Our Towns — Book Review & Quotes
Review
After the 2016 election, everybody talked about the 2016 election. People tried to evaluate what everyone had missed. There are plenty of people who have written about that from a variety of different angles.
For me, this book about small towns caught my eye not because of the 2016 election, but because of my own attraction to small towns; the feeling that I have when I walk through a vibrant little downtown. My personal interest has been caught by one little town in particular, in fact it’s about as small as they come. The town of Luna, New Mexico is a place that is deeply tied to my own family roots. My ancestors helped to settle that small town in western New Mexico and ever since I’ve wanted to know how these little communities can thrive.
The other community that has caught my attention more recently is Sisters, Oregon. My wife’s family will occasionally vacation at Black Butte Ranch near Sisters, and we often found ourselves walking around Main St. downtown.
All of these small towns interest me for the same reason: I have no idea how they survive and even thrive in a progressively globalized world. And a lot of them really struggle.
“Every city that is trendy or successful in some way attracts people from someplace else.” — what attracts people to these small towns? Natural resources? Big companies? Universities? Everyone is constantly trying to find the answer to that question.
Reading through “Our Towns,” I was struck by the Fallows’ thoughtfulness in regards to each town they visited. In Bend, Oregon, actually not far from Sisters, they talked about a shift where people are seeing more opportunity to return to smaller towns or even more rural areas closer to home.
“But my sense is, we’re seeing a genuine shift. Historically, young people in early or mid-career just didn’t have job opportunities in regional markets, like this one. So the motivated ones just had to stay in the major metros. But there’s nothing like two major recessions in a decade” — the serious collapse of tech businesses in 2001 and the world crisis beginning in 2008 — “to have people reassess what really matters. It’s not a tidal wave, but a shift. I see people literally every week who want to find out about coming to Bend, for these life-change reasons. Usually it’s because they’re tired of being on the hamster wheel or want to build a family.”
The more these small towns can do to communicate the ability to live there and still have solid job opportunities, the more attractive they will be to people like me. And with an increasingly flexible workplace, this isn’t far off. A lot of my friends have jobs they could easily do anywhere with an internet connection.
“People like living here, and they define success as finding a way to stay.”
“Could younger, better-educated people really be lured that far away from the benefits increasingly concentrated in larger cities?”
“I have always maintained that if we created a great work environment, it would help us to find and retain great local talent,” he said. “We could always find smart people coming out of Harvard or MIT and they would move here. But the odds are that without roots in the Lehigh Valley, in a year or two they will return to Boston. But if we find great people from the Lehigh Valley, who in theory could go anywhere — we could show them a caring company culture and cool workplace that would convince them this is the place to stay and start a career.” Pelletier said that as soon as his downtown plans were announced, he received six job applications from engineers at nearby firms.”
These quotes from the book are just a cherry picking of comments related to this idea: young people will go where they feel they can have the best opportunities while living in the best places. Proving that jobs are accessible in these small towns (whether in-person or remotely) goes hand-in-hand with communicating that this is also a place you could really enjoy living.
In The New Urban Crisis, Richard Florida talked about certain key things that attract young people to an area, and the proximity to amenities and ‘lively living’ is key. For small towns, an active foot-traffic downtown scene can be the heart of a community.
“We also felt the downtown’s micro on-the-street sense: almost all of the shop fronts were occupied. Strikingly, almost none of them were lawyers’ or doctors’ offices, financial consulting firms, or other “dead” professional space that does almost nothing to attract casual foot traffic.”
What makes a good small town? This is something I want to spend more time thinking about. Maybe it’s not the idealistic vision that people have, but something resonated with me recently when I walked down Main Street near Disneyland and in California Adventure.
I was walking down the middle of the street, across some street car tracks, and realized “this place is designed for me.” I wasn’t an out-of-place passerby on a street controlled by cars. The shops weren’t uninviting offices. The people weren’t in a hurry or unfriendly. The entire environment had been curated to optimize my experience.
Now, there is an obvious argument to be made that actual city life can’t be so curated and perfect with trash being emptied from underground. But there is something to be learned from such a person-focused design approach. I think the biggest takeaway for me listening to James and Deborah walk through town after town is that the very best towns are the ones that take into account their people’s needs most effectively.
Some Highlighted Quotes From The Book
“We began by looking for towns with positive energy, with signs of rebound from some kind of shock or shift, like a mine or factory that had closed or waves of people who’d departed or newcomers who’d arrived. We ended up adding towns with down-and-out reputations where we truly feared for what we might find. Life upon landing was never quite what we’d planned.”
“After so many miles, we knew that flight in a small plane is rarely routine. There are dramas when you’re airborne: weather, birds, parachute jumpers, mechanical blips, crop dusters, and drones. And perspectives unfold among the clouds or over the sights below: rangy forests, tamed farmlands, strings of quarries, hours of desert, well-defined prisons, pop-up small towns.”
“By now, I knew Travels with Charley the way some people know the Bible, and I was more than a little envious that Steinbeck could stock his trusty outfitted truck Rocinante without limit, including what he described as “far too many clothes” and a week’s worth of food.”
“Despite the economic crises of the preceding decade and the social tensions of which every American is aware, most parts of the United States that we visited have been doing better, in most ways, than most Americans realize. Because many people don’t know that, they’re inclined to view any local problems as symptoms of wider disasters, and to dismiss local successes as fortunate anomalies. They feel even angrier about the country’s challenges than they should, and more fatalistic about the prospects of dealing with them.”
“We were interested in places that had faced adversity of some sort, from crop failure to job loss to political crisis, and had looked for ways to respond.”
“This is an ongoing project: we ask readers to send a tweet about their cities to @JamesFallows or @FallowsDeb, with the tag #ThisIsMyTown, or a longer message about where you live and why to TheStoryOfMyTown@gmail.com.”
“There is a high-toned tradition of road trips as a means of “discovering” America, from Lewis and Clark and Tocqueville through John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, and William Least Heat-Moon.”
“From the sky, America is mainly forest in the eastern third, farmland in the middle, then mountain and desert in the West, before the strip of intense development along the California coast.”
“As we flew along one of the east-west lines that brought settlers into these territories and carried crops out to markets, we would see little settlements every few minutes. In the 1800s, they were set up at roughly ten-mile intervals, an efficient distance when farmers were delivering their harvests by wagon. Now it seems that four out of five of those towns are withering, as farms are run with giant combines and crops are hauled by truck.”
“Every city that is trendy or successful in some way attracts people from someplace else.”
“The big-box malls all around Sioux Falls are a disappointingly familiar part of its look, versus the more homegrown look of its restored and revived downtown.”
“Many people we met, like the nurses that first night, talked about Sioux Falls as occupying a sweet spot: big enough to offer most of what is attractive about very large cities (shopping, medical care, entertainment, and an increasingly rich food-and-drink life) but small enough to be manageable, inexpensive, and — something we often heard — “safe.”
“We didn’t realize it at the time, but the falls and the trail were markers for something we’d encounter almost every place we went: restoration or revival of civic attractions, like the falls, and creation of bike and walking paths. Deb eventually formulated a law: the mark of a successful city is having a river walk, whether or not there is a river.”
“During our first week in town, I mentioned to a local college professor that the place seemed “over-retailed.” Its shopping malls, chain stores, and specialty shops were part of the overall sense that it had a larger physical layout than its population would normally indicate.”
“The reason, he explained, was the city’s emergence over the past generation as the economic capital of the region as a whole.”
“This pattern is obviously bad for the much-smaller cities in the area — we heard about those who had lost their clinic or their school or their grocery store, as services concentrated in metropolises like Sioux Falls — but changed the character of Sioux Falls in a way we hadn’t expected, and that was a reminder of some classic chronicles of boom-era towns in the American West.”
“From them and other college-age people in the area we heard: Back in my town, the public school is shrinking or being consolidated (so we go to a regional school); the local grocery store is closing (because the owner got too old), so we take big shopping trips; the post office is closing; it’s only my parents (or my uncle, my grandparents, our old neighbors) who are back there, because it doesn’t take much manpower to run the farm.”
“Our destination was the Pathways Spiritual Sanctuary, a labor of love by Dave Snyder, who, after a career as a pig farmer in Nebraska, decided to create a refuge for reflection. He bought two hundred acres of forest and meadowland in the low hills and tamed paths and resting spots, where he placed statues and rock collections, and then he opened the sanctuary to the public from dawn to dusk daily.”
“People walk, meditate, and record their thoughts or impressions in journals that he provides in weatherproof Tupperware containers along the way.”
“We quickly noticed traits that we eventually learned to associate with towns on the rise. Residential buildings and new hotels. Multiple restaurants, and a brewery. Viable stores that are not part of a national chain. Corporate headquarters that have moved downtown. A nearby college student base, from Hope College, which is located downtown, but also from several other schools in the vicinity.”
“We also felt the downtown’s micro on-the-street sense: almost all of the shop fronts were occupied. Strikingly, almost none of them were lawyers’ or doctors’ offices, financial consulting firms, or other “dead” professional space that does almost nothing to attract casual foot traffic.”
“Greg Holcombe of a civic group called Riverview.”
“Prince proposed and partly underwrote taking hot water from the cooling system of the giant downtown coal-powered electric plant and running it through a set of orange plastic pipes placed under the city’s streets and sidewalks, to keep them free of snow.”
“Everything about Holland, we quickly learned, was connected to the culture of creating. San Francisco has a culture of people who start new Web companies; D.C., people who start new blogs or interest groups or think tanks. In this part of western Michigan, it’s a culture of people who start companies that make things.”
“The company employs some six hundred people, among them a significant number of people who had served time for offenses and who the Padnoses thought deserved a new chance. Around town are pieces of public art the Padnos family has sponsored or created.”
“Sunday is Family Day.” Family Day! And sure enough, every bike shop in this churchgoing, family-centric town was closed, even during the height of the summer tourist season. I began noticing signs in shop windows: “Closed for Family Day.” Sunday closures are not new, but Family Day closures were new to me. I didn’t recall them from my youth in the Midwest, and I’ve certainly never seen them in our hometown of Washington, D.C.”
“We have children who come from homes with a million-plus annual income, and ones who come from homes with incomes under twenty thousand dollars,” he said. “Just under ten percent of them are considered homeless. When you factor all those variables in, it’s the future of what public education looks like.”
“People like living here, and they define success as finding a way to stay.”
“People look at our paper, and it makes them happy and interested to be here,” she said. It was a vehicle of local consciousness and involvement. “That motivates them to do something, and participate — which makes it more a community, and gives us something to cover. It’s a cycle that works.”
“Flying across the landscape on a clear day at low altitude predictably reveals things you had not known, or noticed. From 1,500 feet up, about the height of the Empire State Building, you are far enough from the ground to discern patterns not visible at street level but close enough to pick out details that to airline passengers would be just blurs. From 2,500 feet above the ground, nearly the height of the world’s tallest building, you can see far enough in all directions to notice how cities interleave with suburbs, or how the course of a river, a ridge, or a tree line shapes the farmland and settlements around it.”
“When they asked if we could handle it, I immediately said yes,” Gardner told me. “My answer to everything is yes. Then we work out the details of what it would take.”
“They set their sights on an abandoned building between the WaCo Diner and the pier, just next to the fisherman’s statue. Because of the building’s unbeatable water view, the women saw it as a fine place for a gallery that could showcase local artists’ work and a space that would offer small public programs and lectures. There would also be enough room on the second story for two small apartments for tourists or visitors to rent, and a storefront with community edibles for sale. So the six women pooled their resources and bought the building. They resolved to name it the Commons, in the democratic spirit of their vision. The Women of the Commons intended a profitable venture for themselves and an inspirational one for the town. While others might look at a town with the size and economic state of Eastport and think “scarcity,” these women instead thought about what they had learned from Stephen Covey (The 7 Habits of Effective People) and focused on “abundance,” in deference to the town’s people, attitudes, networks, and potential.”
“Next up is the renovation of the currently derelict Seacoast Canning Company building, which, during Eastport’s era as a capital of the sardine industry, housed a tin-can-producing factory. The women plan to develop the old factory into a multiuse downtown center for retail, entertainment, office space, meetings, and hotel and apartment use that could make Eastport attractive for many people and purposes.”
“Can Eastport make it? If it does, one of its keys will be civic boosterism, a central part of American culture since long before Sinclair Lewis wrote a whole book about it, Babbitt. But if willed optimism sometimes deludes people, it can also empower them. “I think it was Henry Ford who said, ‘Whether you think you can do something, or think you can’t, you’re right either way,’ ” Chris Gardner told me. In practical terms, a belief that you can shape your fate is more useful than a belief that you cannot. Captain Bob summed up Eastport for us one day. So, I asked him as I looked around at his minuscule hometown, why are you living here? “This is where I’m from,” he said. “Where the hell else would I want to be?”
“Positive attitude,” civic responsibility, and what I have come to think of as local patriotism matter only so much when matched against the largest forces of geography, of demographics, of economic change.”
“Could younger, better-educated people really be lured that far away from the benefits increasingly concentrated in larger cities?”
“These limits are real: no amount of positive thinking can change a city’s location or, at least in the short run, offset its demographic or transportation obstacles.”
“They have to think of themselves as a city — a distinct region and culture, not as part of an urban sprawl. The places we’ve been most definitely have a sense of themselves as distinct entities, with their own traits and strengths.”
“The students are driven — or more accurately, they drive themselves. “One-half dream, one-half plan” is how one student described his life at the school. Dreaming big at the governor’s school means Broadway, Hollywood, Carnegie Hall, Pulitzer, Pritzker. Planning big means half of every day in practice, rehearsal, studio, workshop, training, rewrite, instruction, all alongside the usual high school academics.”
“The mascot of the school is a robot, and the team members are the “engineers.”
“STEM versus STEAM is a hot topic in the education world. Proponents of STEAM argue that infusing more liberal arts into a highly technical curriculum will build more well-rounded, richer lives for the students. Part of the push to STEAM for Fisher came from Greenville’s business community, which wanted to nurture a future workforce steeped in the world of technology, but also one that would be comfortable and practiced in the softer skills of communicating, teamwork, organizing, and public speaking.”
“Fisher’s STEAM curriculum is taught through a method called project-based learning (PBL). Students address a real-world challenge or problem and then work to explore and respond to it. They are encouraged to collaborate, think critically, be creative, and solve problems.”
“These issues — construction, shelters, wind tunnels, weather, homelessness — were on the students’ mind, as they were concurrently reading a popular novel called Maniac Magee, about an orphan looking for a home, and woven through with themes of homelessness and racism.”
“We went from the idea for the center, to finishing the building and opening it, to having it full, all within three years. If we’d had to start with a university or an existing city facility and tried to change its model, it would have been a lot harder and slower.”
“Led by strong mayors, each city changed the physical look of the street, redid parking arrangements, commissioned public art, ran concerts and fairs, and took the lead in bringing new life to a battered downtown. Each city has a very popular minor league baseball team. Greenville has a software and design start-up community with a critical mass of entrepreneurs who have chosen a smaller-town life. Burlington has a critical mass of entrepreneurs who have chosen the outdoor life and political tone of Vermont. Both cities have commercial airports that are bigger and nicer than you might expect, given the cities’ size — yet small enough to be quick and convenient to travel through. And despite their deep dissimilarities on most issues of national politics, the leaders and voters of each city have relied steadily on public-private partnerships, in which state and city governments have taken active steering roles for corporate and philanthropic efforts.”
“People in the city said they are trying to think about using things they do have, to foster the growth of what they now lack. Their ideas include several facets. Chief among them is the pretty downtown, which resembles better-known and more popular resort cities but with dramatically lower real estate costs.”
“Beautiful places, especially by the coast, are increasingly where people with a choice of where to live want to live. You can rebuild infrastructure, but you can’t manufacture an ocean view.”
“What struck us about the school was the very practical-minded and well-supported embrace of what used to be called “vocational education” and now is called the “career technical” approach.”
“Among the non-expert U.S. public, the conventional wisdom about today’s education system is more or less this: At the highest levels, it’s very good, though always endangered by budget cuts and other problems. At the lower ends, it’s in chronic crisis, for budgetary and other reasons. And overall it’s not doing as much as it should to prepare students for practical job skills, especially for the significant group who are not going to get four-year college degrees. Sure, the Germans are great at this, with their apprenticeship programs and all. But Americans never take “voc ed” seriously. One high school doesn’t prove a national trend. But what struck us at Camden County High was its resonance with developments we were seeing elsewhere: serious training for higher-value “technical” jobs. “Non-college” often serves as a catchall term, covering everything from minimum-wage-or-worse food-service jobs to highly skilled hands-on technical and engineering jobs that may be the next era’s counterpart to the lost paradise of assembly-line jobs that paid a family-living wage in the 1950s and 1960s.”
“Allowing for all the other explanations, it still seemed clear that a handful of forceful people made the difference in shaping the region’s economy as a whole. In a way, this is consistent with the pattern we were beginning to see around the country.”
“Then we drove through here — the azaleas were in bloom; it was pretty. My wife said we should at least look the place over. We looked at what God gave ’em, and what they were doing with it. And I said, There’s no reason in the world these folks aren’t winning! But they’re not.”
“Higgins went back to the headhunter. “I said, Here’s what I want: audited financial statements, budgets, all this kind of stuff. I spent weeks just looking at it. I came to the conclusion, these guys should be hitting home runs, but they’re not even getting to the plate. That’s an opportunity.” So he signed on and has gone at full speed ever since.”
“He mentioned a conversation he’d had with the mayor of a small town in Tennessee. “I’ll never forget when he told me: ‘I can’t wait for the blue jeans plant to close in town!’ You never hear a politician say that. He said, ‘We got to get those ladies to community college and get their skills up. I can’t run my town on minimum wage.’ I thought that was the deepest thing I ever heard.”
“The farming is a source of revenue for the Palmer Home, from produce they sell at the local farmers’ market to their new venture, a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program where people buy a season subscription for fresh produce.”
“But time and again we found that the same forces of local patriotism that motivated young people to start their families or businesses in a smaller town, or that convinced mature people to stay there and assume civic responsibilities, also showed up strongly in non-commercial realms. These ranged from promoting the arts to supporting local sports and recreation to protecting the environment.”
“Caddo is almost as significant for what it is not,” the Texas author Joe Nick Patoski wrote in The Texas Observer in 2005. “No condos, no high-rises, no chain motels or restaurants, no resorts, no gated, planned communities, no margarita bars, no chains, no pretension, none of the trappings of modern Texas Lake Culture….Caddo Lake may be in northeast Texas and relatively close to urban centers in all directions, but for those who get Caddo, it is a natural jewel just as worthy of protection.”
“What we are really intending with a question like “Where do you go to church?” or “Where did you go to high school?” is to find a rather gentle, regionally and socially acceptable way of sizing someone up. We are using the question to gather valuable information about their socioeconomic, cultural, and historical background. The question is a veiled probe of “Where do you fit in my world?” or “Let me understand who you are.”
“I’ve been asked the default question in Washington, D.C., countless, truly countless times: “What do you do?” or “Where do you work?” The question reflects the currency of the town. The answer, according to many who offered their interpretation, suggests a measure of a person’s power and connections. I would add politics, passion, and money to that mix as well. It’s a New York question, too, and probably common in other cities with a predominant industry, like tech in the Bay Area, or academia in Boston, or “the industry” in Los Angeles.”
“Some younger people told me that they shy away from that question because it reeks as too sensitive or judgmental among a generation of those who are having trouble landing jobs, or don’t have a direction, or are just taking their sweet time figuring it out.”
“A lot of people told me that they dislike every one of these possibilities. As a questioner, they feel intrusive. As a respondent, they feel boxed in and, often, judged. A few people suggested that they are more comfortable asking an open-ended question, one that invites a person to take any number of directions to answer. It’s a question something like “So, what’s your story?”
“Obviously they have the scale of economic activity, but that very scale overwhelms the right social connections we’re able to maintain. That’s the secret sauce for us. I’m not sure there are a lot of places big enough to do anything but small enough actually to get it done.”
“Some kids translate their school-year work into summer jobs. Others become more realistic about the opportunities in their futures. When I asked one boy what his dream job would be, he immediately said, “Professional football player.” (I’ve heard this answer from countless high school boys around the country, by the way.) And, I asked, if that might not work out? “I’d like to own my own business,” he said. “Or maybe be a civil engineer.”
“Patrick Losinski, who leads the Metropolitan Library System, described Columbus as being large enough to have international companies and small enough that he can call up a CEO and say, “I’d like to talk to you about some things around the library.”
“Losinski left no doubt that the most important message to take away from the Columbus library was that on the stone engraving above the grand entry: “Open to All.” Those words are there to remind every single person who enters of this nearly sacred message of public libraries in America.”
“On the other end of the economic spectrum of customers — “customers” is the term of art favored by the Columbus library instead of the more common term “patrons” — as I traveled across the country, I became accustomed to spotting the young entrepreneurs who set up virtual offices at long reading room desks.”
“Do you resent this?” I asked librarians around the country. “Not at all,” the librarians invariably answered, adding that one day when their companies were flush, these titans might remember where it all started.”
“After visits to dozens of public libraries from Maine to Arizona, from Mississippi to Minnesota, I saw that America’s public libraries, the place people used to go primarily to find books or do research, have become the heart and soul of American communities. I learned that in the library, I could discover the spirit of a town, get a feel for the people’s needs and wants, and gauge their energy and mettle.”
“A makerspace is a communal twenty-first-century workshop where hobbyists, artists, entrepreneurs, artisans, designers, and dreamers share hardware and software like 3-D printers, laser cutters, wire benders, and hammers, to create and build. Around the country, we’ve been to makerspaces that are franchised like gyms, where you can take out a membership. We’ve seen others in forward-looking companies, where employees are encouraged to spend time with the most sophisticated tools, bringing ideas to reality. And there are makerspaces in libraries; they are free and open to all.”
“All the children’s sections have readiness for school in mind. When I asked Losinski to describe that in more detail for me, he left no room for imagination: “When a five-year-old walks into kindergarten, takes a book, and holds it upside down, you know there is no reading readiness there.”
“The question on my mind was: What would it take to foster a new wave of manufacturing? And this, too, we began to hear about, with something I had previously not paid much attention to: the “maker movement” and its role in fostering close-to-the-customer, fast-turnaround manufacturing within the United States.”
“Faster means an edge on the competition. It means less tied-up capital. It means a better ability to offer new features or efficiencies. It means quicker response to shifting tastes and market trends. The GE team began looking at start-ups. “We became interested in low-volume manufacturing,” Venkat said. “What can we make that could be successful in units of ten?”
“That is: the products coming out of this microfactory use cloud-centric digital techniques we’re all aware of, including crowdsourcing, online collaboration, crowdfunding, online sales, and open-source coding and design. But they also use the new production techniques, from the real world of real hardware, that have become available only in the past few years — and that keep improving thanks to Moore’s law. These 3-D printers, laser cutters, and low-cost but high-sophistication multiaxis machine tools, as well as a range of other devices, allow people in smaller, less formal, much lower-cost workspaces to design, test, refine, and manufacture items that previously would have required factory production lines — and to find audiences that collaborate in the process of design and, so far, have provided eager markets.”
“We are trying to overcome the selection bias of needing to scale up for big-volume production,” Venkat told me. “We don’t have to design to a spec. We are making in small batches, low volumes. We can make one, then the next one, then the next one. We want to be open to as many ideas as we can.”
“I have always maintained that if we created a great work environment, it would help us to find and retain great local talent,” he said. “We could always find smart people coming out of Harvard or MIT and they would move here. But the odds are that without roots in the Lehigh Valley, in a year or two they will return to Boston. But if we find great people from the Lehigh Valley, who in theory could go anywhere — we could show them a caring company culture and cool workplace that would convince them this is the place to stay and start a career.” Pelletier said that as soon as his downtown plans were announced, he received six job applications from engineers at nearby firms.”
“Life-sized renderings of the three victims are set under words from Edmund Burke: “An event has happened upon which it is difficult to speak and impossible to remain silent.”
“The kids who go to college are making it there now,” Dooley said. And this is a big change from recent times, when the reaction to the challenges of college life used to be “What do you expect? You’re from Ajo. You’re wasting your time!”
“The nonprofit aspect of TET is important. When I spoke with Gallo, he inveighed against some for-profit trade schools as representing the worst in the student-debt syndrome. (They deserved more blame, he said, because they loaded debt onto mainly disadvantaged students, without carefully matching them to available jobs.) And Gallo and Clarke both emphasized the four-part strategy on which their TET approach was based:
- A “comprehensive, immersive training environment,” in which students work in a machine shop six hours a day, five days a week, for six months.
- Nationally recognized credentials and certificates at the end of the program, so that the students’ training is officially recognized and is transportable.
- A realistic, on-the-job training environment, in which students produce real products on real machinery and thus can go to employers with real-world experience.
- Placement connections with local employers, of whom the region’s fastest-growing at the moment are in health care and logistics.”
“In 2010, Dunkelberg and the Deschutes librarians set out to do something about it. The librarians assumed new titles — they were now “community librarians” — and headed out to embed themselves in local groups and organizations, carrying the message of the resourceful and activity-rich library. They also wanted to see how they might build partnerships for the good of the community. At first, Dunkelberg said, the librarians met with a puzzled reaction: “Why are you here?” But after a few years of listening, learning, sharing stories, and collaborating, people would see the librarians coming and ask them, “How can we work with you?” Bend was pulling a paragraph straight from Tocqueville’s observations from his classic reporting trip around America. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville waxed on in astonishment at how many “associations” Americans made, for anything and everything: “Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of dispositions are forever forming associations…of a thousand different types — religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute….As soon as several Americans have conceived a sentiment or an idea that they want to produce before the world, they seek each other out, and when found, they unite.”
“A New York Times feature in 2009 presented Bend, in economic “freefall,” as a “succinct symbol for the economic perils of ‘lifestyle destinations’ in the so-called New West, recreation-heavy communities where jobs have been heavily tilted toward construction and services and where many of the new residents were self-made exiles from California cashing in on their overpriced real estate.”
“The main local concern of the moment seemed to be managing the pace of growth — both in the short term, so as to avoid a repeat of the previous real estate bubble and bust, and in the longer run, to steer clear of a prospect that was always described to us as “becoming another Aspen.” By this people meant a Mountain West shorthand for what could also be called “another Hamptons” or “another Nantucket,” a place so successful in attracting moneyed residents that the people who work for them can’t afford to live anywhere nearby.”
“In one immediately obvious way, the central Oregon story differed from other regional-comeback sagas we had seen. The difference was in its educational establishment: there’s no research university, or even a four-year degree-granting university, in Bend, Prineville, Redmond, or elsewhere in central Oregon. This is an anomaly, because where you have tech-based hopes for economic growth, you almost always have a research university.”
“It is an anomaly that people in central Oregon are hyperaware of, and it is part of a years-long local push to expand a branch of Oregon State University–Cascades into a stand-alone four-year school in Bend. The proposed location for the new campus has been the subject of lawsuits and local controversy, but most people we spoke with expected that sooner or later the school will be built. The region has gotten along without a university in significant part through an unusually active and ambitious community college, whose vice president told us that it was “university-esque.”
“I always knew that I wasn’t going to spend the next twenty years of my life in the Bay Area, with its hassle, or Seattle, with its rain,” he told me in the office of his Seven Peaks tech incubator in Bend. “I wanted to be someplace with actually interesting people, and I’d assumed that meant near a university” — which Bend did not have.”
“Without an established local investment or tech-talent community, local start-ups that did get going would eventually leave for San Francisco, Seattle, or another metropolis. “The more I got to know the Oregon market,” he said, “the more I realized that just as start-ups were getting to scale, the big venture funds would pull them down to the Bay Area — especially if they wanted to go public.” This had a perpetual lopping-off effect on the local economy, and it meant there wasn’t a generation of successful businesspeople in their forties and fifties to encourage those in their twenties and thirties.”
“Vendetti was not suggesting that the concentrated role of the big global centers would go away. It was not an “either/or” case he was making but an “and”: that people would choose to do some work in Bend (or Fresno or Sioux Falls) as well as in New York or San Francisco or Los Angeles. “I don’t think there will be any mass exodus out of Silicon Valley. But the disadvantages of not being there are diminishing.” Partly that stemmed from the ability to hold on to talent: while big bonuses were luring engineers from Google to Facebook to Uber (as they did a generation before, from Intel to HP to Silicon Graphics), people who signed on with a regional company tended to stay there.”
“But my sense is, we’re seeing a genuine shift. Historically, young people in early or mid-career just didn’t have job opportunities in regional markets, like this one. So the motivated ones just had to stay in the major metros. But there’s nothing like two major recessions in a decade” — the serious collapse of tech businesses in 2001 and the world crisis beginning in 2008 — “to have people reassess what really matters. It’s not a tidal wave, but a shift. I see people literally every week who want to find out about coming to Bend, for these life-change reasons. Usually it’s because they’re tired of being on the hamster wheel or want to build a family.”
“Vendetti argued that fostering the spread of tech companies to places like Bend served a larger national interest as well. Info tech and its related capacities are no longer a self-contained industry, he said. Anyone who tries to do anything, anywhere, is affected by their development. “So it’s crucial that communities across the country be able to participate in the tech economy in a more meaningful way.” The tech industry needed to do this as a whole, he said, and he felt he was doing his best to do his part in central Oregon.”
