Josh McManus is a Partner at M|B|P, an advisory firm that helps communities and organizations grow their economic and social potential. He is known nationally for revitalizing post-industrial cities through place-based development, small-business growth, and organizations that combine social impact with market success. As COO of Rock Ventures, he oversaw the transformation of 14 million square feet of Detroit real estate. Earlier, he co-founded CreateHere in Chattanooga to spark grassroots business growth. His work has been featured in Forbes, Fast Company, and The Econom
All right, Josh, thank you so much for accepting my invitation. I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story. And it's a really big, beautiful question, which is why I borrow it. But because it's so big, I over-explain it the way that I'm doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in total control, and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from?
I come from—I identify as coming from—a little tiny town called Rock Mart. That is in the Appalachian foothills of North Georgia. It's a place where those people native to that land were quarantined in the northwest part of the state prior to the Trail of Tears. And it's a place that's very reflective of post-industrial change.
The town was arranged first around a slate mill, and then later around a cotton processing plant that took cotton and turned it into belts for tires—because before tires were steel-belted, they were cotton-belted.
Oh, I did not know that.
And so it's a little microcosm of the industry and post-industry across the U.S. And it's a place that is sort of firmly footed in my sort of ethos and outlook on the world.
Yeah. Yeah. What does it mean to you to be from the Appalachian foothills, from that town?
I think that in the national political narrative, there's always a gross oversimplification of people that are from a very—actually a huge—geographic footprint that's called Appalachia. And what it means for me is that I think that I live firmly rooted in an understanding of what it means to be working class. And everybody that comes from where I came from is, at best, working class.
And I went to school with a full strata—but a full strata of working class, right? You're either on the north side or the south side of working class. And I think it really has informed everything that I've done and everything that I continue to do—that sort of grounded perspective that is actually quite egalitarian, somewhat nostalgic to a time when people lived in close proximity to each other no matter what the background was. And I think that sort of instructs how I believe that democracy can, should, would work if deployed correctly.
How would you describe the childhood you had there?Yeah, interestingly, I very much identify as being from Rockmart, but I was born in DeKalb General, which would be in what's defined as Atlanta. And I went home to Gwinnett County, which was the fastest-growing county in the nation at the time—just a white flight commuter suburb. And then, in third grade, I was sort of taken out of this fastest-growing county in the nation and put into what I've later described as the slowest-growing county in the nation.
Not so much—I mean, it's had some forward progress—but it was a very slow place. But that juxtaposition I think is fascinating relative to what we're experiencing as a world right now: some people are living in the fastest-growing places in the nation, in these coastal mega-regions, and then everybody else is living in what one of my heroes, Samuel Mockbee, called the forgotten places and the forgotten people, and what some folks would call flyover country. And so I'm acutely oriented to that juxtaposition of these different lives that people are living, all defined as American.
Do you have a recollection of what young Josh wanted to be when he grew up?Absolutely. Yeah. He wanted to be an architect and go to Georgia Tech.
Wow. Where did that come from?I think, well, I had a tremendous Lego collection, which I still have some of, and I play a lot of Lego with my son. And so I think the instinct to build came from that. I also did have these formative moments with this city and the growth that was Atlanta, which has become such a metropolis now and one of the last bastions of upward mobility in the country.
And so my dad would always commute to work from wherever we were. And so when we were in North Georgia, he would commute to Atlanta to work. So I was one of the kids who had exposure to the city.
And so I think seeing those buildings, playing with Lego, seeing the size and scale of the skyline—and then, pretty early on, someone gave me a book about Frank Lloyd Wright. And I remember recently recalling a couple of reports that I did—you know, when you had to assemble information, cut stuff out, paste it, and all that. One of my reports was definitely on Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater.
Wow. As a kid, like elementary as you're talking?Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. One was on Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater and one was on Milton Hershey's Hershey, Pennsylvania.
Well, that's a perfect segue now. So at this point, I usually ask: catch us up. Where are you now and what do you do?Yeah. Yeah. I did end up going to Georgia Tech in a circuitous way. I did not become an architect—I'm not a formally trained architect—but I have become sort of an idea architect.
You know, it's hard to completely define my career, but problem-solving in post-industrial places is a big piece of it. What I call P3RE, which is public-private partnership real estate, is a big piece of it. And in some ways, I’m trying to solve the complexities of what I saw laid out before me growing up in that Appalachian foothill town.
You know, so many folks there were dependent on the mill, which had been a Goodyear mill. There had also previously been one in a little—not even a town, almost a hollow—next to it, called Aragon. But everybody depended on the mills, and if the mills were going, then life was okay.
And so I then, bathed in that, got involved in Chattanooga's turnaround beginning in the ’90s. Chapter one of my career was Chattanooga and its regaining of post-industrial population loss—becoming one of the repeatedly named “Best Outside Cities” in the country and “Gig City.” I then took that to chapter two, which was Detroit.
And Detroit was—I went in around 2010, and I got recruited to help on transformation from a philanthropic standpoint. And so that chapter runs, you know, from 2010 until now. And I'm just now taking a deep interest in the Deep South, even deeper than where I grew up—so Louisiana, Mississippi, and the Black Belt of Alabama—as sort of my perspective, chapter three of problem solving in post-industrial places. Yeah. Yeah.
Can we start at chapter one, and maybe Chattanooga is that story? But for people who don't know how much is in, you know, what you talk about—post-industrial problem solving—you’re so efficient in how you communicate. What does it mean? What are we talking about when we're talking about solving problems in post-industrial cities in America?
Yeah. Well, Chattanooga in 1969—which is before I was born—but I have these folks I call my adopted grandparents that were leaders in the change. Chattanooga was described by Walter Cronkite on CBS News as the dirtiest city in America.
So, topographically, it’s a saucer of land. So if you were doing heavy industry inside that saucer, the dirty air just kind of sat there. So there were stories of, you know, if you wore a white shirt to work, you had to change it at lunch because the collar had turned brown, that sort of thing.
And these are mostly stories you would typically hear about, you know, New England and the Midwest. But if you think about how industry moved in the United States—just south of Chattanooga is Dalton, Georgia, which was at one time the carpet capital of the world. But, you know, textiles start in New England, gravitate down to the Midwest, and then to the South, and then offshore. And almost everything does that.
Another suburb of Chattanooga is called South Pittsburgh, and that was based upon the rolled steel industry that did the same thing. You know, some of it started in New England, moves to the Midwest, moves to the South, moves offshore.
And so Chattanooga had a lot of the same problems that all the cities that you wince when you hear about in the Midwest had. And even some of the cities that, you know, you wince when you hear about in the Northeast—these are all places that I've either been a part of, guest lectured in, whatever. You’re, you know, your Camden’s, your Newark’s—every state has their sort of post-industrial places that they don’t like talking about a whole lot.
So, in Chattanooga, the work was—you’re losing population, which means you’re then losing tax base. So then you’re asking your existing residents—because of the way that you monetize municipalities in most cases—you’re asking your existing residents to pay more to get less, and that becomes a negatively reinforcing cycle.
And, you know, sometimes urbanists will call that white flight. More so, it’s typically resource flight. If you have money to get out of a municipality that’s on the downward spiral, you do. And then what that leaves left over is people that don’t have that sort of physical mobility, and typically don’t have economic mobility.
So it co-locates and isolates pockets of poverty, which have really negative outcomes when that happens. Yeah. So that happened in Chattanooga.
And I had, you know, about a dozen people—some of which I call my adopted grandparents—that sort of banded together in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and they started engaging in civic intervention in a variety of ways. And they got philanthropy involved, they got the municipality involved, they got the people involved.
And I’d say one of the most important things they did was they, you know, defined a destination that was different from where they were at that time. So there was something called Chattanooga Venture and Vision 2000, and they decided they wanted to be the best midsize city in the country.
And they did that through a public engagement process—something called nominal group theory. And nominal group is something that we’ve all done before, which is more or less mass ideation, and then you get some sort of voting mechanism.
And so, like, you know, paper dots at the time is what it was. So people come up with ideas, and then they get some voting capability with these paper dots, and then it’s supposed to show you where the will of the people is.
If you do nominal group in a community enough times, people—activists—learn how to game the system. So they ask everybody to put their dots on their thing. So you can’t always use nominal group, but—
What’s the methodology there? I mean, I’m sure, is that… yeah, what’s the…
The best way to do it?
Yeah.
It needs to be a little bit more blind in my experience, because you have mimesis set in. So, even if nobody’s gaming the system, the sort of tribal nature of humans is that if something’s got a lot of dots on it, they’re really inclined to consider whether they should put a dot on it or not.
I feel like that’s been called the—I think in advertising, there’s this law that they call the Matthew effect or something like that—that big things get bigger. The benefit of big is big, or the bigness is a producer of bigness.
Yeah. Well, I’m a—I don’t want to call it a fan—but I’m a student of René Girard’s work, which is now somewhat championed by Luke Burgess. And a lot of the notions with mimesis are that we want what we want because other people want it. Those dots on something are an instruction—a subconscious instruction—that maybe you should want that too. Yeah. Yeah.
It’s beautiful. I’ve seen him, I’ve encountered him recently too, in Luke Burgis as well. And what was I going to say? Well, actually, so I’ve interrupted you. Is there more to the thought that you’re in now before I ask the question?
So, with Chattanooga, it was about changing the narrative and then doing demonstration projects—a lot of which were this P3RE, public-private partnership real estate. The world’s largest freshwater aquarium is a great example of that: city involvement, county involvement, private philanthropy involvement, land that was purchased from the private sector.
And then sitting an entity beside that to do economic development around it as a sort of economic development of last resort. But if you look at it—I think the aquarium was $25 million pounds—I was talking to a friend in Chattanooga yesterday, pound for pound one of the best philanthropic interventions that’s ever happened because of the tax revenues, hotel/motel, jobs creation that has spun off of it over the years.
But at the time it was considered a white elephant, a boondoggle. There was a lot of, “Hey, we should just use this money to subsidize the city budget because people are under heavy burden right now. We need police, we need fire, we need school”—all the things that you hear when people don’t understand macro mathematics.
And the Chattanooga story—I could spend two days just talking about it—but Chattanooga changed their narrative. Actually, it’s important to say what I learned ultimately from Chattanooga is that you have to change the story. You have to begin to live that new story and narrative.
And you have to shift from a culture of scarcity to a culture of abundance, which is very hard to do in post-industrial places because you’ve been living with a pie that gets smaller and smaller every year, handing out smaller slices. And so that notion that there could ever be abundance re-emerge—and that working together could work—violates everybody’s instincts that are involved. And so this has become ultimately the big to-do in every city that I’ve ever worked in: can you begin to rebuild the abundance muscle? Yeah.
Where are we? I feel like the Chattanooga goes back a ways, right? And I feel like that was the first...
Yeah, it’s a 50-year overnight success.
But that work, when was that work? Was that ’90s? Is that what you said?
Yeah. So they began in the late ’70s. I came into the work in the late ’90s. I led a wave that was late ’90s to 2010. But the friend that I was on the phone with yesterday—he’s now leading quantum computing efforts that will ultimately result in public-private partnership, real estate, and educational stuff.
And so, in some ways, it never ends. But I will say that Chattanooga now has the flywheel of net new taxpayers so that it doesn’t have to be so much on a wing and a prayer and cobbled together by philanthropy and that sort of thing. You now have some municipal revenues. You now have some bullish for-profit actors. You’ve got a more healthy ecosystem of an economy.
Yeah. What’s the question I want to ask? I’m just curious about cities in general. So that was going back 20 years ago, and there was a particular narrative, maybe even just about any city or all cities in the United States. Where are we now in sort of the history of cities? Is it the same? Are cities struggling in the same way as Chattanooga was then, or changed since then in terms of how the role that cities play and what’s possible for a post-industrial city in 2025?
Yeah. It’s a good question that I’m quite ponderous about. And I would say I was baptized in—all of my knowledge on cities is a bit sort of like folk knowledge. I’m autodidactic. I just read voraciously.
And so I haven’t been through a traditional curriculum. But what was going on in the Brookings and the more formal cities places as I’ve come up and come through was this sort of notion of the inevitability of urbanity. Sort of by 2075 or whatever, that most people will live in, quote-unquote, cities. And we were well on that trajectory.
And then we ran into COVID and populism at the same time. And I still think the net arc is towards urbanity. My sort of my own reasoned position is that American suburbanism is anomalous, and it was created by the World Wars—but specifically World War II.
So, when you come back from World War II, you’ve got these forces in place where you’ve desegregated the military. So it’s now inevitable you’re going to desegregate the population. And that puts all sorts of social forces in play.
You’ve then got your Eisenhower interstate going on. You’ve got all these tools—governmental tools—like the GI Bill and a lot of housing intervention, all of which had some good actors in and a lot of very bad actors. And so you saw this sort of race to suburbanization, which then sort of spread people out.
The other sort of military reason for that was the introduction of the H-bomb and then the N-bomb. It puts you in a place where you didn’t want to consolidate industrial capacity anymore. Because if you could drop a nuclear bomb on the center of Detroit and take out a large amount of capacity, that wasn’t a good strategy. So then you start putting plants and people in all these sort of different places.
But I’ve not traveled anywhere that I find this suburban condition other than the United States. Yeah.
I had heard that explanation for the suburbs—that it was like a military defensive strategy, right? Or sort of.
Yeah.
I had never… I mean, it blows my mind. I mean, I grew up in the burbs, of course. So I was an adult man before I discovered that the neighborhood that I grew in had been sort of inspired by that kind of thinking, that kind of strategy. It’s really outrageous. So where are we now?
Yeah. So one of the things—and this is germane to things that I think you’re going to be thinking about—is we are left with this sort of urban form where most of the city limits were set during the time of horse and buggy. And so there’s a real question of a broken business model around municipalities.
And so you take Hudson there where you are, right? There’s a lot of people outside of that city limit that depend on that city limit, right? They come in to transact commerce. They come in to actually do their business. And depending on what the sort of monetization scheme is, they very well may not be paying their fair share for the benefit they’re gaining from having that co-location of assets, amenities, infrastructure.
So we have a real question before us, and it’s sort of like GDP—are we going to keep it where cities can only survive if you can grow population inside of that original arbitrary borderland? And you see some examples where this has been challenged.
So, like in the state of Tennessee, Nashville is the only major municipality that has fully, functionally merged city and county and sort of taken away that dichotomy of, like, I’ll use the city, but I will benefit from tax infusion in the county.
I love—I mean, of course this diagnosis is perfect, and I’m learning even about Hudson as you describe it—but what explains the broken business model? You mentioned horse and buggy, but why is the business model broken for a post-industrial city?
Yeah. So, by and large, we’ve monetized cities on property tax. And so it’s on a property tax levy inside the city limits, and cities have had an ebb and flow of who’s actually living inside the city limits and what the uses are.
And also, some cities have been very challenged by a number of parcels being taken off the roster because of their “charitable use.” And so what happens is you then become constrained in how you can put together resources for your city, and a lot of states have proactively said, “Yeah, that’s your only levy capability.” Like, we maintain most of the taxation capability.
And some places are allowed to put additions on to their sales tax and that sort of thing, and to retain it for a specific geographic barrier. But what you have—for me, sort of like as part pragmatist, part philosopher—if you could walk all the way back and say, okay, when these arbitrary borderlines and boundaries were laid out, they were in the time of horse and buggy…
So if I lived in the city of Detroit, which is 140 square miles, I’m pretty much doing everything that I do inside that 140 square miles, because it’s not pragmatic for me on the daily to ride my horse 40 miles out into the country and be able to evade participation in taxation.
Well, I’m talking to you right now from Maine, but we have a real question here in that my taxing municipality from a property tax standpoint is Bar Harbor, and our taxes are going up precipitously in part because our actual residents have been falling. Well, our year-round residents have been falling.
And so you’ve got the same amount of people responsible for building the new school—that’s what we’re really getting taxed on right now. But then we have 5 million people a year visit and benefit from all of our… they actually sort of take over our town, and they don’t bear much of the tax burden at all.
Whereas, if you think about it, if you built that business model from scratch tomorrow, you would be like, okay, well, the people who come for a week at a time, two weeks at a time, and take inordinate benefit from it—and actually take it over for the time they’re here—they should probably subsidize the year-round residents, or at least be pari passu with the year-round residents.
But that’s not the way the game was designed. And we’re not really good at going back and rethinking taxation structure. We’re not good at first principles of, like, wait, how did this business model originate? We’re not even good at saying that a city is a business model. We just sort of accept it as “it is what it is.”
Yeah. Yeah. That’s amazing. What do you—there’s a lot of other stuff to talk about—but what do you love about your work? Like, where’s the joy in it for you?
The joy in it for me—interestingly, because it yields in a place-based way. So, like, I’ll go to Detroit this week, and I will experience a place that’s better because of projects that I’ve had the good fortune to help with.
But the joy in it for me is the teaching. It’s the sort of professorial work of helping people see these other thought models. And I’ve worked with a lot of young people in doing this work over time.
I call most of them my kids. And so seeing them take the ideas and build upon them and make them their own, and sort of live out their ideas of what great cities are and can become—that’s the joy. And spending time with them and watching them grow.
Because I think that goes to a sort of core part of my outlook on the world, which is: legacy is not buildings with your name on it—which is sort of what old, resourced people have thought for a long time, right? Name a building, name something at a college after you. But I’m quite convinced, and I have a sort of belief I call the “humanity immune system,” which is like, you know, people—there’s a certain set that are like leukocytes, healing blood cells. And the more people that become living leukocytes and healing blood cells in communities, that’s actually what makes a community great or not.
It’s not the building stock. It’s not the special projects that somebody’s done. It’s not the public art. You know, it’s the hearts and minds of the people that occupy and operate these places. And so that’s why the people part is the joyful part to me. Yeah.
What is the work that you do? Is there a way you can sort of describe what it takes to turn—I mean, to turn a city around? You talked about the shift in mindset from, you know, the scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset. What do you do with a community or within a community to make that happen? And what’s the—you know, how do you describe what you’re doing?
Yeah. Well, I’ve had to turn it into—because I think it’s hard to understand, and, you know, I can’t… I’ve never gotten really good at defining it and describing it. But what I can say—I just use a case study, right, as I’m thinking a lot right now and I’m really hopeful that I get to work in Jackson, Mississippi right now. And so I’ll just use that as the example as to how I think about a place and go to work on it.
And Jackson’s really interesting in that it’s like Detroit and Memphis, in that it’s, you know, one of the three most/least diverse cities in the United States. Most diverse in that it’s over 80% African American, least diverse in that it’s highly economically homogeneous. And it’s a blue dot in the middle of a red place. It’s just, you know, fascinating from an urban thinker, urban practitioner standpoint.
What I do is I have developed a 20-step process over time. And I use that process repeatedly in the course of my work. And the first thing—and I, you know, I don’t know if it’s apocryphal or not—but there’s an Einstein quote about, you know, “Give me an hour to solve a problem, and I’ll spend, you know, the first 45 minutes defining the problem.”
That’s the first step for me too. It’s like, you know, people are like, “Oh, we need…” You know, so I have to be invited to help in the place. If I’m invited to help in a place, then usually people start presenting me symptoms. And the symptom might be like, downtown’s empty.
And I’m like, okay, well, let’s look at that. Let’s not assume that that’s the problem. Let’s analyze it and then work to determine what the true underlying problem is relative to that symptom.
In the case of downtown abandonment, it oftentimes is about the failing master narrative of the city. And it’s about the fact that there’s been a ton of deferred maintenance. And so that leaves you in this position where, you know, the suburban mall is a much better argument for where to go than the urban core.
Hmm. So, and also oftentimes there’s been shifts in business patterns. There’s been changes fundamentally in the type of work being done in the community. Your macro employers may have shifted. So you have to dig into all of that.
You use the 20-step process to first analyze, fall in love with the problem, identify assets, physically map the place, also map any sort of points of potential you have. Where do you still have people that are coming and going?
And then once you get everything sort of laid out under a problem set, then you can start getting into conversation with folks about, you know, what are your ideas? What are your hopes? What are your dreams? What do we have that we could use to sort of deploy together to create some form of energy?
We do a lot of ideation. Try not to go with the first idea that we come up with. Do a lot of business modeling, because even with work that’s non-profit, you still need a business model that works over time, because permanent subsidy doesn’t play out as being a good idea.
Packaging and design, and then you go into implementation. And the implementation is built on—we have about, I think we’re at like 265 lessons learned in this work so far. And they’ve all been documented.
So, you know, anytime you learn a lesson—like one that comes to mind, I try to make them as short and pithy as possible—but like, “Community engagement, not community enragement” is one of the lessons learned. And the way you design public input forums can lead you to one of those or the other. And so those documented lessons then get used with this 20-step process.
The head fake of the whole thing is that you’re actually teaching people how to problem-solve and work together. I mean, of course, it’s great whatever you—actually I’m excited—I’ll be in Jackson in two weeks, and we’re going to talk about gateways and some public cleanups of neighborhoods that have, you know, a lot of refuse and tires and that sort of stuff. Hopefully we’ll figure that out. Hopefully we’ll do a giant cleanup. Hopefully we’ll fill up, you know, dumpsters and dumpsters.
But, like, what you’re really trying to do is build that civic engagement, civic problem-solving muscle. And when these cities got really fast-growing and, you know, wealthy—like Detroit, 1953, that was the high point of its population—they had so much tax money that you didn’t have to do neighborhood cleanup, right? You’d just be like, well, let the city take care of that.
It’s when you go to decreasing revenue that you have to shift responsibility back to the… and there’s no known and logical way right now to do that. So then you just get to complete fail state, and then you have to start piecing it back together. And I like to piece those things together without just saying that, you know, subsidy taxation is the only way to solve it. Usually some creativity can help along the way too. Yeah. Yeah.
What is the—this is where sort of my worlds kind of overlap—where it’s sort of, you know, in my professional life as a researcher, helping companies try to understand the people they serve better, you know, and living in a small town with no planning capacity, no public input, the whole process of how the city tries to learn about itself and improve itself is so broken, or not… sort of non-existent, really. And I’m just wondering, how—you talked about community engagement—what is the sort of the model right now? How does a small city like Hudson think about community engagement around issues of development?
Yeah. I think that one of the biggest problems with community input, and how you get to NIMBYism, is that usually community engagement is a referendum on a singular idea. And it’s almost impossible to contextualize it.
And so it’s like, well, you know, I want to build this 400-unit mixed-use, you know, and then I have to decide, like, what do I feel about that? And then I have to put all my biases into that. So, like, am I scared of people that are different than me? Or am I worried about my rent going up, or whatever?
And I think that when Chattanooga did the “We want to be the best mid-sized city in America” or in Detroit, you know, our mantra was to stop population loss—you could then evaluate that 400-unit mixed-use or mixed-income development against your North Star, which is stopping the population loss. And then all of a sudden it’s like, man, it’s not yes or no.
It’s like, how do we add those 400 units? Because we’ve agreed together that there is somewhere bigger and better that we’re going. And I—I think I mentioned this to you on our preview call—but I recently met a guy in Texas who, you know, is hell-bent that they’re going to become the healthiest city in the state of Texas.
And you also can imagine that, right? If you decide to do, you know, a referendum on whether you should have park space or not—well, park space is like, “Well, I’m not sure. Are we taking money away from the school or the old folks’ home or whatever?” But it’s like, oh, if we’re going to be the healthiest city in Texas, and we’re generally aligned on that, then outdoor space that’s proximal to people that don’t have outdoor access would probably be something that’s important to us. Yeah.
So, I—I—I think that no matter what size you are as a community, you should have a strong idea of where you’re going. And then—I’m very analog—I think you should also have a place where you’re documenting, you know, all of your master planning. Like, where are we going? And then, what do we think that’s going to look like so that we could think about this together?
If I decided, you know, Detroit would be a lot healthier with a million people than it is with the 600,000 it has right now—from a taxation standpoint—it’s so easy for you to understand where you are. It’s so hard for you to understand where you might go.
And I think that the sort of the kid that wanted to be an architect in me recognizes that—for architects—the rendering is the most important thing, because you’re selling people on a world that doesn’t exist yet. And for nine out of ten people, that’s a very hard thing to imagine.
And, you know, letting go of a little bit of tax dollars or suffering through some construction process is harder if I don’t know what that end state is that I’m going to get to, and I believe that that’s going to inherently be better for me.
That’s beautiful. I mean, I just loved hearing all of that stuff. That’s certainly been my experience here in Hudson. We’ve kind of come to the end of the hour. There’s so much more I want to ask and talk about, but we’ll have to do that another time. But thank you so much for joining me.
Yeah. Yeah. It’s been my absolute pleasure.
