Young Talent

If you want your city to boom, you need young talent. To get young talent, you need places they can afford to live upon completion of their college or craft education. But the top thing to know about affordable places to live is that it is not an affordable housing problem; it is a place problem, one element of which is housing young talent can afford. Look at the problem too narrowly, focusing on single metrics like the number of new units provided, and you'll miss the big picture of whether the city or town is an affordable place to live. Or within that single metric of new units provided, what's the median cost? I've seen development advocates trumpeting hundreds of new units, which is good to have, but with a mean sales price of over a half-million dollars, which does no good for recent graduates. Widen your view.

The problem isn't metrics in general; it's the narrowness of the metrics. Quality-based urbanism metrics, because they examine the overall quality of the place, look at simple indicators of complex conditions, therefore broadening the effective view by substantial margins.

But things can still get complicated, as in the apparent conflict between building a prospering society in an affordable place. It's relatively easy to make a place more affordable by doing things that wreck the local economy, but then the society inhabiting the place cannot prosper. But prospering places tend to get expensive, ruining the affordability. Acting on narrow views tends to ruin everything outside that view.

The key to building prospering societies in affordable places is setting out from the very beginning to create a wide range of home values, both purchase and rental. The Industrial Development Complex tends to build subdivision pods with values within each pod varying by around 5%, and often less. I planned a place where we set out from the beginning to create a 15:1 range of values, which is 300 times as great as the range in typical subdivision pods, which is unthinkable to the Industrial Development Complex. We achieved that range, but with this caveat: the developed value of the land was 25 times as much as in conventional subdivisions all around. While on that same developed land, we were delivering the most affordable homes that market had seen in a couple decades.

How is that even humanly possible to deliver a range of values 300 times greater than the Industrial Development Complex delivers on developed land worth 25 times as much as they're delivering? The answer is simpler than you might think: conventional development has hamstrung itself by treating subdivisions like widgets rolling off the assembly line, This means building huge numbers of nearly-identical products that vary little except in basic elements like wall, trim, and roofing color. This also means that they've slammed the book shut on a broad range of building types that aren't single-family detached houses or units in condo towers. We now call those types Missing Middle Housing because they've been missing from the repertoire of conventional development for years.

So in short, the Industrial Development Complex has done it to themselves.

But there's no reason for us to hobble ourselves by following their mistakes. And by flying free of those unnecessary constraints, we can do what humans have done for centuries: build places with a wide range of affordability which can foster a prospering society.

Let's get busy.

Cool Factor

Natural resources that can be mined, harvested, or otherwise exploited have long been high on the list of things industry values when looking for a new location. Since the early years of the Industrial Revolution, employees would often relocate to be employable in those new locations. But young talent today values experiences far more than stuff, so they tend to look for experience-rich locations first, move there, and only then look for a place to work. This breaks the old process driven by industry and puts individuals (especially younger ones) in the driver's seat. And their top priority is the Cool Factor of a place.

Cities Driving Industry

Very Important: What I'm proposing here is not Communism. It is grassroots economic development.

I’m no industrialist nor am I a politician but I’m wondering: what if cities drove industry rather then industrialists driving industry? There will always be places where labor is cheaper than in the US, so the right decision for an industrialist is always to offshore the jobs.

If cities chose to drive industry rather than chase industry, things could look very different. Industrialists know their industry, but cities know their region. An industrialist driving industry looks for scale; a city driving industry looks for opportunities for its citizens. A city driving industry first looks for products needed in the region. Next it tries to find ways to lower the threshold for its citizens to go in business making those products, and regulates them only as much as is absolutely necessary for their scale.

Industrialists driving industry love the largest scale and hope to achieve it quickly. Cities driving industry love the smallest possible starting scale for their citizens and are patient with them scaling up their businesses, if ever. Some will want to remain at the craft scale indefinitely.

Don’t confuse cities driving industry with cities owning industry; as noted above, this is not communism. Rather it is cities doing the right thing for their citizens, rather than chasing industry and then sitting helplessly when it moves away in a few years. A craft-scale business selling regional-scale products is arguably the safest business to be in because big industry and big retail find it difficult to compete in markets that small. Cities driving industry should focus here.

Micro-Production

I’m no economist, but I can’t help but think that small disinvested towns across the US would do better seeing themselves less as consumers and more as micro-producers. Big retail like Walmart sucks close to 90% of every dollar spent out of the town, right? Local micro-production where products never touch the international supply chain can be quite profitable compared to those on the bottom rungs of global supply chains. And for most industries those chains no longer even touch US shores.

I wonder how many communities that have sunk so far into opioids would be much different if we saw ourselves as something other than employees and consumers? And seeing ourselves as dependent on global corporations that are abandoning us now? Could tiny things like the Single-Crew Workplace, the food cart, and the portable shop help turn us around? Is our worst addiction not opioids but rather the Addiction to Big? Everything industrial-scale from big employers to big retail leaves us powerless. Small opportunities bring hope. We Can Do That should be the motto of every place re-setting their economic compass toward micro-production.

Local Resilience

Local resilience begins where Main Street meets the railroad, the river, or the shore, not out in an industrial park on the edge where multinationals are recruited to locate for a little while, until the day comes when they decide to move elsewhere. Help locals thrive; they stay. It's their home.

Local Management

Local management runs from city government level all the way to management of specific parts of the city, such as Main Street. The process of subsidiarity is strong at local management and is based on the principle that organizational, social, or political matters should be handled by the smallest, lowest, or least centralized authority that is able to competently handle the task. Higher-level authorities (like a national government) should only intervene when lower-level bodies cannot efficiently manage a task, such as in cases of national defense.

Focused Finance

I'm old enough to remember local banking before it went interstate in 1994. And I'm no banker, but I have no illusions that banking will ever again in the foreseeable future stop at the state line. But the days of knowing your banker had more going for them than today's digital-only banking experiences where you never see a human face or even hear a human voice. Our bank does does a good job with face and voice, and so long as we walk to the branch that's less than four blocks away, the look and feel is a lot like the pre-1994 era. I have no insight on influencing financial institutions, but hope some of those reading this might, and might take it upon themselves to encourage institutions with which they have connections to lean back into locally-focused finance with a human face.

Local Craft

San Pedro, Belize was long an expat hippie hangout on the Gulf of Mexico, with a strong music culture from the 1960s. This musician immigrated from Canada in those years. When the inevitable happened and one of his instruments broke, he discovered there were no musical instrument repair people in the area, so he started repairing his own. And word got around. So it wasn't long until every other musician in town was coming to him for repairs, and not long afterward he started crafting new instruments, if I recall the story correctly. This is one type of base that due to cultural reasons is unlikely to ever be supplanted by big business.

Artisanal Foods

Local or regional artisanal foods are a curious base type. On a long-ago trip to a region of France known for its champagnes, we discovered that the big boys whose names are common in US grocery stores had massive industrial-scale vineyards, but we had little interest in products we could buy at our local grocery store. And from the look of it, most other visitors seemed to have drawn the same conclusion because the big-boy places appeared to have little retail presence, if any.

The small family vineyards, however, were a very different story; the vintner wasn't just present just inside the entry court, but would sit down with us and not only tell us about their wines, but also enjoy a glass with us. And we discovered that most of the champagnes we tasted were nothing at all like anything we'd ever tasted in the US. So unless there are people ill-advised enough to fly across an ocean to sample what's in their hometown grocery, artisanal foods are likely to hold up well in most places against the Industrial Food Chain.

Fishing

A fishing village has another curious base type, but for other reasons than artisanal foods because it has a two-headed customer type: those coming for the fish, and those coming for the fishing. In ancient times, the economic base of the fishing village base was typically the former, with their catch sold at nearby markets in the region. Now, with the Experience Economy in full bloom, most visitors want to go fishing themselves. And when you're selling experiences instead of products, industry has few ways to disrupt that.

Resorts

The resorts built after World War II tended to resemble hotels or casinos, in that they were buildings into which you entered and then (hopefully) enjoyed whatever their offerings were. And yes, there have been resort towns based on things like hot springs since antiquity, but Seaside was the first resort town built in the US in my lifetime. Or actually, the first town, resort or not.

Driving down US 331 in the early years, the "Come Build A Town With Us" billboards were mind-blowing because townbuilding had not occurred in the US since long before I was born. Yes, there were some similarities with Disney properties, but Disneyland, then Disney World were amusement parks, not actual towns, whereas Seaside is a town. So it became part of the Experience Economy a couple decades before the book was written, and many New Urbanist resort towns have followed similar patterns in the decades since Seaside's founding in 1981.

Work-From-Home-Friendly Places

I have been working at least partially from home since opening my practice in 1991, with almost all my work except meetings taking place at home since 2020. My studio was a windowless, powerless tool shed when we moved in, but we renovated it into the most delightful place I have ever worked. And the fact it is so tiny puts everything right at hand, and makes it a high-caliber focus machine.

But how does working from home help build a strong local economy? Living in the City lays out cases for multiple settings, with issues both cities, their suburbs, and more distant country towns should consider, because working from home can be a local economic engine.

Nighttime Economy

Depending on the character of the city itself, and who the visitors tend to be over different seasons of the year, a nighttime economy can be a significant contributor to the local economy. Some cities have substantial enough nighttime economies that they have a "day mayor" filling the role of a normal mayor and a "night mayor" managing affairs of the night. Take an inventory of your cities evening assets and its 24/7 branding to determine if you have potential for a nighttime economy or, if you already have one, in which directions it might grow.

Incubators

If your city is at all interested in grassroots economic development, incubators are essential. They have requirements similar to those of maker spaces: large, open, cheap, and wired. They can incubate a wide range of business types, or they can focus on business types identified by the incubator's manager. Almost all of them need meeting rooms, something akin to a food hall, and wet space for certain craft-based businesses that could involve materials like paint.

Pop-Ups

Pop-ups in general are pop up for a short period of time, and are considered a Tactical Urbanism tool. They can host a number of uses, but are most commonly used for retail, where they're usually referred to as "pop-up shops."

Pop-up shops can be located in mobile settings like these shipping containers, or they're often located in empty storefronts, where they can help reinvigorate a mixed-use street. I've been involved in one situation where they actually saved a building. Colleagues in Memphis asked what they could do to save the historic Tennessee Brewery, a jewel of a building just days from destruction. I wrote Ground Rules to Save a Building from Demolition (Part 1 of 2) in response, in which I recommended doing pop-up shops in just the first structural bay of the building (maybe thirty feet deep) to activate the street frontage, then use the rest of the building temporarily as mini-storage to help generate a larger revenue stream. The second part was Assembling a Cause to Save a Building from Demolition (Part 2 of 2) which set out to energize a larger community through New Media channels. And it worked! The building is now the keystone of a major neighborhood revitalization.

In short, this stuff works!