Revitalize, or Die.

So much of what makes a person appreciate their community is beauty.

We place a considerable amount of value on aesthetics. Humans have a greater sense of attachment to places that are pretty. We seek out charming environments and will pay more to visit them or live in them.

Yet most communities don't have a single organization advocating for good aesthetics. Not one person whose job it is to ask whether what gets built is actually worth caring about.

Which is why most towns never see anything attractive built.

Years ago I was involved with my local preservation organization. It was time to replace the old wooden sign in front of the organization's prized property. We ended up in a heated argument about whether to replace it with a plastic sign. Equal proponents on each side. It left me astonished. I had assumed that preservation minded people were also concerned with quality design.

Preservation matters. It is fundamental to the revitalization of any community. But we cannot overlook how much it matters that the built environment, whether ancient or brand new, is lovable and charming. People derive a sense of attachment from things they find attractive. And a building has a much better chance of growing old if it's pretty.

Whether new or old, beauty is timeless.

Not all old buildings are special.

Conversely, not all new buildings are garbage. Well, at least they don’t have to be.

I love following accounts on social media that show these sorts or projects off. Photos from Frankfurt, Germany of blocks of new construction that look hundreds of years old. A project called Catfiddle Street in Charleston completely blends in with the existing built environment. A new civic building in Budapest looks like it’s been there forever. Paris, Nijmegen, Barcelona, and even New York City all have examples of recently built structures that are a welcome addition to the landscape.

There are a growing number of examples of beautiful classical style buildings being constructed around the world that heal the urban pattern. Buildings that have context and help repair the damage done to street life. Structures that are gorgeous and make residents proud of their city. Projects that look like they belong and have always been there.

This gives me hope that we can undo the damage we have done to our cities and towns.

When everyone believes quality construction is impossible, the possibility of doing so becomes that much harder. We have to stop saying we can’t and start demanding that we do.

For years I was under the wrong impression.

The argument I always heard and often ended up making myself is that we shouldn’t tear a building down because we couldn’t build anything like it again today. This is a well-intentioned argument, but I believe it has had some negative consequences.

I spent decades of my career believing that we didn’t have the money or know-how to build anything of quality anymore. The fact that we don’t build many pretty buildings anymore doesn’t mean that we can’t build pretty buildings anymore. Conflating the two thoughts led me, and I am sure others, to believe that it was an impossibility.

But it’s not. It never was.

I remain a preservationist. Historic buildings matter enormously. Old buildings are just cooler. Nearly every popular restaurant or retailer is in an old building. All the best apartments and condos are in old buildings. I will take an empty eyesore building with potential over an empty surface lot eyesore with no potential every single time. No one looks at a rusted ’57 Chevy and demands it gets thrown in the sea. Old buildings, like old cars, just need the right person to come along and love them back to health.

But preservation and new quality construction are not mutually exclusive. We can save what we have and still demand that what gets built next is worth saving too.

Honestly, I feel a bit cheated for all the years I didn’t realize that was possible.

I don’t know if anyone has ever said these words, but I am pretty damn excited for the workbook. Almost done!

A building is a business. I repeat, a building is a business.

The community and economic development world gives an outsized amount of attention to business owners but leaves building owners jilted, pining in the shadows, just waiting for a little love.

Entrepreneurship makes Main Street go round, but building owners are entrepreneurs too. They should be getting a lot more attention. Because if you don't have any good building owners, you aren't going to have any good business owners.

The truth is, if a building is sitting empty on Main Street and no one is actively trying to sell or lease it, consider it unavailable. Whether it's part of a trust, owned by some family in Florida, or part of a portfolio being used as a tax write-off, it doesn't matter. That building is not a candidate for any of the businesses you are developing.

Your only hope is replacing the owner.

This is why identifying and fostering potential local developers is just as important as working with existing building owners. There are plenty of business entrepreneurs out there. There are almost no building entrepreneurs, because nobody is providing them the same resources.

Yet they are vital to the health of your downtown.

Before we were all so connected by the internet and roads, communities had to for the most part produce what they consumed and consume what they produced. As more people arrived in a town, more was needed. As more was needed, more work was to be had. New people meant more food was needed, more housing, more shops. Which meant opportunity for people already in town and for newcomers alike.

When you think of your town as a closed loop economy, it becomes a little easier to understand how we can thrive without the mega employers that dominated our towns during the mid-20th century. There is such a push to return to that era, completely forgetting that we had healthy economies long before large industrial employers arrived. And we have forgotten how to create and build things ourselves.

Every town I work with has a housing shortage. At the same time they complain there is no meaningful work for young people, that kids are moving away, and that there isn't enough money. The answer to all of these problems is the same.

What happened to locals building their own homes? What happened to people in town running their own businesses? We didn't lose some ancient technology that made this possible. We just grew accustomed to outsourcing it.

We know we need more homes. We know people need groceries and love coffee shops and restaurants. But instead of reconfiguring our systems to empower locals to build and operate the things we want and need, we wait for someone from somewhere else to come and do that work. We assume no local could manage a coffee shop. We assume no one in town could build a home for their family. So we wait for someone from far away to do it for us, so that they can take all of our money back with them when they leave.

They aren't supplying a better product than you could produce locally, I promise you that. But they certainly have advantages. Not only do we wait on them to do this work, we reconfigured our systems for them and we even subsidize them. We build new roads and infrastructure to lower their costs while locals watch from the sidelines.

We aren't training locals to do the work we need. We are footing the bill for outsiders to come and do the work we used to do ourselves. Then we wonder where all the money went. Where the kids went. Where the pride went.

It was shipped off. One subdivision and strip mall at a time.

It doesn't have to be this way. It never did.

*This is the work I do with communities across the country. If your town is ready for an honest conversation about its civic health, find me at revitalizeordie.com

Most American cities have been in decline for at least 40 years, some as long as 70. To think things will get fixed in the short run is some real magical thinking, but the key to remember is this, we don’t have to make everything right, we just have to make things better.

Improvement is about trajectories, it's about momentum. The results will come, don’t worry too much about them. Focus on the process. Do the work, be relentless, and the outcomes will take care of themselves.

Most of us understand that anything that promises a cure or improvement without effort is a scam and that the only way to address our problems or progress in our lives is to put in the work. Though somehow when it comes to our civic life, we completely abandoned this obvious truth. I know I have hammered this point home before, but like my own advice, I am just going to keep with it until it sticks.

The decline of a community cannot be turned around with one big project, no more so than people can lose weight by consuming a pill.

There are some hard truths we know about ourselves that we can apply to the places we live. And because these truths are applicable to us as individuals, they will always be true to the places we call home.

Nothing comes easy, there are no shortcuts. There is one and only way to get better, and it's by putting in the work. You can have the best plan in the world, the best coach, or the best trainer, but at the end of the day- if each individual isn’t willing to commit to a sustained effort, it's meaningless.

Let's look at some examples.

Lose weight - eat less, do more exercise.
Have more money - buy less, earn more.
Find more friends - look at screens less, engage in new activities.

It's a pretty simple formula when it comes to self-improvement. Stop doing the detrimental thing and start doing the thing that helps you get better. Crazy enough- this is also the secret to community revitalization.

Here’s a simple methodology I suggest for those wanting to improve their community. Start removing the things that are ugly and start replacing them with things that are attractive. Just as we are all a composite of all the decisions we make, our cities are a composite of all the physical features that make it up.

A town, village, hamlet, or city is just some buildings, benches, sidewalks and streets. Take away the physical items and you have a field or a parking lot. So the way to get better is to improve all of the elements that make up a place. As each piece improves, the place improves. There is simply no other way about it.

This is why trajectories matter. It doesn’t take all that much to change them. When conditions have been declining for so long, it's actually quite easy to turn a trajectory around. The act of doing nothing brings about decline and decline is depressing and fosters apathy. But improvement, oh boy! Everyone loves improvement, it’s exciting and gets everyone all fired up.

When a thing stops deteriorating and starts getting better, well we all feel a little spark and a little excitement. We all find ourselves caring a little more, maybe even feeling a bit of affection. It’s fun to see things improve. Cleaning the house feels good, but home improvements are the stuff of dreams! Staying in shape is excellent, but losing weight or building muscle? Hubba hubba!

We have to look around at our towns and be honest about what looks like crap. If decline is still occurring, your trajectory is headed in the wrong direction. Stop it. Halt it. Fix it. Look at all of the components that make up your place and start improving them. You can’t fix them all at once, but you can start fixing them one by one. And with each item improved, the sum total gets a little bit better…thus a trajectory shifted. A momentum born.

Look at all the pieces that make up your place and start improving them. Big or small, they all need attention, they all need shined up and cared for. Revitalization isn’t about silver bullets and big quick fixes. It’s about a thousand small projects. It’s about making one improvement today so that you create a little momentum, a little positivity, a little belief that tomorrow, it can be done again. Repeat this over and over again and you will find yourself living in an entirely different place than when you started. It only takes a bit of effort.

At the end of the day, care is all that counts.

We are built on it. We all need more reasons to care and when our lives are absent of care, what really even matters?

The reason I talk so much about place is because I am seeing so many societal problems stem from places that are no longer possible to care about.

When our towns were built, we built them ourselves. Local hands, using local materials, built with pride, which is why we still love those places today. We knew the builder, the mason, and the carpenter and got to enjoy their craftsmanship every time we walked past or stepped through those doors. The care they put in forever graced those halls.

Those buildings filled up with local people operating businesses they cared deeply about. Businesses that not only gave their families a living but also a source of pride. These are the places we still care about because they were built and operated with care.

When we outsource all of this to national chains and outside developers, we decide that care no longer counts. We become just another quarry to mine.

We can't expect people to care when there is so little left to care about.

This isn't a post about revitalization or economic development. It's about human health, decency, and the people in our lives we care about.