BY KEA WILSON FOR STRONG TOWNS
When people ask me what I did for a living before I started working for Strong Towns, sometimes I tell them that I had a job where, on any given day, I might talk to a neighbor about their rent getting raised, a tourist about how hard it was to find a place to buy Asprin within walking distance of their hotel, and a national journalist about the neighborhood segregation line that ran just a few blocks from my workplace. Other times, I tell them only that I worked a job that gave me the best training in many aspects of community development and social work that I could have gotten outside of a master’s program. Or I might say that I probably met a more diverse cross-section of my home city of St. Louis in my daily work than most local politicians do—and in some ways, I got to know many of these people better than many of their leaders ever could.
Sometimes, I mention that this workplace was an independent bookstore. Sometimes I don’t.
Recently, Commonwealth Magazine ran an article speculating on the economic role that independent bookstores play in our downtowns, particularly in small and mid-sized city neighborhoods…
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