are loosely committed to that community, it will consolidate into even more-impersonal Amazon warehouses! Wal-Mart is not the local-economy defender we wanted, but it's the one it needs right now!
I think it's possible that many towns would have benefited from different policies (and I think that's an interesting subject!), but I still think many of them didn't have any real choice.
If they had a possibility to develop in a more beneficial way, but could not make that choice, what forced them? Making beneficial choices for local economy and community is basically a job description of local politicians and officials.
What defines a downtown? My town has what I think is supposed to be a downtown and I don't really like it. I hate street parking (both doing it and the fact that it creates dangerous situations of not being able to see around a corner and making the road too narrow), there are too many pedestrians, and traffic is slow. Something feels very wrong about having to use metered street parking to go to a post office.
I like spread-out malls/stores a lot better. I hope they find a way to reverse the trend. Besides simply economic concerns, I think the human factor has to be considered. Malls/mini-malls and countrysides/suburb-like environments are a lot nicer for many (I'd guess most) people. I don't think the fact that the budget balances better on a spreadsheet with more density means it's worth it. Preserving a better way of life is an appropriate case for subsidies.
At least drive-thrus probably aren't going anywhere for a while.
I noticed most of your complaints are related to using a car :)
I would say that in a "real" downtown area, you're not supposed to use a car at all. Not having to allocate land for parking essentially allows businesses to be clustered closer together and be more accessible to everyone, without everyone having to own their own car to get anywhere.
To quote Jane Jacobs:
> The point of cities is multiplicity of choice. It is impossible to take advantage of multiplicity of choice without being able to get around easily.
Well, I think what you're describing is essentially good public transit. Anecdotally, I know that in Toronto some people park their car on the outskirts, and then take transit down to the core.
In addition, the whole "malls are failing" rhetoric is a bit distracting.
"Developer owned" malls are mostly failing.
Companies like WalMart, Target, CostCo, etc. discovered the same thing that McDonald's did--own the real estate under the building for maximum economic leverage. That will never happen in a downtown, so the big companies are simply not going to go there unless the economics really work out.
Over the last half-century (probably more) we've seen a big part of the economic base for these small cities and downs either disappear or move away. Agriculture used to play a much bigger role in the economy as a whole, and a particularly large role in the economy of many small towns. And manufacturing used but much more distributed across the country in smaller cities and towns. But a lot of those factories have closed down.
As a consequence the tax base in may of these towns and cities didn't go away simply because retail businesses moved out of the city limits. They may have gone away because the entire GDP of the surrounding area dropped.
For reference: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sectors_of_US_Econom...