3. “Public-private partnerships” are real. Through the years I had assumed this term was just another slogan, or a euphemism for sweetheart deals between Big Government and Big Business.

But in successful towns, people can point to something specific and say, This is what a partnership means. In Greenville, South Carolina, the public-school system includes an elementary school for engineering in a poor neighborhood. The city runs the school; local companies like GE send in engineers to teach and supervise science fairs, at their own expense. In Holland, Michigan, the family-owned Padnos scrap-recycling company works with a local ministry called 70x7 Life Recovery to hire ex-prisoners who would otherwise have trouble reentering the workforce. In Fresno, California, a collaboration among the city, county, and state governments; local universities; and several tech start-ups trains high-school dropouts and other unemployed people in computer skills. The more specifically a community can explain what their public-private partnerships mean, the better off the city is.

Chelsea Beck

4. People know the civic story. America has a “story,” which everyone understands even if only to say it’s a myth or a lie. A few states have their guiding stories—California as either the ever-promising or the sadly spoiled frontier, Vermont as its own separate Eden.

Successful cities have their stories too. For Sioux Falls, South Dakota, that it’s just the right size: big enough so that people who have come from the smaller-town prairie can find challenge, stimulation, opportunity; small enough to be livable and comfortable. For Columbus, Ohio, which is several times larger than Sioux Falls, that it’s big enough to make anything possible; small enough to actually get things done. For Bend, Oregon; or Duluth, Minnesota; or Winters, California, that they are in uniquely attractive locations. For Pittsburgh, that it has set an example of successful turnaround. For Eastport, Maine, or Allentown or Fresno or Detroit, that they are in the process of turning around. As with guiding national myths, the question is not whether these assessments seem precisely accurate to outsiders. Their value is in giving citizens a sense of how today’s efforts are connected to what happened yesterday and what they hope for tomorrow.

Chelsea Beck

5. They have a downtown. This seems obvious, but it is probably the quickest single marker of the condition of a town. For a “young” country like the United States, surprisingly many cities still have “good bones,” the classic Main Street–style structures built from the late 1800s through World War II. In the mall-and-freeway decades after the war, some of these buildings were razed and many more were abandoned or disfigured with cheap aluminum fronts.

Most of the cities we visited were pouring attention, resources, and creativity into their downtown. The Main Street America project, from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, has coordinated downtown-revival projects in some 2,000 communities. Of the downtowns we saw, Greenville’s and Burlington’s were the most advanced, studied by planners around the world. But downtown ambitions of any sort are a positive sign, and second- and third-floor apartments and condos over restaurants and stores with lights on at night suggest that the downtown has crossed a decisive threshold and will survive.

Chelsea Beck

6. They are near a research university. Research universities have become the modern counterparts to a natural harbor or a river confluence. In the short term, they lift the economy by bringing in a student population. Over the longer term, they transform a town through the researchers and professors they attract: When you find a Chinese or German physicist in the Dakotas, or a Yale literature Ph.D. in California’s Central Valley, that person probably works for a university. Research universities have become powerful start-up incubators. For instance: Clemson and the array of automotive-tech firms that have grown up around it in South Carolina, or UC Davis and associated agro-tech ventures. Riverside and San Bernardino were similar-size cities with similar economic prospects at the end of World War II. Their paths have diverged, in part because in the 1950s Riverside was chosen as the site of a new University of California campus.