Galesburg Needs More People

We can choose to grow our town

The vacant lot of the old OT Johnson building, which burned down in 2006

Our town is shrinking, and it’s not a surprise to anyone who has lived here very long. But the numbers have been stark. In the 2020 census, Galesburg came in at 30,052 residents, or 6.2% lower than the 2010 population of 32,195. People are just leaving our town, and it’s been that way for a long time. The highest census count ever for Galesburg was 37,243 residents in 1960. Besides a small increase in the 2000 census, our town has been shrinking over the lifetimes of almost everyone who lives here. 

Since it’s been this way for so long we have a hard time believing it could be different, that this is just the way things have been. When I was growing up here there was a sense from the adults in my life that they had been trapped here somehow. It was seen that if you had any sort of talent you would go to college, get a degree, and get out. There wasn’t going to be any opportunity here for you. In some sense I saw it when Maytag, Butler, and all the other factories left town while I was in grade school. It was hard to think this was a town to grow in.

So I got older, I graduated from Galesburg High School, went off to College and got my degree. I moved to Wisconsin for a decent paying job. I worked there for a couple of years and realized it was not where I wanted to be. I didn’t care about that community, it wasn’t mine. My friends and family weren’t there, they were in Galesburg. So I eventually found a job in the ‘burg area, moved, bought a house, and have been living here happily without a single regret. 

But I know my case is not common. Out of all the people I graduated from high school with: who left town to go to college and actually got their degree, only a handful have moved back to town. As in, I can count those people on one hand. I’d imagine most of them don’t ever think about coming back in their lifetime. And that’s fair, people don’t have to live here forever. People can have good reasons to leave, but we don’t want to see our population get even smaller. 

So what do we do? It’s a tough question, one that many in town have thought about for many years. It’s a problem small towns and cities have been dealing with for decades all across the Midwest. Our problem is not unique, but that doesn’t mean we have to just stand by and do nothing. 

A New Solution

The way we generally think about saving Galesburg is attracting businesses that bring more jobs. For a long time we had more people wanting jobs than jobs available. But now we have the opposite issue, there are more jobs than there are people wanting to work them. Local businesses, our schools, and the prison are all having a tough time finding people to work. A recent Register Mail article said that the workforce has shrunk 25% in the last 20 years. So if a big new factory or warehouse did come to town, there wouldn’t be enough people to work there. We need people to move here to take these existing jobs and start a cycle of growth.

But how are we going to get people here? If we’re in the jobs mindset then we’ll never attract people because we don’t have the new factory with good paying jobs. But not everyone moves just for a job. While most people move for family, some people, especially young people, will move somewhere if they like the area.

We have some qualities that people want in a community.  We are small enough that it isn’t a hassle to get around, but big enough that we have almost anything that you would want in the modern world. We can build on that to have city people want to move to without getting the next big company to set up shop in town. 

I think a feature of our town that could really attract people is our downtown. While it has been limping along for years, losing tenants and buildings getting turned into vacant lots, there is still a charm to downtown. All the close buildings, shops, bars, and restaurants give it an urban feeling while still being in a small town. It’s not anywhere close to its heyday, but it’s not dead yet. We can choose to rebuild. We still have a good amount of our downtown while most towns have let theirs decay all the way to death. 

We should stop trying to be like a suburb, we’re never going to compete with them like that. We need to stop building stores on the outskirts of town. If we can get more businesses downtown it would give people more reasons to go downtown. And when more people go downtown they spend more, making it more worthwhile to be downtown. And if we get more demand it will be worthwhile to build new buildings and hopefully we could fill some of those empty lots, and maybe even have enough to fill the parking lots with buildings again.  

If we can start a cycle of businesses locating downtown and also building more apartments close by, we could really have a chance at growth. A nice, walkable downtown with lots to do would be attractive to lots of people. In particular we could attract young people, who can work the jobs we have and potentially become lifelong residents. This doesn’t mean that the whole town has to change, but downtown is where it’s supposed to be dense, walkable, and changing.

While building up downtown is important, truly the most important thing is that we have to take pride in being ourselves in our town. Why would anyone move here if we act like we don’t want to be here? Too often I see people act like “why try, it’s just Galesburg”. If we ever want our town to be more than “just Galesburg” we need to take more pride in what we do and show it. This is a town that I love and has many great people here. I'd hate to see it decline for another 80 years, I want to see Galesburg thrive.

The focus of this newsletter will be trying to give this vision some legs to stand on. There are many specific actions and changes we can take to improve our position that don’t involve attracting the next big business to come to town. I hope you’ll subscribe and send me your thoughts. You can comment on this post on substack, reply to this email, or email me directly at erthely@gmail.com