What I Found in a Thousand Towns

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Interconnections

Under Consideration — to be added.

Highlights

• “Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there.” Gary Snyder
• What this town is building, aside from new trails and a better school, is positive proximity, or a state of being where living side by side with other people is experienced as beneficial.
• When people transcend the myth that proximity means conflict and invasion of privacy, they gravitate toward finding ways to integrate the talents and skills of their community members.
• I find myself almost befriending them, wanting to introduce them to each other. Peoria, Illinois, have you met Cedar Rapids, Iowa? Seattle, Washington, you have some interesting things in common with Asheville, North Carolina. Gardiner, Maine, I think Dover, New Hampshire, could provide some helpful insights as you continue the winning streak you’re on with your downtown.
• Dogwood’s function as a welcoming place at the community crossroads adds value because its owner was thinking about community over profits from the beginning.
• Brent came to Beacon to help lighten the burden a town can suffer from getting overly identified with one crowd or even one way of seeing itself.
• Urban planner Jeff Speck talks about the “fabric” of mixed architecture and storefronts along a main street. Beacon is starting to have a discernible fabric with many interesting textures. Main Street looks unified without uniformity and therefore incorporates many lifestyles.
• He said, “I make a simple analogy. You know people are afraid of change, and I get it, but in life, change is inevitable. And we all grew up and as clothing styles changed we never wanted to be out of style. We went with the new style! Well, guess what, the whole world changes. When new cars come out, we look to buy the new, trendier car; we don’t want to buy an old Model T. I say, ‘So why wouldn’t we accept change in everything we do? If you don’t change, you’re going to fall behind.’” He told me that people who have lived in Beacon for a long time are happy to see new life in the downtown. I’m betting they will only admit this to Randy.
• what good is it if the people who do their best work because they “buy in” to the city have to live somewhere else?
• Gentrification is about financial displacement on two levels. One is pushing out residents who have created a sense of identity and cohesion in a town, event by event, layer by layer. The other level is abandoning the soul with which citizens created the eclectic, yet inclusive, feel of the town. Gentrification can create lack of affordability, and it can squash vitality when commodification and consumerism steamroll through the sense of positive proximity you can feel at Bank Square Café or Dogwood.
• Positive proximity, on the contrary, is the experience of valuing what we have and knowing that much of it is built by us and our neighbors, not bought and inhabited by pure profiteers.
• Without affordable housing solutions, Beacon will still be challenged by a threat of displacing many of its most committed and creative residents. There are solutions, such as requiring that all new apartment buildings have a percentage of affordable housing. Over the next few years, about a hundred units of affordable housing will be built next to the municipal building. Mayor Casale hopes that new housing in general will even out the rapidly growing demand spiking the prices.
• If, in your town, all you have is a little creek and a grove of birch trees, there is much to learn from Moab as a place that grows as a proud community around its natural spaces, presenting those gifts to the world without exploiting them or being exploited by them.
• Where there is undeveloped land, there will always be a tension between those who want to keep the land/water open and those who want to build on it or extract from under it.
• Tourism alone, as an industry, will disproportionately fill up a town with zero-mobility jobs, and the service economy employment is somewhat cruelly coupled with a real-estate problem in which food servers can’t afford a place to live while part-time residents think nothing of spending six figures or more for their second and third homes.
• But Back of Beyond is also more than a bookstore. For residents it’s also a place that offers itself as a local cultural hub close to the intersection of Main and Center Streets. It is a link between nature as a common experience and nature in the larger context of history and poetic reflection.
• Another big solution Mayor Dave and many others have presented to Moab is to diversify the economy away from service-sector jobs by creating a regional campus for Utah State University. Land has been set aside for it at the southern end of town.
• Moabites know they could use a business or institution that draws on the same love of nature but is not related to tourism. A university could alleviate some of the frustration people have about employment opportunity.
• Together they decided to hold two nights of town meetings at Star Hall for people to say what they thought should happen next. “And we had both nights standing room only. The place was packed. We’re talking about people whose families were born and raised here. I mean true locals. And so the conversation was very open, sincere, because they could feel the dying of the community with all these boarded-up houses; they knew that their neighbors were moving out.”
• In an insecure moment of town transition, the dump contest was clever, confident, and inclusive. The great thing about natural beauty is that if you find a way to focus the cameras on it, nature can take you the rest of the way, and in this case, it did.
• I’ve heard about a lot of painful transitions coming out of steel mill closings, mines shutting down, and the displacement of manufacturing. Moab’s was one of the quickest and most disorienting collapses, but its turnaround moment seems to have been the most dynamic and even fun. It’s not every day that you attract the attention of the Parisian garbage department.
• Some cities have what I call a piñata problem: there is great wealth, but it’s hanging from a high place, far away from the city commons. There are mansions on the outskirts of town filled with famous citizens, high-paid executives, and even a scattering of multinational CEOs. Meanwhile, the downtown could desperately use a capital influx but does not get one
• I’d assumed that someone with the last name Dow or DuPont had written a big check to clear away the brush on the Christina River and get it all started. “Astonishingly, it was the government,” David said, and then he gave me a short, impressive history that included people’s desire to clean up parts of the river for a nature preserve, followed by a fact-finding trip to Baltimore, which was completing its own large-scale, harbor-front project, and finally a river-based revitalization that seemed to be continuing all the way into the city.
• As a traveler or a citizen, it’s easier to dig into discovering a city if it has some sort of “wayfinding” anchors of this kind. Signs are great, and landmark buildings do the job, but a body of water that runs through or beside a city will serve as a constant compass.
• I still see many cities with brush-covered, hidden waterfronts, and I wonder what their potential might be. So many of our waterfronts have been forgotten or covered over.
• The success of a city is not in the achievement of homogeneity, it’s in the peaceful coexistence of its heterogeneous groups.
• Towns cannot create civic engagement from scratch. Without positive proximity, there can be no grist for civic connections, and there are all too many opportunities for us to withdraw from the commons before properly examining what we might find there.
• In fact, the big box strategy was to find Main Streets with disappearing businesses and weak political will. They moved in, undercutting and capturing most remaining local business.
• Renovating a building and bringing life back into it is a great way to honor local history and make the most of what is left.
• keeping an audience on your main strip before and after concerts is key for compounding the value of the concert venue.
• “The first thing you need to share with anyone who wants to do something with a town that is in mourning because it has lost its manufacturing base,” Barbara said, “is you need to create a reason for people to come to that place, whatever it may be, whether it is history, or geography, or some combination thereof.”
• History lovers never laugh at their own towns. They learn about them, and often they spend a considerable amount of time translating the value of their towns to others.
• People who are interested in things like saving old buildings are also not shy about finding preservation grants, advisors, and helpful agencies or just tracking down the precedents set by other towns.
• The modern mind can embrace the importance of what David Reeves did: he used his resources to build an entire public school to compete with the kind of private school to which he could have sent his children. There were almost a hundred private academies along the East Coast by 1834, many of them around Philadelphia, but Reeves made an unusual decision to raise young minds equally and locally.
• A town can revitalize its main streets and boast a network of locally owned businesses, but some wealthy and very cold-to-the-touch towns are full of boutiques and frilly, independent shops. Traveling minstrels like me avoid them, and, interestingly, they often have no performance venue. These are not exciting communities. They are exclusive enclaves.
• He chose the most visible corner in town to have a place where kids could congregate inside and outside, and they do, whether they need a haircut or not. “This is the fish tank,” he said, “and it’s the best place, you’re on the corner, you can’t beat it. And I just love family-oriented places, so that’s it.”
• Jean Krack and every other town leader I met said they depended on the contributions of time and care that engaged, retired citizens give the community. Towns need their senior citizens for their knowledge about where they live as well as their volunteer work and their expertise. They provide a valuable bridge to the history of a town.
• The active presence of senior residents is particularly important to a town’s youngest citizens. When I taught a music history course at Wesleyan University, I noticed one aspect of the students’ upbringing that seemed to give them an edge: students who had a strong relationship with their grandparents, or grandparental figures, had the most interesting comments and showed the most breadth of insight in their discussions and writing.
• We tended to see Walmart as the grim reaper of ailing downtowns, maybe even lowering the scythe before those towns had died. We assumed the staff would appreciate our condolences. They were angry. They told us not to disparage Walmart. Lowell needed the jobs.
• Obviously, you don’t start a venue as a way to identify skill sets, but the community-building potential that comes out of this kind of intrepid, organized (mostly) force, with all of its varied interactions, might be the most effective identity-building project I’ve encountered.
• Olivia says of Carrboro, “Here, we do buy local, and when you buy local, people can produce more, keep the prices down, and so on.” Local culture is self-perpetuating and reinforces positive proximity: in supporting each other, the makers and their friends have an overall pro-artisan ethos in which citizens and tourists can participate up and down the economic strata.
• They also host dance troupes, political debates, movies, sing-alongs, and, consequently, countless ways for a community to gather and speak in an atmosphere of art and beauty.
• Open mikes draw in some interesting eccentrics and draw out the talents of otherwise laced-up citizens, thereby providing a good way to widen a town’s social perimeter and deepen its knowledge of who lives there.
• Sometimes it takes a weird person to help another weird person or a group of them.
• Starting a writing or drawing group, a song circle, or an artists’ collective can also be a way to see ourselves as creative people and to value the parts of our towns and cities attuned to our creativity.
• It takes effort to believe that your town is you, and vice versa.
• Instead of collecting recipes to take home, I wanted to take the best town-building ideas from this region to share with towns and cities everywhere.
• Twenty years ago, he saw that the foodshed concept was the future.”
• If you’re like me, you’ve passed empty lots in cities and wondered how much soil remediation and positive proximity it would take to create a community garden, bypassing the wallet altogether and letting food itself feed our cities.
• This local food industry is socially, professionally, and financially linked. Yes, there are plenty of people who don’t have jobs in this economy, but there is a large number, possibly a critical mass, who do, and they get to appreciate a breadth of positive proximity that jumps the groove of potential social divisions.
• A willingness to share our skills, our stories, and ourselves with each other marks the difference between towns that feel like actual places and those with people who jump in and out of cars all day, shopping at impersonal franchises and filling their ears with radio/Internet content that alternates between celebrity fairy tales and isolation-reinforcing crime reports.
• You’ll hear this controversial, heartfelt statement from me: papers that give a little lift to local theaters, galleries, and music venues allow them to exist, mature, and ultimately thrive. And if you can’t find anything nice to say… okay, say it, but don’t be “too cool for school” and trash an entire gallery show, local band, or local production.
• Jen said to herself, “I’ve got to make Middletown harder to leave.”
• Yes, one of the ways to be in a community is to “serve” it, but in a way that reflects the desire to serve one’s future community or the world at large,
• Spencer Reece, now an award-winning poet and Episcopal minister, volunteered in the state hospital. One day he returned and said, “I used to have a measure of self-pity. Now I have none.”
• She told me that economics and business school professors had actually brought these local businesses into their classrooms and studied their business plans. This was like service learning at Wesleyan with a focus on local commerce.
• Institutions of learning can become isolated and seem aloof, but when the powers that be find ways to help burst the bubble and point out mutually beneficial partnerships, positive proximity can grow with added self-awareness and self-reliance.
• There’s a problematic metaphor here. We have capitol buildings with gilded railings inside and syringes littered outside.
• On top of wasting valuable space, these massive buildings tend to hide our officials from us and us from them. If we’re not around our governments, they can’t see us and our smiling, hopeful, citizen faces.
• The United States has a problem to solve when it comes to homelessness. Perhaps, in the case of people sleeping on the capitol grounds in full view of legislators, it is fitting that the problems are there to be confronted as well.
• Democracy itself was a departure from European monarchies, and the capitol building “was going to help the people to govern themselves for the first time instead of having a king tell them what to do.” The architecture celebrated the achievement of self-governance. “They chose to make them very regal so that there was an element of magic as people went into those beautiful buildings and sat in the gallery and watched what happened, where people would debate on their behalf in order to make change.”
• Despite the energy with which Gainesville citizens plunge into their interdisciplinary projects, there are still very few people who show up at public meetings.
• Seeing this off-campus megacomplex in the making, the social connectors of Gainesville ask: How do we integrate this into the city and provide opportunities for its surrounding community? They worry that too few of the planners are asking these questions.
• “I’m not the smartest guy I know, I’m not the person who reads the most, I’m not the person who has all the details,” he said. “I do seem to actively like to connect the different parts of stuff that I see with other parts.”
• If, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, paraphrasing abolitionist minister Theodore Parker, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” the conscious bridgers I’ve met are interested in following that curve as far as it goes, finding opportunities for the whole community to gain more access to understanding, to healing, and in both the long and short term, to justice. They bring as many people as they can find on that arc, and then they stay the course.
• Gainesville’s size and location (relatively small and remote) might be considered a disadvantage, but I have found that small cities have the advantage of some extra space to spread out, and they’re just far enough off the grid to incorporate intuitive, trial-and-error processes that can yield important discoveries.
• Strong positive proximity allows us to survey the terrain and “know” what the reserves of social capital are and proceed to understand what our towns can handle and what they can accomplish.
• When we let our curiosity and interests, and a little trust, lead us outside our doors and onto the village green, we will flourish as citizens and so will our towns.
• As citizens, you know better than I do what makes you special and how to balance your identity, and even drive it, by managing change.
• As I started to learn the importance of bridging social capital in communities, I started trying to introduce myself to people more. I experience a strange feeling of exposure and commitment when I do this.
• Translating ourselves, in an open and open-ended way, can be anxiety producing, and yet the habit of introducing ourselves to people around us can amount to a more solid, less fearful way of being in our communities.
• THE STRONGEST TOWNS I have encountered have welcomed the contributions of their citizens. When Beth Macy, author of Factory Man, did a reading at one of my concerts, she concluded by saying, “People and communities prosper only when they celebrate a diverse range of equal voices.”
• We look around at each other and see that change is coming. The question isn’t whom to blame, it’s “How will we manage this?” Bigger and bigger waves of tourists are coming in every weekend. Our public schools are improving, and wealthy young families are bound to notice and move here. How do we retain our character and avoid economic displacement? Positive proximity means we know we have only ourselves to decide how to face these changes.