From The Atlantic (via Gladys We), the original article appears in the April print edition —a summation of James and Deb Fallows’s 54,000-mile journey around America in a single-engine plane. Here’s the list, moistly about small- and medium-size towns, but I’ve included the text of those that are tangentially relevant to Vancouver.
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- Divisive national politics seem a distant concern.
- You can pick out the local patriots.
- “Public-private partnerships” are real.
- People know the civic story.
- They have a downtown. This seems obvious, but it is probably the quickest single marker of the condition of a town. For a “young” country like the United States, surprisingly many cities still have “good bones,” the classic Main Street–style structures built from the late 1800s through World War II. In the mall-and-freeway decades after the war, some of these buildings were razed and many more were abandoned or disfigured with cheap aluminum fronts. Most of the cities we visited were pouring attention, resources, and creativity into their downtown. The Main Street America project, from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, has coordinated downtown-revival projects in some 2,000 communities. Of the downtowns we saw, Greenville’s and Burlington’s were the most advanced, studied by planners around the world. But downtown ambitions of any sort are a positive sign, and second- and third-floor apartments and condos over restaurants and stores with lights on at night suggest that the downtown has crossed a decisive threshold and will survive.
- They are near a research university. Research universities have become the modern counterparts to a natural harbor or a river confluence. In the short term, they lift the economy by bringing in a student population. Over the longer term, they transform a town through the researchers and professors they attract: When you find a Chinese or German physicist in the Dakotas, or a Yale literature Ph.D. in California’s Central Valley, that person probably works for a university.
- They have, and care about, a community college.
- They have unusual schools.
- They make themselves open. The anti-immigrant passion that has inflamed this election cycle was not something people expressed in most of the cities we visited. On the contrary. Politicians, educators, businesspeople, students, and retirees frequently stressed the ways their communities were trying to attract and include new people. Cities as different as Sioux Falls, Burlington, and Fresno have gone to extraordinary lengths to assimilate refugees from recent wars.
- They have big plans. If I see a national politician with a blueprint for how things will be better 20 years from now, I think: “Good luck!” In fact, few national politicians even pretend to offer a long-term vision anymore. When a mayor or city-council member shows me a map of how new downtown residences will look when completed, or where the new greenway will go, I think: “I’d like to come back.” Cities still make plans, because they can do things.
- They have craft breweries. One final marker, perhaps the most reliable: A city on the way back will have one or more craft breweries, and probably some small distilleries too. … A town that has craft breweries also has a certain kind of entrepreneur, and a critical mass of mainly young (except for me) customers. You may think I’m joking, but just try to find an exception.
I tend to agree with all of these. Not sure about the craft brewery thing but it did say it was an indicator of a type of entrepreneur, not about the product per se.
“You can pick out the local patriots.” Can someone explain what that means?
That confused me too but my guess is that there are so few patriots that you can spot them easily. So I guess nationalism is bad for successful cities. (If that’s what they mean by patriots. It could have a different context in the States though.)
I took it as local boosters, those who are passionate about their city.
I checked the article: “A standard question we’d ask soon after arrival was “Who makes this town go?” The answers varied widely. Sometimes it was a mayor or a city-council member. Sometimes it was a local business titan or real-estate developer. Sometimes a university president or professor, a civic activist, an artist, a saloon-keeper, a historian, or a radio personality. In one city in West Virginia, we asked a newspaper editor this question, and the answer turned out to be a folk musician who was also a civic organizer. What mattered was that the question had an answer. And the more quickly it was provided, the better shape the town was in.”