What can small towns do about crumbling buildings in their downtown? They can join together to fix them up and get businesses in them. Our own Jeanne Cole helped to bring this building back in downtown Waynoka. Photo by Becky McCray.
Waynoka, Oklahoma, had a lot of vacant run-down buildings in their downtown. In a town of 900 people, the prospects didn’t look great. At an all-class reunion, a group of alumni got together and decided to change that.
They called themselves Project Waynoka, our friend and early contributor Jeanne Cole said. They started raising money. They bought one building. They raised more money with community events. They scrounged for materials. They rallied volunteer labor. They brought this one building up to code, then sold it.
With that money, they bought another building. More work, more fundraising, even more work, and there’s another building brought back into productive use.
The public library in Waynoka is housed in a building that Project Waynoka rehabilitated. Next door is a vacant lot that the library uses for event space and that features a veterans memorial. Photo by Becky McCray.
They just kept saving buildings. Buildings that now house locally-owned businesses. The public library. The popular German restaurant.
A few buildings turned out to be in such bad shape that demolition was the best choice. So they took them down and then cleaned up the empty lots.
Their current project (as of 2018) is the old American Legion building. It’s a big project and will take a long time. But waiting for some outside savior to come do it hasn’t worked yet, and neighbors working together has worked. I’d bet on the neighbors.
Here’s the next Project Waynoka restoration: the old American Legion building. Photo by Becky McCray.
It’s a model that any town can borrow: a small group of people rallying the community to save downtown buildings.
A group of Minneapolis neighbors who did a similar thing, with the added bonus of building cooperatives and nurturing local businesses as part of their project. Read more about it here: These Neighbors Got Together to Buy Vacant Buildings. Now They’re Renting to Bakers and Brewers
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Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.
I love seeing people working together for a greater good. Coming from a small town myself, this hits home. Great post. Thank you!
Thanks, Nick! Glad you found it useful.
Yeees!! That is fantastic.
Ya know, specifically I dug the part where “a bunch got together at all-class reunion.”
That might be one of the most productive and altruistic outcomes of any reunion I’ve ever heard of. That’s inspiring because I bet there was that mix of “home town pride” crossed with “vision” and the like-minded, “we-dont-want-a-ghost-town” attitude. And that’s what came of it.
Thanks for the stories, would like to live out a vision similar in my small town one of these days.
Thanks, Drew. All the best things happen when small groups of people get excited and don’t wait for permission.