What can small towns do about crumbling buildings in their downtown? They can join together to fix them up and get businesses in them. Our own Jeanne Cole helped to bring this building back in downtown Waynoka. Photo by Becky McCray.
Waynoka, Oklahoma, had a lot of vacant run-down buildings in their downtown. In a town of 900 people, the prospects didn’t look great. At an all-class reunion, a group of alumni got together and decided to change that.
They called themselves Project Waynoka, our friend and early contributor Jeanne Cole said. They started raising money. They bought one building. They raised more money with community events. They scrounged for materials. They rallied volunteer labor. They brought this one building up to code, then sold it.
The public library in Waynoka is housed in a building that Project Waynoka rehabilitated. Next door is a vacant lot that the library uses for event space and that features a veterans memorial. Photo by Becky McCray.
With that money, they bought another building. More work, more fundraising, even more work, and there’s another building brought back into productive use.
They just kept saving buildings. Buildings that now house locally-owned businesses. The public library. The popular German restaurant.
A few buildings turned out to be in such bad shape that demolition was the best choice. So they took them down and then cleaned up the empty lots.
After decades of working on the project, the volunteer momentum had run down a bit. One key source of low cost labor was no longer available. But they didn’t quit entirely, they just slowed down.
They took on a big challenge with the old American Legion building. It needed a lot of work. They started with cosmetic improvements to the exterior.
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- Before Project Waynoka took on restoration of the old American Legion building, it was in bad shape. Photo by Becky McCray.
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- By 2020, Project Waynoka had rehabbed the facade of the American Legion building in Waynoka, Oklahoma.
It’s a model that any town can borrow: a small group of people rallying the community to save downtown buildings.
A group of Minneapolis neighbors who did a similar thing, with the added bonus of building cooperatives and nurturing local businesses as part of their project. Read more about it here: These Neighbors Got Together to Buy Vacant Buildings. Now They’re Renting to Bakers and Brewers
Chris Miller, of Adrian, Michigan (pop 21k), told me by email that a group of 22 local investors had pooled resources and bought a downtown building. You can read about it in this report: https://mml.org/placemaking/
So that’s one by a private foundation, one by cooperative, and one by LLC.
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Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.
