Some small Iowa towns figuring out how to ‘Shrink Smart’

A handful of Iowa communities and a group of Iowa State University researchers are trying to demonstrate that less can, in fact, be more, and small can, in fact, be vibrant.

If you’re smart about it.

In an outgrowth of community surveys begun a quarter century ago, ISU researchers have identified what they call “Shrink Smart” communities. Like many other cities, particularly smaller free-standing rural communities, they have steadily lost population since the 1980s recession and farm crisis.

Yet, the residents of Shrink Smart communities view their cities as having a high quality of life, according to survey data.

They’re safe. They’re nice places to live and raise families, and to have fun. They also have good internet access, making it possible to work and live there. Many feature historic older houses and preserved, reused commercial buildings and schools and small business start-ups.

The Iowa State researchers visited a half-dozen of those cities, studying them to gain insights into what's keeping the quality of life high while the population is going down.

“To me, the cities that are maintaining quality of life are those that have been able to pivot and find ways to exist outside of being an agrarian community,” said Bruce Perry, a fourth-generation Sac City resident — and a Shrink Smart city in west-central Iowa of just over 2,000 residents.

Perry, a Sac City Council member, said he and his friends in Sac City recall a time, when he was in kindergarten in the early 1960s, when a school bus could drive 1 square mile and fill up with kids from large farm families.

With a shift to more mechanized agriculture, and a decline in family size, those days are gone.

Sac City’s population has declined by 157 people, about 7 percent, in the past 10 years, according to 2020 Census. The middle school is closing after this school year.

The trend there mirrors other communities in Iowa and the Upper Midwest.

In Iowa, 636 of the state’s 923 towns with fewer than 5,000 people lost population or made no gains between 2010 and 2020, according to an IowaWatch analysis of census data.

Another 41 of the 923 towns with fewer than 5,000 people gained only 1 percent in population. The remaining 246 had population gains above 1 percent.

“We still have to have our agrarian base,” Perry said. “But we need to find other things to augment that agrarian economy.”

Working together

The people who live in Sac City and the other Shrink Smart communities — with some help from former residents — work together on projects to keep their towns nice, and individuals work in concert with local government.

In Sac City, it’s a streetscape project and a study for reusing the middle school.

In Elma, in northeast Iowa, it’s a $1.2 million fund drive for conversion of an elementary school building into a community center for a new public library and child care center.

In Bancroft in north-central Iowa, it’s pooling resources for a big Fourth of July celebration and opening a building to house a grocery store and new “value-added” ag businesses, like a precision-farming seed operation, and a distillery.

Representatives of those three communities participated in a panel discussion on Shrink Smart cities at the Iowa League of Cities annual conference in September. The panel was hosted by ISU professors involved in the Shrink Smart program, including Kimberly Zarecor, a professor of architecture.

“With each community, people in the audience were just amazed to hear all the creative ways they get people involved, get businesses involved,” Zarecor said.

“All the communities have a lot of volunteers for activities,” she said. “People were so pleased. … These communities have all lost people in the last census. The communities are not growing — and yet, we see all this very active work.”

Communities may not control larger economic or social forces, Zarecor said, and shrinking is likely to continue.

"But within a community, the people who want to be there, the people who have chosen to stay, and some of them are returning, what we’re finding is that they can still do all of this even as the population loss continues," she said.

Quality of life

The Shrink Smart project has received backing from the National Science Foundation in its Smart & Connected Communities grant program. The project received $1.5 million in support for the research in 2017, with work expected to extend into 2024.

The “Shrink Smart Small Towns” were initially identified in a 2017 Iowa State publication, based on ISU-compiled Iowa “Small Towns Project” polling data from the early 1990s.

“It’s a different approach, and it looks like it’s working in a number of places,” said Biswa Das, an ISU professor of community and regional planning involved in the Shrink Smart project.

It’s an approach not necessarily predicated on the standard economic development measures of new and expanding business and job and population growth, but on maintaining quality of life.

The researchers emphasize these towns may not rebound to the population levels of decades ago, but they’re going to remain alive and vibrant.

The ISU researchers are working with the Iowa League of Cities and the Shrink Smart communities to pass on what has worked in those cities to other communities in the state and the Midwest.

“This gives us a new opportunity to learn about why certain smaller rural communities are successful. And honestly, that’s what our members want to hear about,” said Alan Kemp, executive director of the Iowa League of Cities.

“This was really a chance to home in on just this issue and really highlight those cities who are doing well, and then take the information and take it out to our other communities that would like to find out, ‘Well, maybe we can do that.’ ”

Kemp has been working with Iowa’s cities — now numbering 923 — for more than 20 years. He was skeptical the state could maintain that number.

“We do lose a couple (of cities) a year. But I’m mostly amazed at the fact that they do stick around. They view themselves as remaining vital, regardless of their size,” he said. “They really do want to find ways to achieve success. That may be just maintaining themselves. I think that’s the real value of this program.”

Idea from Europe

ISU architecture professor Zarecor started on the Shrink Smart project about five years ago, based on previous research she’d done on the history of architecture of Eastern Europe.

“I studied Czechoslovakia, and one of the cities where I lived and did research is a shrinking city,”: she said. “There was a body of research in a European-urban context about shrinking cities.”

Back in Ames, Zarecor reached out to ISU sociology professor David Peters, with the Iowa Small Town Poll, who has a background in rural sociology, to see what might be possible.

“There seemed to be an urgency to address what was, and still is, a kind of spiraling situation — that small towns are losing people quickly, and they don’t seem to have any strategies for handling that,” Zarecor said.

“Smart shrinkage, as a concept, is interesting … because it accepts shrinkage as the start of the project,” she said. “It’s not an effort to grow communities. It’s not an effort to have strategies for them, in the long term, to add people or jobs.

“It’s about looking at places where shrinkage is a fact of life, or it’s the new normal, and what does a community do?”

The ISU researchers failed to find any research on the topic so built their own methodology using data from the Iowa Small Town Poll to find communities where the population was shrinking but people perceived their communities as improving.

“So we’re not necessarily looking at the highest quality of life. We’re looking at the trend line of improving quality of life,” Zarecor said.

“We were really interested in this ‘purposive’ behavior,” Peters said.

“The (conventional) narratives are either, ‘All small towns are declining and withering away economically, demographically, socially,’ or you have people who are filling communities with false hopes that ‘If you build a business park,’ or ‘you do programs X, Y and Z,’ you’re going to grow your town,’ " Peters said.

What stood out was the concept from the European Union.

“It’s kind of accepting the directions of your town,” Peters said. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the quality of life in the community can’t be decent. It’s not going to be the same as an Ames or an Ankeny. But you can have a great quality of life.”

Traits in common

The researchers used the poll data and visited communities to ensure the perceptions were correct. They were.

“All towns have leaders and strong leaders,” Peters said. “The style of leadership matters much more than having a leader.”

Inclusive or shared leadership will triumph over closed or top-down leadership.

“Shared leadership — this openness, transparency and having this leadership be fluid — is a characteristic in most of these towns,” Peters said.

That leadership is embedded in city staff, even if that is one or two people or just a part-time clerk. “But in each of the communities that we have been in, that person is somebody who’s a leader and very focused on the work and doing a great job,” Zarecor said.

The money

ISU professor Das brings expertise in local government finance, working with communities around the state for several years.

“A lot of them go through this prolonged phase of fiscal stress,” Das said. “It’s getting more and more challenging to maintain the levels of revenue; there’s more and more state-mandated legislation."

But, he said, "to Kimberly’s point, some of the communities we’re working with have been smart in how they have been borrowing,” paying off debt before issuing more for additional projects.

Das said leadership and private capital are key, noting projects in Shrink Smart communities do not rely solely on public resources.

“People ask often, when we talk about this project, where do they get this private money?” Zarecor said.

“It’s wealth from within the community — from people who have been long-term residents, whose businesses have thrived in these places. Especially as they retire, they are willing to share the money they have built up over a lifetime of connection and relationship-building in the community.

“It’s not that you can’t do things without these people,” she added. “But I think it’s important for people to understand there is a spirit of generosity, and this is part of what we see in the communities that are doing better. Because I think there’s maybe a sense (of) the public good.”

Zarecor talks about a city clerk who received a large cash donation in the mail from a former resident of one of the Shrink Smart communities.

“We’ve been impressed to see that people don’t necessarily want to get credit and are willing to give money that’s for efforts they know will benefit a broad swath of the community,” Zarecor said.

“It doesn’t seem to be ego driven. It’s more about the quality of life. I think in these towns the wealthy people who do give a lot are very much appreciated.”

New leaders

In their visits to the Shrink Smart communities, the ISU researchers generally found one or two people who’d been devoted and working hard for the long term.

“The danger comes when those people have to step aside” for age or family reasons, Peters said. “It takes a dedicated individual; and can you institutionalize that? Is that possible?”

Some cities, Zarecor said, are mentoring a new generation of leaders.

“All the towns recognize they should be doing this, that they should be bringing younger people into the civic work and into leadership roles,” she said. “But it’s also idiosyncratic those people happen to be there. It’s kind of the perfect confluence.”

Pat Kinney is a longtime Iowa journalist who previously was a reporter and editor at the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier.

IowaWatch — the Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news outlet focused on investigative journalism and educating young journalists. IowaWatch reporting in this project was made possible by support from the Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous and compelling reporting about responses to social problems.