Fools Rush In

I am throwing in the towel on an imagined "business venture" called Eclogiselle. There are some posts there tagged Main.Street and some posts here tagged Main Street. Whenever I go back and reread them, I typically feel like none of them really adequately makes whatever point it is I imagined I was I making.

This post is mostly for therapeutic purposes for the author. I don't see any point in trying to fight the good fight or "take on Main Street America" or convince people to hire me or anything like that.

A long, long time ago, I took a college class at something like age thirty probably called Environmental Biology as part of my effort to try to turn my two years of old college classes into an associate's degree because if you have no degree, after something like twenty years, they stop taking old classes as transfer credits. 

Day one or week one, we are given directions for the big class project we are supposed to turn in at the end of the class proving we learned something and it's basically "Write up a proposed off grid lifestyle. Explain how you will house yourself and make enough money to support yourself."

I immediately knew half the answer was Earth Ship. I just had to figure out income.

I had previously had a subscription to a dead tree magazine about solar power. I had assumed such interests were "because I'm a budget-mindef homemaker." Yeah, no. Not all homemakerd read up on solar power and dream of energy independence.

So I began researching potential degrees and careers and came up with a plan to get a Bachelor's in environmental stuff and a Master's in urban planning. I borrowed the unplayed copy of SimCity from my kids, part of a ten pack of cheap games, and tested the idea if I would actually like city planning and went "I need GIS education. GIS is essential to good city planning."

I wrapped up my AA in May or June, which was pursued just in case SOMEDAY I wanted to get a Bachelor's, and was in a Bachelor's program that fall. I never finished my Bachelor's, so I'm in no position to get a Master's in Urban Planning. 

I also got a Certificate in GIS, the equivalent of Master's level work. It was a summer boot camp and the equivalent of a year long program at the world's foremost GIS program where a lot of my professors worked full-time at the world's foremost GIS software program and taught part-time.

I also participated regularly for some years on Cyburbia and was a low level moderator who inadvertently founded my own sub forum for Citizen Planners.

I likely have a fairly strong educational background for something like small town development. Most urban planning programs are Master's programs. It is the norm for planners to have a bachelor's in something else and geography, environmental studies or GIS are some of the strongest undergrad programs as background for planning.

I know that from spending time talking to professional planners on Cyburbia. I also managed to attend a planning conference once.

I have a serious medical condition and this is the primary root cause of spending several years homeless. I moved to a small town -- Aberdeen, Washington -- in September 2017 and got myself back into housing on my own efforts without some kind of program.

I was doing freelance work online and wanting to improve my income and I began attending various local public meetings. I was interested in community development generally and wanting to get a life and meet people and make friends etc. I had participated in Army Family Wives groups for years and that's a kind of community development work though it's unrelated to the built environment.

I completely accidentally tripped across an ad for Executive Director of the NEWLY forming Main Street America program and applied on lark after being up all night. To my absolute SHOCK, they took my application seriously and this led to a lot of drama.

I'm a former homemaker who has had exactly one full-time job in an unrelated field -- insurance -- and limited paid work experience. I know a lot about the field of planning but I have never worked in a paid capacity in planning.

I ended up getting strung along for a couple of years or so by locals suggesting I might yet get this job. So I spent substantial time trying to figure out how to actually get stuff done.

It's a small town with a big homeless program. How do I address that? And I know a lot about homelessness, in part because I wanted a Concentration in Housing for my bachelor's and I fought to include a class on Homelessness and Public Policy in my degree program.

It's a small town with no real local webmasters worth anything. Can I fill that role?

What does Main Street America want or require of participants? How does my work compare to what this established program is doing?

So I'm an outsider socially in this small town and being jerked around by locals and I'm a former homemaker with substantial volunteer experience. So I'm familiar with accomplishing stuff, but I basically know nothing about pretending to work to keep my boss of my back or nonsense like that.

So I'm focused on HOW to do this job as a one person shop with limited resources. I'm focused on HOW you actually get results and accomplish something meaningful in terms of resolving problems and doing economic development and I'm naively assuming everyone thinks like I do and everyone is making a good faith effort and just doesn't really have adequate education or whatever.

I gradually developed a few things, but it took me a stupidly long time, so long that I felt absolutely sure that if they had hired me, I would have been fired for trying to find real solutions and not coming up with them quickly enough.

The guy they hired was Meeting Man. He measured his so-called productivity in the number of meetings he had per month. 

His job was government pork barrel where the city paid his salary and had no meaningful oversight. I think he knew that when he applied and unlike me, he knew how to pretend to work while doing NOTHING and keep his bosses off his back and I think that was his primary goal: Money for nothing.

I began to suspect the Main Street America program was basically garbage. I was slow to say so because it's essentially an accusation of fraud and I that's a serious charge.

But I eventually concluded that if you sincerely want to see economic development in your small town:

1. No one can really do this job. It's a very tall order and there aren't enough hours in the week to really do everything Main Street America suggests and also seriously make headway on economic development goals under this model of what is essentially a one-person shop.

2. Main Street America is about 99 percent window dressing and is a huge waste of resources. It doesn't really make sense for a small town to pay the salary of the Executive Director because he's extremely unlikely to grow your local tax base enough to cover that cost, much less grow it that much year in and year out such that he continues to cover that expense.

3. If you aren't looking for "money for nothing" in a government pork barrel job, it makes no real sense to take a salaried position like this if you are capable of doing enough economic development to make it worthwhile for the town to cover your salary. You would be better off doing this in a for profit capacity and getting a cut of the growth which might not be literally exponential but would be substantial and ongoing.

Because I was doing website work on a freelance basis and resume work on a freelance basis and prior to learning that the town was covering his salary, I was thinking like "Why should I do this at a nonprofit with an office as a one-person shop instead of as a consultant working for home? If I need to come up with enough earned income to pay my salary and rent on the office, why shouldn't I just work from home and either put in fewer hours or pocket more money?"

I did substantial research into how one might genuinely do small town development. This is an underserved market where small towns either don't hire anyone at all or they have trouble attracting talent because if you are any good, you can get a similar job paying more money in a bigger city.

So there's a general dearth of resources for small communities. The overwhelming majority of resources related to community development or economic development or planning is by, for and about bigger cities.

Nature abhors a vacuum. Main Street America has as much participation as it does because there's essentially no competition.

Worse, I eventually concluded that some of the locals in Aberdeen were "involved" in local development programs with an explicit goal of strangling development because they are basically criminals on the lamb and don't want development. 

Small town America is their hideout and they love the narrative that it's some pathetic creature, a victim of larger societal forces, etc. and -- SADLY -- no one can figure out an effective remedy.

This means locals who want to strangle development and aren't as stupid as they pretend to be warmly welcome Main Street America to help them pretend to do development work while intentionally sabotaging development.

If you are in a small town and genuinely want development, sorry! Sucks to be you! You probably can't resolve this problem and get rid of these parasites.

And I have absolutely no hope as a one person shop of flushing out all the bad guys from gatekeeping roles in small town America to try to establish a business serving the development needs of small communities.

I'm a pathetic loser trying to figure out how to PAY MY BILLS somehow. Conclusion: THIS is NOT it.

Small towns don't want me to succeed. They don't WANT to copy-paste language template because they neither want a style guide -- even for FREE -- not want to give my work any promotion of any sort.

They don't WANT to write me and say "Hey, I see you do map work. You don't have a price list or list of services. I've got $blah and I need yada. Would you work for that much? Can you do that kind of project?"

They don't WANT to use existing sample maps I've created for the Western Washington area where I was living and credit me as the mapmaker under a Creative Commons license as a free solution to something they are doing. They don't WANT to tell other people they know I'm town or in other small towns nearby or whatever "Here's a resource and it's good."

The hostility I got wasn't ignorance by people who don't understand planning and development because they are ignorant small town hicks. It wasn't locals inherently not trusting a newcomer and outsider. It wasn't lack of education or any other kind of "incompetence" or "accident."

The hostility was actually hostility with malice aforethought. The sabotage was very much intentional. They wanted me to fail.

Not just the abusive assholes in Aberdeen, Washington but assholes in possibly COUNTLESS other small towns who read my work for some reason and recognized that it provided meaningful solutions and that was the opposite of what they wanted.

I've never felt like I adequately explained anything. I've spent years feeling like if I had properly made my point and explained what I was seeing, I should have Patreon supporters or paying customers sending me requests for proposals or something.

I've spent years feeling like I see this so clearly, that this is an underserved market, that Main Street America doesn't work, that planning consultants don't take small jobs under $5000, that no one is really providing resources and solutions and I think I am.

And crickets continue to chirp and my bank balance continues to fail to grow.

I didn't fail to explain it. Your small town is just run by self-serving criminals who are very much looking out for their best interests at your expense.

And you probably don't want to try to take them on and lock them up because they won't hesitate to ruin your life if you go after them directly instead of just being a naive fool imagining people want solutions and those resources just don't exist.

Footnote 

If you are in a small town getting ideas: 

Please be very careful. The way to bet is that some or most of these people are guilty of murder or accessory to murder. 

Why? Because there's no statute of limitations and it's a serious crime. Lesser crimes shouldn't compel people to quietly go into hiding permanently and call it "retirement."

Some stupidly high percentage of murders go unsolved. One figure I recall seeing was like forty percent.

And that's of cases the authorities are CALLING murder. It's easy to get away with murder if people think it's an accident or natural causes. Or suicide.