Main Street
How Can We Revive Main Street America?
In 1931, in the middle of the Depression, my great-grandfather opened a grocery store in New Vienna, Ohio. It took courage to open any business that year, let alone in a small farm town. Streber's Market ran for three generations, and I grew up working behind its counter.
That counter taught me what a Main Street business really gives a town. It's more than groceries or hardware. It's the place where you hear who's sick and who just had a baby, where a teenager learns to count back change, and where a neighbor can run a tab until payday.
So when people ask how we bring Main Street back, I don't think it's a nostalgia question. It's a practical one, and the good news is that towns across the country have been answering it for almost fifty years.
What emptied Main Street, and what started bringing it back
By the 1970s, a lot of downtowns were in trouble. Shopping malls pulled stores out to the edge of town, highways bypassed the old routes, and later the big-box stores and the internet took another bite. Storefronts went dark, and the beautiful old buildings above them started to fall apart.
In 1977, the National Trust for Historic Preservation decided to try something. It picked three Midwestern towns of very different sizes for a test it called the Main Street Project: Galesburg, Illinois, with about 38,000 people; Madison, Indiana, with about 13,000; and Hot Springs, South Dakota, with about 5,000. The idea was to save the historic buildings by giving the businesses inside them a reason to stay.
It worked well enough that in 1980 the Trust set up the National Main Street Center to teach the same approach everywhere (Main Street America's history). Colorado was one of the early states to sign on. The approach rests on four simple ideas:
- Organization: a local team of merchants, owners, city leaders and volunteers who keep at it year after year.
- Promotion: giving people a reason to come downtown, from parades and farmers markets to holiday open houses.
- Design: fixing up facades, sidewalks and storefronts so the street looks cared for again.
- Economic vitality: helping existing businesses grow and filling empty buildings with new ones.
None of that is fancy, and that's the point. The results add up. Since 1980, Main Street communities have reported about $124.7 billion reinvested locally, more than 188,000 net new businesses, more than 852,000 net new jobs and more than 356,000 buildings rehabilitated. In 2025 alone, 1,303 local programs reported $9.4 billion in reinvestment, 6,936 net new businesses and 36,549 net new jobs. For every dollar those programs spent to run themselves, their communities saw about $23 reinvested (Main Street America).
The piece most revival plans miss
You can restore every facade on the block and still lose Main Street. The building is only the shell. What really keeps a downtown alive is the owner who unlocks the door at 6 a.m., and right now a lot of those owners are getting ready to retire.
Baby boomers own roughly 2.3 million small businesses in this country, and those businesses employ more than 25 million people. Surveys keep finding the same thing: somewhere around half of small-business owners have no real plan for who takes over when they step away (Entrepreneur). When there's no plan, the most common ending is the quietest one. The owner gets tired, the kids have moved on, nobody steps up, and one day there's a sign in the window.
That's the gap I care most about. A town can lose a 60-year-old hardware store not because it stopped making money, but because no one was ready to carry it on. Preserving Main Street means preserving the businesses themselves: keeping the name on the door, the people on the payroll and the way things are done, while making the improvements that let it last another generation. That's what we mean by preservation equity.
What any of us can do
Reviving Main Street isn't only a job for city hall. A few things make a real difference:
- Shop there on purpose. Pick one local business and make it a habit. A regular customer matters more than a one-time big order.
- Show up. The parade, the farmers market, the holiday open house. Foot traffic is what fills the storefront next door.
- Tell their stories. Later this month we're starting a Main Street registry to honor family businesses that have been open 50 years or more. Start thinking about the one in your town.
- If you own one, start the conversation early. Who would you want to carry it on? Your family, a key employee, an outside buyer who'll keep it local? The best time to answer that is years before you need to.
Streber's Market isn't in my family anymore, but the store lives on under new owners in a new spot. Every time I think about that, I'm reminded that a Main Street business can outlive any one owner if someone cares enough to keep it going. That's worth working for.
Jodi Ashton, Founder & Managing Director
Photo: Streber's Market, New Vienna, Ohio, 1934.