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Incentivize storefront renewal, fresh paint, bright colours, flowers, benches.
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Organize a volunteer army to dress up or disguise eyesores. And cleanup spaces that need it!
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Definitely set up an annual festival, think arts; writers, dancers, playwrights, poets. It can build quickly if they find the place welcoming and comfy. That’s any small towns forte!
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Get a couple of semi pro muralists to whip up a couple, for any large vacant type spots. Make it a great backdrop for Instagram and selfies! Empty parking lot? Clear away the dangerous junk, maybe get some lights, a little lawn managing, and you’ve got a skater par/trail bike course.
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Consider finding a local food, (donut, cake, pie, jam, etc,) and name it a long time local speciality. Give it a fancy name and play it up as a, ‘You gotta try…’
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Build an awesome playground, build in some stuff no one else has and give it a great name. Make sure everybody knows the kiddies will love it, and it’s free!
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Make a ‘walk about’. You know where the pretty houses are, the nicest garden, etc,
If you have enough dictatorial power to overrule any opposition from your subjects you could make money by agreeing to host something that no one else wants due to NIBYism. (prison, nuclear power plant, toxic/nuclear waste repository, etc.)
I would invest in public schools. Raise salaries to attract the best teachers, hire more of them and build more rooms to reduce class size, buy new textbooks and bunsen burners and computers and so forth. Parents from neighboring towns who can afford to will pay more for a house in a good school district, and will even endure a longer commute to the next town for work until they can find a job here. But meanwhile they’ll be paying property taxes, buying groceries, etc. here.
I would definitely not let myself get suckered into building a stadium for a professional sports team.
I have long held the opinion that giving tax incentives, etc. to businesses is a bad idea that never, or almost never, benefits anyone except the businesses.
I am not alone:
A more concise article:
And a 9 minute video:
I guess Trinidad got tired of being the sex-change capital of the nation.
Many town festivals bring in visitors from out of town.
I loved loved loved this program, but it didn’t last. What mayor goes to a woman’s house to change a lightbulb for her? I still need to visit D’Lo. Remember that scene in “O Brother Where Art Thou?” where the sirens were singing? It was filmed in D’Lo.
95 point plan…Wikipedia says he’s still mayor.
The textbook example here is Holbrook, with a population of under 2,000.
Founded by industrious German Lutherans with a strong civic bent and was originally known as Germanton, then patriotically renamed Holbrook in 1915 after a VC winning British submarine commander.
It has no significant geographical assets. There’s a small but reliable creek. A few small hills. It’s good farming land. It is on the Hume Highway, the main transport route between Australia’s two biggest cities, though now a by-pass, usually the spell of death to small towns but the town has largely survived that.
Holbrook it is roughly midway, being about 5 hours from Sydney and 4 hours from Melbourne. Sydney. “Heavy” industry there never extended beyond a grain elevator and a blacksmith. It’s about an hour’s drive from Albury and Wagga Wagga, two of the countries larger (population >50k) inland cities which is where most of the employment is.
The first thing, absolute imperative first thing are the public toilets.
They need to be well proportioned, attractive, sheltered with ample parking. Clean and scrupulously well maintained. They need to be located right in the centre of town, even if the town is just a block along the main road.
People driving through your town on their way to bigger destinations are going to stop in your town once, just once, then drive on.
When they stop, while you’ve got them there needs to be a cafe selling really good coffee, a bakery, a newsagent, petrol stations. Once people start planning their trip with a stop at Holbrook then you are heading in the right direction.
Then add some local craft shops. For an attraction the locals brought in the superstructure of the HMAS Otway, an Oberon-class submarine, to tie back to the town’s name despite the fact the Otway in now located in concrete 200 miles from the nearest ocean.
A humming, vibrant city with thriving nightlife and ample employment within it’s technology park it will never be.
But it is on or about the national average for income, employment and virtually all socio-economic measures which is way better than the vast majority of rural communities.
But students can tele-learn, too.
So building lots of (empty) classrooms, well-equipped (empty) labs, etc. may not matter. Aim a lot of that investment toward better teachers (given teacher salaries, they’ll come cheap enough).
Here in Minnesota, students aren’t limited to their home school district, but can enroll in any school system. But use of that was limited to nearby districts, because of the problems of arranging transportation for the kids every day.
That’s no loner an issue with tele-learning.
Some Minnesota school districts are starting to get worried that a sizable number of their students will now choose to tele-learn at another district, with a better quality reputation. And since state education funding goes with the student, an exodus could really impact their budget (and school administrators salaries!).
Develop a medical center that specializes in a particular illness - and becomes the “go to” place for treatment. (But hopefully, not specializing in implanted goat glands.) Start training local students in auxiliary medical fields (billing, etc.)
Cannabis farms are a growing source of tax revenue here.
Open a place like Wall Drug or a mini museum dedicated to oddities. Advertise heavily - highway signs, bumper stickers, etc.
OMG, I’d heard about goat glands and monkey glands in off-hand references in old movies and books from the early 20th century. But it wasn’t until about ten years ago when I read a book about that doctor (Brinkely) who started the whole thing. Eye-opening (and rather disgusting) to be sure.
One way that I don’t like: Use eminent domain to seize older houses (sometimes entire
neighborhoods) if the houses are paying lower property taxes. Demolish and put up McMansions, business parks, or individual businesses:
I’d commission a quirky low-budget TV or Web series to be set in the town, Parks & Recreation or Crazy Ex-Girlfriend style, then invest in some of the local arts and crafts scene so people would have a tangible souvenir of their visit to Martiniville.
When people discover that Martiniville is a real place and there’s actually stuff to do (even if it’s just enjoy a coffee at our fancy cafe, which features prominently in the series) and they can even buy an authentic Martiniville martini glass, hand-made by artisan glassblowers right in town, world will get around and hopefully some cash will follow.
That only lasts as long as the show is on and is popular. Rouleau, Saskatchewan, got a min-tourism boom for a couple of years while Corner Gas was on, but that stopped when the show ended.
Hopefully the show would have generated enough tourist revenue to move to phase II, which is investing in more sustainable forms of income (arts and crafts, tech, etc).
Others mentioned it above, but yeah, with telework becoming a big thing now, you don’t need to attract businesses - you need to attract their workers.
Lots of small town have seen population declines in recent years, so invest in fixing up abandoned houses and sell them to people willing to relocate to do telework. Invest in the internet architecture so they can have reliable connections for such work (this also benefits everyone else in the town, as lots of small towns are stuck with crappy internet).
Revitalize the town core so that the people you want to attract want to move to your town. Get the local bar/pub type places cleaned up, improve the schools, and add all the arts and social events discussed above. There are lots of people who would like to live in a smaller, more walkable town, so long as the town offers some good places to walk to.
On the other hand, Roslyn, Washington, which was the location for Northern Exposure from 1990-95, standing in for the fictional Cicely, Alaska, apparently still gets a fair number of tourists thanks to that show.