Photo courtesy of IEDC

Guest post by Deb Brown

What attendees learned from attending the Idea Friendly Session by SaveYour.Town at the International Economic Development Council Conference — Big Ideas you can copy in your town 

Becky McCray and I were excited to lead an interactive Idea Friendly workshop at the International Economic Development Council Conference in Dallas in September of 2023.

The Idea Friendly Method is:

• You gather your crowd with a big idea. 
• You turn that crowd into a capable network through building connections.
• You and the crowd accomplish the big idea through small steps.

What Happened in the Idea Friendly Workshop

Attendees developed their own Idea Friendly Projects after learning what Idea Friendly is and how to use it effectively in rural communities. 

Engaging the audience, we asked what their rural challenges were. Not surprisingly, they aligned with the top 5 rural challenges on our Survey of Rural Challenges results: 

1. Shortage of good housing
2. Downtown is dead
3. Not enough volunteers
4. Losing Young People
5. Lack of Childcare

The attendees broke off into groups and chose a challenge to work on together. Each table had a flipchart sheet and the group worked the challenge through the Idea Friendly Method. The different groups presented their results to the entire room.

Photo courtesy of IEDC

What the Big Ideas were: 

Challenge: Housing

Big Idea: Offsetting public infrastructure to incentivize private development 

This idea brought to light the number of people who wanted help with a 12 unit housing development. The first small step they would take is to work with the economic development organization to find ways to bring the interested parties together for a conversation. 

Challenge: Not enough volunteers

Big Idea: Volunteer engagement and involving the whole community 

Their ideas included helping to promote all the possibilities for volunteering and creating a guide to managing volunteers ensuring any required government protocols are well explained. They created a brilliant tagline: making volunteering painless. 

One attendee said to me, “Friend, I’m just a redneck from Alabama and I never get to meet people from other places. This was awesome!” Attendees came from the continental United States, Puerto Rico, Bermuda, Saipan, and Canada.

Challenge: Losing our young people

Big Idea: Helping youth boomerang back 

This group was excited about working with different organizations and people to create a strong publicity campaign. This big idea uses storytelling and sharing the small wins with some catchy promotional pieces. “Wish you were here”, “While you were gone”, and “We’ve grown up” are some of the hooks to use in promoting the community to their audience of young people. 

Big Idea: Downtown is dead

These folks took their big idea to fill the downtown and built out a list of who else wanted to work with them, and then built possible connections that could help get it done. They realized they were not alone and had others in their towns that wanted to help. 

Challenge: Lack of childcare

Big Idea: Create a downtown childcare facility 

After identifying a long list of people and organizations that would want to join this project, the group came up with the idea of playground “playdate” to bring them all together for productive discussion. They were excited to see how a new downtown childcare facility could not only improve the availability of childcare, but also spur downtown revitalization and contribute to positive placemaking. 

Creating Idea Friendly Projects is an easy to use and effective way to address our rural challenges. 

This interactive IEDC session was a great success, and it was inspiring to see the plans the participants came up with to address the challenges they were facing. By working together and using innovative approaches, we can create more vibrant and resilient rural communities that are better equipped to face the challenges of the future.

“Thank you both so much for your preparation and execution of your session today! Sincerely, it was a true pleasure meeting and supporting you today. Your preparation and professionalism was reflected in your session. I appreciate your adaptability as well.”

Alexa Schultz, IEDC

Next steps:

• Reach out to SaveYour.Town about an Idea Friendly Workshop for your community or event
• Read more about the Idea Friendly Method. 
• You can also watch a 24 minute Idea Friendly video for a $5 investment into your community. 
• Don’t forget to sign up for our free weekly newsletter that addresses rural challenges! 

Empty lots in your town’s core are the biggest first opportunity for improving the rural housing supply. Photo by Becky McCray.

The only housing “best practice” that really works for every town:

Keep renewing your town’s core

No one likes a mushy core, in an apple or a small town. Build more in the center, less on the outside.

Grab a paper map of your town and a highlighter. Circle the oldest neighborhoods, the ones closest to your downtown or town center. Those are the areas to focus on.

There are two important reasons:

1. Make the most of your existing infrastructure. 

You already have water and sewer and streets in the core. You’ll make more of your existing infrastructure investment when you replace and renew the existing housing close to it.

2. Draw your community closer together.

People who live close to the core can walk and bike more to run errands. They can go downtown for shopping and events more easily. Parking at downtown events is less of a problem when more people can walk from their homes in the core area close by.

How to renew your town’s core housing

Find the empty lots within your existing core residential areas. Highlight them on the map. Use different colors for privately owned lots, ones held by banks or other organizations, and ones currently owned by governments at any level. You’ll probably find several that ended up in municipal government ownership after an owner failed to pay taxes or failed to maintain an old house.

Pick another color for empty lots in the core housing area that are only used as parking or storage. (Look next to churches and businesses.) You might have to get extra creative to find ways to put them back into housing.

Then get together and brainstorm ways you can promote homebuilding in the core. Here are some starter ideas that might spur your thinking:

• Make people aware which lots in the core are available for building right now.
• Offer incentives, like waiving utility connection fees for close-in lots.
• Sell empty lots in the core at low prices.
• Remove zoning barriers to adding new structures or accessory dwelling units in your housing core.

Add your ideas in the comments or send us an email.

Send us pictures if you put up signs: “Fabulous homebuilding location! Close to downtown!”

Find more ideas for small town housing issues in our video, Improving Rural Housing: An Idea Friendly Approach

Photo: Randolph, Nebraska, converted a dilapidated property into a new energy-efficient spec home financed by local investors. Photo provided by Gary A. Van Meter, Revitalize Randolph.

By Becky McCray

Small towns need good housing to retain population and to attract new residents, new industries and new entrepreneurs.

There’s growing interest in living in small towns and rural communities, making good rural housing even more important. You might have heard about Zoom Towns, as more people choose remote work and live in small towns. If you don’t have a good place for people to live, they aren’t coming.

If you want to retain your young people, you’ll need housing options for them. Walkability and livability are huge factors in where people choose to live when they have a choice.

Communities without good housing can’t stay communities for long.

Rental houses can become a source of blight and dilapidated housing if they aren’t well managed.

Keeping your town’s rental housing in decent condition can require a little economic self defense as a community. Right now, corporate real estate investors are buying up rental housing even in tiny towns. They have a terrible track record when it comes to maintenance and tenant relations.

One solution is to create a local investment team to buy up rent houses before corporations snap them up, or buy them back. You could do this on a community ownership or cooperative model.

Making a spec home out of a blighted property

Revitalize Randolph, Nebraska, (population 944) used local investment to transform a dilapidated property with an $8000 assessed value to a new home even before a buyer was found.

In 2015, Gary A. Van Meter, Community Development Director in Randolph, told me about the project. It was the first spec home in Randolph in recent memory and was funded by individual local investors.

It certainly drew a lot of interest, with 150 visitors to the open house, including a city administrator from a nearby community.

They did their homework to make it an attractive house to buyers, including super energy efficiency, custom touches like cabinets, and additional storage and workshop space in the garage. They also put in a concrete-cast FEMA approved safe room.

That workshop and garage space makes the home a good match for makers and crafters looking for a live-work space. Those potential entrepreneurs might be your existing residents or new artists to attract to the community.

Improving Rural Housing: An Idea Friendly Approach

There is no one solution (not even local investing!) that can solve every housing challenge in rural communities. Since your situation is different from other towns, the Idea Friendly Method helps you test any idea to make sure it will work for your community before you commit to expensive plans that will be hard to change.

Deb Brown and I put together a 24 minute video at SaveYour.Town that shows you how to apply the Idea Friendly Method to improving housing and shares the most promising ideas that almost any community could adapt.

Learn more: Improving Rural Housing: An Idea Friendly Approach