NC STEP program training
I am presenting with Greta Lint at an NC Small Town Economic Prosperity (STEP) program training event. Greta is giving a presentation titled “Using Tourism to Stimulate Your Town’s Economy,” including a marketing 101 segment. My presentation, “Y-Web,” will touch on ways these communities can use technology to promote their towns.
The NC STEP program is sponsored by the North Carolina Rural Center to support small towns under 10,000 that are sturggling to overcome economic hardship through training, technological initiatives, and other strategies.
Why smaller is sometimes better
From Blogging Stocks
When the big company leaves the small town
This post opens our Big Company, Small Town series, featuring large companies and the small towns in which they are headquartered. Watch for more Big Company, Small Town posts coming soon.
All across this great country of ours, small cities, towns, and villages have been built in the shadows of major companies that supply work for their local populations. It can be a wonderful situation that cultivates a special kind of community and a deep-seated local pride. However, it can also be a recipe for civic disaster, if the major supplier of a wage base in a locality goes out of business or leaves town. Such was the near disastrous fate of Park Falls, Wisconsin, not so long ago.
The city of Park Falls, which is Wisconsin’s most geographically isolated city, was built around its paper mill. At its height, the mill helped to bring the population of the city to nearly 4,000 inhabitants. However, in 2006 the paper mill, which was operating at reduced capacity under ownership from out of state, was shut down almost without any prior notice. The result was immediate and deeply wrenching turmoil. Not only had the paper mill workers lost an excellent source of income, but the collateral damage was jarringly significant also. Loggers had no local market for their pulp wood. Dozens of family-feeding log trucks were idled. Private contractors who did various types of work for the mill were left with thousands of dollars worth of unpaid invoices. Local vendors, retailers, and support businesses almost immediately went slack.
More on the collapse of suburbia
CNN: American dream has faded into suburban nightmare
Posted on June 17, 2008 by Brian Cesarotti
The collapse of the American dream or the beginning of a new one?
That’s the issue Lara Farrar explores in an article on CNN.com, relaying a story of how the once typical suburb of Elk Grove, California has turned into an abandoned, unkept, haven for young criminals. The foreclosures resulting from the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the increasing desire to live in a walkable community has one University of Michigan urban planning professor predicting a large shift toward “walkable urbanism” as already seen by Atlanta, Detroit and Dallas. Instead of labeling the American dream has “dying” he instead says it is “changing.” This view isn’t shared by everyone. The homeowner featured in the story says he would not want to move out of a suburban setting.
“”It’s the American dream, you know,” he said. “The American dream.”
Nevertheless, urban planning professor Christopher Leinberger predicts half of the urban development in 2025 will not have existed in 2000. In addition, about 22 million “McMansions” will be occupied by the several lower class families. This seems to be the only way to overcome the massive misallocation of resources that has been suburban development.
Thirty-five percent of the nation’s wealth, according to Leinberger, has been invested in constructing this drivable suburban landscape.
Suburbs are out
From Confessions of a Small-Church Pastor:
The Decline of the Suburbs
CNN notes today that 40% of Americans want to live in “walkable” communities, and that the suburbs as we know them may be an endangered species. The subprime mortgage crisis, which put many people in homes they could not afford, has led to record foreclosures, bankruptcies and repossessions. Some homeowners, facing falling home values, are abandoning their dream homes altogether.
Professor Arthur C. Nelson contends that by 2025, America will face a surplus of 22-million large lot (suburban) homes. Some suburban developments are noticing an increase in crime, unkempt lawns, graffitti covered sidewalks, and other signs of “suburban decay” which is the same as urban decay, only in a different neighborhood.
Travel to Main Street to shop–by train
Here is an interesting post from teaberries in All the Little Stuff That is Life.
“What I’m saying, is 1) bring back Main Street shopping, only maybe this time, we need to base it on more European models of villages and towns. 2) It’s time for the big-box retailers to break themselves down, and start fitting into the mold of small town America. Then 3) reform transportation, start using trains again. This country has thousands of small towns, and hundreds of miles of railroad tracks connecting them. Use them, again. Refer, again, to Europe and Japan.”