Small Town Indiana Corporation

01/12/2026

Why do we call it “economic development” when it’s actually economic extraction?

Your town has a Home Depot. That store earns about $49 million in annual sales.

Of that $49 million, about $7 million in pure profit gets loaded up and shipped back to headquarters. Every single year.

Now add Target ($2.5M extraction), Walmart ($2.3M), Lowes ($7M), Dollar General, McDonald’s, Applebee’s, CVS…

A town of just 15,000 people can easily lose $30+ million annually to national chains.

That’s $30 million that used to pay local contractors, local accountants, local ad agencies. Money that used to recirculate through your community 7-10 times. Money that stayed with local families, that went to maintaining homes or supporting the t-ball team.

Now? One and done. Straight out of town.

This is the sprawl economy. We traded local ownership for “convenience” and wonder why our towns are broke.

Do your local officials calls this progress?

Because its really a money mining operation.

How much money is your town shipping out every year?

06/11/2025

Here we go again... We'll try to go a level deeper this season. Then we'll hand the social media off to the people who are good at this! 🙂

06/04/2025

Great point! How do we better utilize what’s already being done?

In a town of 25,000 people, you can expect around 12,000 volunteer hours each month dedicated to local organizations, assuming national averages hold. According to Volunteering in America, about 25% of adults formally volunteer, and the average volunteer gives around 2.5 hours per month.

Which is amazing, but here’s the problem. Studies suggest that as much as 40% of that time gets spent in meetings. That means nearly 5,000 hours a month in a single community might be burned just sitting around, listening to reports and talking about what needs to be done instead of actually doing it.

That’s the equivalent of 30 full-time people stuck in meeting hell every month!

What could your town accomplish with an extra 5,000 hours a month?

05/28/2025

One week to go! Reading up about debt, it’s key to where we’re going!

05/19/2025

2 weeks left until we start the episodes and the conversations about more communities!

05/08/2025

Our next season based on “Assets” (episodes 51-100) start to drop in just 3 weeks! I hope you’re keeping up with your reading, if not Joseph Stiglitz is brilliant and I spent a lot of time following him around campus when I was at Columbia.

04/18/2025

One of the biggest mistakes we make in community development is assuming that what exists is what people want. We conflate supply with demand. But just because something is present doesn’t mean it’s preferred.

When a town doesn’t have any downtown apartments, people often assume, “Well, no one must want to live downtown.” When we keep building subdivisions with vinyl siding and strip malls anchored by yet another Dollar General, we start to believe this is what people want. When things decline, when things fall into disrepair, we tell ourselves, “This must be what the community prefers.”

But none of that is true. It’s just the way things are.

These outcomes are the product of policies, outdated zoning, outdated thinking, and a failure of imagination—not a reflection of collective desire. Most of the time, our towns don’t look the way they do because we chose this, but because this was all that was allowed, incentivized, or permitted by the prevailing systems.

The truth is, everyone likes nice things. Everyone prefers beautiful homes made of quality materials. Everyone loves vibrant, walkable downtowns with local coffee shops and bookstores. People go out of their way to travel to places that offer charm, character, and a sense of place. No one is taking their family vacation to the Dollar Store next to the Starbucks.

What we’re dealing with is a confirmation bias. We assume what we see is what people want. But people are just adapting to what’s available.

If we want our towns to get better, we have to learn how to work past that bias. We have to recognize that current conditions are not proof of community preference—they’re a symptom of deeper dysfunction. And if we keep mistaking the symptoms for the solution, we’ll keep building a future nobody actually wants.

04/03/2025

A brilliant read on how communities are changing in America and what real revival looks like…

03/28/2025

You’ll need this to understand what we’re fixing.

03/26/2025

Episode 50: The end of the series on our history of Argos starts an entirely new venture. If this system can help other communities that may be experiencing other systemic problems, why not help them? Especially when some of them ask us for exactly that...

03/25/2025

03/02/2025

Episode 49: How do inclusive economics work? What is Kind Capitalism? and how have the economic systems provided real specific gains for the people of Argos? One wonders, could this system be used to help other communities?