Small Town America ReDesigns Itself into Prosperity

Langdale Mill planning map, Valley, Alabama

Last year in the small town of Valley, Alabama on the banks of the Chattahoochee River, Mayor Arnold Leak found himself sitting next to his attorney in the conference room of the local Holiday Inn Express holding an auction paddle. On the block was the abandoned, 500,000-square-foot Langdale Mill that had been built originally in 1866.

"Had we not gone through the Your Town process, we wouldn’t have ever known how important that mill was to us." —Mayor Arnold Leak, Valley, Alabama

Symbolic of the region’s vanishing textile trade, the building’s owner had gone bankrupt and was forced to sell it off. The mill was boarded up and an eyesore. Now, representatives from firms intent on demolishing the mill and selling it for scrap waited in the conference room, poised to bid against the mayor.

Leak admits he and the city council were reticent about stepping forward to bid on the mill, “Good Lord, who wants to go $300,000 into debt?” Plus, more than a few of his colleagues outside Valley questioned why a town of 9,200 people with little more than sales tax and licensing fees to generate revenue would risk purchasing an enormous, obsolete mill.

But eight years earlier, Valley had embarked on a town planning and design process initiated by a little known program called Your Town. When he arrived at the auction, Leak was acting on a widely supported, sweeping plan for the city’s future that included transforming Langdale Mill into a riverfront economic hub and cultural center.

“Had we not gone through the Your Town process, we wouldn’t have ever known how important that mill was to us,” said Leak. “We would have said, ‘Oh, it’s an old mill. Go ahead tear it down.’ The scrappers would have chopped our future off right there. … It was clear we had to have it.”

Leak won the mill at auction for $300,000 – the city council and his constituents celebrated. His bankers considered it a steal.

Your Town: Citizens’ Institute on Rural Design

Launched in the early 1990s by the National Endowment for the Arts in cooperation with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Your Town: Citizens’ Institute on Rural Design quietly promotes better design and planning as a means to small-town economic development and viability.

Your Town workshop in Plains, Ga. (Photo courtesy of National Trust for Historic Preservation)

“The more mobile we become and the more easily we can move,” observes NEA Director of Design Jeff Speck, “the more it is that quality of life will determine whether towns succeed or fail.”

Every year Your Town workshops teach rural community leaders how to assess their town’s physical assets and make the best of them.

Cheryl Morgan, director of the Center for Architecture and Urban Studies at Auburn University, helped establish Your Town Alabama and serves as a workshop facilitator. “Everyone who comes through this program is proud of their community, but they don’t always understand what that means physically,” says Morgan.

Your Town teaches them how to tap into their city’s unique architectural, environmental and historical features. For example, when Valley City Clerk Martha Cato first attended a Your Town workshop, she and her colleagues wanted to replace their disappearing textile industries with “smoke-stack” ones.

“They had 14 miles of the Chattahoochee River running through their town,” recalls Morgan, “but no place to make a physical connection to it that they could really leverage.”

“We had never done anything with it all,” says Cato.

But after Cato attended the initial workshop, she came home “really charged up.” She said, “We’re a community who does things, but I believe Your Town gave us a direction. … I knew what we needed to do.”

Cato brought Cheryl Morgan in for subsequent planning meetings, and the city worked on its long-range plan. During the process, in addition to realizing they were underutilizing their proximity to the river, they recognized another problem. Valley had been incorporated about 20 years earlier from four historic mill villages. As a result, they had no obvious center to build on. When they considered where they could put a downtown, the Langdale Mill jumped out at them.

“It’s a combination of knowing what you’d like to have ideally and recognizing opportunities that fit like pieces of a puzzle to get there,” said Leak.

Slides at the 2005 Your Town Alabama workshop (Photo courtesy of Your Town Alabama)

Since beginning their planning process, Valley’s progress has been swift. They rented out the Langdale Mill for two years while final plans, including a possible hotel/convention center, are put into place. They built a recreational complex, completed a seven-mile extension of the Rails-to-Trails project, and began publishing an annual report to their citizens. From 1998 to 2003, revenues from sales and use taxes rose by more than ten percent. Earlier this month, Mayor Leak is seeking approval from the city council to buy a second mill.

Richard Hawks, co-founder of Your Town and chair of Landscape Architecture at SUNY-Syracuse, says that Your Town workshops frequently begin with a viewing of old and recent photos of a town and a discussion of what has changed. “We ask them, ‘How do you feel about the change? Do you care? Do you like it?’”

More often than not, Hawks says, it’s the incremental changes — a fast food restaurant here, a relocated post office there — that erode a town’s character and its ability to thrive.

“I don’t know of any place where incremental decision-making by Wal-Marts and departments of transportation adds up to anything people want to live in,” he says. “If (small towns) have a plan and their vision is based in reason, a remarkable amount of success can come of it. … It’s communities who don’t know who they are and what they want to be that get victimized.”

Yet, once small towns like Valley understand the importance of good design, they still face unique challenges in developing and implementing their plans. Often their towns have modest financial resources and few paid staff members. If the town does have a vision, it’s subject to disruption because elected officials frequently turn over.

Your Town gives participants tools and solutions to combat these problems. City leaders get to brainstorm about representative problems faced by towns in their region, frequently alongside local and national experts. They’re shown how to evaluate developers’ plans, so they’ll be better prepared to respond to them. They’re taught about funding programs and how to build their work force capacity by fostering networks of volunteers.

Unique Designs for Unique Cultures

Of course, not all town officials who participate in Your Town end up buying a mill. “Like with all planning efforts, the outcome of Your Town is rarely immediate,” says the NEA’s Speck. “What we’re positively influencing is often subtle and profound.”

Dan Wildcat, director of Haskell Environmental Research Studies at Haskell Indian Nations University, facilitated a Your Town on the Reservation workshop that was attended by members of seven Midwest tribes. “I thought Your Town on the Rez was particularly valuable,” he said, “because one of the things native people are beginning to do is take very seriously the design insight of our ancestors.” He added that the workshop, which included a keynote speech by acclaimed architect and native person Johnpaul Jones, helped reinforce that tribes can and should draw on their culture when planning and designing their reservations.

Most Your Town participants and facilitators who were interviewed for this article cited this kind of positive, ripple effect. Connie Krahn, director of Rio Reyes Trust in California, says that Your Town helped her young organization raise its profile among key stakeholders, which she feels will increase the Trust’s effectiveness in safeguarding the Kings River. Doug Self of Driggs, Idaho, applied for a Your Town workshop to help his community respond to its rapid growth. Although the workshop resulted in a four-block plan for Driggs’ downtown, he says the “motivation and inspiration” it provided were even more important.

If there’s a drawback to Your Town, it seems to be its limited scope. Richard Hawks says he’d like to see a national program with “more horsepower and greater capacity for delivery.” Although the NEA steadily funds the program at $120,000 annually, it results in just a handful of workshops a year.

Hawks believes one solution for growing Your Town might be more state-sponsored programs like Alabama’s. Your Town Alabama was started when Paul Kennedy, a county employee, attended a national workshop and convinced his supervisor it could help struggling towns in their state. Present at Kennedy’s very first workshop was Valley’s Martha Cato.

“If I had to put an assessment on (the Your Town process),” said Mayor Leak. “I would say it’s one of the most important things we’ve done in our city’s history. And, I’m not just flowering that up for you.”

Your Town workshop in Block Island, R.I. (Photo courtesy of National Trust for Historic Preservation)

Jennifer Roche is a writer and former executive editor for a major publishing company. She lives in Chicago. E-mail: JenniferRoche@yahoo.com

Original CAN/API publication: July 2005