Main Street America is Unfixable

I applied for a job with a Main Street program and didn't get it but was strung along for over two years with the idea I might get another shot at it, so I tried to imagine how I would do that job. Trying to figure out how you actually develop a small town as a person with that job made it increasingly clear this is impossible. 

This makes no sense. Their program can't work. The numbers don't add up. There aren't enough hours in a week for one person to attend all the public meetings in town you should be attending to keep up with what is going on, do all the paperwork required to keep your affiliation AND actually do any planning and development.

IF getting the small town in question to cover the majority of the costs of the program is typical and thus the garbage I saw in Aberdeen is the norm, then NOTHING they (the national Main Street program) do is likely to be effective because everything they do will be intentionally designed to cover up the fact that their model is fundamentally broken so as to keep the money flowing in for the Main Street program.

I haven't figured out how to monetize my work. I have a Patreon but the few people supporting it have been doing so since before I began writing about community development and it's shrunk. I'm not really being paid to do community development work.

So it's essentially a hobby and I am free to make a fool of myself, wildly speculate, make mistakes and then admit my errors.

The Main Street program probably won't ever admit their program doesn't work because people are already making money off of it. People working for the national organization are supporting themselves this way and LOCALS have paid jobs supporting themselves.

If it is standard practice for the small town to be paying the expenses for the local affiliate out of city coffers, the local organization needs to keep up the fiction that it's adding enough value to justify the expense. 

The national organization actively teaches local organizations to lie with statistics to the people in town paying their bills at the local level, actively hides how they actually operate to make it difficult to determine the truth and locals are generally not really qualified to do this kind of work so not well positioned to realize it's bullshit and if they do start to suspect that fact, they have a conflict of interest and don't want to lose their paycheck.

It took me a long time -- nearly eight years -- to conclude with confidence this doesn't work and begin putting together an argument supporting that conclusion and I have an acrimonious relationship with the Main Street program in Aberdeen, Washington and the people involved with it. I'm NOT making ANY money from it, so I have no reason to hesitate to say "I don't think it works."

But I'm a lone voice aware that I'm taking on the local Main Street program, the entire town of Aberdeen, Washington which has a history of stalking me and intentionally being abusive and the reputation of a decades old, well-established national organization. So I better be sure I'm right and have some idea of how I'm going to argue my case in the court of public opinion before I attack this model.

More than sixteen-hundred towns already affiliated with their program don't really want to hear "You're program doesn't work and never did. You're wasting your time and money." They don't want to look like fools.

So I had better have an extremely strong argument and something better to offer or thousands of people will keep doing this shit and will dismiss me, talk trash about me, emphasize that I'm a loser with no life and no credentials etc etc etc to save face and cover their asses.

If you have a tank and you need an airplane and you add giant wings to your tank and it sinks into the mud, bigger wings won't make it fly. You probably cannot tweak the Main Street America model and magically make it work. You need something else entirely.

The Main Street program NEVER actually worked AND it's entire ethos is about covering that fact up. It's easier, quicker and more effective to scrap it than to try to fix it.

They tell local programs to track metrics like new businesses in downtown and DON'T tell them ANYTHING about how to check if those businesses are actually NEW taxes much less any means to check if it's plausible to say "We helped make that happen."

That's INTENTIONAL. They are inculcating local programs with intentionally broken metrics to cover up how broken it is.

If they added metrics for checking if it's new taxes and means to check if they actually made a difference, they would immediately look so bad, a lot of local towns would promptly pull the funding for the local program, defacto killing it because these people don't know how to pay their bills some other way. No one would go "Awwwww. They are trying to fix it! This is step One. In like eighty years, they might have something functional!"

No, they would look at the NEW data showing that most of the new businesses in downtown Aberdeen are refugees from the dying mall, not new taxes for the town and not businesses attracted to Aberdeen by the Main Street program, and go "So you've been BULLSHITTING us all these years and we wasted thousands of dollars on you and you didn't do one tenth what you had us imagining you did? GTFO. No more pork barrel money for you, assholes."

A few days ago, I provided a means for any small town to adopt style guidelines without first becoming a Main Street affiliate. WHY would anyone want to PAY Main Street America to provide a few guidelines?

Mine is already written up. What do you think they can add that's worth paying for when I have a free solution online anyone can use TODAY without first becoming a Main Street affiliate?

That's a suggestion they have in their program as a basic thing that should be done quickly and they don't enforce it. I independently came up with several projects, including a style guide, and figured out later it's similar to some of their suggestions.

The screenshots in this post are from Washington Main Street Program Guide and Handbook. It has four sets of core competencies. I am only going to use screenshots from three of them.

One of their four sets is called "Organization." It basically covers how to set up a non-profit and run things in line with the goals of the Main Street progam. It's not relevant.

So one quarter of their guidelines are about how to establish a Main Street program. That's substantial overhead for a program that doesn't work.

They are very focused on old media, like TV and newspapers. I'm not too concerned with TV, newspapers etc. I prefer using the internet. I find their ideas about promotion outdated and I question the value of those priorities.

I have already written a fair amount about developing a lightweight website to serve your development goals. I'm unconvinced social media should play a large part in promoting your town and most extremely small towns won't even have a local radio station, TV station or newspaper.

Furthermore, if you are a small town, locals interested in development can and probably do attend local meetings regularly or can talk to people they know and hear through the grapevine "You should really be there for the November meeting. This one's important." 

So your published promotional materials should probably be aimed at outsiders, not locals. Most of the people you want to speak to probably aren't reading your local paper, watching your local TV station or listening to your local radio station if you are fortunate enough to have those assets.

Given that the Main Street program website for the national organization is an exercise in how to lie with statistics and milk small towns for money for a program that doesn't work, I seriously doubt they are capable of developing useful information about how small towns can use the Internet to effectively further their development goals.

If they were doing anything useful in that regard, Aberdeen's Main Street program wouldn't be hiring Rick Moyer for way too much money to provide their lousy website that continues to do things I advise against, like post photos of local women who are involved with the program and dates and times you can meet these women in the flesh. I would bet money at least one of them has been a victim of a crime as a consequence of this practice, victimized by someone breezing through town and stopping long enough to rape or rob someone.

And they aren't publicizing that fact and may not have even explicitly made the connection that there's a cause and effect relationship between their website and these "unfortunate" events.

This may well be an ongoing problem with repeated incidents and yet the website hasn't been updated to a model that prioritizes safety of locals like I advise. No, it's been updated to have more attractive, more recent photos so criminals can more readily identify their targets.

I'm a one-woman shop and have been for more than two decades. When I tell you that small organizations publicizing themselves on the Internet should prioritize safety first and not include unnecessary personal information, especially photos of the people involved, I speak from firsthand experience with having people overly interested in me as a person and not actually interested in my work.

I haven't been sexually assaulted as a consequence of my Internet activities but I have had people ask inappropriate invasive questions they don't ask of MEN on Hacker News and have had my time wasted with many long conversations with men who wanted to TALK to ME and weren't genuinely interested in my WORK, no.

If you want to use the Internet to materially improve your situation as a small fry, you need to be mindful of the fact that Internet activities can be huge time wasters, people you meet via Internet have their own agenda and probably don't particularly care about you and you need to prioritize safety and staying focused on your goals.

I don't believe the Main Street America program is qualified to develop materials that tell anyone anything useful in that regard. The reason their program is such a top heavy, bureaucratic design actively burdensome for small towns is because Main Street America is a large national nonprofit organization.

They tell small towns to run their development programs like they run their own organization. They don't know HOW to design something lightweight that makes practical sense for a small town.

They are a tank telling small towns to operate like a tank and when you tell them "I need something lightweight and birdlike that can fly." they instruct you on adding wings to your tank and LA LA LA not listening to how now it's sinking into the mud.

Main Street America is 45 years old and small town America is more distressed than ever. I guess we need MORE REMEDY!

It's like a doctor actively making people sick to sell more drugs and services.

I once said on Hacker News "If I make the world a better place, I get to live in a better place." And someone replied with "Mind: blown."

I didn't set out to solve small town development. I was newly off the street after nearly six years of homelessness and wanted to attend meetings open to the public to pursue my interests and get a life and get to know the community I had just moved to.

I tripped across a job listing while trying to figure out when the next meeting was and applied for it because their shit website, run by Rick Moyer, didn't promptly remove the job listing from the site and it was still up five days after the listing officially closed. I hadn't slept and like someone drunk dialing friends, applied for the job on a lark, not expecting to be taken seriously.

This led to a great deal of drama while I continued participating in local meetings in good faith hoping to network, develop a freelance income on the ground and hoping to improve the town I lived in. Because even if they didn't want to HIRE me and PAY ME, if my town got better, I would get to live in a better place.

It was crystal clear to me none of the locals I was interacting with had any clue how to improve things. In spite of being handicapped and incapable of working a full-time job, I knew so much more than locals that I hoped just providing better ideas would improve the town I was living in.

And that didn't happen -- the town I lived in didn't get better -- because locals wanted to steal enough of my ideas to pretend they deserved the money the city was giving them and wanted to actively deny me credit so they could take credit, thus my work didn't even make the town better. It was a complete and total waste of my time while locals actively strangled the town and strangled my ability to make money from my work to cover their asses and con the city of Aberdeen, Washington out of money on an ongoing basis.

Nearly eight years later, I feel I have no choice but to talk about my opinions that the Main Street America program simply doesn't work because I am still being stalked online by people who were never anything but abusive to me when I lived there. I don't even really WANT to try to turn this into a business per se at this point. 

I just want my life back. And this seems like my only hope of putting a stop to this garbage.

Footnote 

Don't believe me that Main Street doesn't work? Check it for yourself.