Main Street America
Main Street America is apparently a not for profit community development organization and I'm skeptical of its value.
I'm not actually clear if it's an independent nonprofit or a federal government program. I've seen it promoted on at least one state (governmental, or so I believed at the time) historic preservation site and I used to believe sincerely this was a federal program.
Part of what their website says is:
The Main Street America Institute is the leading provider of education for downtown and commercial district leaders.
Eclogiselle has a much longer history than this website. It was a tentative business name I came up with many years ago and came back to while trying to imagine how to actually redevelop the downtown of the small town where I lived and, on a lark, had applied for the role of Executive Director for a local community development organization that had very recently started the process of becoming an official Main Street program.
Some criticisms I have rooted in having interacted for more than two years with that program locally in the small town where I lived:
1. Someone from their program comes in, assesses where the historic buildings are and tells you where your "downtown" is that you will be revitalizing and you are supposed to MOSTLY invest your time and effort in developing that physical area.
2. For years, I sincerely believed it was a federal government program because it's an insanely top heavy bureaucracy with burdensome paperwork and other program requirements that actively interfere with getting any community development work done locally on the ground.
3. My impression is that it's designed to help extremely small towns with enthusiastic local volunteers but no real qualifications to do planning and development work. But if your small town is large enough for them to require you hire a full-time paid Executive Director, there is a terrible mismatch between their program and the organizational needs of a community development organization with full-time paid staff.
At one time, I went through some of their supposed "requirements" and I was working on similar projects to some pieces of it, including a style guide for the downtown to help unify the look of the area and enhance cohesiveness for next to nothing. Meanwhile, the actual local Main Street program never developed a style guide for the downtown area in the years I was aware of their activity and declined to use my free style guide, apparently due to "small town politics" which was ridiculous levels of drama I would like to forget.
Looking back on it, I don't know why the Main Street program doesn't simply provide a few free style guides. There's really no reason this should be something created locally that's unique to that town.
My research basically turned up TWO historic styles, Mid century Modern (1950s) and Art Deco (1920s), that struck me as good examples for pedestrian-friendly, historic downtowns to use. Two general style guides, each with a handful of color schemes to choose from, could be provided to HELP them for next to nothing.
Plus, this was supposedly a "basic" requirement but the fact that our local program NEVER developed it didn't get them cut from the program for failing to accomplish the stated goals in a reasonable time frame.
If this is important, GIVE them a few options to choose from. If it's so unimportant that never getting around to it doesn't get you booted from their program, then don't tell them it matters.
Their emphasis on historic downtowns and historic preservation is de facto an admission of incompetence. They don't really have answers and promote the idea that where your DYING and decaying downtown USED to be is what you should TRY to breath life back into.
There are REASONS the downtown died and in the multiple years I was involved with the local Main Street program, our downtown was NOT significantly revitalized.
One of the reasons for that was the old, mostly empty buildings were often full of mold and chemicals and the walkable downtown could NOT realistically be filled up again while meeting modern codes that all require more parking than our downtown had.
The Main Street program acts like the old buildings are all extremely valuable assets and it's essential to preserve them while utterly ignoring the fact that old buildings are frequently a public health hazard. I saw zero evidence they actively help local programs address issues like mold and chemical contaminants in old buildings and zero evidence that they have ANY useful information on how to deal constructively with the friction between walkable mixed use historic areas and the more recent car-centric practices and rules which make those areas obsolete and nigh impossible to actually develop.
I heard from an informed local that someone was considering buying a second building next to the one they owned to be able to develop their building by tearing down another building in order to provide the required parking.
This really doesn't fix the problem because ripping out half the existing buildings to develop the other half would completely destroy the historic pattern of walkable mixed use development that people value so much they invest a lot of time daydreaming about bringing it back.
I spent substantial time developing a concept for a building that could potentially resolve the friction between historic walkable mixed use development and the modern cult of the car. It required a lot of out of the box thinking and Main Street America does not appear to provide anything of the sort to help small towns keep the density while allowing for the fact that you do need to accommodate our car centric lifestyle to some degree. You can't just pretend that doesn't exist.
Over the years, I've read a fair amount about both business development and how non profits work. Non profit does not mean there's no money involved.
I have to wonder if Main Street is paying its bills by selling professional development classes and the like and if so you have to wonder how well that is serving the redevelopment of small towns in the USA. Because my impression is this program is not effective, so odds are good those classes exist primarily to pay the bills of this non profit.
What I read and saw of the program suggested to me that if you know NOTHING about community development and you are an all volunteer group for the very smallest towns they serve, then going through the motions of tracking the data they want tracked and so forth will help you start understanding your area and some basics about small town development.
But for a town large enough for them to require you to hire a full-time paid Executive Director, you really need something better than that. I came to believe that the Executive Director at our local Main Street program was tracking the data they asked him to track and feeling extremely successful at "attracting new business development to the downtown area" when the reality was that most "new" businesses in our downtown were refugees from a dying mall that got shut down following structural damage in a severe winter storm.
It may have made him feel like hot stuff, but it absolutely didn't improve funds via taxes for the town nor did it bring new jobs for locals seeking employment nor new establishments to town for people wanting additional services. It just shuffled around existing assets in a way that happened to make HIS numbers look good.
I understand why small towns WANT to participate in a program like this one, but I frankly don't think this one actually works and I don't care how many gushing YouTube videos by people in small towns will swear it did wonderful things for them.
You can't go back in time and run a simulation of what would have happened if those same enthusiastic locals had worked to develop the town independently without this program. So you would be extremely hard pressed to turn up hard evidence that THIS PROGRAM is really the essential secret ingredient and not the devotion of locals who WANTED something more for their town.
Footnote
Resources listed by me in a previous post about Main Street that has been redacted:
Street Life Solutions has ideas for addressing homelessness but will eventually be folded into this site.
