In another thread I posted 2 videos showing how smaller communities ended up with food deserts because of disinvestment (the ownership of the only grocery in town deciding its not worth it anymore) and the community had to resort to communal ownership of a grocery store, even Chicago is proposing this for under-serviced areas.
When I lived in Virginia that was the first time I ever saw gentrification so boldly practiced. A community of rent-controlled housing with low property value sold off to Target, surely at an inflated price but one Target Corporation would still consider cheap, and the residents just told to get lost. Many of them people with disabilities on fixed incomes (and yes, minorities). Makes me wonder when we hear stories about Targets getting robbed as economically displaced people, some portion will create black markets to make ends meet. I know I've contemplated that at desparate points in my life.
I also have an affinity for watching YouTube videos where people tour dilapidated towns across the US, and some give the economic metrics or a bit of back-story as to what happened:
My wife and oldest Son love Stranger Things, and there was one episode where the community was protesting the building of a mall. I remembered that from the 80's where some small towns were very very against the building of shopping malls as they felt the big businesses would muscle out local shops with their loss-leader practices and bulk buying power. Proponents just saw job creation. Interesting to think the paranoid ones were correct in the long run:
That channel has quite a bit of videos of these defunct monstroseties of commercialism that many towns cant even afford to repurpose. Giant buildings with even bigger parking lots, humongous wastes of space. There are now channels also doing abandoned schools. This is how I stumbled upon what urbanism actually is, and looking into what makes cities and towns economically viable. Things like mixed housing, and limits to euclidean zoning so that neighborhoods can have easier access to commerce rather than having to travel to big box stores, or at the very least having multiple means of efficient travel to and from them. I live in a neighborhood where if you walk around the corner there is the elementary school, then there are apartments right up the street, right behind my house there is a set of duplexes, and then single-family homes. There is some commerce within walking distance, although not really grocery access (there was an Albertson's across the street but they closed that location). Theoretically you could go from apartments, to duplex, to single-family all without leaving this neighborhood. In Florida when I was a kid my Mother made all of those transitions, but we had to move clear across the town twice to do it, because the suburban area with single-family units had no nearby apartments, and no access to commerce close by.
I also thought about homogeneity. What is the real "death of American culture?" IMO its selling our identities for convenience and corporate profit. Why is Denny's "America's Diner?" Why do we have to eat at Denny's or IHOP literally everywhere? Each American town being a carbon copy of each other, I cant think of any more efficient means of killing culture than that. And it sucks for business owners. I used to work for GNC's selling supplements and the Franchise owners were almost always at odds with corporate. This was because most franchises were destination stores where people in those areas wanted certain products that were often 3rd-party products (not made by GNC). These products also have higher profit margins. Both owners I worked for had it out with corporate goons who told them, and I quote "When you go into a Burger King anywhere in the Country you always see the same menu. That's what we want for our customers." All the Franchise owners heard was "you have to make less money to sell our corporate manufactured cheap products that your customers dont want." Both these guys had million-dollar stores that the locals were very happy with (one guy had 2 stores and I worked at both, they were even very different from each other), one of them when he was told this threatened to close his store down that day.
The point of all this rambling is to say that having economically sound towns requires access to things that make sense. Access to upward mobility via housing, access to groceries, access to commercial diversity. And very rural towns need access to these places, because despite Amazon's best efforts, not everything can be delivered. And Amazon controlling delivery commerce for rural areas is just as risky as these other giant corporations who eventually gave up on these places. Too much market fluctuation and they will absolutely pull out. Hell some will pull out even before they experience losses, but rather they feel their profits arent growing fast enough.
I dig the message of Strong Towns and adjacent channels:
