Welcome to The Difference. I'm Kevin Farnham. Today I'm talking with Paul Cloutier about reimagining rural America. Paul and I are partners at Kei, and he's been leading an extraordinary project in Humboldt, Kansas. It started with a simple but radical idea. Build the town you wanna live in.

For anyone interested in how small towns could become frontiers of innovation, this conversation reveals how real change happens in rural communities

Hey Paul. How's it going?

Hey, how's it going, Kevin? Good to see you.

What drew you to Humboldt in the first place?

Well, it's been about eight years, actually starting a little bit after the election in 2016. I lived in the Bay Area and was looking for just a different approach, a way to get involved and do some good and it was hard to make a big difference in the Bay Area, it was a very large pond. And it turned out that we had some good friends that had recently moved back to their small town in the Midwest. And we came out to visit–in the state of Kansas, where I'm from originally, where much my family still lived–and over the course of the Thanksgiving weekend after that 2016 election, we visited Humboldt and saw this very walkable town, that needed some help and a lot of work, but the bones were interesting.

It's a small town, about 1800 people, built in an era before cars so it's really walkable. Something about that grabbed us, like we'd come from a city… we were in Oakland before, where it was incredibly walkable and it was actually a really high functioning neighborhood. There was a grocery store close to us and there was a dry cleaner, and all the things were right around us. And Humboldt, which as a small town not close to things seems and seemed like it would be a more complete place, actually didn't have a lot of those things.

And so for me it was this recognition that small towns and rural places have an incredible charm, but they've lost some of the things that make them functioning towns–the placemaking of these places have atrophied. So I think part of the genesis of the idea here was like, wow, you can operate at scale in a place like this and make things happen in a way that we are used to, but in a totally new context. So we got really excited about this prospect and we made the jump. It wasn't too long after we got here that we realized, let's give it a shot and, let's spend some time here and try to make it work.

And here we are eight years later.

What were the first inclinations? Like, "there's, there's something workable here". There's something that's gonna allow us to, to have the latitude to make a difference,

There's probably several answers to that range from… well maybe the most honest answer is that it's not that expensive to do things here. And there's a cost imperative that almost drives you towards like, "oh, I could get a building and I could start making something happen".

But very quickly you realize there's a reason this building is as cheap as it is. It doesn't have a roof, or the roof's about to collapse, or the floor is rotten, or whatever. And so, what you trade in upfront cost, you're making up in ongoing commitment to making these places work. But right away–even before we fully moved here–a group of us that are working on this whole thing together, started a project to retrofit a pretty messed up old building and open a shave ice stand, which our friends ended up going on to run. And just that process of being kind of scrappy and cleaning up a space and doing something in it and opening it within a month or two. Was really empowering because I came from a world where you have to go raise money. You have to go talk to banks. You have to go compete with a bunch of people to win this contract to get the building, you know, on and on and on.

And there was something about this that was just like, oh, I wanna do a thing, like I'm gonna do a thing. And then the thing is done. And it was incredibly exciting and really empowering.

Yeah, I can imagine. What were the, what was, the progression of events from there, tell us a little bit about how it unfolded after that.

When we got here at first it was all big plans. I come from a design background and from a studio and consulting background. And so we started by applying these relatively rigorous approaches– Let's do journey mapping and let's do service mapping, and let's do a big brand effort.

And so we started with that and to some extent, that served us well. It helped us create a basic platform that we could operate from about who we were and what our ambition was. But very quickly you realize like some of that stuff just doesn't work because you realize, oh, there's a lot of challenges that are hidden just below the surface on some of these issues.

And so you think, oh, well we will open this business because the town needs this business and because people are leaving town and going to spend that money somewhere else. And you realize, oh, okay, you can't open this business because there's a law that's been on the books for 75 years that keeps you from doing that.

Or you can't open this business because you don't have enough people or whatever it is. And so you start to get into the mix and all of your best made plans and strategies start to crumble. And so being able to roll up your sleeves and be in it and realize, all right, time to adapt, time to pivot, time to change.

So very quickly we went from this very rigid top-down structure plan making mode to this very grassroots bottom up, just get in there, and start adapting and learning. As we went, we came to call that strategic action, the idea that you just start making things. You learn, you try to be thoughtful and you think ahead, but ultimately you adapt along the path by seeing what's happening.

What sort of failures happened along the way? Where did you pivot some of the ideas? Did that happen?

As you asked that I immediately started thinking of the physical building failures that happened along the way. I remember falling through a floor that was basically load bearing linoleum at one point.

But to your actual question, the real failures were failures of system design, basically, not realizing that there were actually bigger issues at play here than we thought. A great example is one of the biggest projects that we've undertaken here is a 10 barrel brewery, a 160 seat restaurant that we have opened and it needs 40 employees to run that thing from the brewery and the restaurant side of things.

And in the course of finding 40 employees, and you're like, okay, well there may not be a history or culture of working in high-end breweries around here. So you're not gonna find people who have familiarity with this kind of environment. And then you're like, all right, well maybe we'll hire some folks from out of town to come work here. and then it's well, we don't have housing. And so oftentimes we would jump into a plan thinking we can do this, we know how to build it, we know how to brand it, we know how to make the experience really awesome. But reckoning with all that backend stuff, that actually is the real problem here.

It's not that somebody hadn't come along and figured out how to make a cool thing. It's that the bigger issues that were obstructing it are still there and are maybe worse than ever. And so like a lot of our things we rushed through the design process and came up with something very cool.

But then had to reckon with the fact that there just isn't infrastructure for doing some of these things and so now we've started to layer that in as core parts of the planning process ahead of time.

Have your thoughts around community changed? Like what makes a community what you've been doing there to bolster community? How do you think about it now?

Yeah I mean, community is a big word for me. When I first started this process, I considered myself a designer. You know, I have an architecture background, but early in my career quickly moved towards software design and websites. And over the years, as I've worked on collaboration tools and gathering spaces, I've come to think of myself as a community designer, that's how important it has become to me.

I opened a bar here called The Hitching Post about two years ago. We call it a modern honky tonk, and it's a place where we have a huge selection of whiskey, and old school country music and a live music stage. And while it is very much a bar and it is very much a music venue, which both serve really important purposes in the community, it's really a community hub. I think one of the things that drew me to this whole project in the first place , and continues to animate a lot of the work here, is this belief that, nationally speaking–I mentioned the election a bit at the top of this thing–this sort of polarization that's happened amongst people, regardless of your political beliefs or where you're at on that spectrum, nobody likes the idea that we're like running in two different directions away from each other, this kind of "two Americas". And so how do we start to reweave that fabric of community?

Well, you do it by creating places where people can gather and environments that are welcoming for people of different beliefs and backgrounds. And so a lot of our work–and particularly the bar–has been focused on that. So community's been a driver of all this, and for me at least, it's the singular driver. It's the only reason that I think that it's worth doing any of this stuff is to reweave the bonds of community.

How do you bring them along? Like how do you paint a vision for a thing? How do you invite them in? How did you avoid outsiderness in this situation given you with your fancy new car, from California and all of those things, like how does that work?

I mean it was definitely interesting. Being from Kansas helped, you'd say, "well, we just moved here from California", and you get this kind of skeptical look on their face, and you're like, "but I'm born in Kansas". And there was always this like, "Well, welcome home! Thank God you got outta that place". And, so that helped. It broke it down, and of course just being approachable as you can be. But I also think a lot of our early work was, you know, we were taking, buildings that had been sitting more or less empty for many years and putting them back into productive use with stuff going on in them.

And so we gained a lot of goodwill, just simply by doing that. And of course, we're working on private property, so it wasn't a big deal to people. And then we also contributed a lot to the area. We were working hard to do these free events like Movies on the Square, a free outdoor movie theater, and Water Wars, which is a big water event that we do, all these things that we were trying to put something back in the community, and be a part of it.

And I think just through the course of it all, that stuff helped in many ways. And then of course, just trying not to be like, I don't know. I love the idea of being native to a place. There's an author actually somewhere up there in this stack of books. An author named, Wes Jackson, who's also a Kansan. He's a very interesting guy who talks about being native to a place and it means not necessarily being from the place, but committing to the culture of a place and being a part of that, and pushing it forward, extending it, but really dedicating yourself to it as opposed to operating outside of the cultural norm there.

And I think we've tried to do that. Like we are all ourselves, but we are very much in the community. We show up, we keep doing things even if people sort of squint at us a little bit. You still show up the next day and you just keep doing your thing. And after a while people are like, all right, they're here.

They're committed to the bit.

Yeah, that's right. There's also an 80/20 rule that we sometimes call the fifth tap, and it's this idea that when we were opening the brewery, that if you had five taps that your first four should be familiar and comfortable and your fifth tap better be weird.

And the idea is that you're designing for home and for local the community that's already here, but you're also expanding your horizons a little bit and attracting people from outside and speaking both to those outsiders and those locals and finding common ground there. But you're also elevating everybody in the course of that.

And so that philosophy obviously applies very directly to a beer tap, but also to everything else we do, to be mostly comfortable and familiar and native, but don't take that as like, well, you can't push the boundaries. You know like, "People around here don't like that sort of thing". That's just not true, you see people in Kansas City from Humboldt spending money all day long and so, don't assume that people don't want something just because they're from here or "Rural".

How much of it has it played a role, speaking of Kansas City, to attract people from outside of Humboldt to that place?

When we started, we did not think that tourism was our plan. In fact, our original proposition was like, traditional economic development people would say, okay, well small towns recover via tourism. And we very clearly were stated that it can't just be that. And we had this whole strategy that we set up that was how it was more than tourism, what role tourism played and all that.

We had this idea that it was really about makers, and over time we continue to evolve in that direction. But what was weird was at least at the start, it turned out to be totally tourism. And tourism has been a major driver of the revitalization we're seeing here.

When we started ABH, one of our ideas was a kind of glamping campground. It's called Base Camp. It's a 21 acre property at the north end of town where the bike trail comes into town that we put a number of really nice kind of Scandinavian cabins around a pond and a couple of other things. And we opened that in October of 2020, the peak of the pandemic. Nobody wants to stay in a hotel at that point, but it turns out people desperately wanted to get out and these cabins are outdoors and no contact. And so that first weekend a journalist from Kansas City came down, a friend of a friend. Came down and wrote about us and the next weekend it was like, it's been booked up three months in advance every weekend since 2020 because of that demand. Kansas has only 2% public land, like the least of any state, basically. And so there aren't a lot of places to go that feel like you're getting away, and we're in that sort of magic two hour circle, that we draw from. So anyhow, lots of folks come to town for that and that's continued to be a driver.

We have a two-hour-drive radius of about 6 million people that we draw from and sort of optimize for that weekend tourism. And then on the weekdays we've got this 20 mile radius, which is about 27,000 people and so then we optimize our weekdays for that 27,000 and move back and forth between those two spheres.

Speaking of journalism and tourism, one of the things that made me sit up and notice during your process here was the New York Times article of the top 52 Places to visit. It's a pretty intense milestone for me at least. What was that like for you and what was the sort of result of that?

It was very crazy. It was definitely not something we were expecting or quite frankly, that we really deserved. But but we were very fortunate to get it. I mean, we were literally on the list next to Kyoto.

Did you pay somebody off? I mean, that's pretty intense.

I mean, the reality is that someone had come to town to stay at Base Camp, whose spouse worked for the Times, worked in the Travel group, and there is a cultivation of attention and care and connections that we try to maintain here. Telling our story has turned out to be almost as important as making things happen. So we've been very intentional about that process of getting the story out there, connecting with people who can tell the story, creating opportunities for those people to come to town and see what's going on. So there is a kind of intentionality to the press strategy with all of this. But nonetheless it was still perhaps the most shocking of all the various things that have happened to us story-wise. And you know, it happened when we were still very, very, very much in progress. Like we had the coffee shop, the brunch place, the candy store open and not a whole lot else. And my bar was very much in progress, very under construction and one of the other bars was very under construction. And so there was this kind of, oh shit, we gotta go like, let's start, we gotta hurry the hell up and get these things open.

Because literally people within the week started showing up with out-of-state license plates, people take that list very seriously. And even to this day three years later we're getting people showing up in town saying, "oh, I saw you on the Times 52 places list and I thought I had to come down and check this out". And fortunately now we're at a point where you can, if you're here from a Friday to a Sunday, there's actually enough stuff to do. But for a long time it was kind of like I would see people without state plates and I'd run outside and be like, Hey, welcome to town lemme show you around and give you the tour. I felt terrible that people had traveled here to see what we were doing and there wasn't much open yet.

You're the personal welcome wagon

Absolutely, a hundred percent, because I was working on building out the bar at the time so I could see everyone and, so I'd take it on myself to get out there and try to show people what's happening here.

But yeah, it was amazing. And what's been great is that it opens doors. It obviously created a lot of follow-on opportunities from press. The governor of Kansas, Laura Kelly, mentioned talked about us a bunch after that and our Senator as well. And it's allowed us to get more action than maybe we would have otherwise. And it's certainly motivated us to get some stuff launched.

When you're talking about there being enough for people to do there, maybe, it would be interesting for people to hear the general list of the stuff that you guys have done over the course of this arc of time.

Yeah, there's a couple ways that we talk about it. One is that we started making a list of the things that we want. Oftentimes, we'll describe this as, build a town you wanna live in, because you kind of, selfishly, this is hard work and you will get burnt out, and so you better be doing something you care about, otherwise you're gonna walk away from it.

And so we tend to operate from a level of like, well, what do we want to do? What do we want to be involved in? What do we wanna create and think about? And that's the kind of first category. And then the second has been we want to make the case that this is a place that young, creative, ambitious people can come back to, and so we started talking to people who've left, that grew up here and left. What would it take for you to come home to, to come back? And, you know, you just go down that list. You're like, well, we need bars, we need restaurants, we need museums.

Would just kind of go down that list of like, all right, cool. Let's start doing those things. And building this out. And so now we have, I mentioned Base Camp, which is our glamping resort, which has cabins, tent camping, RV parking, this cool little pond, a trailhead that gets on this bike trail that's a kind of world renowned gravel cycling path. We have a five room boutique hotel. We have a cocktail bar, kind of hotel style cocktail bar. We have the honky tonk and cocktail bar. We have a coffee shop. We've got a candy shop, an ice cream shop that's really fun. A garden school that teaches kids where food comes from.

We have a fitness center. We have this brewery Union Works. We have a number of other restaurants and destinations and shops that we did not launch ourselves, but others have now launched around us. So it's been cool to see. We have a music hall that's about to open, that's an old church that we've converted into a cool concert venue, and a variety of other things that are bubbling right now.

Have there been moments of, we try a thing, it didn't work out, let's try something else. Or what's the process that you've been through to stand up new businesses and try things and experiment?

One of our earliest theories was this idea that we now call the Lean to Business. For example we had this idea that makers were really important, and so we're like, all right, if makers are important, then we need a place to showcase local makers, people who we're convincing to stay or move here.

We need a place to showcase the work, and so we wanted to create what became the Humboldt Mercantile, which is basically local products and gift shop. But we weren't really sure, given that there was nothing here yet, really not much here yet. We weren't sure if that was going to be its own a draw in and of itself.

And so we also wanted a coffee shop because we needed a gathering place. So we're like, well, let's put these two together. Let's create this one business that leans on the other and can leverage the labor pool as well as the traffic for both of these businesses in one place.

And it ended up being great. It allowed us to prototype something, learn what worked, what kinds of products people were looking for. Eventually what we realized was like there were certain things that were happening there that nobody really cared about. So we actually created a new business that was just the gift shop, was separate from the Mercantile.

And now those are both spun out of that space, and now they're their own things. And then there's been other times where… well, we're always reticent to give up. And fortunately we kind of have a pretty long runway with some of these that, given that we own the buildings and it keeps some of the operating cost relatively low, we kind of keep trying, like, okay, if that didn't work, then let's just pivot it. Let's push it over here a little bit.

So we have, cocktail bar that's in the hotel called Perrenoud's that it had some space issues, like physical space issues that weren't quite working for it. And so it got closed for a little while and retooled. And now it's going to reopen. There were a whole bunch of things that–everything from like architecture problems to having the right management in place to like, is the concept even right? And maybe even the name and brand shift. And so the ability to take a step back and say, well, let's just try a different way and see what we're going for. We still believe in the fundamentals of it, but like maybe the exact expression of it didn't work out and so let's just try another version of it in that same space. In a normal expensive city, that would be a death knell.

If you were to start this again, like if you were to start over, you do anything differently?

There's a million things that I would love to do differently and we try to take that into account and do that every day. We as an organization operate a little bit like a design firm in some ways. we tend to overfocus or perhaps just focus very much on design as a solution to our problems.

And one of the things I think we probably should add… somewhere halfway through this process, we added a community manager and grant writer to our staff, which was amazing and incredibly helpful. Having done that sooner would've been very helpful. There's probably other people that are kind of community consensus builders that would be helpful. It's in our nature to have a point of view about what we want to do and just try to do it versus getting more people involved in the community at large inviting their opinions in. How do we create something that's a little bit more democratic? And that's hard. It's very hard, especially for a bunch of designers who know what they want, to say "and now it's time to open it up". And so managing that is one thing that I think we've slowly learned, but we're not perfect at yet.

It can be both of those things though, right? You can have the design point of view and you can elicit sort of the community input in more meaningful ways. It's, it seems like you can balance those things.

Yeah, and that's what we have tried to do, which is like still have a strong point of view, still have a set of particular opinions. Being able to bring people along for the ride and also recognizing that not everything is like design you know, those beautiful touch points.

A lot of these things do need to get people involved. I'm a big fan of the Citizens Assemblies and these participatory budgeting models and things that you're seeing evolve out of Europe and finding ways to do some of that so that the community is more involved in figuring out what we want our place to be like is gonna be important going forward.

When you reflect back on all of that's happened here what surprised you? What has gone faster? What's gone slower? What did you set out to do that you didn't?

Yeah, I mean, I sort of alluded to this earlier, but the idea that there's so many things that you can do if you come from a design background, you can do at a pretty high level. Places where you would say "Wow, that's very cool looking", or "What a cool place this is". We have found that because those are our skills, that's been the easy thing to do. It's almost the default behavior for us is to approach with design, like, try to solve the problem by making a cool thing.

But the reality is there are so many challenges that are endemic to how our rural places got to where they are that their actual work is not designing a cool, business because that's easy, relatively speaking. The actual work is getting down into the nitty gritty of like, we don't have enough housing. And actually housing is, there's no easy solution because it costs more to build a house than you can sell a house for here. And so there's just this constant challenge of like, how do we keep people here?

How do we keep people from leaving? How do we get new people to move here? And that just affects absolutely everything. And so on the one hand, you want to just like, ah, man, I just wanna open a cool new business. I wanna open a grocery store. I wanna open a bar. I wanna open a, you know, a concert venue.

But on the other hand, you're like, who's gonna work there? and in fact, who's also gonna go there if we lose the people that would otherwise go there? And so you really have to not let yourself get distracted by the bright, shiny, fun things when there are meaningful shifts that have to happen for a place like this to thrive.

And so, there are a lot of people here working on the housing issue. We've contributed to that in a number of different ways. It continues to be an issue. There's also things like rural training and rural health.

The lack of childcare, affordable childcare is a major issue. Do you wanna work for 15 bucks an hour if childcare also costs 15 bucks an hour? It doesn't make a lot of sense. So how do we create an environment in which these businesses can thrive? You kind of have to solve a lot of problems that are not just the visual design solution, not just make a cool place type solutions.

It is interesting to consider some of those, like needing to create routines and workarounds based on governmental issues that are here in the US maybe more than there are in other places. Do you see other things that are system level challenges that you need to work around on a regular basis?

I tend to always think about like, don't try to use the same toolbox that got us here in the first place. You know, oftentimes when we're like, well, we gotta reopen our grocery store, we gotta reopen whatever that we may have lost. You can't do the same thing that you did before, it closed for a reason.

There's a fundamental reason and in the case of a grocery store, it's a proximity to a Walmart or a Dollar General, or lack of food distribution networks in this area any longer. And so like how do you get past that? Oftentimes you're operating outside of the mode of traditional government models or even capitalism in the most reductive sense. We live in an area where–in many of our local communities around here–the cities are buying grocery stores and running them with city employees, because otherwise they cannot survive.

You wanna call that socialism. Great. You wanna call it crafty scrappiness in rural areas, even better, because it may be the same thing, but it's just a matter of putting the lens in the right place and just getting the job done. The reality is a grocery store or a lot of these kind of important bits of community infrastructure, they just can't survive, with a 1% margin when you have, Walmart next door or down the street, whatever, operating at a completely different scale than you. So you really have to be thoughtful about your economic models and your ways of contributing to this. What is your approach to this business given that Walmart exists?

And to your question about, the larger scale political shift in the country. I do think that the reliance on grants from a federal level, which has driven a lot of rural progress, a lot of the development that's happened in rural areas may be shifting and going away.

And so I think some of these organizations like A Bolder Humboldt, and others that are independent operators that are scrappy and finding money here and there–a little bit of philanthropic money, a little bit of like local investment, various other things, building these kind of new models that can adapt to a slightly more hostile federal infrastructure–we're probably gonna see more of these kinds of organizations. And figuring out ways to operate outside of what we would otherwise like to be able to do, working with the federal government… maybe we're just not gonna be able to.

If other rural towns are considering doing something similar and are inspired by stories like this and don't know where to start and maybe aren't designers themselves, I mean, other than coming to Kei, what would you tell them to do? What's the starting point? What kind of kit would you imagine giving to them if you were to hand them, like, here, think about these things.

That's a regular question that we get and sometimes couched into the like, well, it's all fine and good, you guys are spending money on this, but how do we get started? And the reality is there's so many ways to do this but it's always about people. That's the first and shortest answer is it's just about getting people together and creating a momentum that allows people to keep working together and get stuff done. 'cause it doesn't take much.

Generally I think there's three things that you need to get roughly aligned to be able to do what we're doing here. You need to find people who have a concern for the legacy of their community that have a little bit of money. And it doesn't have to be millions of dollars. It can be thousands of dollars, just a little bit of starting capital, from somebody, who really believes that this place should thrive and survive.

And then the second is people with ideas and vision. And so you may have a thought, oh man, I wish I could do something different, or I wanna start a thing. They're, you know, entrepreneurial in nature, or they're optimistic and hopeful, and you need to find those people and align them with the money people.

And then the third are the people that I think of as the doers or the muscle or the people who can actually bring this to life. And that ranges everywhere from people who can literally just build something or make something happen and help you get a building ready, to people who can actually run these places. Because it doesn't matter how much money and many ideas you have if you can't actually keep it running, it's just an academic exercise.

So that's always the kind of starting point. There's lots of other little things, if you don't have a gathering place for your community, first place to start, create somewhere where people can come together and start to have these conversations where you can feel the soul and expression of a community. You do that by having a place that people can bump into each other and gather.

And then I think just asking yourself what do you want to be as a community? What is it that you're here for? Because a lot of places have lost that. Our community in Humboldt was a farming community, it still is, there's still a lot of farming around here, but historically it's reason for being was farming. And so you have to ask yourself, is that still the case? Are we here to enable farming? Are we here to do something else? Increasingly, our employment base is manufacturing. We have a huge manufacturing plant in town, and so what does that mean to our future? Are we here to generate and support the future of manufacturing? Are we here because we're cyclists? What is it? And again, that sort of overlaps with brand and purpose and meaning. And so those are the questions need to be asking yourselves because those are the things that give you direction and purpose in terms of what you should be making.

It's amazing the overlaps to hear you say it into like very much be coming from a brand point of view, how much overlap there really is in that line of logic even large scale brand redesigns and North Star exercises, with towns and communities. What kind of questions do you have left?

Like you've, you've done this do you feel complete? Do you feel like you've answered the questions? What, what comes next?

One of the things that we're very interested in here is, this kind of like changing the way that work works. Right now we have these small businesses that are, we try to pay well, as well as a small business can. But oftentimes a coffee shop or a bar can't offer insurance in any real way, just cost-wise. So how do we start to get at some of those things? And again, to that point of like, what if we just did it differently than we've ever done it before. What if we set all of these things up as nonprofits? What if we created a kind of co-op amongst all the employees that allowed everyone to go in on insurance together, to be cross-trained, to have a single point of payment so that we could get an economy of scale across the a hundred or so employees that we have here. Those are the kinds of things that are really compelling.

We are gonna keep making cool places. We're gonna open another thing that looks fun and amazing and is Instagrammable, et cetera. But at this point, those aren't the things that are driving, at least speaking for myself, that are driving my enthusiasm. It's the actual deeper problems that are keeping a place like this from being successful that are more exciting.

And so thinking about those, like what if it worked differently? Instead of just like, well, let's just build another coffee shop the same way we would if we were in San Francisco or wherever. That's a major one. And I still think a lot of this all started for me with this sort of presumption that coming from this urbanist background that perhaps, cities and density are the only answer to the future in terms of thinking about climate and thinking about where we go from here.

And I get it, and I definitely understand the argument there, but I just can't wrap my head around the idea that, that means 98% of this landscape in the rest of the country needs to be empty. And so if it's not empty, then people need to live there. And so living people living there means communities.

So what does it mean to design small communities? And that, for me, it's just continuing to explore that idea of ruralism or smallness. I just don't know if I can really understand or believe that everyone's gonna live in New York, San Francisco, and LA And so what else is there and how do we go about that?

How do we create a quality of life and a richness of life in these places that allow us to do the things that we love and care about at a scale that doesn't kill us like it often does in cities, to, pull that off and like live at a human scale. And so that for me continues to be an area of real exploration.

Are there any sort of metrics, have you put anything forward or have you guys started to either gather success metrics like how are you evaluating this? How is the town evaluating the success of all of these endeavors?

Yeah, it's interesting, so B&W, the the trailer hitch factory that's here in town, is a big part of why we've been able to do what we do. They're an employee owned operation, with just really an incredible heart for a modern business. When we first started ABH we were inspired by something they said about how one of their metrics that they use is how many employees bought houses this year. It's both an investment back in the community, obviously, which is a very straightforward and useful way to think about keeping your business in good shape. But it's also a recognition that there's something more than profit-making behind all of this.

So, for us, that was very inspirational in the early part of this. And so we also think a lot about how many people have been able to move to town? How many people have been able to convert to home ownership, how many businesses are started by people from here. People who are able to go from working at the hospital or some local area business to starting their own business because those are the things that are gonna be the the root system that keep the soil from blowing away.

It's the things that really anchor people to a place. And so often we think about those kind of rooted experiences, whether it's entrepreneurialism or housing or whatever, that keep people here. So we think about that a lot. Certainly how many people have moved to town.

For a such a small community we've had a good number of folks move here to work for these projects or because they wanna start something, or also obviously because of the larger employers in the area. All of those things together, have been really meaningful. And then I just think there's all the traditional stuff, like the economic leakage stuff of like how many dollars are staying in town, I'm on city council and so I have a direct front row seat to the budgeting process and and just seeing the money that's flowing into the general fund now, that wasn't 10 years ago, from tax revenue, property tax, revenue, liquor tax revenue, a variety of things, hospitality stuff, like all these things that are coming through that just didn't exist before.

When you think about the future of small towns and rural places, you've mentioned a couple of influences into the system that, future of work and climate change and that kind of thing. What other sort of like big open questions do you think, are heavy in your mind around the future of small towns?

We're very well positioned for manufacturing in these small towns, in these small communities. I think a lot about if you're a young, creative, ambitious person our rural places are the frontier. Those are the places where you can actually afford to go try something relatively low risk.

And yeah, there's challenges. It's hard in a lot of ways, but if you want to go do a startup in the Bay Area or in New York you're looking at a VC and you're beholden to the traditional fundraising process. Or your costs are enormously high for real estate and labor and people and all of that stuff.

And so you can actually try things here that you can't in other places. So when I think about rural places and entrepreneurialism, and I think about climate and I think about, the sort of shifts that are required for us to be able to adapt, people should be here starting things that are really focused on that.

We have an incredible manufacturing heritage. We should be making wind turbines here. We have all kinds of space and manufacturing capability to do this. So, I'm very interested in the role that rural places can play in climate resilience.

Not to mention, just purely from a housing standpoint, we need a lot of work to get these houses in into better shape. And so why not think about building them from the ground up. And we have places that have recovered from storm related destruction here where they've tried to rebuild LEED certified. And it's been a net positive to see that happening.

But yeah, I just, I think the role of rebuilding and climate friendly ways is really interesting here.

Any questions that I should have asked that I haven't? Anything you want to talk about?

One of my favorite anecdote generators here is the Hitching Post bar, and we see people come in all the time whom I know their deal, like with their sort of cultural and political backgrounds, having conversations with each other. And I know that if they were online, if they were on Facebook, they'd be throwing rocks at each other.

But they have a kind of common ground in a space like that. And when I think about the power of placemaking to solve some of our political issues or lessen some of the divide that we see between people, it's pretty incredible because it doesn't take much. It just takes a place, it takes a space, it takes a guest and host relationship where at the bar, it's just inviting people in and saying like, Hey, this is what this place is, these are the basic rules. This person's into that, that person's into this, good luck, have fun. Here's a drink. And watching the guard go down a little bit between those people has been really incredible.

But I just always return to that insight, as we just need gathering places to generate a kind of common ground, a sense of common, shared connection. And so many of our communities in rural places and urban places have lost those gathering places where different kinds of folks come together. It used to be the Elks Lodge or whatever on the very male side of things and dance halls and bowling alleys and stuff. But we just don't have enough of those gathering places. And so that's been like so much of the goal here is to re-weave that fabric of community, bring back together places where different kinds of people can interact.

Thanks for sharing your insights, Paul. Much appreciated.

Yeah, man. Thanks for having me.