Reinforce the Main Street Ecosystem in Your Place
This article is part seven in a new in-depth series we’re launching on the economic challenges facing resource-based communities, and strategies that can help build lasting prosperity. Read part six here. Part eight will be published tomorrow.
Resource-focused cities of the past built wealth in a downtown core surrounded by neighborhoods. This configuration concentrated the energy of the community, allowing it to be magnified by powerful feedback loops.
For example, the more successful the downtown became, the more people wanted to live in close proximity to it. The more people who live in and near the downtown, the more patrons there were for local businesses. The more patrons there were, the greater the investment in the downtown to serve them and the more successful it became. This is a positive feedback loop where improvements over time make things better for everyone.
Think of it as a roaring fire where more and more fuel is being added all the time.
Modern development practices take the opposite approach. Homes and businesses are spread out, disconnected from each other throughout the system. The failure or success of one property does not impact, for better or for worse, any other property in the community beyond a general trend. There is no direct feedback loop.
This is like taking the logs in that roaring fire and spreading them out over the ground. Some may burn and some may go out, but they don’t reinforce each other. Spread out, they can’t create a roaring fire.
To accelerate wealth creation, resource-based communities need to concentrate the energy of the community into positive feedback loops. This is done with design, mimicking traditional development approaches that have worked for thousands of years.
A Main Street ecosystem has a core downtown with storefronts, offices, public buildings, and places for people to live. This is all comfortably connected and walkable, making it as easy as possible for someone in the downtown to reach and do business with anyone else in the downtown. Get the logs close together so they heat each other up.
The core downtown is then surrounded by neighborhoods: places with homes, but also with neighborhood-compatible businesses, things like small offices, a home-based hair salon, or a coffee shop. The connections between the neighborhoods and the core downtown are critical; they must ultimately be so easily walkable that people would prefer to walk than drive. This is how the community adds more and more logs to the fire.
Ultimately, the downtown is an amenity for the surrounding neighborhoods while the neighborhoods are the customer base that supports the core downtown. Both reinforce each other in a positive feedback loop. Our ancestors who built cities understood that this is how a largest roaring economic fire possible is created.
We no longer have those cities of the past. Our Main Street ecosystem has been damaged and the energy there dissipated. To build a Strong Town today, we need to reconnect the core downtown to its surrounding neighborhoods while we also work to make all of it a more enjoyable place to be.
A Necessary Mental Shift for Building a Main Street Ecosystem
Reinforcing a Main Street ecosystem requires resource-focused communities to think differently about some things.
Zoning reform is essential. Zoning was originally put in place to separate businesses with smoke and noise from the places people lived, and there was a lot of sense to that. Over time, zoning became the cookie cutter to quickly replicate the post-War development pattern across North America. Today, cities must reform regulations that lock neighborhoods in place and unnecessarily separate things that are easily compatible with thoughtful design.
Connections matter. In an ecosystem, all the different parts act independently but, over time, they grow to work together. It’s the connections that make this self-directed altruism possible. Economic ecosystems are collections of homes and businesses where human interaction stimulates growth, and so to create them, the internal connections within a place need to be designed for humans to easily walk everywhere.
Image via U.S. National Archives.
Design matters. One thing modern Americans generally admire about humans of the past was their attention to detail, all of the ornamentation and craftsmanship they put into everything they built. They did this because, as poor people, it was how they added value to the places they built and the spaces they walked through. We tend to experience public spaces at the speed of an automobile, but cities that want a successful Main Street ecosystem will need to relearn the old design tricks of placemaking.
The stories we tell ourselves matter. The connections of a successful Main Street ecosystem are not merely physical, they are also social, cultural, and spiritual. Festivals, parades, and other celebrations reinforce our connectedness and help communities face difficult challenges.
Steps for Building a Main Street Ecosystem
Building a Main Street ecosystem creates the positive feedback loops a community needs to turn small wins into large gains. Here are some things any community can do to make their Main Street and surrounding neighborhoods stronger:
Focus on your downtown and an ecosystem of neighborhoods. A strong and prosperous place is a healthy ecosystem. Traditional neighborhoods around a core commercial center form the most adaptable, productive, and strong form of development. These places need to thicken up and become vital again. That’s where a community’s iterative and incremental efforts should begin.
Regulate neighborhood compatibility, not just usability. Fragile development approaches focus on separating all elements of a city into monoculture pods. Commercial offices are separate from commercial retail, and residential areas are set apart from all commercial space. This is what use-based zoning does, even though monocultures are uniquely fragile. Development regulations need to focus on overall compatibility of buildings and patterns instead of trying to solve every potential conflict with different degrees of isolation.
Legalize neighborhood-essential services. Obtaining daily essentials shouldn’t require everyone to travel to the same big box store. Along with legalizing home occupations, allowing neighborhood-scale commercial activities (things like small grocery stores, pharmacies, hair salons, and other quintessentially neighborhood-focused businesses) to open in residential neighborhoods reinforces every other strategy.
Use a “park once” mentality. There are few things that rob a community of capacity more than imposing the need to park a vehicle with every trip. Businesses are required to provide more parking than is needed while struggling citizens are taxed for the luxury of free and abundant parking. The tax base and financial productivity is reduced. The energy of the community dissipates, reinforcing the practice of spreading things out, one of the worst negative feedback loops a community can get into. Instead of adding or requiring parking, focus on reducing the amount of parking by having people park once and then making it easy for them to get to places outside of a motor vehicle.
Expand housing opportunities. Top-down financing has provided local communities with an abundance of single-family homes and clusters of high-density apartments, but this is like a forest with only two types of plants: sequoias and ferns. Housing types that fall somewhere between these two are often called the “missing middle” and they’re “missing” partially because cities make them difficult to build. There is an enormous need for expanding housing opportunities.
Improve the housing stock. People need to have confidence that their investments in the community will pay off. When they don’t, neighborhoods experience steady decline, but when they do, people become willing to invest their time, energy, and capital improving their place. This is another opportunity for a positive feedback loop. The Oswego Renaissance Association (www.oswegonyonline.com) uses such an approach to leverage small amounts of capital for tremendous gain.
Leverage public spaces. Too often, communities treat their parks like they are mere recreational amenities. Poorer cities of the past built spectacular parks by recognizing their capacity to improve surrounding property values. When a park, public building, or open space is well designed and connected to the surrounding neighborhood, it radiates wealth to all the nearby properties.
Throw a party. There is a reason nearly every city of the past, no matter how small or how poor, developed its own culture of parades, festivals, and gatherings. These celebrations bind communities together. They make it possible for everyone to experience their common humanity along with a shared future. Don’t underestimate the power of getting the community together periodically for a good party.
How to Understand the Role of the Automobile in a Strong Town
There is tension in a Main Street ecosystem over the role of the automobile, but there doesn’t need to be. Resource cities of the past had trains, carriages, and horses that brought people and goods to town in the same way people today travel by automobile. The technological advancement of the automobile has allowed us to travel further, faster, and in greater comfort. This is a good thing.
In a traditional city, once a traveler entered the Main Street ecosystem and arrived at a destination—a business or residence they were visiting—they didn’t take a horse or a carriage everywhere to their subsequent stops. They walked. They used their two feet to get around within that space.
A walkable street. Image via WikiCommons.
A parking crater. Image via Flickr.
Much of the economic damage that has been done to cities (the way we have spread out the logs and diminished the once roaring fire) involves a change in assumptions about how we get around within the core of the city. There is no community that can build an adequate tax base if the expectation is that people drive to every destination. The cost of providing space for parking itself is too overwhelming, let alone the dissipation of economic energy that comes with such an arrangement.
Cities need to accommodate people arriving by automobile, but local communities will only prosper and be economically viable if they can ultimately replace most of the space between buildings—space now used for parking—with something productive, like another revenue-producing building.
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