The New Builders. Seth Levine

CHAPTER TWO How Change Really Happens

      “ Come down to my store,” Steve Murray said, urgently, one day in the mid‐1990s. He'd reached Elizabeth, who at that time was a reporter with the Lancaster Sunday News, handling the cops and business beat on a small news staff.

      Steve's store was about six blocks up Queen Street, one of the two main streets in the small city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, about an hour‐and‐a‐half west of Philadelphia. Once prosperous, by the 1980s and 1990s, this historic city in the middle of tobacco country was struggling, having fallen into the familiar narrative of Main Street decline.

      Steve never seemed to notice that the world around him didn't match his style. He stood in the middle of his vintage shop in a historic storefront, loving the Deep Throat role he'd given himself. Zap & Co. was filled to overflowing with brooches the size of lobster claws, hats like flying saucers, and floor‐length gowns and psychedelic shirts. Inventory that brought to mind Wallis Simpson, Lena Horne, and Cher, all at once.

      And to an enterprising reporter, he was about to hand over the super‐secret plan for the economic revival of Lancaster City, prepared by business owners involved in a group called the Hourglass Foundation.

The group was goodhearted but blind, Steve thought. Most of them longed for the patriarchal presence of Armstrong World Industries, a giant flooring manufacturer that produced enough linoleum in the mid‐twentieth century to pave to the moon. But Armstrong was shrinking, replaced as Lancaster's largest employer by the local hospital. And, as in other cities, Lancaster's downtown was suffering from the lingering effects of White flight to the suburbs.

Steve thought the plan concocted by the big business leaders was all wrong. They wanted to tear down the beautiful old department store that anchored the town square for – “get this,” he said, his voice dripping with derision – “a chain hotel.”¹

      He was a renegade business owner who believed deeply – passionately – that Lancaster was a beautiful place. That the fading Victorian buildings could regain their former glory, that people from big cities would flock to the small downtown if there were good restaurants and more shops like his. Twenty‐five years later, and only after Steve's point of view influenced the powers that be, he would prove to be right. Lancaster is in the middle of an economic renaissance.

Today's Lancaster is a vibrant small city, complete with an active downtown, a progressive mayor, and a growing national reputation as a place that has welcomed refugees without abandoning its conservative roots. In February 2018, Forbes named Lancaster one of the “10 Coolest US Cities to Visit,” describing it as “one of the US's best‐kept secrets” and “a cultural hotbed.”²

Former mayor Rick Gray gave credit where it was due, speaking to the Lancaster newspaper: “Without Steve's foresight a decade before the convention center was built, downtown would not be what it is today.”³

Dynamic economies are those that are in a constant state of change and motion. Businesses are continually being started, while others are failing and going out of business.⁴ A dynamic system is often propelled by innovations and inventions, as well as by new ideas and new ways of doing business. Dynamism is a key ingredient to the overall health of an entrepreneurial ecosystem as well as to our broader economy. But dynamism isn't just defined by growth, as it is often misunderstood to be. It also isn't solely the purview of big businesses or large industries. In fact, it is often the interplay between the small end of the economy and larger companies that provide an economy its dynamic traits – small firms nip at the heels of larger ones, forcing them to be more nimble and innovative; large firms force upstarts to search for new products and markets to gain a toehold. Dynamism is more appropriately understood as change that happens across many dimensions. Size is one dimension, of course, but so are changes in terms of quality, value, and experience, as measured by scales other than size and profit.ⁱ

      Steve Murray, like another entrepreneur we'll meet in this chapter, Fred Sachs, was dynamism in action. Zap & Co. never grew large, but Steve was a key actor in creating the long‐term vision that would power the city's economy. Without him, the revival of an entire city might never have happened. A vibrant economy thrives on a certain amount of turnover, regeneration, and risk‐taking. Old ideas are replaced by new ones, and past ways of thinking and working are overtaken by novel approaches. Dynamism lives in people like Steve: entrepreneurs who run businesses at the smaller end of the business spectrum, but who bring passion and life to new ideas. We have been taking these small businesses – these engines of dynamism – for granted.