The Strongest Town in North America: Marion Ohio's Remarkable Journey

How does a small Midwestern city rebound from decades of economic hardship to become North America's Strongest Town? The remarkable transformation of Marion, Ohio offers a masterclass in community resilience, citizen-led development, and the power of incremental progress.

Regional Planning Director Evelyn "Evie" Warr-Omnis shares the philosophy that propelled Marion past 49 other towns to claim this prestigious award: identify a need, listen to citizens, take small actions, and repeat. This humble approach acknowledges the resource limitations of smaller communities while emphasizing their greatest strength – determined citizens willing to roll up their sleeves.

• Marion's approach: see a need, take small actions, and repeat
• Citizen initiatives like the PB&J Truck and Exploratorium children's museum demonstrate grassroots problem-solving
• Historic buildings saved through community efforts now serve as downtown anchors
• Founders Park created from demolished buildings now functions as town square and event space
• Local businesses collaborate rather than compete, creating a downtown destination
• Innovative housing solutions include converting upper floors of downtown buildings and rehabilitating abandoned homes
• "Deed in escrow" program grows local developers by selling foreclosed properties that buyers must renovate
• Partnership with vocational school builds construction skills while creating new housing
• Despite limited resources, Marion demonstrates resilience: 

Marion's journey demonstrates that transformation doesn't require massive resources – it requires listening to citizens, taking consistent small actions, and believing in your collective ability to overcome obstacles. To learn more about Marion's initiatives or explore opportunities, contact Regional Planning at 740-223-4143 or visit downtownmarion.com.

Transcript

Introduction to Marion's Strongest Town Award

Speaker 1 0:01

Welcome to Central Ohio Matters, the podcast where we delve into the issues that shape Central Ohio's future. Each episode features in-depth conversations with local leaders, visionaries and changemakers driving progress in our region. These conversations offer insights into the challenges our communities face and the solutions being crafted to move them forward. Here are your hosts Michelle Gatchel and Ryan Rivers them forward. Here are your hosts Michelle.

Speaker 2 0:25

Gatchel and Ryan Rivers. Welcome everybody. We have a great episode for you. As always here on Central Ohio Matters, I'm here with my co-host, ryan Rivers. Hey, ryan, what's going on?

Speaker 3 0:36

Good morning. How are we doing Michelle? Good, good, good. You just got back from a vacation. Did you enjoy it? I did a little time off at the beach Always a good time.

Speaker 2 0:47

Good, good. Well, we have a great show today. We have a lot to boast about from Marion Ohio. They received the Strongest Town in North America Award and they were up against 49 other towns from Canada and the US of A. They made it to the top 16 bracket and then they ended up winning the whole shebang. So joining us to tell us all about that and why Marion is so great, is Regional Planning Director Evelyn Warr-Omnis, also known as Evie. Evie, thank you so much for joining us.

Speaker 4 1:24

Thank you. Thank you, yes, some of my staff and colleagues are in Providence, rhode Island, getting the award. I believe they got it yesterday. I'll have to go on the Facebook live stream and watch the. You know the video of it, so they're all excited, I'm sure.

Speaker 2 1:42

And didn't? The beginning of the year, the world Atlas named it like the best city to live that could be we.

Marion's Community-Driven Development Philosophy

Speaker 4 1:50

I think we're. We've been making it into a lot of the uh, you know, uh competition either competitions and or listings of of Ohio communities and around, for instance, strongest Town. That's across all of North America. It even included some towns in Canada. So we worked real hard to tell our story. I think that, like many of the smaller communities in central Ohio, we're starting to rebound again. Communities in central Ohio were starting to rebound again. Many of us were hit pretty hard in the recessions of the 1980s and then again in the housing crisis in 2008 to 12. And we're kind of getting our footing again and putting our best foot forward. So I think that it's starting to show. I appreciate all the time and effort everybody is putting into it in terms of small business owners, community citizens that are just taking one thing at a time that they see that needs to be done and going with it, and I think the cumulative efforts are being felt across the community and being noticed around the greater community or country, etc.

Speaker 2 3:08

So what were some of the highlighted reasons that they chose you? I mean, this was like a march madness bracket when I saw it, of towns competing and they and they broke down, you know, to the top four and then the top two, and then it was you guys. Yay.

Speaker 4 3:26

Right, yeah, we were really excited and I give a lot of credit to James Walker. He's our planner and so he had always been a follower of Strong Towns and the concept behind it, and we felt it dovetailed very well with the way we operate here locally. But the concept is that you know, you do one, you see something that needs to be done, you humbly listen to your citizens and see what challenges they're facing, and then you find the one smallest thing you can do and then you just do it and then you repeat. And again, in many larger communities, um, you know, you might have boatloads of money and big administrations that can do something, and so you can do it all in one fell swoop.

Speaker 4 4:18

Well, here in the uh, smaller communities, we don't often have the resources and we cobble it together with between grants, local funding, nonprofits, whatever, and we have a certain expectation that if we want to get it done, we have to do it ourself, and it might be a multiple phased approach, and so maybe we're starting to build in some built-in persistence and therefore those fit into the philosophy of Strongest Towns.

Speaker 4 4:51

So, as we started to talk up our prior accomplishments, things that maybe in the past people didn't give credit to all our struggles, because it's easy to say, man, we don't have this, man, we don't have this, we don't have that, woe is us. But when we started to look at but what do we have and how did we get it? And it always ended up being that it was through persistence, through small changes built upon each other, most often started with maybe a citizen or a nonprofit. So we, you know, some of the things that came to mind that we all ran with and were able to convey to the strongest town was that, let's say, the peanut butter and jelly truck. You know Amy Orr Parker. She saw a need we have a lot of poverty in our community so she took an old ice cream truck and has volunteers throughout the community make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and they drive the truck around and give out free sandwiches.

Speaker 4 5:57

So I mean it's just like something so simple but yet and it plays the peanut butter jelly song. You know it is like how do you? Again that really epitomize it, and in many ways that's how a lot of stuff gets done. You know, sometimes it's somebody's dream, like the Exploratorium that was Cindy Bin's dream to have a children's museum, and so she started the Exploratorium in what had been the former Carnegie Library. Now it's part of owned by Trinity Baptist Church. But when she passed away our local developmental disabilities organization, they have a program where they have their students working called Remarkable. So now they're manning it.

Speaker 4 6:48

And again it's how, when you're given lemons, make lemonade, and that's a nice resource for the community, family, friendly in a beautiful building that now has purpose. And so it's all these little things that as a community we were able to come up with many, many ideas like that again, maybe out of necessity. And so then you could vote, of course, each week. So we try to have a group of the locals. We didn't spend any government money on this. They were making flyers and Lightly's printing in town would make flyers for James and he and the others would just run them all over town and you could vote every day and then we would have some of the local stories published, you know, highlighted in the local social media, and then that really, I think, got a lot of people proud of the community and our own stories and we encouraged others to highlight their other things that either they themselves do well for the community or what they see others doing well. So I think it really helped brighten everybody's spirits.

Speaker 3 8:11

What were?

Downtown Revival and Business Collaborations

Speaker 4 8:11

some of the major anchors or building blocks, either on the public or private side. Starting out that you saw Marion has that you felt you could build upon, I would say you know, for example, downtown we had when I first came in 1990, there were had been many white elephants and prior generations had saved a few of them. So, like the Palace Theater, it's a beautiful atmospheric theater, looks like you're in the inside of a grotto inside, and it was slated for the wrecking ball and then the palace guard, a bunch of volunteers came to save it. Over the years they've had a lot of funding from either city and county, block grants, you know, arts groups, whatever, and they've restored that building and it's kind of an anchor. The next one was the Harding Center. It's an eight-story former hotel built when President Harding was going to be kind of using it as his local offices, but he died in office offices, but he died in office. So, um, that had been vacant for, oh, maybe 20 or so years. But because it was built out of concrete, which was a big deal back in the time, uh, it couldn't be demolished. So then people got together at city, county, um, and, and raised money and finances to renovate it. So now it houses 67 or 68 residential units. So once you start doing things like that, it starts to be you believe that nothing's too big that can't be done. It just might be hard and it might take all of us.

Speaker 4 9:40

In more recent years we had some burnt out structures. Downtown we had a tiny little pocket park called Founders Park. That was where one building had been demolished and downtown Marion got some money to. You know, the community foundation, which is our local philanthropic organization, gathered the funds to demolish those with the condition that that land be turned over to the city to expand Founders Park. And since we didn't have a town square, we're kind of a trolley line sort of a city. So everything is very linear, linear. That gave us a focal point downtown. Now we have kind of the new generation of downtown businesses, business owners and building owners really being quite creative and coming up with quite a lot of venues and businesses. You know you've got things that are and they're all kind of focusing around the area of the park. So we hold a lot of our local events like Christmas you know, pictures with Santa and the Grinch or the you know different events.

Speaker 4 10:56

It's kind of almost serving as our town square and then many of the businesses around it are starting to thrive. You know we've got Kin and Kilt, marion Brewery, maddie's on Maine, elena Renee. You know we just have all these new energy of these younger entrepreneurs which, again in a smaller community, most of our businesses are actually owned by local people, so they have to be supported by local people. We don't have a lot of big box and I think that's probably not uncommon of smaller towns.

Speaker 3 11:30

Anything unique or what is the kind of the recipe you found that works for your downtown area of those smaller businesses?

Speaker 4 11:40

They've been fortunate in the sense that they all are a good support system for one another. And so we do have a Downtown Marion organization and again that kind of came out of the idea that, boy, our downtown is struggling, we need something. So we created a nonprofit called Downtown Marion Inc and recently, in fact, they were becoming a Main Street program which, with Main Street, by using all of those tools collectively, you know, we have the organization starts to host events that brings some of the foot traffic. We have the local business owners collaborate together so that, if you know, you can go from one, collaborate together so that, if you know, you can go from one business to another. And there's still an event.

Speaker 4 12:50

We have created a dora, which is a designated outdoor refreshment area so you can walk with a open drink for quite a distance within the area. You would be wanted to, you know, hop from one of the various uh, you know, because we have a blend of seven winery, we have shovel city drinkery, which is spirits. We have marion brewery, we have amados that has, um, you know, pizza and and everything. So we have all of these, these local businesses, so you kind of create it as a destination in and of itself, because if you can't get in attaboys, you might be able to get into taco central, you know. So you just go downtown, there'll be something to do. You got things for the kids max air inflatables. If you want to do axe throwing, you can go to kin and kill, you know. So there's just quite a variety of things that they can kind of build off that energy.

Speaker 3 13:44

You could stay all day any questions employers, any major employers or your larger entities that have come into Marion outside of your small business community.

Housing Innovation and Adaptive Reuse

Speaker 4 13:58

We do have. Our larger employer would be Whirlpool, for example. We also have a steel history, so New Course Steel is big and a lot of the times. What's really nice about the industrial corporations is they're also corporate citizens. So it is not uncommon to have new core steel volunteers or their employees coming out and doing the putting the mulch and stuff in the downtown planters, you know, or whirlpool donating the appliances to habitat for humanity. So everybody's really connected as a community, which is, I think, really nice. It's small enough that you don't have too far reach up the food chain to ask somebody for help. It's not like, well, I'll have to send that to corporate, you could just call someone and they tend to be willing to participate what about in regards to housing?

Speaker 3 15:02

have you had much mixed use or anything outside of just traditional single family homes?

Speaker 4 15:08

actually we have had that, I say, and that has come a lot with our downtown, one of the ways in which our downtown was underutilized. Again, it's probably not uncommon where you have buildings that were built at the turn of the century and everybody lived above their storefronts. Well then, once things changed in the 80s, 90s, nobody was living upstairs, so that land, that space was underutilized. Well, you did start having some of the smaller businesses start going back to living above their businesses. So I remember PDQ printing. At the time they created this beautiful loft upstairs. Well, everybody was so amazed by it.

Speaker 4 15:53

Then Lois Fisher, who started to acquire a lot of the downtown buildings. Then she was really utilizing the upper stories and renovating them into housing. So sometimes we partnered together with the city or the county with their chip housing grant, which usually is a federal funding source through the department of development, to create affordable housing and we would do rental rehabilitation. So we would take units on second and third floors that hadn't been lived in for decades, turn it into affordable housing. It would have mortgages on it that said it might need to be affordable for 15 years or something you know, but it got them occupied. Then, after they've aged out of the affordability period. They're still occupied and they're still, frankly, pretty affordable.

Speaker 4 16:47

Same with the Harding Center. That has started out as senior housing. Now it's gone market rate and all ages. And you see students from OSU Marion, you see, you know young professionals. One of my co-workers lives in the Harding.

Speaker 4 17:05

So I think by utilizing those upper floors now, in fact we're starting to get people developing them even into Airbnbs, because some of the downtown venues hold wedding events and then people can come into town and stay downtown in an Airbnb on one of these upper stories units and be right near whatever it is they were coming to attend. So that's been good. We are trying to change some codes to allow more flexibility within the zoning code so it's not just strictly single family. In fact, city council is just rezoning a stretch of our center street, which is State Route 309 in the city, into our two district, which is a general dwelling, so that will allow, you know, multifamily as well as single family. Those structures are right now physically single family homes, detached, but if somebody wanted to convert it into a duplex, that's possible too. So we're trying to create some flexibility.

Speaker 2 18:15

Evelyn talk about, you were working on attracting more developers for housing and you have a very unique program that you've kind of started with houses that are out there that aren't really livable right now.

Speaker 4 18:29

Right, yeah, I think and again this kind of plays into that strongest town we can hope to attract a national builder, and that's good. We're trying to do that, but in the meantime we're going to work with what we have. So, uh, we have a marion county land bank. It's a city and county organization ours my office happens to be the staff that they contract with to oversee. And then we have a housing coalition, a bunch of kind of housing minded citizens and nonprofits, and we all collectively came up with an idea that if we want to have some developers and landlords that are, you know, have the best interest for the tenant, we will grow them ourselves. And so we take structures that are abandoned and they're coming through foreclosure, maybe through sheriff's sale, and go to the auditors for the auditor sale. If we think that they're salvageable, we'll take them. We'll have a housing inspector, go do a write-up of what needs to be done, give kind of an estimate of what that might cost, you know. And then when we put it for sale on the land bank, we don't just let anybody buy it. We say you have to make those repairs. And so what we do is enter into a one-year agreement with them and at the end of the year, and we'll have some inspections throughout. We pay for our own inspector because our community does not have one, two and three family building department, so we have no local inspectors. So therefore, we kind of contract with somebody and they'll go in and look at the rough in and the final and the electric and all of that and then at the end of the year or if it's sooner, if they pass all their inspections, then we will give them their deeds. It's called a deed in escrow and gosh.

Speaker 4 20:26

I forget the exact total, but we're pushing about between 16 to 20 houses have now been rehabbed. Some are being owned, you know, by people that are doing it for their own owner occupancy. Others are doing it, as you know, an investment property. You know others we have partnered with Habitat for Humanity, black Heritage Council and others that are doing it as nonprofits. So and then now we're starting to see we have a lot of empty lots that if we partner with Clayton Homes or others, that might be able to put a modular on it. We're also even working with Tri Rivers, which is our vocational school. This is kind of cool. So there we have about four properties in a row, I had two houses. We're demolishing those with the grant and then Tri Rivers will use those parcels to build, you know, two to three houses on and that will help their construction, trade school, you know, create, you know learning opportunities as well as improving the, you know that street. So we're trying to grow our own developers, our own contractors, basically everybody.

Speaker 2 21:44

And those are really good deals too, because sometimes it's only like $1,000. You're knowing full well that they're going to have to pay a lot more for the rehab of the place.

Growing Local Talent and Developers

Speaker 4 21:54

Right, and we've even done little tours of some of the projects, because you know a lot of these things, you know the roofs have been caved in and what weather all through it and you know it's really hard to envision them habitable. And I know, uh, one of our social responsible developers, nick Roland. He had a duplex over on Columbia Street, so it's kind of an older neighborhood. Oh my gosh, when he took us through at the end, I mean he probably had to put 140,000 in it, but they were gorgeous, nice and they're available for rent. They had a little parking lot off to the side, you know. So this is we're hoping, and I do think we're seeing, because we're starting to see neighborhoods um, start to tip in the right direction. Before they were somewhat abandoned, so even the people that live there could barely maintain their values because and they couldn't sell because they're kind of stuck there.

Speaker 4 22:52

Well, here now we're, when you take the worst ones out of the mix then, it just looks like well, that one remaining bad one looks like it could be the ugly duckling that turns into a swan and you're not taking as much of a financial risk. You have a chance that it's upwardly. You know trajectory there.

Speaker 3 23:17

How long would you say this whole process has been, from taking um kind of where felt like you were struggling in some areas to be in an award-winning model for others to uh to try and follow um, I think in some regard it's been the whole 30 years I've been here.

Speaker 4 23:37

But I feel like last 10 years we're getting traction. You know, before it was, you know certain winds of like, let's say, our bigger structures, you know the harding, or you know some of the downtown buildings, et cetera, and getting some of these nonprofits up to the, you know, from a fledgling new entity to now a high functioning entity. Same thing with Marian Matters. They help mentor low-income individuals that are, you know, going to make them go from low income into middle class, going to make them go from low income into middle class. So now all of these new entities and adventures are getting kind of out of the infancy and into their teenage years. Now they're really running. So I do think maybe the past 10 to 15 years we've really seen it and I think that we'll continue to see. I think the past five years I was really pleased that even during the pandemic we had more growth downtown when it all shut down, I mean that we should all packed up and hit under a rock, but instead we built our way through it and everyone pulled together. So I mean again, I think that's teaching the resilience that it might be hard, it's just, it's possible, it's just hard, and we're no longer afraid to do hard things. What's next? What's next? I know we are heavily marketing some of our industrial sites. So we would like to, you know, create more jobs. You know family supporting jobs, you know those sorts of wages Downtown.

Speaker 4 25:24

I know our leadership group, which is usually out of the chamber, that every year they have a class of people that take nine months worth of kind of leadership training and they come up with a project for the community. I believe this year they want to find a way to put a splash pad in Founders Park. You know, I mean I don't doubt that eventually it will happen. Yeah, that'd be really cool. You know, lincoln Park has our aquatic center. We've started a walking trail through there. We've done the first phase.

Future Plans and Connected Communities

Speaker 4 26:00

The second and third phases are now, I think, in contract. We're hoping to continue it. I just put in a grant yesterday for a neighborhood revitalization to continue it through the whole lincoln park neighborhood that could connect ultimately to maybe quarry park and different places where in our 10 mile bike loop that goes around the whole city. So again, now we're kind of working on connecting the dots. We have a few successes all over the place, and now it's connect the dots and strengthen the netting, you know, of the of the built environment, as well as the social connections within people, and kind of really create that feeling of community.

Speaker 2 26:46

So I'm hopeful so if people want to find out more about the things that are going on, or if someone listening right now wants to possibly develop one of those spaces that you might have, how do they find out more about it?

Speaker 4 27:03

okay, well, you could, I would say right now, start out with our office, regional planning. We're also the economic development office of both the city and the county as well, as we're connected with downtown Marion and Marion Can Do, which is our industrial site development organization. So, regional planning, marion County, city County, regional Planning that's 740-223-4143 is my direct number, 4143 is my direct number and 4140 is our office number, but we could start that conversation and see with whom you need to be connected. Also, for fun things to do, downtownmarioncom or visitmarionohioorg is our Convention of bureaus, because there's just tons of events. Again, even a lot of our restaurants have game nights or open mic nights or you know. So even if it's what, if it's one sort of a venue, it might be used as something different.

Speaker 4 28:06

Or there's board game nights at Lulu's Toys and you know, and even at Ken and K kilt, which is the axe throwing place.

Speaker 3 28:15

So you know everybody doubles.

Speaker 4 28:17

we all wear two or three hats, so there's something going on somewhere and, uh, we're happy. We do have some empty sites, uh, downtown that I think. I think one of the uh art studios had to close due to medical issues in their family, and it's a ceramics shop, but I believe they're looking for someone to buy that business. So, crafty, let us know, we'll hook you up.

Speaker 2 28:47

Well, Evelyn, thank you so much for sharing your time with us on this story and, you know, letting Marion and everyone around Marion know that you guys are the strong town here in the US.

Speaker 1 29:02

Thank you for listening to this episode of Central Ohio Matters. Be sure to like, share and download. We cover government policies, health care challenges, housing and business developments, transportation solutions, education and innovation. If you know of a good story we should be talking about, go to the radio station website and fill out a contact form Directed to Michelle Gatchel, host of Central Ohio Matters.

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Speaker 1 29:50

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