There is a lot of conversation happening in the United States today about the rural/urban divide, serious questions about how we experience prosperity and opportunity throughout our county’s rural communities. I live in a small town, as do a number of people on our team, and we think about this a lot. We were recently invited to submit a proposal to a foundation interested in our vision for improving the economic health and vitality of Rural America. The submission was a good opportunity for us, along with our close friends at Urban3, to put our ideas into a solid narrative. I particularly find this concluding point to be urgent and actionable:

Local governments need to be repositioned to advocate up instead of merely administering down. As an alternative to populist fervor or broad disenfranchisement, this is the kind of authentic representation that Rural America needs.

Even though we were not selected, I sense the submission is worth sharing. What follows is the introductory narrative. If you’d like to see our entire proposal, you can download it here.

Small towns and rural areas are generally treated, through public policy, as merely smaller versions of major metropolitan areas. They are given the same tax structures, the same economic incentives, and the same transportation and infrastructure approach, among many other things. They are expected to be part of a globalized economy, using the tools and resources at their disposal to compete and thrive. This is not working.

America’s rural places are economically and culturally fragile, lagging urbanized areas in key metrics of health and success. The gap is growing. Yet, policymakers have responded to this crisis by imposing even more of the urban toolbox, often with a not-so-subtle (and not-so-helpful) veneer of cultural superiority.

Opportunity Zones were supposed to bring Wall Street capital to rural areas, but they simply inflated real estate prices without creating an equivalent rise in wages. Infrastructure investments were supposed to attract new development, but the dollar stores and franchise restaurants that showed up merely extracted wealth while stifling local entrepreneurs. Assistance with higher education allowed some youth to escape the decline leaving behind the rarely fulfilled promise of someday returning to help rebuild.

The disparities are most pronounced in low-income neighborhoods, particularly those of indigenous, black, and immigrant communities. Chris Arnade, the author of Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America, uses the term “strip mining” to describe policies that are meant to help but end up extracting wealth and opportunity from rural areas. He recently wrote:

To truly value poorer communities, the wealthy, the politically connected, the rich, the elites, (call them what you will), have to view them as places to be respected, not places to be controlled with police, or as pools of talent to be extracted.

The call for an approach centered on humility, one that does not impose but instead takes its cues from these struggling places, aligns with a key component of the economic justice vision put forth by the Movement for Black Lives.

We demand a world where those most impacted in our communities control the laws, institutions, and policies that are meant to serve us—from our schools to our local budgets, economies, police departments, and our land—while recognizing that the rights and histories of our Indigenous family must also be respected.

In our small towns and rural areas, our goal must be to build a culture of health, one where everyone has a fair and just opportunity to live a good life in a prosperous place. That is exactly what it means to live in a Strong Town.

Achieving this goal requires policy changes at the state and federal level, but even more urgently it requires systems change at the local level. The 20th century economic paradigm places local governments at the bottom of a food chain of governments, their systems oriented vertically to receive capital flows and guidance from centralized systems, both public and private.

As we have discussed at Strong Towns, local governments must reorient horizontally to obsessively focus on the urgent needs of people within their community, especially those who struggle. In rural America, we must:

Recognize that local government is not the lowest form of government in an ecosystem of governments, but the highest form of coordination and advocacy for the community.

This is a transformation attainable by any small town or rural community, one that reveals an endless number of productive pursuits.

For example, the quintessential Strong Towns case study is a familiar small-town redevelopment story. Two blocks of shops once served a healthy and growing neighborhood. In pursuit of faster economic growth, the street in front of the shops was turned into a highway. Whatever gain was achieved by this investment was offset many times over by the atrophy of the neighborhood and the financial burden mandatory auto-ownership has imposed on the people living there. The two blocks became blighted, a condition affirmed by city decree.

This is a tragedy if the story ended there, but it doesn’t. It actually gets worse. Using incentives and subsidies developed primarily for suburban and urban redevelopment initiatives, the local government was able to get one of the blocks of blighted shops torn down and replaced with a modern fast-food franchise. The new restaurant met all the zoning and building codes required of new construction. On paper, this was a successful redevelopment.

Only, that paper didn’t include the most impactful measurements of success. For example, after the redevelopment, the remaining blighted block was worth $1.1 million. In contrast, the new fast-food block was worth only $610,000. Even before the decades of subsidies and rebates are subtracted, the city’s approach devalued the redeveloped property by 45%, making the community poorer while shifting the tax burden to other struggling property owners.

The new restaurant created some jobs, but they were mostly low wage and without benefits. In comparison, the eleven remaining businesses on the blighted block were not glamorous, but they were all locally-owned. They all reported using local accountants, attorneys, print shops and advertising. In other words, the blighted block was part of the community’s economic ecosystem, an emergent network essential to building local wealth and prosperity.

The community would have been better off had they done nothing, but there were many productive things they could have done. They could have used a tiny fraction of the tax rebates given the franchisee to instead match façade improvements the shop owners made. They could have changed their zoning codes to provide more flexible use of the sites or changed their approach to code enforcement to make upgrading less of a financial burden. They could have worked to make it easier for people in the neighborhood to walk to the shops, expanding options for residents while growing patrons for the businesses. The list of alternatives is long.

The community could have spent less money, experienced greater financial returns, and had that wealth accrue to people in the city’s most struggling neighborhoods (spatial equity), had they shunned modern wisdom given to them by outside experts and instead focused on the urgent needs of people within their community. This experience that has been repeated for decades in neighborhoods across North America. It continues still, despite the damage.

By focusing on the struggles of the most vulnerable in their city’s neighborhoods, not only can any rural community broadly build wealth and prosperity, but it can also become an enlightened, focused, and empowered advocate for its citizens. Local governments need to be repositioned to advocate up instead of merely administering down. As an alternative to populist fervor or broad disenfranchisement, this is the kind of authentic representation that Rural America needs.

A Plan for Building Strong Rural Communities

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