Small Cities Weekly | 10.27.2023
Shapes & Sizes of Cities, Golf Carts, & New Investing Models
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.
Shapes & Sizes
I’m working on our second Problem Profile, which is going to be about the link between transportation systems and employment in small cities. I’ve looked at a lot of data for the piece and wanted to share a few tidbits from the work thus far.
Chart 1: Percentage of Population v. Distance from City Hall
This chart plots the average percentage of the population vs the distance from the city center (as approximated by location of city hall) for different sized MSAs. As you can see from the two blue-ish lines (MSAs 100k-500k) compared to the two red-ish ones (MSAs over 2.5M), the shape of these cities are very different. The smaller cities look like what you might imagine, with most of the population within 10-15 miles of the center, while the larger cities have most of their population pushed out between 5-30 miles from the center. Mid-sized cities are a bit of a combination of these two distributions.
Chart 2: Total US Population v. Distance from City Hall
This chart shows, in aggregate, how many people live with a certain distance of the city center by city size. A takeaway here is that there are more people, in total, that live within 2 miles of a city center in cities with less than 500k people (~9M people) than live within 2 miles of their city center in cities over 500k people (~7M people). That was surprising to me.
Chart 3: Population-Weighted Density v. Distance from City Hall
This chart shows a measure of population density versus distance from the city center. This one is probably the least surprising - the larger cities are just more dense, no matter the distance from the city center. So while there are more people in aggregate that live within 2 miles of the center in smaller cities, they are spread out amongst a lot more cities, meaning densities are lower when compared to the larger ones.
I’m excited to share how these distributions interact with employment and influence decisions about public and private transportation options in smaller cities. I’ve found some really cool research and data on the “spatial distribution of employment” in cities that, when combined with this population data, raises interesting questions and (I think) startup opportunities!
Links
Beyond the Myth of Rural America, Daniel Immerwahr, The New Yorker
With so few income sources available, rural people depend heavily on each employer. The opening of a mine, a factory, or a military base might bring flush times, but their closure spells ruin. While cities are, by their diversity, hedged against economic fluctuations, small towns lie dangerously exposed. That’s why they were so devastated by the trade liberalization of the nineteen-nineties and, particularly, China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, in 2001. Jobs that had once left the city for the countryside moved abroad, causing a rural manufacturing collapse that rivals the urban one of the nineteen-seventies. Rural deindustrialization has received less notice, but it’s been potentially “more painful,” Conn observes, given workers’ lack of other options. Where metropolitan employment bounced back from the recession of 2007-08 in five years, rural employment still hasn’t recovered.
I found this interesting for three reasons. Firstly, I’m from a rural town (my parents still live there) that mirrors a lot of what is talked about here. Secondly, I thought this piece was a good follow-up to The Last Days of Papertown from last week’s post. And finally, it’s a good anecdote of a theme I talked about in the original Small City Segment post - the framework for the whole article is “rural vs. city”, and as read it, I found myself saying that small cities are “neither this, nor that” in that framework.
The Ultra-Affordable EVs That Won’t Be Coming to the U.S. Anytime Soon, Christopher Mims, WSJ
Most days, Athena Frederick goes grocery shopping and picks up her grandson from school without ever getting into a car. The same is true of her teenage daughter, who takes herself to and from high school.
That’s possible because she lives in Peachtree City, Ga., a small town just south of Atlanta that started building a network of paths in 1974 that are accessible to golf carts, but not cars. It now extends more than 100 miles, serving 38,000 residents and their more than 11,000 registered carts. Nearly every destination and domicile in the town is accessible via a class of vehicle most Americans regard as a toy.
This article seemed relevant given the piece I’m writing about transportation options in small cities. There is a lot of discussion about the differences in car preferences between Americans and Europeans, but I found the most interesting part the opening two paragraphs (quoted above)!
Modeling The Flexible, Place-Based Portfolio, Jamie Finney
Pueblo is rebuilding and it knows the danger of building in the floodplains.
Geologically, that is simple.
But where are the economic floodplains?
CF&I was safe, until the flood of the 1982 steel crash. Small businesses was safe, until Wall Street got carried away with mortgage-backed securities. Last week, every startup with Silicon Valley Bank got a glimpse of what it is like to be in the lowlands with the levees about to break.
It is anyone’s guess where the next economic 100-year flood will come from and what businesses will be in the lowlands.
The trick is to foster entrepreneurship wherever it is sprouting, not just where we are used to watering.
This is where new economic pathways come in, and why local, flexible funds are worth trying in every Pueblo around America.
I’ve had the good fortune of meeting and talking with Jamie (you should subscribe to his Substack if you’re at all interested in new models of funding entrepreneurs). This post from earlier this year talks directly about what a model for investing might look like in small cities. Details aside, these are the kinds of things that I’m really excited about exploring further. What are the funding structures that match these places and what wants to sprout in them?
If you…
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