A Market Gap the size of the Grand Canyon
I concluded that there is a substantial gap in the market where small communities don't have adequate support for their needs because most planning resources are written for big cities.
That really doesn't do the issue justice.
Rural areas need regional planning. When you have a small population dispersed over a large area, it's wholly insufficient to simply provide ideas that work locally for small towns, hamlets and villages.
There needs to be some big picture work of some sort. There needs to be some concept of how those small communities fit into and interact with the larger area.
The first piece I wrote that was taken seriously by a local planning authority was the parking minimums piece. The transit authority that bought the parcel they had wanted for years in downtown Aberdeen was a countywide agency. It wasn't the local bus service for just Aberdeen.
They hadn't met me in person. They probably weren't taking my screeds too personally the way people in town who knew me in person and were intentionally shafting me were doing.
It was published on the Internet and got them to thinking and they acted on it.
There was no real need to contact me and give me credit or whatever. This wasn't like my experiences with attending meetings in town in person, suggesting ideas, being intentionally and immediately SHOT DOWN and then those ideas getting stolen and botched -- in other words, implemented soon after without crediting ME and thus without consulting with me about what I had in mind, so not really doing what I suggested and doing something lousy with it.
The transit authority was already on public record as being interested in that parcel. My piece wasn't really about them plus their decision to finally purchase the parcel was about wanting to expand the station, not implement my half baked idea about a parking garage.
My writing merely made them aware that they really should act on their own pre-existing plans to expand the station. There was need for more transit and Aberdeen Station is the biggest hub in the county.
I'm perfectly okay with my writing getting someone to act on something and it not being my plan per se. My writing served as a catalyst but it also told me there was, in fact, something of value in my writing in spite of it being largely a screed ranting about people in town mistreating me and how stupid and incompetent they were.
I know something about planning topics and included enough citations plus local observation for it to do something for someone in a decision making position.
I eventually repositioned r/aberdeenwa as being about the Aberdeen-Hoquiam-Cosmopolis micropolitan area. Then I redacted that when I got fed up entirely with abusive bullshit from the locals.
The US mostly doesn't do regional planning. This is actively problematic and yet I don't know a good solution because being too top down authoritarian is also actively problematic.
The book Seeing like a State is about failed "utopian" plans and the problems you see when people who aren't local and thus don't really know what they are talking about dictate processes from on high.
The US has municipal, county, state and federal government and there can be other agencies with authority over some specially defined something -- such as regional transit or an Indian reservation -- and those special districts often lack real teeth for getting things done. Most planning is at the municipal level and there's no real coordination between these different layers of authority.
As far as I know, states do not and cannot create urban planning style development plans that are statewide. And I am reluctant to suggest they should because top down solutions are known to have inherent problems rooted in the way rigid heirarchies typically tie the hands of locals and practically guarantee that the decision makers in authority are not adequately knowledgeable about local conditions on the ground to design optimal solutions.
I ended up developing Eclogiselle because while I was developing DowntownAberdeen and hoping to get the job they were continuing to dangle in front of me, I realized that to actually fix the homeless problem, I would need to do something for the region which was beyond the scope of the duties of the job in question.
So I really started Eclogiselle because it became increasingly clear in my mind that Aberdeen cannot solve "Aberdeen's homeless problem" by trying to "fix Aberdeen" and fixing this problem would be something expected of me if I got the job. This is where the homeless go and trying to fix it here is like asking more homeless to show up, so I would need to do something else outside of the scope of my job duties to actually accomplish this goal.
I ended up quitting all the public meetings. The pandemic had started and all meetings were cancelled and I opted out of virtual meetings that some organizations arranged, in part because I was very poor and my cheap laptop couldn't cope with videoconferencing, but mostly because I wanted NOTHING to do with these people.
I'm medically handicapped and my life is online because that limits my exposure to germs and allows me to work when and where I feel like working. I'm not even supposed to be ALIVE much less getting anything done. Online activities have long allowed me a virtual life and attending meetings in person had proven to be a debacle, so I decided to figure out how to engage with planning entirely via Internet though that seems like a DOOMED effort.
Doing it "the normal way" was a dumpster fire, and not just for ME. Not "because Doreen Traylor is medically handicapped and this causes problems and makes in person meetings a big problem."
My original parking minimums piece was a much more pointed accusation that the person they hired was incompetent and actively making up excuses to justify his failures. He was blowing off his bosses and claiming that the downtown area was dead and unfixable "because flood insurance here is so expensive."
I was supporting my argument that this was not the case and that he had no idea what he was talking about and also was a grifter being paid to pretend to work because fixing downtown WAS his JOB and he's gleefully bragging to people about how it's not fixable and this is why and so his bosses can't reasonably expect him to fix it.
The first pieces I wrote that other people acted on were published in 2020. In 2021, looking for some kind of objective metric for measuring my work, I read through the Main Street America guidelines and wrote this piece about MY work and that I felt I was accomplishing a surprising amount for being a one woman shop.
I didn't talk about how that exercise had me reassessing my opinions of what was going on with the local Main Street program where I had applied for a job, in part because I didn't have firm conclusions and in part because I had no desire to give abusive locals an easy out claiming their intentional mistreatment of me was fine.
The very first screenshot in that piece is from a section about promotion and if you read it, it talks about media relations and everything it says is about newspapers, radio and TV. It doesn't say a single word about websites or social media.
That's all kinds of problematic.
The Main Street program is aimed at extremely small towns. It has three tiers of town sizes:
Under 2500 people
2500-5000
And over 5000.
Aberdeen, Washington is in the largest category and actually still had a local TV station, local radio station and local newspaper at that time, but local media of that sort is a DYING industry nationwide and most towns under 5000 people probably NEVER had ANY of those things.
Because of its emphasis on very top heavy bureaucratic processes, I used to believe this was a federal program by the US government and I have found resources related to it on the Washington State website. I think it's actually a charity that engages with states, but it's an extremely top heavy bureaucratic program that is supposedly trying to help small towns and its program REQUIREMENTS are completely unreasonable for such towns.
So one reason the guy they hired wasn't developing the website until the pandemic is because the program dictating his activities said not one word anywhere about even having a website while expecting extremely small towns to work on establishing a relationship to "local media" -- TV , radio and newspaper -- that probably doesn't even exist for most towns small enough to have any interest in this program.
I ultimately concluded it was a pork barrel job. The city paid his salary and he argued against the city establishing meaningful oversight on grounds that he was already drowning in paperwork and bureaucratic requirements from the Main Street program.
As far as I could tell, his goal was to draw a cushy paycheck and play big man on campus while going through the motions and filling out the right forms etc. to qualify for the job according to the Main Street program while doing absolutely NOTHING to actually develop the downtown area.
BUT the Main Street program itself was part of the problem. It wasn't just him. His awful behavior met their requirements and if their program weren't completely dysfunctional, he couldn't possibly have treated the job as a cushy paycheck for pretending to work.
I suspect he didn't know enough about economic development to know he wasn't actually doing anything at all for the town. I suspect he learned that from ME.
The last screenshot is for Economic Vitality Core Competencies and it has a long list of things you should track, such as buildings in downtown and businesses in downtown. For some of it, I have no idea how a one person shop which isn't a government entity would even get those figures.
Again, it's a LOT of paperwork for a one person shop. Just fulfilling their paperwork requirements can take ALL your time.
And it also isn't economic development, which is the stated goal of the program. Worse, it's data that can be extremely misleading.
I live without a car. I'm seriously medically handicapped. My ENTIRE life in Aberdeen, Washington was lived within a fairly small area and I never saw large parts of this town.
In the process of running r/aberdeenwa, I learned that ALL of the "new businesses" opening up in downtown Aberdeen were NOT new businesses AT ALL for the city of Aberdeen. They were refugees from the dying mall in South Aberdeen where I never went which was "temporarily closed" following damage from a winter storm.
I knew from attending public meetings and hearing local people in the know talk that the mall was a white elephant from the get go. They justified building it based on misleading traffic data. It was built on unstable ground that required substantial infrastructure just to make it buildable at all and that detail is why it had to be closed following a winter storm.
It NEVER thrived because it was too much commercial space for the town in question and probably also because it was in a bad location. Downtown is where two historic scenic highways meet. South Aberdeen almost certainly simply doesn't have the through traffic needed for such a project.
So most likely this guy was following the program and tracking "new businesses in downtown," seeing a big influx of "new businesses in downtown" and FEELING like he was hot stuff and they were doing great things for the town.
Reality:
1. The businesses moving to downtown because the mall shut down moved there for reasons wholly unrelated to the existence of the Main Street program. That would have happened if they didn't exist at ALL.
2. The city was paying his salary in hopes that the program would attract NEW taxes sufficient to more than cover that cost. Businesses moving from South Aberdeen to Downtown Aberdeen are NOT new income for the city coffers, no.
My initial feeling was that telling extremely small towns of under 5000 people who are entirely volunteer run or only have a part-time paid executive director to track such things was expected to not be that much paperwork and to also be an exercise which helped educate non professionals and begin exposing them to data and start mentally quantifying existing assets in hopes this would become a basis for development.
But towns of over 5000 are supposed to have a full-time paid executive director and most people actually qualified for the job in question can make vastly better money doing similar work in a bigger city.
I prefer smaller cities and spent some years reading job listings for rural communities and even sometimes applied to such jobs. Having done so, it was my observation that rural communities routinely had unfilled planning jobs for months at a time.
Small communities cannot easily find people actually qualified for the job who want to work in a small town for less pay than they can get elsewhere.
The Main Street program is nominally designed for enthusiastic volunteers who could never make a paid career in the field of planning happen and aren't interested in doing so and just want to see THEIR beloved hometown thrive.
If you have mad economic development skills that can attract new businesses and create sufficient new taxes to cover your salary out of city coffers, you would be a FOOL to work for such a pittance. Someone with those skills should be a business person insisting on getting a PERCENTAGE.
The job ONLY makes sense as a pork barrel position with no meaningful oversight from someone happy to go through the motions and check off the paperwork boxes to meet the bureaucratic requirements to keep the job.
I'm still working on developing my mental framework for what actually would work. My most recent project is called Escaping the American Nightmare and it's currently two posts and it is rooted in the fact that something is starting to gel in my mind about transit and housing and I forget what.
I don't KNOW how to develop small town America. I don't believe that EXISTING programs, like Main Street America, are really good models for serving this goal.
I'm concerned it can't be done at all for reasons rooted in White European colonizers STEALING the concept of democracy from Native peoples and then apparently doing something akin to the Main Street America program of imposing this ridiculous top heavy European heirarchical framework on an organizational concept fundamentally ill suited to such top down authoritarian methods.
How we develop a bottom up, decentralized democratic something, I don't know. But wholly online seems less crazy to me than when this journey started because some things fundamentally require a certain threshold of people and that means solutions for small communities must somehow involve regional approaches.
Big cities typically develop where a river meets the ocean and forms a natural port conducive to a concentration of people. It's not realistic to believe small towns simply lack human ambition. It's much more likely the very geography of the area encourages small town and rural outcomes.
If you want civilized outcomes in environments conducive to farming and mining and similar, you need a new framework for coordinating local community development and regional development and it somehow needs to not be top down authoritarian.
Or so I currently think while hashing out what DOES work by falling on my face trying all the "usual" approaches and -- after those things roundly FAILED -- tossing out new ideas and hoping something sticks.