On the Durability of Main Streets | Main Street America
A large crowd sitting in a dimly-lit theater listening to a person speaking from the stage.

Erin Barnes speaking at the 2025 Main Street Now Conference opening plenary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

One of my favorite things about the Main Street network is hearing all the stories of profound positive change. These stories have drama — and great before and after photos. They show what happens when we work hard to save the places we love, and make them thrive. It’s like taking a fallow field and making it bloom.

But I think there’s something more happening below the surface, and I shared this with the network at our national annual conference in Philadelphia this week.

I think the Main Street work is actually much more like seeding an ecosystem than planting a field crop. Strong ecosystems are balanced, unique, and durable. They can withstand and recover from shocks, and adapt to shifts.

Our downtowns are not fragile, and neither are Main Street organizations. We’ve been around for 45 years and we have adapted and thrived through multiple recessions, a global pandemic, and the biggest terrorist attack on U.S. soil. And we’ve endured countless more local things like funding uncertainties and staffing changes. Even as more challenges arise, we’re ready, because Main Streets are built to last.

I see durability in four components of our work. It’s our job to recognize the seeds of this durability in the places we love, and in the organizations we steward, and help it grow.

Place Durability

First, there is durability in our downtowns themselves. When you walk down Main Street, you’re seeing the results of a lot of trial and error. You’re seeing the layering of investment and knowledge and experience, sometimes over generations. A historic downtown block with a few well-loved businesses represents many, many different kinds of local knowledge. It’s accumulated to build a place that will not just last, but grow and change with the times. So we should look at the places within our districts and across our whole network that are really working, and have been for some time and take lessons from them.

One place that has a lot of place durability is Chinatown Main Street in Boston, a community that has endured since the 1870s. They’re building on an incredible legacy of place and culture, and they’re planning for the future. The Main Street program is piloting micro-grants for small businesses to mitigate the impacts of extreme heat through projects such as painting building rooftops white, investing in induction stoves, and installing water misters outside of storefronts.
 

Chinatown gate in Boston

Boston Chinatown has been a vibrant neighborhood and cultural center since its founding in the 1870s. Photo by Kyle Klein

People Durability

Our Main Street movement is only as strong as its people. Our most successful places are built on passion and dedication — that of staff and board members, people in all levels of government, business owners, and partners. It’s not about all these people being in total agreement, it’s about the bonds of trust they build through shared vision and practice. The most durable Main Streets programs have people who are truly dedicated to the place they’re in. Who share a passion for making it successful. And that’s what keeps them coming back. So we should find allies everywhere we can, find out what people are good at, and bring them in.

I’m always interested in the people who have been a part of the Main Street network in more than one place or at more than one level. One of these people is Marlo Dorsey, who was trained in the Four Point Approach back in the 1980s. She was an entrepreneur living in Laurel, Mississippi, and learned about the Main Street movement, and wanted to join. She and a few others worked tirelessly to write enabling legislation for the City of Laurel. Then they fundraised so that they could all travel to Washington, DC, to learn the Four Point Approach from the headquarters of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, where the Main Street movement was being incubated. She and her team successfully led the movement in Laurel for years before she went to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where she serves on the Board of Directors. Later, she also joined the Board of Directors of the Mississippi Main Street Coordinating Program. As a leader, she believes deeply in collaboration. She told me she thinks of the Four Point Approach as four buckets. One person can carry one bucket well, but to carry all four you need to be collaborative, which leads to the next component:

Practice Durability

As Kathy LaPlante told me, we have a shared commitment to a culture of practice. It’s the practice of working together for years, and decades. It’s the golden bagel tradition at the office. The 8am Board meeting every Wednesday at the same diner. The regular visits to the state legislature. We practice planning, doing, reflecting. We practice recovering from setbacks large and small. We practice by showing up and setting up the chairs for the meeting, or the concert, or sweeping the street after the parade. We practice celebrating together, and dreaming of the next big win. And so we should keep on sweating the small stuff, and keep practicing, because this is how we build trust.

The Main Street program in Emporia, Kansas, survived a years-long shutdown of the statewide coordinating program because the team, under the leadership of Mary Helmer Wirth, had established such a durable practice. The Board of Directors was used to meeting twice a week, so they kept on meeting, and just pivoted to a model without a lot of outside resources. Mary had a model of mentorship, and she invested in the next generation of leaders. She had poured time and energy into cultivating small businesses, and they were strong enough to keep customers coming downtown with a lot less support. Through all of this, Emporia helped make the economic case that Main Street was a resilient model, and the statewide program was reinstated.

Three women standing in front of a storefront holding an award.

The Madison Main Street Program recognizes business owners who design new, whimsical, and attractive window displays. Photo by Austin Sims

Idea Durability

Main Street is a powerful idea. Even people who rarely set foot in a Main Street district will say that they want it to succeed. These places are symbolic and meaningful to so many people for so many different reasons. Maybe they grew up somewhere with a vibrant downtown, or maybe their family came to this country and became small business owners. Generations of people have built memories in our downtowns, and they all want them to keep thriving, even if they don’t know what all goes into them. So we should have faith that Main Streets represent something powerful to a lot of people, and our circle of supporters might be a lot bigger than we think.

I think a lot about Madison, Indiana, one of the three original pilot Main Street programs, which is still going strong and was a 2024 GAMSA winner. Madison is a great place — anyone who visits there can tell you it just feels vibrant. And as an idea, it was a risky one at first. There were lots of people in the early days who thought midwestern downtowns were a relic from another time, that any money invested in revitalizing them was just going against an inevitable current of big box stores. But under the early leadership of Tom Moriarity, more and more people started to see the vision, and realize it resonated with them. It’s now the country’s largest National Historic Landmark District, which shows the power of a strongly held belief in the idea of Main Street, and how that can grow.

These are only a few examples of the kind of durability that our Main Streets are built on. I know there are countless more. Facing a future of deep uncertainty, we know our only path forward is to create places, relationships, cultures and organizations, built to last.