Driving into Great Falls from the airport, Jeff Siegler didn’t get a great first impression.

Siegler, of Revitalize, or Die, was in town to give the keynote presentation at the Montana Main Street Conference on Oct. 18.

He noted that there were lots of empty lots and wide streets, a sign of a town that has catered to the car too much.

But once he made it to Central Avenue, his impression started changing.

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After about 48 hours in Great Falls, including presenting at the conference, tours of downtown revitalization and murals, and socializing with locals and conference attendees, Siegler told The Electric, “Great Falls is certainly a place where there’s an energy and excitement. Once you’ve captured that, you’re on your way.”

With a background in urban planning, downtown district management and more, Siegler now consults on community development nationwide.

It struck him that when Great Falls was built, there was a lot of money invested, in terms of the original core and the architecture of the older buildings.

“It’s beautiful,” he said.

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Siegler said he tends to find in successful communities that “everybody can sort of tell which way the wind’s going,” and in Great Falls, he found optimism.

“At this point, I don’t think you can fail,” he said of Great Falls.

Earlier in his visit, he told The Electric that as downtowns deteriorate, people feel different and it breeds apathy.

“I think cities are emotional,” he said.

There’s a funny thing that tends to happen in community planning, he said, an idea to get people together and decide to work on making things better.

It’s better, he said, to just make things nice and people will come anyway.

His most recent book, Your City is Sick, focuses on improving social, economic, mental and physical health by treating cities like people.

In his experience, Siegler said “nobody hates their town more than people who never left.”

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People sometimes remember their city in a different way from a particular time and don’t want to associate with the way it is now.

“That opposition can be very vocal and very challenging,” Siegler said. “Go forward even though. It’s sad how often those people thwart projects.”

Every community thinks it needs to be unique, he said, but people are largely the same. They like nice things and have similar needs, even to 100 years ago, such as restaurants, bars, convivence and grocery stores, hardware stores and book stores.

A downtown needs the things people gravitate toward, but they have to be done well, he said.

“If it makes people feel good to be inside of it, it will likely be successful,” Siegler said. “It’s not a big city thing to try to look nice.”

That’s harder in smaller communities, he said, when people sometimes feel they don’t deserve to look nice or have nice things.

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“That’s not true. Everybody deserves nice things,” he said.

Siegler worked in Livingston for a few years early in his career and while there learned how important land use planning is to the health of an area.

The Ohio native went to get his masters in urban planning in Virginia, then back to Ohio, serving as a state main street director, and is now based in Pittsburgh.

He’s been to towns that were rundown and unpleasant to visit, wondering what it would be like to live there, realizing at some point that the ideas and resources from the main street program wouldn’t help towns overrun by apathy.

It’s a different job to combat apathy and not always technical, he said.

A lot of it is human nature and “that’s the real solution…making people feel good,” he said.

Siegler gave an example of a town he visited where residents said they were proud of their town, but it was evident in walking around seeing the condition of their downtown that they weren’t. Turns out, they were proud of their high school football team.

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“People are desperate to feel a sense of pride and if don’t have a place to invest it, they’ll find something else,” Siegler said. “The more things we have that we’re proud of our in our lives, the healthier we’re going to be. Pride is the antithesis of apathy.”

One Ohio town he visited had a rusted out welcome sign with weeds growing in front, making it not particularly attractive as a visitor or investor.

“If you’re in a town when people say ‘why would you invest here?’ They’re living in a place they don’t think is good enough. But they suck energy. If you’ve heard that before, it means your residents are dealing with these self esteem issues,” he told the Montana Main Street conference attendees.

Looking at his hometown of Lima, Ohio, where generations of his family grew up, he said it went from proud to apathetic.

Community doesn’t exist behind screens and a “sense of community is at least part of the human experience.”

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By the time he graduated, his parents told him he needed to move and now all the people he loves are spread all over the country.

“Parents shouldn’t have to tell their kids they have to leave to make a name for themselves,” Siegler said.

In the early days, there was a lot of effort that went into towns nationwide.

It was, “here’s a patch of grass and sticks, lets do it,” he said.

With effort, came progress.

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“Our towns experienced a tremendous amount of progress,” he said. “All these towns, they came from nothing.”

He told the conference attendees not to hang their hats too much on history because they “still need to do good work today.”

Where American society made a mistake, he said, was, “I really want a cheeseburger and I’d like to eat it in my minivan. We blew it.”

Towns were retrofitted around cars and while cars are great, it hasn’t worked out, “it’s caused a lot of harm,” he said.

With the car came sprawl, national chains and suburbia, changing the economy and reducing the amount of local economic activity.

Chains pull a lot of money out of towns, making them “boring, lifeless, generic,” he said. “Somebody from out of town does not care about beauty in your town.”

Reducing local ownership also changed the nature of work.

“It’s hard to care about things that we don’t own,” he said.

Things have deteriorated and “it stings, it hurts.”

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Everyone has experienced walking into a Walmart, or Dollar General, or the like, and it’s not a great feeling.

“We’re always being affected by our environment. We seek out places that make us feel good and what we’ve done is build a lot of places that make us feel bad,” Siegler said. “Place matters. We’ve allowed a lot of beautiful places to deteriorate.”

Cities and towns now, with ugly commercial corridors, shouldn’t be surprised that people are apathetic and not as civic minded as their grandparents were.

“Stop looking at people who aren’t civic minded and blaming them. They’re being rational,” he told the conference attendees. “You’re the weirdos who are looking at something and believing you can make it better. Not everyone is like you.”

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Ways to restore a sense of civic pride, Siegler said, include counting on human nature versus thinking of things so technically.

Not every investment in a community is a good investment, he said.

“A face tattoo is an investment. Is it a good one?”

Towns have to build their identity, image, brand, logo and traditions, much like sports teams, who are good at branding, he said.

Traditions are helpful in making people feel special and included and recommended highlighting or creating traditions that are authentic to their towns, such as celebrating local history.

Siegler also recommended against lowering standards in an effort to attract development.

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“Standards matter. When we raise standards we get better,” he said.

At the municipal level, it’s often said officials don’t want to enforce codes because it might bother people and so they lower their standards.

“It’s okay to have standards, not only is it okay, it’s imperative,” Siegler said.

“Raising standards is a gift,” because when that happens, people and communities will often rise to meet them, he said.

There’s a correlation between higher property values and higher design standards, he said. Without standards, everything is acceptable, he said.

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“So many cities think we don’t want any bureaucracy, it scares away investment. No, no, no, risk scares away investment,” Siegler said.

Having clear and consistent standards for development and investment reduces risk, Siegler said.

Fostering community and helping residents feel a sense of ownership is another way to improve civic pride, he told the attendees.

A mayor in a Pennsylvania town started a community cleanup every weekend followed by grabbing a beer with the group, he said,

“Stop looking for people outside of your community to rebuild your community, do it yourselves,” Siegler said.

He recommended fostering small scale local development and improving the look and condition of downtown buildings.

“The appearance of the center of town affects everybody,” Siegler said.

But, he warned, all the plans in the world won’t matter without action.

Revitalization takes hard work every day and will go on forever, Siegler said. “There is no magic bullet.”

Photo by Matt Ehnes for The Electric