(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 538: Small Scale Manufacturing in Cities

This week we’re joined by Ilana Preuss of Recast City to talk about small scale manufacturing in cities. We discuss the commercial side of economic development, the types of jobs we are creating, and how to build community wealth in left behind places. We also talk about hot planning topics such as jobs housing balance, economic multipliers, and spreading the retail peanut butter too thin.

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Find the SPARK Scorecard here too.

To listen to this episode, find it at Streetsblog USA or the hosting archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript of the show:

Jeff Wood: Illana Preuss welcome to the Talking Headways podcast.

Illana Preuss: Having me here today.

Jeff Wood: Thanks for being here. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Illana Preuss: I am a person who’s always loved great places. I grew up wandering places, and I. When I decided on something to study, I went into city planning and worked in economic research consulting for real estate.

I did federal work in smart growth and then was the vice president and chief of staff at Smart Growth America. And then 10 years ago, a little over 10 years ago, I started my own business called Recast City, where we work with communities to bring small scale manufacturing businesses into. Downtown and other redevelopment projects and economic strategies.[00:03:00]

Jeff Wood: So what led you to that specific niche? ’cause it it’s, it’s very particular right?

Illana Preuss: It is very particular. I seem to be very particular. I worked in this market growth field for a long time on housing and transportation. We were promoting housing Choice, we were promoting transportation choice. I worked on the Transportation for America campaign.

We were really promoting investment in in transit. And through all of that work, I realized that we kept talking about creating great neighborhoods and benefiting people in different neighborhoods, but at the same time, we didn’t talk about what else it meant to create great neighborhoods. And at the same time, I.

Wow, this is like 12 years ago now. I was getting involved in the Maker movement and watching the Maker movement, which was promoting access to tools and education around making things and really making it demographically and democratically accessible that everybody should know and feel like they can make things using tools.

It was very popular and it had been around [00:04:00] long enough that we were seeing businesses grow out of the sector, both technology businesses, but also artisan businesses. And I thought that there was a something there. So I explored this question about what kind of small business, there’s a world of entrepreneurship going on, what kind of small businesses make the biggest difference in neighborhoods to create a place that people love to be, that benefits the people who are there now, but also one that creates a resilient local economy.

I landed on small scale manufacturing, also called product businesses. Anybody who makes a tangible product that you can replicate or package, and I realized that it solves a lot of these questions about how are we creating entrepreneurship and good paying jobs alongside the things like housing and transportation that we’re already paying attention to.

Honestly, I always love trying to figure out the puzzle that nobody else is playing with, and that was part of what gravitated me in this direction is to say, well, we have a lot of people working on housing and transportation. [00:05:00] Great. I’m gonna work on a different part of this broader community development puzzle.

Jeff Wood: It’s interesting ’cause I was just thinking about when I was at Reconnecting America, and obviously you’re at Smart Growth America. We did a lot of housing stuff. We did a lot of housing with transportation stuff. But one of the things that really is really interesting to me and and folks like your friend and my friend Dena Belzer, was kind of the employment connections, right?

Like I. How do you connect transit and transportation to this employment stuff? Because that’s what drives ridership a lot more than the housing stuff. Obviously, clustered housing drives ridership, but it was the employment ’cause people have places to go, places to be places to shop, places to visit their friends, places to go to the hospital or whatever it is.

And so that connection was always really interesting to me. And it’s interesting that you went even deeper on this.

Illana Preuss: Dena is a huge influence on it early on. I love that you bring her up as well. You know, the thing that I learned from all of our transit-oriented development work was exactly that piece of, there are some destinations that are just about jobs, but if we only say jobs, housing balance, and we never [00:06:00] talk about who’s helping grow those jobs, who’s benefiting from those jobs, who owns those businesses, then we’re not.

Thinking comprehensively about the places that we’re making, we’re just sort of waving a magic wand and saying somebody else will take care of the housing or somebody else will take care of the businesses. And you know, at a city level, in many ways, we are siloed. Economic development is often separate from housing or transit.

But the reality is the way that a place is made is not like that. It really all comes together. And one of the ways I started talking to people about it, you know, we’ve done all this work around TOD and mixed use, and I was certainly one of the people that ran around the country saying, mixed use. Mixed use, put it everywhere.

We still spread the retail like peanut butter, and we displaced a lot of people because we didn’t build enough of it. The prices went up, right. There’s lots of factors of why displacement happened, but we also. Weren’t thinking about the end users of all of the different kinds of spaces, [00:07:00] and one of the things that I really love pushing people to think about now is we’re gonna have ground floor retail.

Who do we want using those spaces? What kind of space do they need? What can they afford? For those spaces. And then let’s reverse engineer the proforma. You know, and this is a lot it, it is from the economic analysis of these real estate projects of really figuring out how do we, in fact, get the thing out the other side that the neighborhood needs.

Jeff Wood: Yeah, I wanna get into that discussion about manufacturing and what it is because I feel like some folks might have an idea in their heads when they hear manufacturing, like, what does that actually mean? And you mentioned earlier about the small things that it could be, but I kind of want to go into more detail about that because I think it’s an important kind of starter to our conversation.

Illana Preuss: So when I talk about small scale manufacturing, I am talking about any business that creates a tangible product that you can replicate or package. One of my shorthands for it is hot sauce, handbags or hardware. [00:08:00] Sometimes it’s easier to think about it as artisans to advance manufacturing, so it’s everybody who’s making stuff, which has really grown exponentially over the last decade.

If you think about all of the holiday popup markets and the people who are the amazing artisans selling things there, if you think about the manufacturing that is exploding all over the country, that’s doing domestic component creation for the aeronautical industry, right? So we have this happening in all different ways, direct to consumer and part of our domestic supply chain has plenty of challenges, but it is growing across the country.

What most people don’t realize is that they’re mostly under 50 employees. In fact, most of them are under 20 employees, which means that they’re fantastic neighbors. For the most part. They’re modern manufacturing. They’re clean, they’re quiet, and if they put tools in the windows, they’re really cool to walk by and see things being made.

So we work with communities to identify what are the small scale [00:09:00] manufacturers that are in their community today, and what do they need to grow and to thrive in that community. And it’s this hidden economic engine in every community. It doesn’t matter if we’re working in downtown Atlanta. For a small town in Colorado, population, 600 people are making things and selling them.

And so how do we build up that part of our economy and how do we then work with those businesses to create these great places that we know every community deserves in their downtown, in their neighborhood, main Street, wherever it’s.

Jeff Wood: It’s interesting because I feel like that description of manufacturing doesn’t fit into like how we’ve generated like the code base or the land use ideas of what we think goes where.

When we think of some manufacturing, we’re like, oh, some plant that’s on the edge of town. Right? But it’s actually something that fits into something that we never really accounted for in the way that we plan cities.

Illana Preuss: Well, if we think about form-based codes, right? If we’re saying anything that can fit into this space is allowed here, right?

At the most basic level, that’s what we say form-based codes are. Whether or [00:10:00] not they are or not is a different question,

But that’s exactly what we’re saying here is we’re saying, well, if you have a a 3000 square foot storefront, a consumer product business. That might have a little bit of retail, but is actually using most of that space for production that they’re selling online.

Might be a great user of that space because what we see with these businesses is that they wanna be a place where people gather, they want to connect with the community, they want to have that retail frontage. We’re also acknowledging that most of their revenue is probably coming from online sales or a distribution network.

Maybe they’re doing wholesale, and that actually makes them a stronger business when the businesses are coming in and they are making stuff in the same place that they’re selling it. They’re selling in person, they’re selling online, they’re selling wholesale. They’re also in the biggest markets, and we have examples of this all over the country.

Then all of a sudden they’re, they’re a multi-channel business, right, which is. Sort of the cool thing to say that this business is gonna be really nimble no matter [00:11:00] what’s going on in the economy. And so that’s what we’re doing when we’re saying we want artisan businesses. We want small scale manufacturing in our storefronts.

It can be screen printing that’s shipping nationwide. It can be a food product business that’s packaging hot sauce and sending it to online sales or wholesale to supermarkets. But if it fits into the space in that form-based code that is a storefront, then let’s let it be there.

Jeff Wood: That makes me think also of economic development and different ways that cities pursue that.

And you were mentioning that, you know, there’s lots of ways to get good employment through these processes, but I also wanna look back in time and think about the mistakes that we’ve made in the past. So one of the things that your book talks about is the three mistakes that we made around economic development specifically, which is like, we chased big business, uh, only some places were worthy of investment and real estate was the only goal, really.

So where did some of these come from and, and how hard is it to push back against those original sins as it were?

Illana Preuss: They came from 20 years in our sector working on all sorts of different products. I mean, [00:12:00] they’re, they’re the conversations that I feel like I was having with people everywhere we went.

I always worked in a lot of different communities. That was always a core part of my work and I. Well, we can take them one by one, right? The Chasing Big business, we have lots of great research from Good Jobs first, so that I cite in the book. That really shows that if you are spending a lot of money on recruitment, if you’re giving away tax dollars on recruitment, you’re very unlikely to ever make up that cost.

And when they’re bringing jobs to the community, the vast majority of those jobs, they’re filling with people they already have. The other part of the argument that’s made up in terms of business recruitment is that most communities don’t win that fight. So what is everybody else doing in terms of economic development or economic mobility or creating, you know, good jobs or good business ownership in the community?

Everybody else needs a solution, even if you’re not one of the places that wins one of those fights. So that’s one piece of it. You know, the other part is that I think we just. We spent so many years in economic development, I called it old school economic [00:13:00] development, thinking that if we find one big business, it’s gonna solve all of our problems and it doesn’t.

And we have example over example, over example of some big business coming and it still doesn’t solve all the problems. And what we have found is that when we pursue deep roots. With our local businesses, we’re creating a completely different impact, right? When we help local people create businesses that are using the resources in the community than spending on those resources in the community, the dollars are circulating in the community.

People have the opportunity to own businesses. They also hire from within the community because they’re from the community. And this is a great positive feedback loop within the community versus thinking somebody’s gonna drop into our world and save all of us. Right. Some sort of hero complex in all of it.

A lot of that is just watching what was going on in economic development at the time, and it honestly hasn’t changed. What has changed? I would say. [00:14:00] Five years, uh, especially, is more people recognizing that truth, that the fight to attract and retain talent is about creating great places. And the more that we’re helping people in the community create that their own opportunity, create the business ownership, create the good paying job.

The more that we are creating that great place and creating an opportunity for that talent. So it is, it is a very different way to go about the economic development work and incredibly successful.

Jeff Wood: How much of the difficulty of that is the communications aspect. You see, then the headlines, HQ two, you see in the headlines.

Boeing moves from so and so place to other place, taking money with it. You see all this stuff about sports stadiums, et cetera, but you don’t read the stat that, you know, most of the business growth comes from these small businesses. And that’s another thing that, Dena and I talked about a while ago, was that, you might be able to get a couple jobs here and there from recruiting, but.

A vast majority of people are just [00:15:00] hiring internally and there’s no real big news story there. Like, you know, we brought on an extra person to do typing or to, manufacture this good or whatever, but that’s bigger than these stories that generate so much press.

Illana Preuss: It is a storytelling challenge.

You know, one of the reasons we launched actually a new campaign this past year called Spark 10, is to tell those stories, the stories of the businesses that are doing this, and the stories of the spaces that are helping these businesses. So we selected 10 champions from across the country who are creating businesses and spaces to do exactly that because.

I wanted to make sure that people saw in a very personal way what is happening in different communities, both so that they could feel like, oh, I could do that, but also so they could replicate those models, right? Both the business model and the support space kind of model. I think that we have to turn more of these local business owners into our heroes and have them in the press and tell their story and, and feature them.

That network that’s gonna really explode the exposure of the sector. And we have to tell their story. Look, every elected official is gonna be jealous of somebody else’s toys. That’s sort of the nature of how it seems to work. So the other way we can get there is by saying, no, you actually have everything you need in your community.

Who your community is, is unique and let’s showcase that. And that resonates with people too.

Jeff Wood: The image you brought in my head when you said toys was of the Joker asking about where Batman got his toys. You also talk about networking. That’s something that I. Found really interesting too is like getting all these folks together to talk to each other and something [00:17:00] you see sometimes where, you know, you do round tables and things like that.

And I think that’s interesting. Part of it too is maybe actually getting people together to like help each other that maybe didn’t talk to each other, but should.

Illana Preuss: Yeah. There’s great research out there that showed, especially in time of emergencies, the business owners who have strong connections to other business owners are twice as likely to succeed.

And in the tech sector, we’ve spent years networking our business owners and our entrepreneurs, let’s take the lessons and apply it to this business sector. Let’s bring them together. Let’s make sure that they have mentors who are from their sectors. Let’s make sure that we’re providing them with the direct assistance together that they need.

It’s one of the reasons that I’m a real advocate for cohort programs, both for city leadership as well as for small scale manufacturers, because I think that not only group accountability, but knowing that other people are going through similar challenges is really strengthens what you’re doing to know that.

Oh, you know, I’m facing this challenge in my business or in my city and, and I can talk to somebody else. Not only [00:18:00] facing the same challenge, but we each have nuggets. We’ve figured out that we can share with each other many steps before something as official as a mutual aid society, which is, those are also popping up all over the country right now.

But even just that informal personal network. There’s a lot of considerations around who has access to which people, and if your population is part of the geography that hasn’t had access before, or you’re from a community where access has been removed or hasn’t had access for a long time, being really purposeful about knitting those connections together again, can be incredibly impactful.

Jeff Wood: That goes to something else, which is, you know, how much of this is an idea about creating, you know, belonging social capital ties to the community as a whole.

Illana Preuss: I mean, you know, we have decades of breaking the trust of communities, especially in the world of planning and commun and city development. I was just talking to somebody about, what we’ve done is we’ve really extracted resources and people from a lot of communities, urban and rural, [00:19:00] how do we turn it around and say, actually this is a great place.

This place is valuable. I wanna help you see the value in this place and turn it into what you envision it should be. I shouldn’t be the one telling you what it should be. You can tell me what you see and then let’s ground truth it with business owners in your community. And that’s a lot of what we’re doing with folks with re casing method is really.

Learning from business owners in the community, part-time and full-time business owners in small scale manufacturing to say, where are you today? What do you need right now? What’s working really well? What’s challenging about it? So that the answers, the solutions that we’re creating are very much in response to the challenges and the gaps that we’re identifying in that community.

What we’ve done very often, and this is true of the entrepreneurship community too, as well as the economic development community is saying, we have a solution now let’s figure out what problem we’re solving with that solution. And then nobody wants [00:20:00] that solution because there’s actually no market demand for that solution.

So we’re de-risking the investments by saying, let’s actually go do the user research like technology businesses do. Understand what’s going on in the community and then solve for those problems.

Jeff Wood: What are some of the major barriers when people say they want to, you know, follow this path? What are some of the major barriers to actually implementing it?

Once they figure out, you know, they go through the research, they figure out what people want. What are some of the things that keep them from moving forward?

Illana Preuss: You know, the first step is understanding what do the small scale manufacturers in the community need, and then figuring out what is in fact going on in the real estate and business development capital sides of it.

The biggest barriers in most community right now is real estate. So access to affordable space that is in a state of good repair. A lot of our smaller communities have pretty large commercial properties in their downtown that somebody has sat on for a long time, sometimes for generations [00:21:00] and allowed to decay and is going to take a boatload of money to bring back into use and, vacant properties.

Suppress surrounding property values by 20%. Right? It it’s like having a dump in your downtown. And so figuring out how to pull together the financial resources to either get a hold of those properties and to renovate those properties or to partner with the property owner to do those renovations is a pretty big barrier in a lot of communities right now.

The other major barrier, I would say is that most communities have never thought about small scale manufacturing, and so they don’t have the same infrastructure. To say it in a wonky way. They don’t have the ecosystem in place for those kinds of entrepreneurs. And so there is no business development program.

There’s nobody on the capital side who understands small scale manufacturing at all. They don’t have all of the core steps that, uh, that we have for the sector, like tech sector where lots of people understand it and see the [00:22:00] value proposition in it. And so we have to build up all of those capacities in each community.

Jeff Wood: It feels a lot like the housing discussion in some ways. You have the banks that understand certain products, like the single family home or the five story building, uh, you know, on a podium, but they don’t understand all the little nuances in between. I was thinking also about you know, when I got my house and I had to get, I.

Some insurance. I tried to get insurance from places all over the country and they’re like, what do you mean you don’t have a garage or a car? Uh, what do you mean that you, what do you mean That you have a, a three story building with an apartment on top? You know, it, it doesn’t make sense to them because it’s not the standard and so I feel like that’s kind of discussion we’re having in housing.

But that’s also seems like a discussion that you’re having as well.

Illana Preuss: Yeah, I mean, we spent decades demonizing manufacturing. I mean, the seventies and eighties and nineties, it was manufacturing’s dying. Manufacturing was dirty. We had in movies, we had it in TV shows, and we had federal policy. That really pushed it offshore and in the last decade is when this [00:23:00] resurgence is coming, but we don’t have the systems in place anywhere to really support it, and there are.

Fits and starts in this in pockets all over the country where people are trying to figure it out on their own. But it, it’s a lot of reeducation and it’s a lot of that storytelling we were talking about, right? The more that we can say, Baltimore has all of these different amazing small scale manufacturers.

Here’s the story of three of them and how they’re wildly successful from an economic perspective and connecting that to the capital stack community. The more that they’re gonna start connecting with it, but it takes a lot of educating.

Jeff Wood: What are some of the excuses you get from folks that are skeptical that need the education?

Illana Preuss: What are the excuses I get from people? That’s a great question. I guess there’s a few factors that come in. One is, from a, an investment standpoint, people only see it as high risk. Mostly ’cause they don’t understand [00:24:00] it or it’s not gonna be fast growing like venture capital wants. So people aren’t looking for an exit.

They wanna grow these businesses and hold onto them. So they need a different investment strategy than what venture capital is interested in, which is fine. There are solutions. People just have to be open to them. So I think that’s the challenge on the capital side. On the other side, I think there are a lot of people in economic development who, who discount small businesses.

At the most basic level, anything that has under 50 employees, they’re gonna assume is gonna be too small in terms of an economic impact. When in reality, when we can put these businesses into storefronts. The economic impact of having places that people wanna walk to again, that’s gonna draw foot traffic.

It’s gonna make people feel welcome. It’s gonna have this positive feedback loop that our economic impact analysis sort of suck at measuring. And so our models aren’t up to what we need in most places to really understand the impacts of these [00:25:00] things. And a lot of economic development authorities are only built on the basis of recruitment.

Jeff Wood: That’s so interesting because like the term small business itself is usually political gold, right? It’s, yeah. Small business is this and small business is that, but then they’re not treated as political gold in the end.

Illana Preuss: Absolutely. And the amount of money in a community that goes to the locally owned small businesses versus bigger recruitment dollars is night and day.

I mean, it’s a small, small percent of what’s put out in most communities.

Jeff Wood: There was a really fascinating item in Planet Money the other day about manufacturing, and I don’t know if you read this piece, but basically there were two economists, uh, a right-leaning economist and a left-leaning economist discussing, you know, tariffs and all that stuff, but they were talking about manufacturing and why it should be one of the things that helps.

You know, small town America and Midwestern America, not the superstar cities come back and there were arguments for and against. But the interesting thing to me was kind of that multiplier effect, uh, something that we learned in planning school. You know, you talk about [00:26:00] primary jobs and secondary jobs, and manufacturing actually has a good multiplier.

It could be 1.6 if it’s a regular, you know, small business type of manufacturer. Or it could be, you know, for every job you create, you create four to five jobs, which is more along the lines of like. Tech and finance. And so I think that’s an interesting kind of discussion to have is like how much does that manufacturing induce more jobs in the community, help communities grow over a long period of time, but also can it make manufacturing something that helps cities grow that want to grow that maybe haven’t in a while?

Illana Preuss: Yeah. There’s two things I I think about that. One is the multiplier is such a one piece of the conversation because the multiplier, those models never look at what kind of job you’re inducing. And we’ve used the multiplier so much to make the case for everything under the sun, when in reality the multiplier in most communities has been creating very low wage jobs.

And it’s not all jobs are created equal as opposed to small scale manufacturing that is generally paying [00:27:00] 50 to a hundred percent more, um, salary than a retailer service job. So the other part of that whole conversation is this is actually about how to build wealth in these communities that have been left behind that we’ve neglected for a long time.

It is about small town comeback, but it also is about the pride of being in these places and, and the ownership of these places. And yes, we have to play the game and, and use the economic models to do it. But you know, I think it’s really important to think about not just how many jobs we’re creating or inducing, but what kind of jobs as well.

Jeff Wood: Well, that’s an interesting point from your book too, is like the jobs, they’re probably going to have to buy some special equipment that costs more to build and you’re gonna have some machinist or something that needs to build that. And so there’s a knock on effect where you have a lot of specific things that you’re trying to produce that come from those types of jobs.

I.

Illana Preuss: And the other benefit for small towns is that when we can set up these businesses for online sales or wholesale distribution, they’re quite literally bringing dollars into the [00:28:00] community where that community itself might have a very set income that’s going on. And it’s not about local sales it’s about the export from that community of that product.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. Also thinking about, you’re talking about e-commerce in larger cities like San Francisco and others, it actually has driven up, I think, uh, some of the land prices and some of the larger parcels because they need the space for just in time delivery. They need the space for the next day. Deliveries.

They need the space to store their zoox cars or whatever, self-driving vehicles and stuff like that. Is that something you see everywhere is like the prices of commercial property have gone up? Or is it, ’cause obviously a lot across the country also have these vacant spaces. We have empty storefronts, we have all these other things.

So it’s like how much of it is an A and B problem where some cities have this problem, other cities have that problem, and then how are you solving it?

Illana Preuss: So the problem is pretty universal, that there’s a lot of vacancies. Why that’s a problem is different in different places. The industrial spaces, especially the close in urban industrial spaces in the bigger cities.

Many of them need 700 square feet, and some of them need 2000 square feet, and a few of them need five or 10,000 square feet. So it’s just a different part of the market. We have vacancies all over the place from two different ends of the spectrum. One is, like I was talking about before, there’s real estate that’s been neglected storefronts, historic main street buildings that are in a state of disrepair.

The cost of renovation is so high. And the value, the price that they can get for a lease is so low in some of these communities that the numbers just don’t make sense. And so there is going to have to be some kind of grant or support [00:30:00] to bring those buildings back into use so that it makes some kind of financial sense in the short term.

That’s one end of the spectrum. The other end of the spectrum is the high price places where we’re seeing lots of vacant storefronts in those superstar cities because the spaces are priced very high, and if they change the pricing of that commercial space, they’re messing with the entire financing of the project because they wrote their pro expecting a certain amount of money out of those spaces, so they can’t discount them long term in any serious.

Unless they completely change the underwriting of the project. And so they’re stuck in a very different kind of way. And the third factor is this mismatch where a lot of the spaces that were built in the eighties and nineties and two thousands were really big. They’re expected to be used by the national chains, and the national chains have consolidated over the last 10 years.

They’re in fewer primary markets. They really don’t care to be in your [00:31:00] community if you do not have high foot traffic already. They’re not coming. But we still have these spaces and so there’s these large footprint and spaces, but businesses that want small footprint space. So we have to figure out how to rematch and redivide that space.

Jeff Wood: That’s something I’ve seen recently in San Francisco is like the, banana Republic or whatever. They used to have a huge space where they had a huge showroom for all of their clothes and stuff, and now it’s just like a really small building and then they don’t really care that it’s a small building or a small space that’s like one 10th of what it was before.

They’re just gonna do what they’re doing. The other thing is, like you mentioned in the book and in some of the articles that I was doing research with, was. That there’s these rebates, or at least tax breaks that you get for leaving your storefront empty. Here in San Francisco, you also have Prop 13. So if somebody’s owned a property for a really long time and you have a really low rate, it doesn’t make sense.

If you can’t get that $8,000 rent to give it to somebody else for a shorter term or for a lower rate, if you think that over the next 10 years you might get that rent, right? And so there’s all these [00:32:00] disincentives for renting out places as well.

Illana Preuss: Absolutely. Absolutely, Joe. And you know, part of what I always try to work with communities on is how are we creating a stick and carrot situation?

Are there policies that we can put in place like a properties tax that actually makes it cost prohibitive to sit on vacant properties? And at the same time, are we creating programs that help people who want to make the investments in the space, make those investments supportive, financing some kind of matching grant, and doing both of those things to really push those properties back into use.

Jeff Wood: Yeah, the one up in the corner, I was like, this would really make a great space for me to set up my model trains and just run ’em in the window. Before the pandemic, it was gonna be a cannabis shop, and then now it’s gonna be an ice cream shop, and they wanted $8,000 a month for it. And I was like, that’s not worth 8,000 a month, but apparently somebody’s gonna pay it, so we’ll see.

Okay. That’s crazy, right?

Illana Preuss: Yeah. One of the things that we see a lot of communities do now also with the small scale manufacturers, is a retail readiness program to make sure that people [00:33:00] really understand what it means to go into a storefront and will be successful in it because they got their numbers right before they go in.

Because we are seeing in some of these properties, a lot of our revolving door because people don’t have access to the expertise to know if they’re, they’re ready to, to be in a storefront. So hopefully that won’t happen at the spot you’re talking about.

Jeff Wood: Well, they, they already have a store in Mill Valley somewhere where they’re very successful and so they’re coming into the city, and so I think it’ll be successful, but we’ll see.

There’s been good rotation of places. At first when I moved in, it was just a corner store, and then it was a high end clothing store, and then it kind of has been vacant for the last 10 years or so, which is kind of weird. But yeah. How do we get away from only thinking in the longer term? I think that you mentioned this in terms of the bankers and the VCs that are thinking kind of shorter term, but how do we start to make sure that we’re doing things in a way where you’re doing short term, but it’s also a long term project as well?

Illana Preuss: It’s an interesting piece because I feel like coming from the world of city planning, everything was a long-term plan, right? Everything was what’s, what are we gonna [00:34:00] be building five, 10 years from now? And part of my reaction to that when I started Recast City was to say, what can we do this year that’s gonna make a difference?

And recognizing that small business owners are really in dire straits always. And now,

Jeff Wood: right

Illana Preuss: now. Now it doesn’t matter if it’s now, now, or now five years ago, like it’s now. Right? And we need to do things to help them now A, because they need it, but B, because we’re gonna build buy-in for the bigger, harder stuff that’s gonna, looking at that assessment of the needs.

What are those short term wins that we can create that are real wins, not some poster child for a win? Create real wins for the small businesses, some meaningful benefit for them, but that also is gonna be building buy-in from elected officials or other local leaders to be able to create that bigger, harder project [00:35:00] later on.

And it totally depends on the community, right? In one community we worked in, the quick win was creating a commercial shared kitchen, which in other communities was gonna be their long-term win, but it happened to be that they had the right partner in the right place and the right financing in line in six months.

And that was just their unique outcome in another community, it was all about this was during the ARPA money, they launched a grant program. Right off the bat to help small scale manufacturers cover the cost of the high lease rates in their downtown so they could help recruit some of them into their downtown.

So it’s really dependent on that community, but we always wanna do that combination of short-term wins that have a real impact for the small scale manufacturing that builds towards those bigger, long-term, harder things that need to happen.

Jeff Wood: You’re a big fan of interviews and talking to folks. Is there an interview that stands out to you that led to something bigger?

Illana Preuss: So we did a project with Elgin, Illinois. [00:36:00] And they were in our Recast Leaders program, which is our, our national Cohort program. Um, they were in it last year and part of the program is that you do interviews with small scale manufacturers in your community and property owners in your community, and they, through a series of conversations, met with a property owner who now is going to give them a low cost lease to create a retail incubator for product businesses.

This all happened in the last year. That’s a real impact. The commercial shared kitchen that I talked about is in Columbia, Missouri, and they opened one within a year in the middle of the pandemic. Um, they opened their first commercial kitchen and it was so successful that they realized they needed a bigger space.

One of the property owners, they had interviewed from their first round of interviews, we worked with them to understand what the need was, approached them and said, I wanna give you a space. Created a deal so that they build up a whole new commercial kitchen for the area in Columbia, Missouri. I think for me, every time I do an interview, I, I know I’m learning [00:37:00] something.

Uh, it doesn’t matter if it’s a business owner interview I’m doing or a person I’m interviewing for one of our profiles for the Spark, I’m learning about how they do the work that they do. Why they do the work that they do, and that why I find to be so important because it’s in fact the motivating force behind.

It’s funny you asked about the interviews and we were talking earlier about being analysts coming into this, all of this. Where does analysts, one of the things I learned early on was the values of somebody’s why, right? How do we understand somebody’s personal why that connects them to this topic? And what I found as I was making this transition when I started Recast City, and I’ve been talking about smart growth for years and years and years with people, and all of a sudden, the first thing I’m talking to them about are small businesses that make products in their community.

People heard me in a completely different way because I was connecting [00:38:00] to something that they had an emotional connection to. The first time I gave a talk about product businesses, I was in North Carolina and Winston-Salem, and there were people in the audience who came up to me afterwards and said, I feel validated because you are talking about our manufacturing history and that we have the skills to do something great today.

The solution in terms of storefronts or business development or mixed use or whatever it was, that was a traditional smart growth answer was the secondary piece that we were gonna talk about. But it was because people had this emotional connection to what we were first discussing, which made them open up to all of these other ideas, which I think is really important for our field to think about people’s values and people’s whys and what is inherently important to them in all of this.

Jeff Wood: Does that make you think that our discussions are too abstract in the field of smart growth, transportation transit, all that stuff? Maybe we aren’t talking to people the way that they wish we would talk to them about [00:39:00] things or, or maybe to get to the place where we want to be, we have to, you know, use a different language that I.

As technicians and, uh, analysts we’re not used to using.

Illana Preuss: I mean, I think when we’re within the field, anytime we’re even using a term like mixed use, we’re already in wonky language. I really encourage folks to think about how to, we do goal and outcome refining at the beginning of all of our projects.

And when you get a bunch of economic development, people are planners or main street people to write down their goals. It’s wonky, right? It’s wonky. No matter how many times I tell them not to be wonky. Then I get them to drill down and say, how do you wanna experience this place? What’s it like to walk down the street on Saturday at three o’clock or Wednesday at six?

And when they can describe that place, what do they see? What do they hear? What do they smell? All of a sudden, a different part of their thinking turns on. And we started developing a way to talk about what we wanna create that anybody can understand. And I think that when we [00:40:00] use our technical language, it’s okay within the field, right?

Like the medical profession has its language. We’re no different, but it’s alienating. And we have to understand that anytime we use the technical language in the broader public, we are in fact saying you’re not one of us. And so if we want people to connect, then we have to make sure we’re putting it in their language with.

Jeff Wood: I love this. It’s very connected to another episode we did with Kevin Kelly about experiences and creating experiences. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Kevin’s work, but he’s an architect and he works with all of these businesses, and he’ll go into some place and there’ll be an older statesman who’s been running this business for a really long time, and he’s like, I want to create a family experience for the people that come into my grocery store.

And he’s like, well, we can do that. We need to do this a certain way, and we need to like get people’s experiences. We need to think about how they’re feeling, how they’re. Understanding a place he talks about like the Grove and how there’s so many people that love that place, even though some folks in the architecture community or other places might make fun of it.

It’s [00:41:00] actually a place where people wanna be for certain reasons. And so we need to learn from that. And so I think that that continues on this discussion that we’re having about making sure that people feel seen and heard and understand where they’re coming from and the places that they connect to.

Illana Preuss: We flip all of our work on our head because of exactly that.

So when we work with a community, you know, we’re all doers. We all wanna know the answer. That’s the first question everybody asks me is, well, what are we gonna do? And I said, well, we don’t know because we have to go talk to people first and understand what do they think? What do they see? What’s their vision?

What works really well that we should build on already? And then what are those gaps? And then let’s build for that gap. Let’s not assume we know how they see things or what they need, or from a cultural perspective, what they even want. Let’s learn from people first and then de-risk our investments because we are in fact answering and responding to those needs.

Jeff Wood: Another thing that was interesting to me too, along those same lines is like how a lot of the folks that are doing this stuff are hidden a little bit. They’re folks [00:42:00] who have this dream about opening a storefront or they, they do something and they think, oh, this would be fun. But they’re hidden from the people who, if they saw them, they would say, come into our space, maybe you can make this happen.

And so I, I’m interested in that too, is like, how do you find the folks who are doing this work already? Maybe you can make their dreams come true. Maybe you can make it a little bit bigger. Maybe you can grow your business from being just a side gig to like a real long-term job. How do you find those folks and, and how do you bring them into the fold to make everything work out?

1. A

Illana Preuss: big part of our work with folks is to find those business owners who have not been connected to any of the resources in the past. And we do that through the kinds of people I call connectors. Everybody’s got a different name. I call them connectors with a capital C, because these are people who are known and trusted within a part of our community and who believe in the potential of that part of the community and wanna do right by them.

And so it’s about breaking out of our existing networks no matter who we are in the community. Talking one on one with these [00:43:00] connectors and then working with those connectors to bring new people into the conversation. Because ultimately, when those small scale manufacturers can meet each other. They’re going to start figuring out how they can grow their business or we can connect them up with other training programs or other assets.

But you’re exactly right, if we, we have to find them first. And so that is a, an enormous part of the work is to, to stretch open our networks or, or to explode them so that we have this whole other world of people. And there’s a lot of different ways we can go back doing it, but making it truly. Authentic to the community and its culture is, is a big part of it and important to take that step back and think about, I’m talking all about these connectors and the outcomes and at the end of the day, this is also about.

Job creation and entrepreneurship and filling storefronts and successful real estate and creating a place that actually is renowned for being a great place, right? It’s all the same things our elected officials or our appointees [00:44:00] or our real estate developers are all trying to achieve. But it’s coming at it from the people in the community to say, okay, let’s lift up what you already know about your community that works or doesn’t work, and respond to that all with an eye towards this business sector that really does.

Create good paying jobs, create business ownership opportunities. Regardless if you have any college or advanced degree experience. Doesn’t matter what your history or your background is, fits into the storefronts that we desperately need to fill. Makes people proud of where they are. It gives us all of these other benefits that in some ways have been intangible or they’ve always been a one-off theory.

It really starts knitting them all together.

Jeff Wood: Can you tell me about the Sparks Scorecard?

Illana Preuss: Spark score is a labor of love. Um, the Spark Scorecard is this really cool tool that we created to help. Any community leader, capital L, lowercase L, you can be appointed or elected, or you [00:45:00] can be a citizen activist to look at how are you doing in your community for the small scale manufacturing ecosystem, which is a really wonky way of saying, do you have the stuff in place to help your product businesses grow?

It’s 30 questions and some educational videos if you choose to watch them and every step along the way. It’s across these 10 different elements, giving you action ideas that you can pursue within your community. So at the end of the scorecard, you get a score, like a walk score for your small scale manufacturing ecosystem, but you also get a report that you can download that says, based on what I answered.

Here are 10 different things I could pursue, and here are the three I picked to start with, and you can use that to start organizing people in your community to support product businesses and the kinds of things that they need. And it’s across real estate, business development, work, capital, and PR and marketing.

Jeff Wood: Awesome. [00:46:00] You also have a book Recast Your City, how to Save Your Downtown With Small Scale Manufacturing. Where can folks pick this up if they wanna get a copy?

Illana Preuss: You can pick it up through bookshop.org, Amazon, and if you want a bulk order, you can order it from Island Press directly, the publisher.

Jeff Wood: Awesome.

And where can folks find you if you wish to be found?

Illana Preuss: Ooh, you can find [email protected] or you can email me at Elana. resy.com.

Jeff Wood: Awesome. Well, Alana, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate your time.

Illana Preuss: Thank you so much for hosting me today. It’s been great.

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