(Pew Charitable Trust, Stateline)
By Teresa
Wiltz
Hayes Carll performing at the 2016 Red Ants Pants Music
Festival in White Sulphur Springs, Montana. Some small towns are looking to the
arts as a way of attracting money and people.
© Tony Demin
IOWA CITY, Iowa, November 7,
2016 — Ten years ago, Sarah Calhoun became a 21st century pioneer, staking a
claim in a town far from her Connecticut roots: White Sulphur Springs, Montana,
population 939, located in what was then the poorest county in the nation.
The logging industry had
dried up in the mountain town, but Calhoun saw potential. So she launched Red
Ants Pants, manufacturing work wear for women.
She started an online
business and opened a brick and mortar store, and then a music festival with
big-name talent like Lyle Lovett and Wynonna Judd.
The festival brought
thousands of music fans to White Sulphur Springs and generated money to help
finance rural enterprises. Today, the once ramshackle downtown has been
revitalized as other businesses have popped up.
Which is why Calhoun was at a
conference in Iowa City last week, standing before a crowd of other rural
denizens, business leaders, artists and policymakers, preaching about the role
the arts can play in bringing timeworn towns back to life.
“I want to make rural America
sexy again,” Calhoun said. And the arts, she said, are a way to help do just
that.
As post-recession, rural America continues to struggle, some rural leaders,
using private and public funding, are experimenting with the arts as a tool to
fuel economic and community development like they did for White Sulfur Springs.
The National Endowment for
the Arts is helping by giving $125,000 in seed money to fund a “Next Generation”
initiative to help build arts hubs in rural America.
The idea is to connect
artists, arts groups, civic leaders and philanthropists and encourage them to
create sustainable cultural scenes in rural communities to help spur economic
development and entice new, young residents. Iowa, Kentucky and Minnesota
participated this year. Other states seek to join next year.
“You need arts in rural
America so that the next generation wants to come there and live,” said Charles
Fluharty, president and CEO of the Rural Policy Research Institute, a public
policy institute located at the University of Iowa College of Public Health.
“If you do not build vibrant,
inclusive, diverse places for young people, they’re not going to raise their
families there. They’re simply not. And those communities will wither away,”
Fluharty said.
Around the nation, arts are
helping a handful of rural communities make a go of it. Marfa, a remote desert
town in Texas with a population of 1,765, has become an international arts mecca among fashionistas.
Every summer for the last 45
years, 12,000 people swarm Winfield, Kansas, pitching their tents at the town’s
annual bluegrass music
festival and temporarily doubling the city’s population.
Business leaders and city
administrators say it’s almost impossible to pin a dollar figure on the amount
of revenue arts and entertainment can bring to a rural community. In
2013, arts and cultural production contributed $704 billion
to the U.S. economy and supported 4.7 million jobs.
Community leaders say the
arts can foster community pride and create jobs, even on a modest scale. To be
successful, they say, a rural community must figure out what makes it unique —
a gorgeous natural landscape that can serve as the backdrop for a writers’
retreat, an old opera house, or a tradition of local storytelling — and
capitalize on that.
“People say, ‘I’m going to
Winfield.’ They don’t say, ‘I’m going to the Walnut Valley Festival.’ The
festival is giving us this name recognition. You could never pay for that type
of recognition,” said Warren Porter, Winfield’s city manager.
Tourists flock to Lanesboro,
Minnesota, population 754, a historic town known for its Victorian architecture
and scenic river bikeway, to take in theater, art galleries, museums, film
festivals and live music.
Smithsonian magazine named it one of its “20 Best Small Towns to Visit.” (Minnesota has an arts and heritage fund paid for with revenue from
state sales taxes.)
There, the entire town was
declared an arts campus two years ago. And with $1.3 million in local, state and
federal funding, the town has been renovating facilities, helping artists
relocate there and developing an artist residency center, said John Davis,
executive director of Lanesboro Arts, a coordinating organization. In the
meantime, 10 businesses have opened in town.
Owensboro, a small city in
western Kentucky located on the Ohio River, has invested $260 million of public
and private money to revamp its downtown riverfront and convention center and
build a new building for its International Bluegrass Music Museum.
The city was known for its
museum, which opened in 1991 and “set the tone for creating a brand for arts
and culture,” said Joe Berry, vice president of entrepreneurship for the
Greater Owensboro Economic Development Corporation. The town also has a
symphony and a pre-professional ballet company.
“We’ve watched our state
government send money to everywhere but Owensboro,” Berry said. “We decided
we’re not going to wait for our state government to help us. We’re going to
roll up our sleeves and figure out how to do it ourselves.”
Remaking Small Town America
At the “Next Generation”
summit in Iowa City, artists and policy wonks from 35 states crammed in
conference rooms to talk strategy, breaking every now and then to take in a
performance from a storyteller or folk singer.
They toss around the term
“creative placemaking,” an earnest shorthand for building economically viable
arts hubs.
The bit of jargon belies the
urgency that many rural communities face, said Bob Reeder, program director of
Rural LISC (the rural component of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation),
a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that works with rural communities to
stimulate economic development.
In nearly half of the
country’s rural counties, more people have moved out than have moved in during
every decade since the 1950s. Many rural communities are blighted, with vacant
buildings and crumbling infrastructure. Rural unemployment has eased up since
the recession, but creating jobs remains a challenge.
“There are many rural
communities that are threatened with becoming a ghost town,” Reeder said. “Can
the arts save rural America? I would never call it a panacea, but it’s another
strategy that we have in our toolkit.”
Metropolitan areas
receive community development block grants from the U.S.
Department of Housing and Urban Development, which give them the flexibility to
do long-term strategic planning.
In contrast, rural
communities have to compete for funding. They can apply for a federal HUD grant. And they receive competitive grants from their
governor’s office, which are typically meted out every few years. By the time
that funding comes around, it usually goes to obtaining, say, a new fire truck,
rather than creating an arts scene.
“That’s a massive
disadvantage to community development,” Fluharty said.
Escaping the Big City
Zachary Mannheimer, a former
New Yorker who moved to Iowa nine years ago, travels his adopted state
consulting with small towns on how to convert their abandoned hospitals and
hotels into multiuse facilities that incorporate rental housing for young
professionals, restaurants and community arts centers.
The idea is to make a town
attractive to young people, said Mannheimer of the Iowa Business Growth
Company, a for-profit economic development group that uses federal and state
loans and tax credits to fund small business startups in towns across the
state.
Increasingly, Mannheimer
said, young creative types are being forced out of big cities and are looking
for less expensive places to live. And many people eventually tire of
metropolis living and seek a less hectic existence.
A recent study by the Center
for Rural Entrepreneurship found that half of the young people from rural communities said
that they would love to stay in their hometowns if there were real career
opportunities available for them. That means small town America needs to
prepare to welcome them back.
“Towns have to be prepared
for 30 years from now. It’s all about figuring out what does your town have
that no other town on the planet has,” Mannheimer said.
Rural communities should
think small in starting to revitalize themselves, said Reeder of Rural LISC.
Trying to woo back
manufacturing in today’s service-driven economy is not realistic, he said. All
too often, big corporations swoop into a rural community but don’t end up
hiring many locals.
And they rarely stick around,
he said, leaving carcasses of abandoned industrial parks.
“Don’t be trying to get a
Wal-Mart,” Reeder said. For every dollar spent in these stores, 90 cents goes
outside the community, he said. “For every dollar spent in a local food mart,
just the opposite happens.”
‘Capital of Quirkiness’
Sometimes becoming a tourist
mecca has its downside, especially if a town doesn’t have the infrastructure to
support the boom.
In Marfa, for example,
there’s no room to grow, said James Mustard, the city administrator. The town
is landlocked, bordered by ranches that have been owned by a handful of
families for years.
In the 1970s, the artist
Donald Judd left New York for Marfa. He bought a chunk of land, and with foundation
money, populated Marfa with all kinds of art installations. CBS’s “60 Minutes”
dubbed the town “the capital of quirkiness.”
Over the years, hipsters from
New York and Los Angeles gobbled up the housing stock to use as second homes.
As a result, appraised housing values skyrocketed, and some locals complained
about a jump in their property taxes. Part-timers rented out their homes on
Airbnb. Affordable housing shrank.
“We have few vacant lots,”
Mustard said. “You can’t build a subdivision. You can’t build 20 new houses.”
But as Calhoun of the Red
Ants Pants Music Festival in White Sulphur Springs sees it, with careful
planning, a community can take advantage of tourism dollars.
The proceeds from the annual
music fest go to a foundation that funds leadership programs for women, and
provides grants to improve rural communities and support family farms and
ranches.
Her county is no longer the
poorest in the nation. White Sulphur Springs has a new Main Street, sporting
goods store, brewery and bakery — and new sidewalks and streetlights. It soon
will have a new school and library.
But Calhoun is not interested
in seeing White Sulphur Springs become a boom town. There’s a reason why she
moved to the middle of nowhere.
“Getting bigger isn’t the
solution. Getting better is. If you design it for the tourists, you’re making a
mistake,” said Calhoun, who represented Montana last year at the White House’s
Small Business Leadership Summit. “Design it for your community. Then the
others will come.”
