By comparison to most small towns, the town where I live (Dumas, TX), has a pretty vibrant downtown. Now, it may not be as vibrant as it was in the heyday many imagine from their past, but I’d say it’s doing pretty well in that there are only a couple vacant buildings. In most towns that still have a town square (as in place, not person) there are many vacant buildings. And most of the occupied buildings are antique stores.

Dumas, however, has shops that are actually open. Granted, most of one side of the downtown square (which surrounds the courthouse, as in many other towns) is occupied by city offices and law firms, but hey! at least they’re occupied! Even a lawyer is a step up over an empty, decaying shell. OK, well, that’s a topic for debate, but for today we’ll pretend it’s a good thing.

Many people wax nostalgic about downtown areas—especially in small towns (Dumas has about 15k people). They remember—or pretend to remember—the joys of going downtown on a Saturday morning with their mother and hitting all the shops, stopping for lunch at a little counter, then spending the rest of the afternoon shopping. Even men have fond memories of downtown, as they sat on the steps in front of the corner bank (why were banks always on the corner?) and told jokes and whistled at the girls who were out shopping with their mothers.

With this sense of memory prevalent, many towns across America—big and small—are trying to recapture downtown. From revitalization plans that offer tax-breaks to businesses that will move into the downtown area to towns like Lakewood, CO, where they tore down the mall to build a downtown, civic groups are trying to rebuild and even reinvent downtown.

There are probably a myriad of obstacles to these plans, all but one of which I will ignore for the sake of this blog. Many of them are esoteric and some of them are just because the world has changed. But I went to downtown Dumas yesterday (this isn’t a big trip, I work two blocks off the square) to check out an office supply store I had been meaning to go to.

It’s a nice store. Well-stocked for our size of town. At a guess, I’d say the building was once either a furniture store or a hardware store. It was laid out like the buildings some of you are going to remember from your youth: large (really large!) first floor with an open plan, then stairs about half-way back that go up to a sort of balcony area where—in this case—more office furniture is stored/displayed. You used to see a lot of store laid out this way (there’s another one here in Dumas that still is a furniture store) but I imagine they went the way of the dinosaur when it became evident that there was no good way for handicapped shoppers to get to the second floor.

Anyway, it’s a big store, and well-stocked and with friendly cashiers and all. There’s just one hitch, and this is what stands in the way of Dumas’s downtown taking back market share from Wal-Mart: there’s nowhere to park. In the old days, people would catch a ride downtown with a friend or—even if they drove themselves—they’d park in one spot with the expectation of spending the day walking the square. They were going to make a square loop, anyway, so where they parked was of no big consequence. Now, though, folks that shop downtown are generally going there because they have one destination in mind and they want to park near it. But downtown Dumas doesn’t have parking lots. It has parking spaces, but it would be a stretch to call them a lot. As a consequence, the nice big office supply store I was talking about earlier can’t reasonably expect more than 5 customers at a time.

So, for those of you who long for the old days of the downtown, you need at least two things. The first is a sea-change in the mentality of the American shopper. The second is more parking. Considering there are buildings there—which are notoriously hard to move—the first problem may be the easier one to solve.