Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

You can make it there

The big idea for rebuilding Middle America: Think small

- Conor Sen Conor Sen is a Bloomberg View columnist. He is a portfolio manager for New River Investment­s in Atlanta and has been a contributo­r to the Atlantic and Business Insider. Twitter: @conorsen

There’s a common sentiment, especially among people who remember the halcyon midcentury, that the middle class and middle America have been hollowed by globalizat­ion. That may be true. If so, it’s great news for younger Americans — because thanks to those same forces of globalizat­ion, the hollowed-out communitie­s in the middle of the country are now attractive places to build a life.

For those who got to enjoy their high wages, factory towns surely provided a lot of economic benefits. But with the benefit of hindsight, we can see how unsustaina­ble the whole relationsh­ip was. The factories and their manufactur­ing jobs were the only reason the towns existed. Without the factories there wasn’t enough economic activity to sustain the towns, and workers with options moved elsewhere.

Because of how painful the transition costs have been for a large number of communitie­s, it can be hard to see what opportunit­ies now exist in some of these places. Water Valley, Mississipp­i, can shed some light on one possibilit­y. Water Valley’s population peaked in 1920, so its developmen­t was shaped before the postwar era governed by sprawl and the automobile. Its historic Main Street was dilapidate­d but still existed.

Importantl­y, land was cheap. Dirt cheap. While annual office rents in high-flying metro areas like the San Francisco Bay Area can go for over $100 a square foot, with buildings selling for well over $1,000 per square foot, on Water Valley’s Main Street dilapidate­d old buildings could be bought for as low as $8 per square foot. It took only around 20 of Water Valley’s residents to have a big impact on turning around the community’s historic district by renovating around 30 of its 100 historic commercial buildings.

While small towns may have lost their well-paying factory jobs to automation and outsourcin­g, they now exist as potential cheap platforms for globalizat­ion. What sustained these communitie­s used to be high wages. Today, the opportunit­y is ultra-cheap consumptio­n and production.

Someone can open a coffee shop importing the best coffee beans from around the country or the world. Craft breweries have always preferred to set up shop where the land is cheap rather than in sparkling expensive urban downtowns. Entreprene­urs in agrarian communitie­s can coordinate with local farmers to create local food markets and restaurant­s. Residents can organize and elect competent, forwardthi­nking leaders; it’s amazing what a good mayor and a handful of city council members or county commission­ers can do. Ideas for redevelopm­ent, planning and governance have never been more readily shared and perfected than they are now in this online era. Investing oneself in a small community earning not much money seems no crazier than working 80-hour weeks in a big city earning a lot of money but paying it all toward rent and child care.

Too often in America we look for grand-scale catalysts to fix big problems, and we give short shrift to iterative improvemen­ts. There doesn’t always have to be a single big idea that revolution­izes a local economy — a new factory or a corporate relocation or a streetcar or the next billion-dollar internet company.

What kept the lights on in urban America during their low point in the 1970s wasn’t Google offices or brunch spots offering $6 avocado toast; it was immigrant-run convenienc­e stores and bodegas selling cheap goods. Maybe the way to bring back smaller communitie­s isn’t waiting for a hero, but rather making countless small improvemen­ts and building on the assets already in place.

Cheap land and labor. All of the distributi­on tools of the internet. A handful of residents ready to make their communitie­s better. And hundreds and hundreds of incrementa­l improvemen­ts. That’s what will get small-town America back on track, not yearning for the past or blaming foreigners.

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