New Season, New Mission, New Website.
New Season, New Mission, New Website.
Our Towns looks back at ten years of changes across the United States and looks ahead to our new role.
Like many of you who have done some soul searching during the pandemic and made some big life changes, we at Our Towns have, too, including our newly-designed website, to better serve our revised mission. Here’s a quick tour of where we’ve been, why we’re pivoting, and where we’re heading.
Ten years ago, we had an idea to fly around the country to see how some small towns that had suffered economic or social upheavals post-recession were faring. We had little idea what we’d find.
The first few towns surprised us in a gee-whiz way for all the positive community-level activity. We kept flying, from the Midwest to the Northeast, then down the Mid-Atlantic to the deep South. After visiting a dozen or so towns, we began to see patterns with schools experimenting, entrepreneurs inventing, citizens volunteering, partnerships forming, and more. We saw institutions like libraries reinventing themselves; artists reshaping attitudes and culture; and leaders saying Yes instead of No or Maybe.
We wrote hundreds of dispatches along the way for The Atlantic. We called the project American Futures. By 2017, four years along, we thought we could happily continue forever, or we could pause, and try to make some sense of all we had seen. This next episode became a book, called Our Towns, which was published in 2018.
Good luck struck when HBO paired us with Steve Ascher and Jeanne Jordan of West City Films to make a documentary, also called Our Towns. We filmed for 90 days over two years, watching the words come to life through the people we met and the magic of the filmmakers. We finished post-production remotely, between Boston and DC, during the early months of the pandemic.
The film was released in the spring of 2021. Also at that time, we wanted to continue our own work telling the stories and connecting the people across the country who were doing more and more of what we had first seen in 2013. We started the Our Towns Foundation and launched the website as a platform to continue.
Now, two-plus years in, we realize it’s time for another change. Our storyline – that smaller towns are important and serious for the future of the country—has moved from being a ‘cute’ idea to becoming conventional wisdom. The pandemic propelled that change as many people had time to consider their lives and values, and many were making lifestyle changes that included moving to smaller places. Also, people are now telling their own stories in countless new publications, many online. People are knitting themselves into networks, through hubs they create themselves around many topics we believe in, from schools to libraries to rural life to local journalism to civic activities, to climate issues, economic development, and more. Big foundations and institutions are supporting many of these efforts in world-changing ways.
So, we realize that we should rewrite our mission to acknowledge all these changes and to do things a little differently. We will continue to do some reporting on towns, because it is so energizing for us and so important in keeping us current. We’re going to focus on certain topics more closely, all of them from a local, community perspective. What is happening in communities to address climate matters; to rebuild local journalism; to reboot schools, especially in tech skills and trades; to attract citizen volunteers; to develop communities in their own spirit. We are also starting to work more closely with institutions that are way bigger than we could ever be, to share our observations and experience in efforts they are supporting.
We would like to point you again to the next iteration of our website, which we hope illustrates our new emphases and mission. For now, you’ll see the most Recent Articles, which will be part of the archive of many hundreds that we and a few colleagues have written over ten years. We’ll also rotate some special collections that we’d like to call out from time to time, in a section called Popular Topics. And we’ll feature a curated Special Report that is important in the moment; right now that is Local Journalism.
We hope this site will be easy for you as users to navigate around, and we hope it will be easy for us as the producers to write and deliver to you.
Please visit Jim’s post that lays out our mission in a slightly different way. And please, have a look at our newly-designed website.
Thanks.
I recently completed a 4400-mile trip by auto from Phoenix, where I live, to my home town, Dubuque, Iowa (where extensive downtown redevelopment has taken place and continues, as well as several local environmental remediation efforts). I stayed off the interstates as much as I could and drove across New Mexico, the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, and southern Wisconsin. On my return trip I added the breadth of Iowa via US 20 and US 30, and Nebraska, Kansas (again), and Colorado.
I passed through many towns and small cities. I should add that after my family moved from Iowa to Phoenix in 1958, we made car trips throughout the 1960s, prior to the completion of the interstates, from Arizona to visit family in Iowa.
I have sharp memories of those trips and can remark on what has changed: The replacement of family farms with large-scale, industrial agricultural operations; the concomitant decline of the small towns that once supported the rural population; the expansion of medium-sized and large cities, especially those which host institutions of higher education; the elimination of not only branch railroad lines but even of some mainlines, as the rail industry has consolidated.
Despite rural depopulation, my home state of Iowa has held its overall population of about 2.9 million steady by growing its cities, especially the ones hosting the state universities: Ames, Iowa City, and Cedar Falls are much larger than they were during my childhood. Metro areas with colleges have grown — the Quad Cities and Des Moines, although the latter is helped by the presence of state government. Even my home town, Dubuque, a small city of 57,000 with four small, four-year colleges, has held its ground and seen its outlying areas beyond the city limits grow.
In short, fifty years have seen the population of Iowa shift from the countryside and small towns to its cities.
The most profound change is the presence of the interstate highways. Railroad connections are rendered unnecessary; car culture and commuting are encouraged — indeed, even smallish Iowa cities now have sprawl. Even Liberal and Great Bend, Kansas, have homogenized fringes with the usual panoply of nationally branded fast food joints and retail outlets. The fringe of Liberal looks just like the fringe of Phoenix, sans palms and cacti.
Probably from way too much supping at the table of the national media since 2016, I had formed an image of a profoundly polarized America, one in which its rural areas were filled with culture warriors and were in deep economic distress. (The danger of lapsing into black-and-white thinking does not arise solely on the political Right.)
I expected to see hundreds, if not thousands, of anti-Biden and pro-Trump yard signs, banners, and bumper stickers.
I saw exactly four during my entire 4400-mile drive.
I also expected to see a rural heartland uniformly in deep economic and social distress.
This did not turn out to be the case.
Any number of small cities looked lively, with attractive, rehabbed downtowns and the glow of economic vitality. Listing a few that come to my mind: Dalhart, Texas, Minneola and Ottawa, Kansas, Ottawa and Sycamore, Illinois (yes, I passed through two Ottawas), Shullsburg, Wisconsin, Boone, Iowa, and McCook, Nebraska.
I did pass through some small cities in distress, the case of Streator, Illinois, once a major stop on the Santa Fe Railroad’s Chicago-to-California mainline, being one that sticks. Streator is at least making an effort, with a partially rehabbed downtown and a pretty downtown park; but its church buildings and houses near the city center tell a story of decline.
It is the smallest towns, those with fewer than a 1000 residents, that are the most uniformly in distress: Old brick storefronts either boarded up, converted into thrift stores, or just crumbling; weed-covered railroad tracks or, more likely, just a ghost railbed.
A columnist for the Des Moines Register once quoted a small-town resident, and it went something like this: “First the train station closes, then the high school, then the downtown stores, then the post office, then the churches, until all that is left is the nursing home.” I cannot imagine anything in these grim little places that would hold a young person. I passed through many.
But my trip mostly belied my black-and-white thinking. The rural Midwest I experienced is neither monolithic in political orientation nor economic condition. I am sure I met nice people who, for their own reasons, voted for Trump. Who are perhaps persuadable. Who would perhaps try to persuade me rather than scream in my face. And there are numerous economic bright spots to be found, especially among the mid-sized cities.
In short, my trip taught me to remove my polarized lenses. The situation is nuanced.