Sound checks from a local band echo across the cement floor of an abandoned warehouse as digital artist Matt Bucy paces out future tenant spaces with footsteps and a roll of masking tape—sparingly, because even the local hardware store has left this once-bustling Vermont railroad town.
Rental deposits change hands. Local beer froths. After decades of neglect, the 2,200-person village of White River Junction, Vermont comes back to life, thanks to impactful real estate investing.
A Generational Shift
The Global Impact Investing Network estimates that global “impact investments” – investments made for social and environmental benefits in addition to financial gains – reached another peak of $502 billion in April 2019 – double the $228 billion in 2018 and double the previous $114 billion in 2017.
The Economist predicts that this exponential spike of impact investing marks the onset of a generational and fundamental shift in investment philosophy. 93% of Millennials consider social impact when making investment decisions, compared with 46% of Baby Boomers. Millennials are also poised to inherit an investible $59 trillion by 2060 – a fact well-known to the usual flock of large banks and commercial asset managers.
Founder of Northern Stage Theater replaced a 38-year old empty parking lot with The Village, an 87,000 SF, 5-story, 80-apartment assisted living facility.
Kenneth Baldwin/WRJ
“Local” by nature and definition, real estate and community impact investing defies commercialization. 95% of U.S. land remains rural, according to the 2010 census. The advent of Opportunity Zones and tax credits aside, dusty U.S. farmlands and Appalachian hillside communities rarely appear in glossy wealth management brochures.
Paving its Own Road
Fortunately, big-time investors weren’t necessary in the revival of White River Junction.
Digital artist Matt Bucy converted the city’s derelict Tip Top Bakery building into 41 studios, workshops and galleries without external financial or philanthropic support. His strategy of renting affordable auxiliary spaces at concessionary rents—and sometimes for free—drew creatives from near and far into the renovated warehouse and into the community.
In the mid-1800s, the town served as a regional transportation hub. Five separate railroads lines used eight track crossings to bring 50 passenger trains in daily. By the 1960s, federal highways bypassed the area. Factories, businesses and real estate assets tumbled into disuse and disrepair.
As subsequent big-box developers opted for tax-free New Hampshire across the river, creative minds migrated in the reverse direction, drawn by Bucy’s studio spaces, the town’s undisturbed architecture and the accommodating, creative community.
Bucy’s Tip Top Bakery renovation resonated as a precursor to what urbanist Richard Florida now terms “collision density.” A walk down the hallway winds up in a graphic arts studio and, in turn, collaborative conversations between the artists, themselves.
The Center for Cartoon Studies campus includes a 1929 Art Deco department store and a former colonial revival post office built in 1934 and offers the only MFA in sequential arts in the country housing 49 student “Toonies”.
Kenneth Baldwin/WRJ
“Success stems from DJ’ing the tenant mix and keeping tenants compatible,” Bucy explained. “Attract creative tenants. Put them together. Mix them up. Make them more creative.”
Facilitated conversations hatched theaters, shops, galleries, schools, museums, and cultural outlets that didn’t exist a few years ago. It created for the revived community a “triple bottom line”—socially, environmentally and economically.
“Matt Bucy got lots artists set up with studios in the old Tip Top Bakery, and we both wanted to make it possible for artists to do their thing,” reports Eric Bunge, Special projects manager at Northern Stage Theater. “I immediately saw in White River Junction fertile artistic ground where artists would spin off economic and cultural vitality.”
Artistic Breeding Ground
With the Tip Top Bakery building’s supply of costume creators, mask makers, textile artisans, set designers, stage builders and scene painters at her disposal, Brooke Ciardelli founded Northern Stage Theater with $7,000 in the vacant Briggs Opera House, spawning a $2.1 million nonprofit enterprise.
The theater attracts a rotating variety of resident artists and engages the community on a broader level, attracting more theaters, artists, audiences, restaurants and businesses in a positive urban feedback loop. The shows occur at nights and on weekends, inverting slow or closed urban business hours into some of the community’s most engaged periods.
“One of the objectives of theater is to build and bind community,” Bunge proclaims.
And build community it has.
Bucy’s efforts and the success of Northern Stage have led to countless new community contributions. Northern Stage Theater’s new home seats 240, attracts 30,000 visitors each year and alone infuses $4 million into the town annually. Local restaurants staff up on performance nights.
Contemporary and inventive, Main Street Museuam exhibits “artistic taxonomy” in a former fire station and offers samples of “healthful and invigorating tonics.”
Kenneth Baldwin/WRJ
There’s the award-winning JAG Productions theater company, inspired by the Northern Stage’s success.
There’s also the 1929 Art Deco department store and 1934 former colonial revival post office, which now house The Center for Cartoon Studies and the nation’s only accredited MFA in sequential arts.
And now there’s the transformation of a decades-old, weed-filled lot into an 87,000-square foot, five-story, 80-apartment assisted living facility called The Village.
The creative momentum has even led to annual town events like the White River Indie Film Festival, the autumn Glory Days of the Railroad Festival and the “Gory Daze” Halloween Parade and Ball and even the monthly First Friday’s town-wide party.
And every year, at the town annual Oscar’s party, patrons peruse local designers, wearing shirts that proclaim, “White River Junction – it ain’t so bad.”