Staff Spotlight: Exploring Main Street Archetypes with Research Intern Jonathan Nerenberg
This summer, our archetypes intern explored different types of Main Streets and the unique challenges and opportunities that they face.
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Made up of small towns, mid-sized communities, and urban commercial districts, the thousands of organizations, individuals, volunteers, and local leaders that make up Main Street America™ represent the broad diversity that makes this country so unique.
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As the Senior Director of Research, Mike develops research projects that demonstrate the power and potential of Main Street communities. This includes work managing research partnerships, steering research efforts from design through execution, and gathering and analyzing data related to the performance of Main Streets across the country.
Mike has more than 15 years of experience conducting groundbreaking research on the links between communities’ physical fabric and their social, cultural, and economic vitality. Between 2013 and 2020, Mike led research for the National Trust for Historic Preservation that empirically assessed the contributions that existing buildings and commercial districts offer cities.
Through the Trust’s “Older, Smaller, Better” and “Atlas of ReUrbanism” projects, he demonstrated the statistical links between blocks of older, smaller, mixed-age buildings and an array of important community and economic development outcomes in more than 50 U.S. cities. Mike also played a significant role in the National Trust’s Partnership for Building Reuse with the Urban Land Institute, steering policy conversations focused on strengthening building reuse opportunities in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, and Louisville. He holds a Master of Urban and Regional Planning degree (2006) and a doctorate in Planning, Policy, and Design (2010), both from the University of California, Irvine.
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This summer, our archetypes intern explored different types of Main Streets and the unique challenges and opportunities that they face.
Our Research team shares the results of the Spring 2024 Small Business Survey, with insights related to small scale manufacturing in Main Street districts, opportunities to best support entrepreneurs, and more.
Meet BOOMS Tracker super user, Brian Kramer, and learn how he is using to tool to build a deeper understanding of his Main Street district.
Join the Main Street America Research Team for a webinar on June 20th to learn more about how to use the Building Opportunities on Main Streets Tracker.
We are asking small business owners across the country to share their perspectives on the opportunities and challenges they're facing as summer approaches.
We are excited to announce the Building Opportunities on Main Street (BOOMS) Tracker, a new free tool to help designated Main Streets unlock the potential of their vacant properties. This user-friendly property inventory tool allows local leaders can gather, store, and showcase information about their district’s built environment to plan and advocate for new property uses.
Designed for local leaders, this user-friendly property inventory tool allows users to easily gather, store, and showcase information about buildings and lots in their districts. The Building Opportunities on Main Street Tracker (BOOMS) Tracker is available to all designated Main Street districts in our network.
From budgets and staffing to programming priorities and the myriad of backgrounds that bring people to Main Street, the insights and key findings from this year's trends survey provide a snapshot of the state of the Main Street Movement.