Saving Small Towns

Small towns are dying, and it is not just because of their dwindling economies. The physical fabric of our communities is literally crumbling. A visit to most any small town today illustrates the poor condition of their downtown facades. Altered over the years due to design fads, and temporary fixes using inexpensive and inappropriate materials, has left many facades in disrepair. Although many resources, including financial incentives in the way of tax credits, are available to encourage preservation of these buildings, our small-town facades remain largely untouched and left to ruin.

Why are small town building facades not being preserved? The answer goes beyond the lack of interest and the lack of funding. Often, a small-town building owner or buyer is interested in improving the façade but has no idea how to get started on a preservation project. The knowledge gap from getting started, to obtaining tax credits and other funding, to executing the process of rehabilitating a façade seem too foreign and monumental to take on.

In response to this pervasive problem, a community design center with over 40 years of experience working in small towns has recognized this knowledge gap and developed a series of resources to preserve these building facades. “The Preservation Toolkit” is a resource to help users get started on executing preservation-based projects. This free, digitally interactive, and user-friendly resource covers a wide range of topics to make façade preservation achievable.

An additional resource created by the design center is geared toward downtown design standards for historic buildings. Created as a set of recommendations for property owners, the set of best practices includes drawings and photographs of typical small town, downtown structures, noting their scale, architectural styles and features. It also highlights case studies of improper construction versus proper construction in an easy-to-understand format. The goal of both sets of resources is to appeal to the average small town building owner or future buyer to make preservation accessible and understandable in a way that encourages more preservation of small-town building facades, ultimately reversing the trend of both physical and economic decline in these communities.