Leaving Main Street

I tripped across this on Reddit: Texas, Florida Lead in Financial Distress. Having recently written about Florida having a high number of Main Street programs, it made me curious about Texas. 

A quick search turned up the stat that Texas has 89 Main Street programs. I think it's not unreasonable to infer that Texas and it's current state of distress is partly caused by the Main Street America program and one way to begin getting Texas some relief would be to run them out of town post haste.

Some years ago, I wrote a piece on my parenting site called The Hand Licking Incident and posted it to Hacker News which resulted in over 60,000 page views.

My takeaway from this experience was "If you know your solution amounts putting out the fire with gasoline, just STOP what you are doing, watch it burn and try to figure out something else, anything else. Because doing NOTHING is literally better than what you are currently doing."

Someone emailed me who worked at Strong Towns and told me they shared that with the folks there. But I know MOST people would rather do SOMETHING, even if they know it doesn't work, than stand idly by and watch it burn.

If you have a paid job, you may not be able to justify "I'm going to watch it burn rather than douse it with gasoline. Because I got NOTHING, boss." You probably can justify "Uh, I'm pouring this LIQUID on the fire to try to put it out..." while you play stupid and act like you had no idea gasoline makes the fire worse, no sirree, that's not what anything you've read ever said.

Which is why I wrote Something from Nothing. If you are going to try to convince someone to STOP the local Main Street program, you will be extremely hard pressed to convince anyone that doing NOTHING is literally BETTER than this garbage.

Even IF you can prove to them it's a scam and the town would be better off doing NOTHING, they have a boss or they have voters they need to convince and "My strategy is do nothing and watch it burn. Trust me! The town will suck less in a few years with my Do Nothing strategy than with Main Street."

So ideally, you convince them you have an alternative that is both cheaper and more effective. A reminder: Main Street America suggests you create a style guide, dose nothing to help make that happen and doesn't enforce it. 

So foing NOTHING doesn't get you booted from their program. And if people like the idea that Main Street probably does good things, talk to them about "Have you gotten a style guide yet from the program? No? Here, we can do that cheaply and easily without them. It's a good idea, but they aren't delivering."

I don't recommend that you try to talk the local Main Street program into shutting down. I think they probably know it doesn't work and will fight for their right to keep conning the town out of money. And that may be the tip of the iceberg.

If you are concerned, I recommend you read through the Main.Street tag on both this site and that last site linked immediately above, contact whomever in town needs to approve funding the Main Street program out of city coffers and make your case with them.

Main Street has been around 45 years and has over 1600 programs. That's around three new affiliates per month. I think that's shockingly low IF they actually work. Those numbers imply it's not really getting the job done.

I'm not asking you to convince people to simply abandon the Main Street program even though "Stop putting out the fire with gasoline" applies. I believe you are literally better off doing NOTHING than doing Main Street, but I know that's an extremely hard sell.

I'm providing other answers, even some the Main Street program nominally promotes but neither meaningfully enforces nor meaningfully supports. And currently this is a blog and the ideas here are FREE to use.