Revitalize, or Die.

06/01/2026

Most community development training is designed for individuals.

But community change doesn't happen individually.

Why do we keep asking one person to come home and somehow change an entire community?

Revitalization is a social activity; learning should be, too.

So, my friend, Rebecca Undem of Growing Small Towns, and I are exploring a new community learning experience specifically designed for communities of 5,000 people and fewer.

We're imagining a one-day, highly interactive experience in Oakes, North Dakota (pop. 1,800), the headquarters of Growing Small Towns.

And instead of sending individuals, you’d register a team of up to 4 people from your community for $1,200.

You'd learn together.
Challenge assumptions together.
Build relationships with leaders from other small towns.
Leave with a shared 90-day action plan.

Because the goal isn’t to learn cool theories.

The goal is to experience things that make you want to come back to your town and get stuff done.

Before we take this any further, we'd love to know:

Would you attend?
What would make it worth the trip?
Would you want to host one in your region?

Tell us in the comments or send a message.

05/29/2026

What is your town’s best summer event?

05/28/2026

Stop treating beauty like a luxury.

It’s not. It’s infrastructure. The kind that fosters care, pride, and connection while making every other investment work harder.

05/27/2026

The Simplest Economic Development Strategy You’re Ignoring

There is no mystery to why certain streets thrive and others don’t. People are drawn to beautiful places. Not complicated, not controversial, just true.

When a street is irresistible, foot traffic follows. When foot traffic follows, shop owners notice. When shop owners notice, they compete for space on that street. When they compete for space, rents rise, buildings appreciate, and the surrounding neighborhood becomes more desirable. The homeowners nearby benefit. The tax base strengthens. The community grows.

This is not a theory. This is how value is created.

The public sector’s role in this chain is straightforward: invest in a high-quality public realm and enforce your building codes. That’s it. You don’t need another survey telling you that residents prefer to live in beautiful places. They do. Everyone does. Act on that.

Cities that understand this stop treating aesthetics as a luxury and start treating them as infrastructure. Because that’s exactly what they are, the infrastructure that makes every other investment work harder.

Make your streets irresistible. The private sector will do the rest.

05/26/2026

05/22/2026

Anything that isn’t done with care can’t be received with care.

You can’t shortcut a town worth loving. If your streets, buildings, and public spaces weren’t built with love and intention, don’t expect your residents to care about them.

National home builders won’t build you a town people can love. National chains won’t either. They’re creating wealth extraction operations, not communities. Places designed to mine money, not foster connection or pride.

Then everyone acts surprised when residents feel apathetic about where they live.

People respond to what you give them. Build ugly, cheap, and extractive and you get apathy in return. Build with care, intention, and beauty and you get residents who care back.

You can’t demand civic pride in a place that was built without any.

05/21/2026

You spend valuable resources attempting to attract outside investment.

But is anyone connecting local money to local people who are hungry to be developers, entrepreneurs, and builders? To the people who want to rebuild the economy and infrastructure that’s been neglected?

Is anyone helping the people who have the means and desire to fix what needs fixing in the community they already call home?

05/20/2026

I spent a decade giving towns technical advice they weren’t ready to use.

Update your zoning code. Apply for this grant. Create a TIF district. Fix your economic development strategy.

Then I’d come back a year later and nothing had changed.

I thought they weren’t listening. Turns out they were dealing with something more fundamental.

Low civic self-esteem. Community apathy. A complete lack of care or concern.

You can’t fix that with a grant application.

Most towns I work with are struggling with these issues. And it’s not their fault. Residents are simply responding to decades of choices that left them with very little to care about and very little to be proud of.

A community full of apathetic residents is going to be an apathetic community. A town with low self-esteem is going to struggle with confidence.

This is why every big new investment fails to make a difference. Why tourism numbers don’t matter. Why economic development wins don’t move the needle.

Because residents don’t give a damn about those things. And why should they?

Those numbers make officials excited. They make the CVB happy. But they don’t affect the vast majority of residents.

Here’s what I realized: Cities and towns behave just like the people who inhabit them.

And sometimes what a community needs isn’t a consultant. It’s a therapist.

Someone who understands that you can’t cure apathy with technical solutions. You have to address the emotional stuff first.

If people don’t care about their community, ask yourself: what would make YOU care?

If people aren’t proud of their town, ask: what would make YOU proud?

The answers to those questions are the actual answers.

You already understand human nature. You have all the insights you need.

05/19/2026

The nationwide erosion of standards has run parallel to the rise of the sprawl economy, and that’s not a coincidence.

In the early days of our towns, when a local family built something, they understood that building was a reflection of who they were. They spent the extra time and money to construct something they could be proud of, something that signaled to their neighbors that they were people who cared about this place. They put their name on it, literally and figuratively. Local business owners understood the same thing. Extra effort meant more success, yes, but it also meant having something worth being proud of.

The things we’re associated with shape how others see us. They also shape how we see ourselves.

This is the real cost of ceding local ownership to the sprawl economy. The board of a publicly traded big box store doesn’t care what your community looks like. Exactly the opposite. Their concern is the bottom line, and every dollar not spent on aesthetics, context, or wages is a dollar earned. Their interests are diametrically opposed to the wellbeing of your town.

These businesses don’t lift standards. They prey on low standards. Their entire business model depends on them.

They’ll lobby to remove design requirements. They’ll threaten communities with lawyers or accusations of being anti-business. They’ll promise the world or warn that they’ll go somewhere else. Here’s the thing: they showed up because they can make money here, and they aren’t leaving over a design standard.

So why should your community lower its standards for an outsider? Shouldn’t the national chain have to meet your standards if it wants to come to your town?

Standards fall easily. They are a hell of a lot harder to lift. Don’t give them away cheap.