Small Cities Weekly | 12.22.2023
Immigrant Entrepreneurs, Absent Landlords, & Surging Infrastructure Costs
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.
Bright Spots
I saw two articles this week about the outsized impact of international immigration on population growth in certain parts of the country.
Immigrants make up bulk of South Bend-Elkhart region's recent population growth, data shows, Jordan Smith, South Bend Tribune
There is also almost countless research and data that show that entrepreneurship rates among immigrants is higher than those born in the US. Here is a snapshot from a report by the Bipartisan Policy Center:
It is much easier to feed something that has already emerged than to start something from scratch. No doubt that the immigrant community’s “entrepreneurship ecosystem” has all the features that more formal actors are constantly trying to create - founder-led, peer-supported, and focused on the tangible solutions that allow businesses to survive and grow.
If we are searching for entrepreneurial density, this seems a great place to look.
Links
How College Football Is Clobbering Housing Markets Across the Country, Allison Salerno, The New York Times
Athens is no outlier. Around the United States, in small cities reliant on college sports to keep their economies humming, short-term rentals are destabilizing housing markets, fueled by wealthy fans and investors who transform single-family homes into de facto hotels for a few weeks out of the year, and often leave them sitting empty the rest of the time.
My friend Samuel sent me this article. A perfect example of the emergent problems that show up in weird ways in small cities. Legislation seems like one solution, but as it mentions in Indiana, the legislation has actually pushed the other way. I’m curious what other options are out there.
Highest non-tropical tide on record floods Charleston with 9.62 feet of water, Kailey Cota, The Post & Courier
The deluge came, to some extent, as a surprise. But city leaders have for years been warning more flooding-event days will begin to overtake the coast.
Even if the National Weather Service’s tide prediction had been more accurate, there was not much more the city could have done to prepare in the short-term, according to Dale Morris, Charleston’s chief resilience officer.
…
Charleston leaders are weighing a proposal to wrap a sea wall around roughly eight miles of the peninsula. The estimated $1.3 billion project aims to protect the city from rising seas and strengthening storms.Charleston has a population (city-proper) of about 150k people. At $1.3B, that’s almost $9k per capita cost of this sea wall - a massive investment. As flooding, coastal or river, continues to become more prevalent and problematic, infrastructure innovation that can reduce that cost, especially for smaller populations, seems imperative.
With South Bend family evicted after scam, some question their property owner's practices, Jordan Smith, South Bend Tribune
Travis Ford, according to St. Joseph County Judge Eric Tamashasky, appears to be a "charlatan." He somehow obtained the code to the lockbox and posed on Facebook as the property's rightful owner. Then he stopped answering the family's calls and messages.
“You became the victim of somebody from Facebook who rented a place they didn’t have the right to rent," Tamashasky told Miller during an Oct. 30 eviction hearing. SFR3 "became the victim of this person from Facebook because now they’ve got a person who they didn’t rent to in their rental.”
…
Representatives from American Avenue and SFR3 are "not in the state. They’re not really on the ground talking with whoever’s there. They’re not talking with their attorney in person in any way," said Katherine Wines, a legal navigator for Pro Bono Indiana who has watched hundreds of eviction hearings this year. "I feel like their knowledge is kind of abstract.”
This has some rhymes with the short-term rental story - in the sense that arms-length ownership of housing stock can create a lot of problems. Over the past few years, more non-local investors have been getting into residential real estate across the country, and it seems inevitable that issues like this will continue to crop up.
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