The Roots of a Resilient Small Former Mining City Economy

[M II A II R II K]

The Roots of a Resilient Small City Economy in Durango


April 22, 2021

By Daniel Herriges

Read More: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/...omy-in-durango

The history of modern Colorado, like much of the American West, plays a significant part the history of mining. The hunt for gold, silver, lead, tin, and so on was what motivated many of the expeditions of white settlers into the state's forbidding mountain passes and valleys in the nineteenth century. Durango, in the southwestern part of the state, is no exception.

- Every place where the economy is premised on the exploitation of a finite, non-renewable resource eventually reaches a point where it must either adapt or die. In that, Durango's highly successful adaptation makes it a powerful model of what the future could look like for former or present mining communities throughout the region. — A city of 17,000 people in a county of 51,000, Durango is now known as a tourist town leveraging its renewable resource of mountain views and skiing and hiking opportunities. The former site of the smelter is a dog park, and the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad, recognized for the spectacular scenery along its route, hauls sightseers instead of silver ore.

- Even tourism poses challenges for growing a resilient and diverse economic base. Tourism is a cleaner, greener version of the resource economy, but it doesn't wholly address the question of whether the community is building its own financial productivity, and developing in a way that can sustain that productivity over time. — The answer almost always involves a compact, walkable, strong downtown core that anchors the community. And it involves nurturing a robust ecosystem of local businesses that will generate prosperity and keep the proceeds at home. — In Durango, they've been making the investments in downtown and in locally generated prosperity that they need to make. And we can see what it looks like when those things start to pay off.

- In 2015, the geoanalytics team from Urban3 paid a visit to Durango and did an analysis of property and retail tax revenue generated by area of the city. Urban3's work in Durango demonstrates the power of a strong downtown anchor, as usual. But it also contains a couple of interesting findings that might surprise. — One is that we can dispel the myth that the sales taxes generated by chain and/or big-box retail are such a boon to communities that they override the low property tax value generated by these stores. — In 2018 we wrote about how, in fact, retail tax revenue in Durango closely tracks sales tax revenue, and is much higher on a per-acre basis in the walkable downtown dominated by local businesses than in South Durango, which is dominated by automobile-oriented chains.

- What's going on downtown is the success of a local business ecosystem, not just a few successful businesses. As Joe Minicozzi of Urban3 put it to me, when you think about the owner of the downtown coffee shop or bookstore versus the Starbucks down the highway, "Who's using a local accountant? Who's using a local print shop? Who's sponsoring a little league team?" Local business owners are more apt to support each other by using local services, but they're also more likely to explicitly cooperate toward shared goals. — The city government has also been willing, often at the request of small businesses, to reassess the public space of the city and how it's serving the community.

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