Small Cities Weekly | 10.13.2023
A 140th Year, Cars or Bust, & -1 to 0
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.
What’s the vision?
A good friend of mine, Jacob Titus, and a partner just bought a building here in South Bend. We had space there pre-pandemic and just recently starting renting an office again. It’s a 139-year old amalgamation of 17 buildings, previously home to a dry cleaner and before that a pump manufacturing business.
A lot of people are excited about Jacob’s new undertaking and asking, “So what’s your vision for the building!?”
He was telling me this week that, right now, his answer is rather boring. It’s to do the little things until they earn the right to have a bigger vision. Keep the lights on, make sure the wi-fi works, pay the bills, find new tenants, keep the current ones happy.
The immediate thought I had was, “Earn a 140th year.”
I think there is some wisdom in this approach for startups, small cities, and the interactions between the two. Visions are great - and narrative is important for optimism. But there is also merit in focusing on doing the work that earns the right to do the next day’s work. I’m coming around to the thought that most of economic development in small cities is just this. Take the next step, do the work, and choose strategies that you can imagine sustaining for long periods of time.
We can only hope to have more stories of 139-year-old assets finding a way to contribute again in the 140th.
Links
How the Costs of Car Ownership Add Up, Lydia DePillis, NYT
For millions of Americans, cars are a necessity — to get to work, to carry children around, to buy food. In recent memory, they’ve also never been as expensive to own.
According to AAA, the average annual cost in the first five years of new-car ownership rose to $12,182 this year, from $10,728 last year, reflecting increased purchase prices, maintenance costs and finance charges. That’s 16 percent of the median household income, before taxes. (The figure includes depreciation.)
What does that look like in the aggregate? About 92 percent of households have at least one car available to them, and 22 percent have at least three. That comes out to about 223 million personal vehicles, and trillions of dollars a year in spending. By contrast, only $79 billion was spent on public transportation in 2019 for both capital and operating expenses.
Transportation is one of the issues I believe to be most overlooked when it comes to solutions specifically built for small cities. As you can see in the vignettes in this piece, cars are literally the only way to get to the necessities of life: jobs, food, daycare, etc. The choice now feels like a binary one: everyone owns a car or small cities spend millions or billions of dollars they don’t have on expensive public infrastructure. I don’t know what the answer is, but it feels like there has to be a third way.
What is -1 to 0? A Philosophy of Ideation., Ruchi Sanghvi, South Park Commons
That’s what -1 to 0 feels like: messy, confusing—squiggly. The hardest part is escaping. What ultimately leads you out of the mess is conviction, a state you must build incrementally and internally. And conviction and certainty are not the same.
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Prevailing wisdom has it that talented founders can take some funding and throw things at the wall until something sticks, or that all you need is that first small group of users who love something you built. We celebrate when great teams beat bad markets and mythologize successful pivots. We say that opportunities are founder-constrained instead of idea-constrained.I believe this is no longer the case. Tech isn’t a maverick industry anymore. This doesn’t mean you should play it safe—it means that investing your time in the early stages is more important than it used to be.
We’ve been following South Park Commons for a few years now and I just love their approach and philosophy toward entrepreneurship. They are very people-focused - taking the rather unconventional stance that deciding what you want to work on and building your own conviction is just as, if not more, important than building at the earliest stages. We agree and I think it’s a philosophy that lands with a little more resonance in places outside Silicon Valley.
Inside Oklahoma’s Innovation Rush, Nicholas Lalla, SSIR
The BBBRC grant is funding four initiatives in the Tulsa region: (1) developing a 114-nautical mile “beyond visual line-of-sight” flight test range for new technologies…
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While most of the winning BBBRC proposals are based on best practices and claim to be supported by rock solid data, in truth, much of tech-led economic development is an experiment. Major federal grants like BBBRC not only offer the opportunity to invest in American communities, but they also allow for experimentation with policy and practice, offering rich learnings for local, regional, and federal actors. In implementing federal grants, communities can often become frustrated that things aren’t working out exactly as planned and they can struggle to adapt. As the leaders I spoke to suggested, coalitions may need to shift mindsets. Kamas, for one, encourages regions to “test and assess strategies to see how they translate into equitable outcomes in neighborhoods.”
There are two things that I found interesting reading this piece. The first is using funding to build the kind of infrastructure that no one startup can afford, but many can use and benefit from - like this 114-mile flight test range. This reminds me of infrastructure like the West Race in South Bend and the Erie Canal in NY and how it powered an acceleration in mills, foundries, and other industrial businesses.
The second thing is this point on experimentation. It might seem odd to consider a $40M project an experiment, but in the grand scheme of economic development, it’s not. And it allows you to build the kind of infrastructure listed above that may lead to interesting niches for decades to come.
What I’m Working On
Current Startups Serving the Small City Segment: I want to do a few profiles on companies that I think are serving the unique markets in small cities. I have a few examples already, but would love to hear any that you all know of!
Transportation & Employment in Small Cities: As referenced above, I’m still looking at transportation issues, but taking a bit wider lens now than just the public bussing angle. If you have any resources or thoughts here, let me know!
If you…
are interested in building for the small city segment…
are already building for the small city segment…
know someone who might be/should be building for the small city segment…
want to contribute expertise to problem profiles…
or want to help us expand our networks of trust in small cities…
please subscribe and reach out at dustin@invanti.co.