Starting to Bring Back Main Street

The one thing we know for sure about our recovery from the coronavirus pandemic is that things will be different. Like Yeats’ rough beast, we will slowly slouch toward a New Normal. There are things that we can reasonably predict will happen along the way, but for now we do not know what’s at path’s end. In the next few posts I’m going to look at recovery. As the title implies, I see recovery as bringing back the Main Streets in our communities; regaining some stability and control in our lives in more resilient communities.

The one thing we know for sure about our recovery from the coronavirus pandemic is that things will be different. Like Yeats’ rough beast, we will slowly slouch toward a New Normal. There are things that we can reasonably predict will happen along the way, but for now we do not know what’s at path’s end.

I’ve often criticized federal bureaucrats for not knowing what victory is. Here’s my definition of victory: simply put, more resilient communities. That’s a general statement that few will disagree with, but the Devil’s in the details. To me, communities are complex living systems that carry out common functions for the members of the community. Each community uses the capital it has available to carry out these functions. By “capital,” I mean human, social, environmental, cultural, and institutional capital as well as financial/economic. Indeed, communities perform their common functions through consumption of capital; generation of capital is one of the most important of those common functions. And, as a result of COVID-19, each of our communities has lost tremendous amounts of capital of each kind; no one can argue that our communities are as functional as they were a year ago.

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