Selling Small Cities, Companies that don't Die, & Climate Impact on Renters
Small Cities Weekly | 08.02.2024
As part of the work we are doing on the Small City Segment, we send out a brief weekly post of thoughts, links, and research in progress that reflect the week’s work. I’d love to hear from you if you have any thoughts, questions, disagreements, or things to add. Please forward this on to people you think might enjoy reading it.
Selling Small Cities
I’m at the stage of life where there is a lot of discussion about the choice of where to live. Job, family, and lifestyle considerations are in new combination with each other.
I was asked by a good friend last week, “But why South Bend? Why not come back to Michigan, or go to Chicago?”
My initial answer is too simple to be interesting. Frankly, I just like it here. Period, full-stop. I like the size. I love my circle of friends. I like the way it feels possible to participate in the never-ending project of a city.
I was then asked, “So what’s your pitch for other people to live there?”
This one is tougher for me to answer. As I visit more of the nearly 300 small cities that exist in the US, many of the default answers are common to a majority of them. The cost of living. A more intimate built environment. A great place to raise children. The close-knit nature of the community. A sense that others want to see you succeed.
It made me consider that maybe the answer is best considered in two tiers. First is the pitch to live in any small city - the second, a pitch to live in this small city.
The above reasons are a good foundation to live in any small city. It is not for everyone. But if it’s for you, there are a lot of great options to choose from.
The reasons to live in this small city are much more esoteric. Some have natural beauty. Some have certain types of weather. Some have interesting institutions and history. But more often than not, some are just where family, friends, or a job happen to be.
I think I could be happy in a lot of small cities because their general features resonate with me. The phrase “small enough, big enough” gets used a lot and for good reason.
I have chosen, and continue to chose, South Bend though. Part of it is proximity to family. Part of it is the culture of the Midwest. Part of it is my personal history with Notre Dame. But a growing reason is I’ve now invested the better part of a decade in being here. It’s whatever the opposite of the sunk cost fallacy is. It’s compounding. The longer I’m here, the better it feels to be here.
There is something to calling a family, a heritage, a university, or a team ‘yours’. That’s how I feel about South Bend. I feel like I belong to it, and in some small way, it belongs to me. A lot of cities create this relationship, but I think small cities specialize in it.
As much as I’m pro-South Bend, I’m rooting for people to find their place far more than I care about the population growth scorecard. So if it happens that you want that relationship with South Bend, we’d love to have you. But more likely, if you want that relationship to any city, I’d urge you to consider a small one. They seem to have a knack for delivering.
Links
You can find links from this and all previous editions here.
Do you rent? You may be more vulnerable to climate-driven disasters, Rebecca Hersher, NPR
“There’s not the help afterwards that you might expect,” she says. “I feel like, financially, we’re in a scarier situation than 5 to 10 years ago.”
She’s not alone. Millions of Americans who survive hurricanes and other weather disasters such as wildfires and floods find themselves in dire financial straits years later. And a growing body of research warns that renters are particularly vulnerable after disasters, in part because they are less likely to have relevant insurance and may not receive adequate assistance from the government in the immediate aftermath.
“[It’s] the fundamental sin in our disaster policy in this country, that everything is based on property and possession,” says Carlos Martín, a housing and climate researcher at Harvard University. Many renters have less wealth, and receive less government assistance after disasters, than homeowners, and suffer more severe and long-term financial impacts as a result, he explains. “It compounds these differences between the landed-gentry haves and the rest of the country that are have-nots.”
The Price of Immortality (or why some companies seemingly never die), Rohit Krishnan, Strange Loop Canon
Companies, as we understand them, have mission statements and a purpose. They have a vision led by a founder or CEO and they have at least some semblance of understanding as to what their "focus" should be and their "core competencies" are.
Part of the answer is surely that they want to provide predictability to employees and investors in terms of what they are going to do. Circumscribing the possible actions help with justifying and understanding the future.
But surely do what makes money is a better defining characteristic?
Are there other companies out there that do similar things? Probably. Berkshire Hathaway is one. There's no justification or vision beyond invest in great companies. KKR does this too, they just want to find a deal, and don't care at all whether the company is in technology or healthcare or oil.
But Microsoft isn't going to go start a restaurant chain. And Facebook won't go start a semiconductor manufacturing plant.
Imagine if you're the city of Miami. You make your recurring revenue services from attracting companies to relocate and taxing them. Do you care if the companies that come over are in social media or semiconductor or auto or a restaurant chain? All you care is that they come, get set up, employ people and you get to collect taxes.
In other words they only optimise for the revenues, and don't care at all about how that's brought in.
The price of immortality is staying small and in your lane. The price of longevity is to continually hunt for the next dollar wherever you can, and be ruthless with your sacred cows, with limited guarantee of success even then. The price of following your passion and charging ahead in a given direction, that prize is the Elvis Presley of prizes - to live fast, die young, and leave a good looking corpse.
Chicago Workers Cottages Gave Immigrants Access to Homeownership, Zach Mortice, Bloomberg CityLab
Although these types of houses are seen in several industrial Great Lakes cities, their affordability for people like Torkelson was driven by technology, geography and material resources that coalesced most powerfully in Chicago.
First among these was the advent of balloon framing. Previously, houses were built with heavy timber framing made of thick beams held together with hand-carved mortise and tenon joints, a method essentially unchanged since the Middle Ages. But balloon framing made houses from a “cage-like framework consisting of many lightweight studs and joists rather than a few massive wooden columns and girders,” according to William Cronon’s economic history masterpiece Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West.
Because it was held together with nails and not handcrafted joinery, it didn’t need especially skilled labor, so a small group of builders could erect a lightweight and strong balloon framed house rapidly. This building system was also quasi-modular, and easy to expand with a floor above, or even below. Even today, it’s not uncommon to see multi-story cottages with brick on the first floor and wood framing above, evidence of an addition slotted in under the original lightweight wood-frame house. “Another family is coming over? Jack up the house, put in another floor,” says Mary Lu Seidel, a Chicago preservationist that has researched workers cottages extensively.
This building method was largely developed in Chicago because of its unique location as a continental rail hub with access to the old-growth forests of Wisconsin and Michigan. From there, logs would be felled and floated down rivers for milling along Lake Michigan in the nation’s preeminent lumber yard. According to Cronon, the lumber industry in Chicago was worth $80 million, several times more than the city had in its coffers. The expansive Illinois prairie allowed builders to expand in every direction except eastward into the lake, making for relatively modest land costs.
You can reach me at dustin@invanti.co if you want to chat more about the small city segment!