Welcome to another episode of Less People. I’m Jenny Russell. So this is another episode on those people that have inspired our work in rural areas, those people that we feel are really rock stars and leaders in the rural economic development talks in the nation and beyond, and those who have inspired us throughout the years to continue our work and to continue to be positive and hold that, you know, hold that torch up for the rural living and rural life.
Talked about already Marcy Penner from the Kansas Sampler Foundation. She was my number one influence in kind of developing my career and working in this area. Number two was Ben Winchester.
He’s a, he’s an economist from the University of Minnesota Extension, and he has, looks at things from a very scientific analytical way of thinking, but we just really like a lot of the things that he has to say about rural areas. When I used to work with Luke Mahan, we got to meet him at one of the Kansas Community Foundations conference in Wichita, and we both kind of geeked out because he was kind of one of our celebrities that we really liked. And then, so I’m going to talk about our third person that has really inspired our work in rural areas, and I was, had the privilege of bringing him into Republic County where I work and where I live last summer, last fall, and it is Jeff Siegler with Revitalize or Die.
So Jeff Siegler used to really, lives in Pennsylvania and was a person with the Ohio Main Street Program. If you’ve not heard about the Main Street Program, the Main Street Program, National Main Street and State Main Street Programs, are something that I had some experience with back in 2003 when I first became an economic development person. It was one of the more effective programs that I’ve ever seen for developing, really thinking out strategically how you’re going to develop a downtown.
And I always thought it was really smart they had different focus committees focused on economic revitalization, so how to raise the money, bring the money into your downtown to be able to do the work that you want to do. A marketing committee that marketed the different aspects of your community, of your downtown, different things that represented the retail of and how to bring more diversity into the retail and kind of work together to to have things going on in your downtown area. So all of those things, and building design is also a big part of Main Street, but all of those things were from the Main Street Program and something that I thought was really smart.
So Jeff Siegler with Revitalize or Die has a lot of experience with Main Street Programs and I learned about him because I started watching his Downtown Happy Hour Program on Facebook when it was COVID lockdown times, which I know, don’t remind you of that, I get it. I watched some episodes of different shows and I’m behind on and I watched the binge watch episodes and anything that comes up with oh this was during 2020 and just makes me want to turn it off, don’t, it’s like trauma. But that is something that good that did come about from COVID was Jeff Siegler’s Revitalize or Die Downtown Happy Hour.
He brought in a lot of his friends from the industry and they just had discussions about, you know, downtowns and challenges and great things that are happening and really interesting perspectives on how to develop downtowns and really got inspirational. I got inspiration from him on that and then he started offering, you know, the ability to bring him out to communities and have him actually do deep dives in your communities on what your challenges are, what is good, what is not. So we got to bring him out, like I said, this past fall and we toured him around our different communities and really got to pick his brain about things and one of the main things he’d really talked about was, you know, don’t loosen your standards, make sure your standards stay high.
This concept or that it’s, you know, southern gentry talking about saving plantations or house museums, like that’s not it at all. Maybe that’s what it used to be but what it really is about is creating attractive and economically viable commercial districts. It’s about upholding standards, it’s about preserving quality materials that went into these buildings and recognize the craftsmanship and the history that go into our commercial districts.
Nobody is seeking out, no good business is seeking out crappy run-down space. So when we preserve our buildings, what we do is keep intact this great attractive quality space that good businesses seek out. We tell people, we announce to people that see these quality spaces that this is the type of people we are, that we care about our resources, we care about our history, we care about our commercial district, our center of the town and our community.
It’s so important to preserve these beautiful buildings because that is what defines us, that is where we house our great businesses, that’s where we come together, that’s what people think of our community when they come to it, that’s our best marketing feature, that’s our best tourism attraction. So preservation isn’t just about saving house museums, it’s about creating quality space that boosts the economy, that lifts up the businesses around and it stabilizes the tax base. So we let that, when we let those standards start to decline, we hurt everybody around it.
We send a message that apathy is taking hold and we can’t do that. We have to stand up against apathy and we have to make sure that we preserve our historic assets because oftentimes in most communities it is the greatest asset, it’s the single largest investment that most communities will ever make and it’s our greatest asset. So stand up, fight back against apathy and if you see it starting to take hold, if you see your building starts to deteriorate, go out and say something.
There’s no reason that we should have strict code enforcement in neighborhoods and then be completely lax when it comes to the downtown. They’re no different and we have to treat them the same. We have to stand up, say something and make sure that we don’t let these buildings start to slip into decline.
Just because you live in a small town in a rural area doesn’t mean your standards can’t be high and I really feel like that a lot of times you teach people how to treat you. I think that in my professional life, I also think that in our town lives, if you accept somebody’s broken out windows and you don’t have any standards available, you don’t have any codes available, you don’t have any code enforcement available to take care of those problems, Jeff Siegler often says, you know, broken windows basically are an invitation for people to commit crimes.
Which, you know, I get that that’s not always completely accurate but if you think about it, if you’re not saying, if you’re saying, oh these broken windows are fine, you know, we’re not gonna spend the time or the money or the hassle to tell those people that we don’t want those in our small town, in our downtown, then other people are like, okay, well I guess we’re okay with graffitiing this wall.
I guess I’m okay to leave my trash outside this building because it doesn’t look like anybody cares. Sometimes that’s intentional, you know, sometimes that is a thought people have. Sometimes that’s not an intentional thing.
Our minds are drawn to beauty and that was one of Jeff’s points. Our minds are drawn to beautiful things and if you think that beautiful things don’t matter to your town or to rural people, that’s just not true. I mean, people might not value that, they might not think that, they think that that’s the first thing that you can cut corners on, that you can cut the cost out of things on.
But beauty is important. Spending that extra money, spending that extra time to focus on those details, that’s really important to how your community looks. We’re talking about economic development this week and how the choices you make in terms of economic development affect your community.
This particular community, as you can see, has not put much of their economic development efforts into the downtown and this is the result. Unfortunately, you’ve got buildings that are empty, empty businesses, and a place that doesn’t necessarily serve the community well. But the problem with that is that this is the heart of the community.
This is the center of the community. This is where people identify with. This has been the center of the community for a hundred years and where people really recognize it’s the heart of their town.
And when these buildings start to fade, when they start to collapse, when they start to deteriorate, it has a real psychological effect on the people that live here. When those businesses go out and are replaced by national chains, it affects how people feel about themselves and how they feel about their town. And it really is a choice.
You can say, well, the community doesn’t have any money, but that’s not true. We’re going to show you where the money is. In this particular clip, he pans to a strip mall with a bunch of national chains.
And I guess this is the new downtown. This isn’t very good. This is the choice that you make and that this community made and decide how it wanted to grow and who it wanted to be.
So instead of everybody coming to the downtown where there’s locally owned buildings and businesses where that money goes back into the local economy, they’ve created this. It’s a soulless, meaningless place where they’ve provided outside companies to come and replace what once used to be local. And so all the money that was spent in the community before now goes to these companies and back to their hometowns.
And it’s a sad replacement for what once was special, for what once was the heart of the community, what once brought people together. Because this isn’t public. This is private.
And what makes downtown special is it’s a public place and we feel comfortable going down there to meet up with one another. You might say, you know, hey, let’s meet downtown. No one ever said, hey, let’s meet in the back of the target parking lot.
That’s not how this works. It’s a sad replacement. And it’s a choice that the community makes and how it wants to grow.
And when you decide this, you know, it 100% comes at the cost of something special that you had downtown in a place where people come together. So when you think about you as a community, you as a city leader, how you want to grow, how you want to choose to try to grow your economy, you’ve got a choice to make. And you can either grow your downtown and continue to have someplace special to boost your economy, or you can opt for this.
So Jeff Siegler really talks about that. He talks about, you know, focusing on the heart of the community, which is your downtown area, making that the most beautiful it can be, upping the standards, making sure you have land banks in place and different tools in place to be able to take owners to tasks that are not upholding your buildings the way they should be upheld. And then working out as you’ve gotten your downtown secured and beautiful and the way you want them then working out from there kind of in a bullseye type of a situation where you work out from your downtown, start targeting different houses that are around your downtown.
And then as you get that cleaned up and figured out, then go out to the next tier. So Jeff Siegler does some really interesting work. Again, I’ll put some links to Revitalize or Die here in the comments of this episode so that you can research him along with our first and second inspirations, Marcy Penner from the Kansas Sampler Foundation, Ben Winchester from the University of Minnesota Extension, and Jeff Siegler from Revitalize or Die.
I hope that you’ll be able to research them, check out what they are doing and really get inspired like we have been. So those are our top three inspirations in the work that we do and who we’ve met and who we’ve come across throughout the years of working. I know there are a lot of others that are inspirational.
So if you know somebody who’s inspirational that I’m missing in this rural economic development realm, please leave them in the comments below. I’d love to research them a little bit more and pick your brains about who you have found that are inspirational in your communities. So again, thank you for listening.
This is Jenny Russell with Less People, the podcast about rural economic development, and we will catch you on the next episode.