Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Americana
In 1919, Clem Kruse started selling Oldsmobile, Maxwell, and Chalmers-Velie vehicles from the ground floor of a two-story concrete building on Mill Street, in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, just south of the Twin Cities. Upstairs, Kruse’s Hall hosted dances, plays, and high school basketball games. One hundred years later, Cannon River Winery opened a tasting room […]
The development application is straightforward on paper. Twelve residential lots on forty acres of prime ag land, five miles outside of town. The heirs of the family that farmed it want to sell. A developer has found buyers. The parcel is accessible from a county road. No wetlands. No floodplain. Nothing obviously wrong. The planning […]
What began as scattered neighborhood resistance to individual projects has become something much larger: a national backlash against the physical footprint of the AI economy. According to Data Center Watch, at least 75 data center projects worth more than $130 billion were delayed or canceled in the first quarter of 2026 alone, effectively matching the […]
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently reported 96.9% of Americans have access to 100/20 Mbps fixed terrestrial broadband. I guess that puts me among the 3.1%, despite a 44% reduction in unserved populations in rural America over the last two years. I was reminded of that report listening to Deb Brown and Becky McCray […]
Pullman, Washington, is the county seat of Whitman County. It’s not the largest or smallest place out there; it’s a Main Street community that seems to sit about right. The city of about 33,500 residents has grown over the past 25 years, as has the county, at a faster or slower rate like much of […]
The creation of the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) by Executive Order 7037 followed the TVA Act in 1935. The REA, which was later incorporated into the US Department of Agriculture and became the Rural Utility Service, was established to support electrification in rural areas. When the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 provided federal loans to […]
Economic diversification and innovation is a fairly Big Picture topic. In the context of rural economic development, it’s also the kind of conversation that works just as well over friendly debate with libations as it does at a mid-morning coffee club down at the co-op. That conversation is different on Main Street than on Wall […]
When I say “economic development”, what comes to mind? Is it big industrial plants and multi-million dollar tax incentives? I wouldn’t be surprised. That is so 1960s. Welcome to the later 2020s. For many years now, especially in small towns and rural places, economic development looks a lot more ordinary—and a lot more interesting. It […]
Through the years, the United Kingdom and the nations founded by the British Crown have followed some similar trends in urban and rural development. While each country has unique natural resources and development patterns, the share of people living in rural areas has contracted as people move to the cities for jobs and housing. It’s […]
Thank you to Joe Barker for inviting me to join his Rural Strong podcast this week. “John Shepard, If you fail to plan, plan to fail! Our guest on the RuralStrong podcast is John Shepard, a seasoned planning and economic development professional at Marvin Planning Consultants. John has over 30 years of experience across the […]
