You know Casey Malmquist’s type. He grew up in the flatlands of Bemidji, Minnesota, and was lured west by powder skiing. In his 20s, he worked at ski resorts outside Salt Lake City and guided river trips around Glacier National Park in Montana. Summers on the Flathead, winters in the Wasatch. “Those were the halcyon days,” he said recently.
When Malmquist started a family, he decided to settle down in a smaller town, something more like Bemidji than Salt Lake City. The natural choice was Whitefish, Montana, and his family moved there in the early 1990s.
Here’s where Malmquist’s story gets unusual. He has a degree in environmental studies, and while he was working construction, Malmquist realized there might be a greener way to do things. In 2012, he started a company, SmartLam North America, that today is one of the only firms in the U.S. producing cross-laminated timber — wall-size panels constructed of glued-together 2-by-6s that can be assembled into everything from luxury homes to 10-story skyscrapers, and hailed as a more sustainable construction material than concrete. Business boomed: SmartLam now has production facilities in Alabama and British Columbia, with plans for three more by 2022. HQ, though, is staying right in the Flathead Valley.
Malmquist said, from a business sense, that choosing where to start the company came down to proximity to timber versus proximity to distribution. But what Malmquist really chose was proximity to the Flathead; SmartLam is based in Columbia Falls, just outside Whitefish. He noticed many of the area’s young people moving to the West’s big cities “to get a decent, well-paying job,” he said. “So I was motivated to create an environment where we can create and provide good-paying, technical jobs, [something] other than serving coffee or changing sheets.”
Casey Malmquist is a rural economic developer’s dream — SmartLam employs about 40 folks in the Flathead Valley, and Malmquist expects to hire 25 more this year as the company expands. That he and his company ended up here wasn’t happenstance, though, and the factors at play are backed up by research. That means people in other towns across the West have the opportunity to make their rural economies more diverse and resilient, too.
In the 1990s, rural communities were growing quickly, and economists with the U.S. Department of Agriculture wanted to know where folks were going, and why. Their first finding: scenery helps. “People really move to where the climate is nice, where there are mountains, where there’s water, and whatnot,” said David McGranahan with the USDA Economic Research Services.
So, with data in hand justifying the snowbird migration to Arizona, McGranahan and crew wanted to better understand why some rural places do great, and others slip into the decline that often dominates the rural narrative. Further research confirmed that the presence of a creative class is correlated with growing economies in rural communities, but they can’t just be there — they have to start value-add companies.
In a 2010 report, McGranahan and his team spelled out this “rural growth trifecta”: leveraging outdoor amenities, presence of a creative class, and an “entrepreneurial ecosystem.” Together, they serve as a roadmap for rural communities trying to build resilient economies hinging on that oft-mentioned but rarely achieved variable: quality of life.
But does it hold up? “Well, it doesn’t work during the recession,” McGranahan said, laughing. “For this kind of system to work, there has to be some optimism.”
Most communities in the West possess that first ingredient: outdoor amenities. Or, at least the potential for them. Many a Western town was settled not for scenery or trail networks, but to dig stuff out of the ground and ship it east. That was the case for Salida, Colorado, a railroad and mining town that, over time, came to rely on jobs at the Climax molybdenum mine upvalley. When moly prices tanked in the 1970s, Salida and other Chaffee County communities saw some 3,000 jobs disappear, and they were written off as the next ghost towns. But a group of dedicated newcomers embraced a different natural resource there: the river.
After an extensive cleanup, the Upper Arkansas River Valley today is an outdoor recreation hotspot. The Arkansas River Headwaters Recreation Area is a whitewater rafting destination, and kayakers can test themselves at man-made whitewater parks in both Salida and Buena Vista, a town upstream. Fly fishers seek out the river’s calmer eddies, and hikers and bikers ride a robust local trail system. Nearby Monarch Mountain ski area keeps locals and visitors busy in the winter.
Charles Forster moved to Salida in 1985 and was president of the local Collegiate Peaks Bank until his retirement last year. He credits the town’s revival to two key elements: the influx of new residents who saw potential in the area, and the landscape that lured them there in the first place — and kept them around.
“The valley has an amazing climate, an amazing base of recreation if you like the outdoors,” Forster said. “You look at the setting, you look at the town, and you say, ‘Man, this can be a really great deal.’ That was the start of people coming here in the mid-’80s, and it just built on itself.”
Forster and a few others in town went beyond just the outdoor recreation economy, though. They kickstarted the redevelopment of Salida’s historic downtown, and Forster’s bank loaned money to the local economic development corporation to buy an abandoned steam plant along the river that today is the town’s focal point.
Similar stories, of course, have played out around the West. After a Utah town’s silver mines went kaput, leaders decided to focus on skiing instead; today, Park City boasts three world-class resorts and brings in the most famous film festival in the world. Most of Colorado’s ski towns started off as mining outposts.
Accordingly, smaller communities across the West are thinking tourism can be a gateway to greater opportunity. Steve Smutko leads the University of Wyoming’s Collaborative Solutions Program, and will soon undergo a one-year pilot project to help remote Dubois, a small town best known for its proximity to hunting and snowmobiling, build a more robust tourism economy. “Outdoor recreation and tourism has good potential for a lot of communities in Wyoming,” Smutko said. “They are really starting to take a hard look at understanding how to make that work for their communities.”
But in the broad economic mix, leveraging outdoor amenities doesn’t mean just going all-in on tourism. Jobs in this industry tend to be seasonal and low-paying, which can foment economic inequality within a city. Indeed, in the West’s premier resort towns — Park City, Vail, Jackson — most workers can’t afford to live in them.
That’s no recipe for equitable growth. But luring hikers, hunters, bikers, and backpackers into town has long-term value — if you can convince some of them to stick around.
Wendell Pryor spent most of his career working in city and county governments, primarily around Denver and the Bay Area. In his late 50s, Pryor was ready to spend more time fly fishing. He and his wife bought property in Salida in 2004 and moved there full-time in 2007, but he wasn’t ready to spend all his time in the river just yet. Pryor led the local Boys & Girls Club for a couple years, and now serves as director of the Chaffee County Economic Development Corporation. One way he’s developed the county economy is by luring more folks like himself to move there.
“It has become a mecca for active retirees … with discretionary spending who want to be involved in the community,” Pryor said. “We move here and look for another gig. That’s what I did with the Boys & Girls Club — we’re doing what we want to do.”
A good deal of rural development talk centers on halting “the brain drain” — the phenomenon of young people leaving their hometowns to pursue degrees and careers. But McGranahan feels that concern is overblown (the Congressional Joint Economic Committee agrees, at least for communities out West). “I really feel like it’s good for young people to get out, see the world,” he said. “They tend to come back to rural areas when they start families. So for me, the question is — how can you attract them back?”
As Malmquist observed in Flathead County, young people are indeed leaving rural areas. According to an analysis by the Pew Charitable Trusts, rural counties have a smaller share of young adults ages 18 to 34 than do suburban or urban counties; meanwhile, the share of their population that’s 65 and older is large and growing.
But an influx of late-career folks can be an asset — and build the creative class McGranahan identified as critical to rural health. Those like Pryor who leave cities for rural areas often do so at an age when they might be willing to take a pay cut to be closer to blue-ribbon trout fishing — but they’re not done with their professional lives. Rather, they might just be at a point where they have the financial and lifestyle freedom to pursue a more meaningful career. And that could mean starting a company that can change a region’s trajectory.
In 2014, Erick Mueller hopped on his Harley Davidson and made the drive from Boulder to Buena Vista, north of Salida, to give what he thought would be a one-off entrepreneurship lesson to a group of local businesspeople. Mueller, who runs the University of Colorado’s Deming Center for Entrepreneurship, had met Pryor at a workshop he held on campus, and Pryor convinced him to hold a similar event in Chaffee County.
“I was thinking there’d be maybe a dozen folks,” Mueller said. “There were 60 people. Standing room only. … I don’t think I’ve ever been in a room so hungry to learn how they can live where they want to live, and thrive.”
Mueller returned to Chaffee County each of the following four years, and has set up similar workshops around the state. In doing so, he’s helping establish the important third leg of a resilient rural economy: an entrepreneurial ecosystem.
The lore of the startup looms large in the West, but entrepreneurs hold a special importance in rural communities. For one, economic diversity is critical — a company town struggles when the company folds, as Chaffee learned firsthand when the Climax mine cut back operations. But the ecosystem McGranahan wrote of doesn’t just mean there are a lot of independent businesses.
“You can’t just start businesses and think everything’s going to be fine,” McGranahan said. “If you support people starting new businesses, they’ll often reproduce what’s already there — another shoe store, another spa. You need something else. That’s part of the reason, I think, you need people who’ve been out, who’ve seen different things.”
That’s certainly been the case in the Flathead Valley. In addition to the cross-laminated timber Malmquist produces at SmartLam, companies are building carbon-fiber rifle stocks, and the local community college has an advanced manufacturing program to supply those businesses with workers. Even software companies with retail analytics and financial services products have popped up in the county of 71,000 people.
What McGranahan’s trifecta boils down to is building a place-based economy. The small towns that are most resilient are ones that find a way to distinguish themselves using existing traits, according to Katharine Ferguson of the Aspen Institute Community Strategies Group. “Instead of looking at a community and saying, ‘What do we not have?’, we stop, and we encourage communities to look at what assets they have,” she said at a recent Western Governors Association panel.
It’s worked in the Flathead Valley. “This place, because of its beauty, because of its opportunities, attracts a certain kind of person,” Malmquist said. “Those people have been motivated to make a living, to provide a living to others, while enjoying all those other amenities. The Flathead Valley — it attracts a really forward-thinking, hardworking, practical people.”
That’s not to say these communities aren’t facing their own struggles. Though they might not be high-dollar enclaves to the level of the West’s best-known resort communities, towns in both the Arkansas and Flathead valleys are struggling with housing affordability. Flathead County is 94 percent public land; Chaffee is 77 percent — that’s a dream for recreation, but it also puts constraints on development, and rural communities are usually hesitant to adopt zoning that allows for dense, affordable housing. That puts the squeeze on senior citizens — all those active retirees will eventually become regular retirees — and folks who work lower-paying service industry jobs.
“Waiters, the guys floating the boats … to a great extent, they have been priced out of places to live,” Forster said of Salida.
But the drive of residents who created these thriving small towns could be what sustains them. After all, in a place-based economy, people will do what it takes to stay. That’s one reason Mueller has devoted a significant portion of his time to teaching entrepreneurship in rural communities.
“It’s really heartwarming how passionate they are about the natural environment they live in, and the community they’re connected with,” he said.
