- This video is sponsored by Curiosity Stream.
People love small towns.
People love them, even if they've never lived in one.
When I was a city planner
and asked people for a vision for their community,
"small town feel" was one of the most common responses,
regardless of the size of community.
When I would ask them what that meant,
they typically said things like knowing your neighbors,
being able to walk to the store,
having a quiet and slow community.
With so many urbanites yearning for small town feel
it's worth taking a look at what that actually means
on a channel about city planning
and small towns have a lot to teach city planners
as they have a unique perspective on land use,
transportation and economic development.
To tell this story,
we're going to go to my favorite small town,
Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin.
It's a town of about 9,000 people,
about 45 minutes from Lambeau Field.
This is where I grew up.
Yes, the producer of City Beautiful
grew up in a small town quite far from a major city.
I can't complain,
it's a beautiful and charming little town
spanning both sides of a bay, on a bay, on a lake.
Its main street is absolutely charming
and they even shut down the street on Saturday evenings.
I think they've been watching my videos
on pedestrianization.
Now that we're in the right place,
let's dive into the topic of small towns.
What are they? Are they disappearing?
And how do they create that "small town feel"
everyone wants.
Let's answer those questions after the bike bell.
(bike bell rings)
Okay. Let's start with the beginning.
What exactly is a small town?
Let's start by defining "town".
In the US, the terms "villages," "towns," and "cities"
refer to different configurations of local government,
not necessarily the population of those communities.
Towns, or townships,
are often unincorporated places
administered by a town board or the county government.
I am going to be using the common use
of the term, "small town"
to refer to any community with a small population,
whether or not it is legally a city with a city council.
My hometown is technically a city
because it has a city council,
but the US Census considers it to be rural.
Now, let's talk about the US Census for a minute.
There is no official Census definition of a small town,
but it does define rural area as any place
not in an urban area.
The proposed 2020 Census definition of an urban area
is any place with more than 10,000 residents
or 4,000 housing units.
So a small town is basically any place
with less than 10,000 people.
I'm also going to be talking primarily about small towns
that are not directly adjacent to larger cities.
Those are suburbs, according to the common use of the term.
The US Census says that a rural area
or small town can exist in a larger metropolitan area,
as they are built out of counties
that include both rural and urban areas.
And I should also mention
that other countries have different thresholds
than the United States.
Communities in Sweden with more than 200 people
are considered urban,
while the threshold in Japan is 50,000.
Okay, to sum up this fascinating discussion,
there is no official definition of small town,
but we'll be using the US Census' definition
of communities with less than 10,000 people in them.
You may have heard that small towns are shrinking
and at the risk of disappearing.
This is the global phenomenon known as rural depopulation,
and it has been occurring
since at least the Industrial Revolution
as people sought economic opportunities
that big cities can offer.
In 1920, about a 100 years ago,
the United States became an urban nation,
where more people lived in cities than in rural areas.
Today, 86% of Americans live in cities.
This sounds like a big change,
but some of that statistical change
isn't caused by migration.
Some small towns are disappearing,
and the most at risk of disappearing
may actually be those in major metropolitan areas.
Those towns can be annexed into larger cities
and all the residents would then be classified as urban.
And if these small towns become commuter suburbs,
their populations can get high enough
that they'll switch classification to urban area.
So, from a demographic and statistical point of view,
a small town can go away by growing too big
to be called a small town anymore.
But what about small towns
that are actually losing population?
They lose population for much the same reason
bigger cities lose population - jobs disappear
and people move to find opportunities elsewhere.
Young people go off to college and don't come back.
My recent video on Gary, Indiana
could apply to shrinking small towns too.
Small towns are at an increased risk of depopulation
because their economic base isn't big to begin with.
If a small town loses a major employer,
there aren't a lot of opportunities left
for those unemployed.
The town may not recover
and enter into a tail-spin of population loss.
So small towns can disappear both by growing
and by shrinking.
But there are still about 19,500 places
with fewer than 5,000 people in the US,
and 42% of those have fewer than 500 residents.
That's a lot of small towns still hanging on.
And many of them are doing just fine, Sturgeon Bay included.
Its population has essentially been unchanged
my entire life.
Sturgeon Bay was lucky enough
to have a fairly diversified economy,
by small town standards.
It, like many Midwestern towns,
is a center for local agriculture.
The area produces dairy products, obviously,
but also cherries and apples.
All of those blossoms attract tourists,
as does the coast line and lighthouses.
But the largest industry is always been ship building.
Its shipyards built Great Lakes freighters,
military minesweepers, and yachts for the mega rich.
Sturgeon Bay also does winter maintenance
on the Great Lakes fleet.
This combination of industries
means that a downturn in one will be significant,
but not force the decline of the entire town.
Small towns often employ the strategy of economic gardening
to shore up their employment bases.
Instead of competing for new employers to move in,
which can be a tough sell for a small town,
they work to incubate new businesses
from the local community.
They also provide incentives, low-interest loans,
and technical assistance to existing businesses
to help them grow.
Small towns may wish
they had the economic diversity of big cities
but big cities want that small town feel.
So, what's the deal with the feel?
Maybe it's like how some animals aren't that cute as adults,
but they're adorable when they're tiny.
But more seriously,
there are two elements to small town feel.
First, you have that sense of community.
When a town is small,
it's easier for everyone to know everyone else.
You're more likely to recognize someone
when you go to the farmer's market,
or take a stroll down the historic main street.
One study found that those social bonds
add to a small town's quality of life,
and can sustain it even through population decline.
This means that people were still volunteering
at bake sales, serving on local boards and commissions
and dancing in the streets.
It's okay if people move out
so long as enough people remain
to keep those institutions alive.
Small town feel can also come from the built environment.
Now, with nearly 20,000 small towns in the US,
it's always going to be hard to generalize here.
But a great many of the small towns in the United States
were founded between 1600 and 1900,
before the era of the car.
Even one single, walkable main street
can be enough to evoke that small town feel
that everyone loves so much.
It can also be a great starting point
for expanding walkability and counteracting car dependence.
Nearby vacant lots or underused structures
can become another block of a charming downtown.
While small towns can be thought of as tiny cities,
some aspects of urban life don't scale as well,
and one is transit.
Mass transit requires mass,
and most small towns do not have enough riders
to justify the cost of a bus or train line.
Some small towns might have a tiny area
that is dense enough to support transit,
but the rest of the town does not.
Many small towns in the United States
have homes on quarter acre, half acre, or larger lots,
and when you spread people out that much,
the cost to provide bus service is simply too high.
And when small towns have shorter trip distances,
it's hard to compete against the car,
or even walking and cycling to places
with supportive infrastructure.
Inter-city transit is more viable,
like a commuter bus or rail service
to a nearby population center.
The small town might have one or two stations
where they can hop on a bus to the nearest big city.
Obviously this wouldn't work
at a place like Glasgow, Montana,
the most isolated town in the US over 1,000 people.
It's four and a half hours from a city
of at least 75,000 people.
Any sufficiently isolated small town
wouldn't be able to run commuter bus service,
but many small towns like those within a metro area
could benefit from this commuter transit service.
Residents get the benefits of a large city for employment
and have that small town feel.
Now there's so much to say about small towns,
and this is a topic near and dear to my heart.
I'm sure I'll come back to this topic,
but if you want a little more content right now,
you're in luck.
I've created a bonus video
on annexation and city consolidation.
One of the ways small towns disappear
and posted it over on Nebula.
We're calling this bonus content Nebula Plus,
and you'll see a lot of it over there.
And not just from me,
lots of other creators are doing the same thing.
And on Nebula, you don't get ads like this on videos either.
Now Nebula is great, but it's made even better
thanks to our partnership with Curiosity Stream.
Curiosity Stream is the source
for high quality engaging documentaries.
They have many documentaries about rural areas
and villages around the world,
including this one
about the archeology of Mont Saint-Michel,
the picturesque French town and Abbey.
It's a high-quality program
like everything on Curiosity Stream.
We have a deal where if you sign up for Curiosity Stream
using the link below,
you'll get Nebula for free.
That's not a free trial,
but free as long as you're a Curiosity Stream member.
And they're running a special deal
where you can get the entire year for 26% off,
that's less than $15 for a year of Curiosity Stream
and Nebula.
Signing up is a great way of supporting this channel,
as well as the dozens of other great creators
working to make Nebula a success.
It's just overall a really great deal too.
So go click on the link in the description and get 26% off.