Does Charm Pay? Economist’s Study of Preservation Investments on Main Street Iowa Agenda

Does often costly historic preservation pay?

That’s a question Iowa Main Street leaders hope to get answers to later this week at a two-day quarterly meeting in Valley Junction, last year crowned one of the shining examples of the program with its Great American Main Street Award.

Forty-eight Iowa communities and districts have Main Street Iowa bragging rights. Nationally recognized economist Donovan Rypkema looked at six of them – Valley Junction, Cedar Falls, Bloomfield, Dubuque, Oskaloosa and Woodbine – for a study he will unveil Wednesday and Thursday during Main Street Iowa’s quarterly meeting in Valley Junction.

Rypkema, the principal of Washington, D.C.-based real estate and economic development consulting firm Place Economics, recently won the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s highest honor, the Crowninshield Award. His firm was hired by the Iowa Economic Development Authority to study the impact of historic preservation in the six communities.

He will present the findings of his study to the public in a Main Street Iowa Economic Impact Symposium at 5 p.m. Thursday at the State Historical Society of Iowa’s auditorium in Des Moines. Register online.

During the Main Street Iowa workshop meetings Wednesday and Thursday, information will be shared about how organizations can work constructively with banks to improve neighborhoods and communities through the Community Reinvestment Act. Rypkema will also discuss with the members different strategies for applying the findings of the report in their districts.

Historic Valley Junction Foundation Director Jim Miller expects Rypkema to focus strongly on strategies to compete against big-box stores, especially in larger communities like West Des Moines, Cedar Falls and Dubuque, and some of them may be borrowed from much smaller communities, like tiny Bonaparte in southeast Iowa.

“We can learn as much from a small community in a meeting as from a Dubuque or Cedar Falls,” Miller said.

The meeting schedule includes plenty of time for shopkeepers to lure a crowd predisposed to shop local, as each participant gets $10 in “Valley Junction dollars.”

“It’s unusual for Main Street communities to have this much retail,” Miller said. “That’s always a nice thing to be able to show them.”