Towns and communities across America once revolved around their downtowns. Here people shopped, worked, relaxed, and worshipped. Changing needs and developments, however, resulted in their abandonment. Over the past decade, citizens have begun to seek ways to rejuvenate their main streets. While these efforts have experienced varying levels of success, this handbook presents many of the more successful programs, providing practical and proven "how-to" insights for those communities seeking similar results for their downtowns. The articles collected here provide an introduction to the downtown situation and its complex issues. They illustrate techniques of organization and management, describe the tools required for successful main street renewal, and provide case studies of many successful programs from across the country. This valuable tool for city planners, business people, and private citizens includes a bibliography and index.

Before the interstates, Main Street America was the small town’s commercial spine and served as the linchpin for community social solidarity. Yet, during the past three decades, a series of economic downturns has left many of the great small cities barely viable. American Hometown Renewal is the first book to combine administrative, budgetary, and economic analysis to examine the economic and fiscal plight currently facing America’s small towns. Featuring a blend of theory, applications, and case studies, it provides a comprehensive, single-source textbook covering the key issues facing small town officials in today’s uncertain economy. Written by a former public manager, university professor, and consultant to numerous small towns in the Heartland, this book demonstrates the ways in which contemporary small towns throughout the nation are facing economic challenges brought about by the financial shocks that began in 2008. Each chapter explores a theme related to small town revival and provides a related tool or technique to enable small town officials to meet the challenges of the 21st Century. Encouraging local small town officials to look at the economic orbit of communities in a similar manner as a town’s budget or a family’s personal wealth, examining its specific competitive advantages in terms of relative assets to those of competing communities, this book provides the reader with step-by-step instructions on how to conduct an asset inventory and apply key asset tools to devise a strategy for overcoming the challenges and constraints imposed upon spatially-fixed communities. American Hometown Renewal is an essential primer for students studying city management, economic community development, and city planning, and will be a trusted handbook for city managers, geographers, city planners, urban or rural sociologists, political scientists, and regional microeconomists.

Recent developments in the field of urban analysis and management are investigated in this book. It is a wide-ranging collection of essays on the subject drawn from a long-term project and seminar, held in Italy, to review the state of the art and speculate on the future influence on the "sciences of the city" of the complexity concept. Of particular interest is the variety of points of view, often contrasting, and the attempt to go beyond the conventional approaches to the analysis, and the planning of the city. While focussing mainly on the European (and in particular Italian) context, the discussion is of general relevance and valuable to anyone concerned with the prospects for the city in the new millenium.

Provides an overview of regional government, discusses twenty-five examples of initiatives promoting regional government, and explores the evolving role of regional government agencies.

An eye-opening investigation of America’s rural and suburban housing crisis, told through a searing portrait of precarious living in Disney World's backyard. Today, a minimum-wage earner can afford a one-bedroom apartment in only 145 out of 3,143 counties in America. One of the very worst places in the United States to look for affordable housing is Osceola County, Florida. Once the main approach to Disney World, where vacationers found lodging on their way to the Magic Kingdom, the fifteen-mile Route 192 corridor in Osceola has become a site of shocking contrasts. At one end, global investors snatch up foreclosed properties and park their capital in extravagant vacation homes for affluent visitors, eliminating the county’s affordable housing in the process. At the other, underpaid tourist industry workers, displaced families, and disabled and elderly people subsisting on government checks cram themselves into dilapidated, roach-infested motels, or move into tent camps in the woods. Through visceral, frontline reporting from the motels and encampments dotting central Florida, renowned social analyst Andrew Ross exposes the overlooked housing crisis sweeping America’s suburbs and rural areas, where residents suffer ongoing trauma, poverty, and nihilism. As millions of renters face down evictions and foreclosures in the midst of the COVID-19 recession, Andrew Ross reveals how ineffective government planning, property market speculation, and poverty wages have combined to create this catastrophe. Urgent and incisive, Sunbelt Blues offers original insight into what is quickly becoming a full-blown national emergency.

A single mom with two teenagers, a small picture-perfect town, four best friends, and a busy local newspaper office provide the setting for Rumor 1, 2, 3. When our perky community news editor inadvertently starts a rumor, she can scarcely imagine that the entire town will hear of it and find so many "helpful" and sometimes humorous ways to get involved. When a second rumor also comes to life, speculation abounds, and it seems everyone has an idea about its origin and its possible outcome. It becomes a mystery that the town wants to solve, and it spreads like soft butter on warm toast. And if you can imagine, a third rumor also rears its head, and the future of the beautiful town may be at stake. Rumor 1, 2, 3 winds through the lives of the town's various residents who all, in one way or another, become affected by the three rumors. The book sometimes becomes a bit of a mystery and other times a glimpse into human nature. Rumor 1, 2, 3 includes some moments of acquired wisdom and growth for the optimistic newspaper editor, her family, friends, and hopefully, the readers. What first started as a rather innocent remark made to friends, Rumor 1, 2, 3 takes a surprising path with unexpected consequences for the whole town. Even with its twists and turns, it is a lighthearted, upbeat story sure to make the reader wonder what could possibly be the outcome.

Local officials are making investment decisions to enhance the quality of life in their communities and to improve economic development conditions. These new programs are not municipal give-aways, or, as some call them, corporate welfare programs, but efforts to invest wisely in downtown areas and neighborhoods with the goal of revitalizing them, with the hope that business and commerce will follow. This work presents case studies from Atlanta, Baltimore, Baton Rouge, Berkeley, Boulder, Cambridge, Charleston, Chattanooga, Chesterfield County, Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, DuPont, Grand Forks, Hampton, Hartford, Hayward, Houston, Kansas City, Lake Worth, Little Rock, Madison, Minneapolis, Nashville, New Bedford, Newark, Oakland, Orlando, Petuluma, Portland, Saint Paul, Santa Monica, Seattle, Toronto, and Washington, D.C. The case study topics include streetscapes, public plazas, museums, libraries, cultural parks, walkways and greenways, major infrastructure improvements, transit and transportation enhancements and other works.

In Small Business and the City, Rafael Gomez, Andre Isakov, and Matt Semansky highlight the power of small-scale entrepreneurship to transform local neighbourhoods and the cities they inhabit. Studying the factors which enable small businesses to survive and thrive, they highlight the success of a Canadian concept which has spread worldwide: the Business Improvement Area (BIA). BIAs allow small-scale entrepreneurs to pool their resources with like-minded businesses, becoming sources of urban rejuvenation, magnets for human talent, and incubators for local innovation in cities around the globe. Small Business and the City also analyses the policies necessary to support this urban vitality, describing how cities can encourage and support locally owned independent businesses. An inspiring account of the dynamism of urban life, Small Business and the City introduces a new “main street agenda” for the twenty-first century city.