According to the mayor of Chilliwack, B.C., where I live, not much. A couple weeks ago the owner of a downtown movie theatre shut the two-screen operation down and donated the building and the land to the city. It was that worthless, apparently.

The problem in Chilliwack is that the outskirts of the city aren’t all that far from downtown; when there’s virgin land 10 or 20 minutes away, there’s not much incentive to buy downtown, get the required permits, tear down environmentally ruined structures and build again. And that’s if you want to invest in Chilliwack in the first place. A lot of the downtown absentee landowners don’t give two craps about a city they don’t live in.

And then there is the lack of a talent base, the part-time politicians in bed with developers, the antipathy towards higher taxes, the dependency on cars and the related absence of public transportation, and the size of the commuter population, all of which makes it hard to get people really excited about building downtown.

But the land issue is the crux of the problem. Vernon is out of land. It has a vibrant downtown. Ditto for Kamloops. Kelowna may not have a great downtown, but that may be changing and there is certainly interest in building in the city core. In Chilliwack, though, that interest is what is lacking. How you recapture that, I’m not sure. It may start with a council that starts to say no. Then you run the risk of scaring of businesses and much-needed jobs. But desperation is also the cause of ruin. There’s a fine line that needs to be straddled there, but if the current state of Chilliwack’s downtown is any indication, local politicians have yet to find it.

The report was brought to my attention because Chilliwack, where I’m a reporter, was ranked ninth in the country. That was an actual improvement on rankings released last year that put us at number six.

Of note for this blog, however, is the propensity for small- and medium-sized cities to be ranked higher than larger cities. While the sheer number of crimes committed is obviously larger in big cities, the average person often has a better chance of being killed, mugged or burglared in a small Canadian city, especially in the West.

The ninth worst cities for crime all had populations under 300,000 (Winnipeg, , at 10th overall, was the worst big city). Some of this has to do with geography; the 10 safest cities were also smaller municipalities, but were located in Eastern Canada.

But there’s definitely a size element at play here; the three largest cities and their suburbs in British Columbian and Alberta (Vancouver and Calgary) boasted the lowest scores in those two provinces.

Meanwhile, Prince George, B.C., had the worst crime score, followed by Victoria, B.C., Regina, Saskatoon, and Fort McMurray, Alta. (Regina, as discussed here, may or may not be considered a small city)

Abbotsford, B.C., had the highest murder rate, followed by Thunder Bay, Ont., and Medicine Hat, Alta.

Cornwall, Ont., led the country in sexual assaults, Fort McMurray did the same for auto thefts, and (in the one category dominated by big cities) Winnipeg was tops for robbery. Chilliwack, meanwhile, was number one with a crowbar for break-and-enters. (The headline, courtesy of my editor).

In the above map and the below charts, I’ve experimented with Excel to try and show some interesting trends. I may or may not have succeeded, but I think we can all agree the yellow on the map is absolutely hideous. My apologies.

I crammed the data together and used averages for each state to produce these three masterpieces. In the map above, the states are coloured according to the relative health of their cities. Green is good. Red is bad. Interesting to note: New England cities have done poorly, while midwestern urbs have performed tremendously well. Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Alaska, the urban population of which resides exclusively in small cities or towns, were the five healthiest states.

Below, the states are ranked from least (Rhode Island) to most impressive (North Dakota). (To make the healthiest cities appear with the biggest bars, I shifted the numbers a bit. In the Milken study, small numbers are best. I essentially reversed that.)

Finally, forthis graph, I averaged both the city scores for each state, and those city’s average populations. You’ll note that Milken scores rise as the average size of cities rise. It may say something. Or, admittedly, it may be more indicative of the small sample size of Rhode Island.

Ron Reiring/creative commons

The Fargo metropolitan area in North Dakota/Minnesota is a pretty bitchin’ place to find the job according to the Milken Institute.

Fargo topped their most recent best-performing cities list, among the smallest 179 metropolitan statistic areas (MSAs).

The Milken Institute’s index ranks cities by “by how well they are creating and sustaining jobs and economic growth. The components include job, wage and salary, and technology growth.”

Find the full listing here.

Bismark, North Dakota, ranked second, while Jacksonville, North Carolina, came third.

Muskegon-North Shores, Michigan, ranked last, followed by Sunter, South Carolina, and another Michigan city, Jackson.

Among the 200 largest cities, some of which aren’t all that large, Killeen-Temple-Fort Hood, Texas, placed first, Austin-Round Rock, Texas, placed second, and Huntsville, Alabama, was third. Two other small cities beat out the big guys: McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, Texas, was fourth, and Kennewick-Richland-Pasco, Washington, was fifth. Washington, DC, at sixth place, was the first truly big city to make the list.

If you didn’t know it already, the rankings make clear that Michigan is in big trouble. Detroit was last among the larger metro areas, followed by Holland-Grand Haven and Warren-Troy-Farmington Hills, both Michigan MSAs.

Indeed, of 10 Michigan MSAs, Battle Creek, which ranked 121 of 179 smaller metros, was the best performing (or least worst) city.

Other interesting points: the Clarksville, Tennessee/Kentucky, MSA was the most improved large city, while the Santa Barbara-Santa Maria-Goleta, California, MSA was the worst.

Altoona, Pennsylvania, was the most improved small MSA. Prescott, Arizona, was the worst.

Anyways, in case you were wondering if city size has much to do with how good a city’s economy has been performing, it turns out it doesn’t. I got ambitious with Excel and produced the following chart to see what effect population may have had. The smallest big city (Merced, California) is on the left of the Y axis. New York is on the right of the Y axis. I used a floating mean and, as you can see, it does float. It goes up. It goes down. But, in the end, the mean of the eight largest cities is just about the same as the mean for the eight smallest cities. Still figuring out how best to work Excel. Hopefully the next chart will be prettier.

That is an amazing vote of confidence for a journalist in a small city. The economic realities of local journalism mean that money from advertisers – most often car dealerships – comprise most, if not all, of a paper’s revenue. For the publishers of those papers, it becomes very easy to bend down on knee and acquiesce when an advertiser expresses displeasure with something that has appeared in the paper.

As just one example, the editor of a Wisconsin newspaper was demoted after writing a column that talked about why she had begun to shop at local big box stores.

Months after being named editor, Drussell wrote in a July column that she was shopping more at low-cost big box stores because of the economy. She suggested that local businesses improve customer service, stop badmouthing their areas and appeal to frugal customers to stay competitive, advice offered at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon she attended.

The column upset some of the newspaper’s advertisers in Stoughton, a city of around 13,000 people about 20 miles southeast of Madison, including hardware store owner Jim Gerber. He warned the paper he would not advertise again until the economy improves.

A post on the blog of Mark Oppenheimer (he being the subject of another recent post) brought this to my attention. It’s hardly a unique situation for advertisers to throw their weight around.

Noted Oppenheimer in his preamble:

This type of thing is endemic in the news industry, of course—there is reliable evidence that the Hartford Courant, where I used to work, punished a business reporter for not cozying up to advertisers, and at the New Haven Advocate, which I used to edit, extra careful attention was paid to restaurant reviews (by our publisher, who was always eager for me to do more of that dirty work) to ensure they did not go too hard on advertisers or potential advertisers. It is a fact of life in the business, worse some places than at others.

Alas, the problem with one publisher intruding into the editorial side of his newspaper is that it has a trickle down effect to reporters, editors and readers elsewhere. An editor sees one publisher’s nefarious actions and questions whether his publisher would do the same. A reporter pulls his punches because he can hardly afford to be without a job and a paycheque these days. And a reader sees what happens at another city’s newspaper and assumes that all outlets are the same. Which, thankfully, they are not.

First, we’re part of the so-called “mainstream media,” or alternately, the MSM.

But the other reason is that the predominance of media outlets in large cities tend to shape our culture to an enormous extent. They evangelize metropolitan values and beliefs (often for the better) while often understating the importance of backwater cities.

The media landscape of small cities is dramatically different from that of larger centres. Most (but not all) small cities do have a daily paper. Some also boast TV news outlets. But other cities, including Chilliwack, where I’m a reporter, rely on twice- or thrice-weekly newspapers for their local news. Large outlets based in regional capitals may cover big stories, but they are more likely to parachute in a reporter than have one on the ground.

For the most part though, small cities rely on small media institutions for their media.

Where am I going with this?

For the first time in three years, the valuations for weekly newspapers are beginning to rise, says the newspaper brokerage firm W.B. Grimes & Co.

Beyond being a mere business story, the other trend is the relative health of media outlets in small cities. The phrase “hyperlocal” has been bandied around much in discussions about how news outlets can stay relevant. Most of this has been in relation to how the media works in large centres, the idea being that an outlet can tailor its product to a neighbourhood or part of the city, rather than millions of people. In smaller cities, news has always been hyperlocal.

To bring us back to that news blurb, the reason this is important is because media outlets have to be able to beat the internet. The only way you can do that is by providing information that you can’t get free over the internet.

Weekly newspapers, which are read by people interested in local news, are fortunate enough to have a monopoly on this. In small cities there simply aren’t enough people who want to report for free and with only one or two papers reporting on the local council and crimes, the newspapers still have life.

Compare that to your regional metro newspaper with the wire service article about India. As good as the reportage may be, that information is available on TV, on the net, and probably in a number of other newspapers.

Fortunately, this all means that while big cities panic about losing newspapers, as has happened in Seattle, San Francisco and Detroit, smaller cities are better placed to weather the internet storm.

Tomorrow, the downside of small city newspapers.

I’m not sure when Mark Oppenheimer wrote this article (although it seems to have been before the death of David Foster Wallace), but he does a wonderful job of articulating why small cities may not be the cultural wastelands some people think them to be.

Hobvias Sudoneighm/creative commons

Oppenheimer, who grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts, and now  lives in New Haven, Connecticut, notes that while New York seems to be THE centre of any and all culture in North America, much of the best fiction writing springs from the centre of the continent.

Here’s an excerpt but you really do need to read the whole thing.

And while time will tell, it seems that the most lasting fiction writers working today live away from New York: David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, Marilynne Robinson, Alice Munro (if I may bring in a Canadian), Michael Chabon, Cormac McCarthy, Robert Stone, and of course Roth and Updike. None of them lives in a big city, unless you count Chabon, who lives just miles from San Francisco. Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo would seem to be exceptions, but it is interesting to note that Pynchon is from Long Island originally, and DeLillo was born in the Bronx and attended Fordham University. They are locals, not aspirants.

…

But I believe that for many people—not all—there is something neurotic about an attachment to the big city. After all, most of us do not come from the big city; we come from small towns, medium-sized towns, suburbs, exurbs, farms. Those are the places that made us. If we like who we are, like what we’ve become, then might there not something disordered about turning our backs on our nativity? The flight from our regions and regionalisms is, in this way, not so different from the fl ight from our ethnicity, or our religion, or our family ties. It bespeaks an inner conflict, which is always a kind of sadness. It’s not surprising that as soon as they can afford it some young urbanites hire others to lead their lives vicariously, to walk their dogs andraise their children. Living in a big city is not the cause of alienation from oneself, but it can be a symptom, and another symptomis the willingness to delegate life’s richest pastimes to employees.

Steve Damron/creative commons

In a long and interesting article (with graphs! and charts! and maps!) cribbed from his Wall Street Journal column, Richard Florida writes about how some suburbs are trying to remake themselves these days. In short, he paints a picture of suburbs trying to escape the much-mocked car-and-strip mall idea for more urbanized, walkable communities.

We care about this because Florida is urging far-flung suburbs to transform themselves away from residential outposts of a large city into livable communities that promote the ideas and innovation that larger metros are so good at inspiring; in other words, he wants suburbs to become successful small cities that interact with, rather than rely on, their larger bigger brothers.

I myself am a card-carrying, dyed-in-the-wool urbanist; I’ve lived in inner-cities for most of my adult life. But I believe my urbanist fellow travelers are making a big mistake when they impugn suburbanization wholesale. Suburbs don’t always grow at the expense of cities; suburbanization and urbanization alike are parts of a larger process. Studies reveal that, counterintuitively, suburbs don’t draw most of their populations from the inner city, but grow by attracting people from small towns and rural areas further out, as well as immigrants from foreign countries, more than 50 percent of whom bypass cities and settle directly in the suburbs of larger metro areas, according to research by Brookings’ Audrey Singer.Great metropolitan areas are like economic suns; their gravitational appeal is irresistible. Suburbs and cities are mutually dependent; they blur into each other at the margins. And the most successful suburbs share many attributes with the best urban neighborhoods: walkability, vibrant street life, density, diversity.

Density, the clustering of people and firms, is a basic engine of economic life—for cities, suburbs, and nations. When interesting people rub against each other, they spark new ideas; the clustering of economic assets and activities accelerates the formation of new entrepreneurial enterprises and dramatically increases overall productivity.

The crux of this entire argument is the acknowledgment that suburbs need to do more than warehouse people who don’t want to, or can’t afford to, live downtown. Those suburbs that will prosper will be those that can function independently, or at least semi-independently.

For those of us who want to be able to work in knowledge-based cities that have cultural opportunities but from which we can escape to go camping in less than an hour, we can only hope the voices of Florida and those like him are heard.

We need them to be loud and proud about their ideas because all these plans require the sign-off of local politicians. Most notably, suburbs and small interconnected cities that aspire to be more dense require public transportation.

Traffic is the number one reason such people hate big cities (although they do also like their backyards). People need to be able to work close to home or, when they do commute, they need to be able to do so quickly and without a headache. And for that you need public transportation.

The problem is that to succeed, public transit requires density.  But sometimes it’s the chicken and other times it’s the egg. Done properly, access to transportation can inspire further densification, and in turn walkability. But for that, though, you need to convince politicians and the public to spend billions on transit instead of highways.

photo by bidgee/creative commons

• Australia’s New South Wales state is trying to attract discontent Sydney residents to its seven largest towns, Albury, Armidale, Bathurst, Dubbo, Orange, Tamworth and Wagga Wagga (I live in a town in Chilliwack, so I’m hardly one to question a name but still, Wagga Wagga? Apparently “Wagga” means crow in the local Aboriginal language. They repeat a word to make it plural).  Anyways, the state government is promoting the availability of jobs and the lack of traffic jams and long commutes. Sounds ’bout right.

• Grand Prairie, Alta., a small city in Northern Alberta (re: the middle of nowhere), hopes to become a wireless “smart city.” It’s betting that better technology will allow residents, politicians and businesses to take advantage of existing infrastructure. It’s also suggested that it may be easier for small cities to get smart than larger centres. Money quote:

There is also the limitation geography poses on the speed at which cities can smarten up. Small cities may be better able to make the change than large ones, says Brad Emond, information technology services administrator for Grand Prairie.

• A surprisingly optimistic account of the job market in Missoula, Montana, led to questions over how national agencies report on the economies of small cities. Despite losing a major employer, a report said Missoula led the nation in job growth. In August, Missoula was named as one of 22 cities at risk of a double-dip recession. The reason for the quirky results may have something to do with the city’s size.

“You will often notice that smaller MSAs often top the chart for the best or worst growth,” Wagner said. “Because of the smaller job base overall, the small MSAs will show a larger percentage growth.”

• A blog post blast from the past: In 2008 Cassandra at Teller of Truths came right out and said it:“Small town values suck.” Cassandra lived in Grand Forks, North Dakota, at the time and wrote, in response to a Sarah Palin comment: “People in small towns are no more honest, sincere, or dignified than people in cities, and a lot of times, they are substantially less so.” She notes that people feel more comfortable expressing bigoted ideas or values in small towns. She guesses that big cities are more diverse and thus you’re more likely to have to deal with people from other backgrounds. That and the inevitable small-town gossip.