how do local economies thrive?

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The_Ink_Goddess

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This is such a basic question but any help would be much appreciated!

Essentially, I need something that would create a very localised, gentrified environment. It can be in a city or a rural area (rural preferred). Most importantly, though, it needs to be something that would make the family in charge VERY rich, having initially come from nothing, but would also make the area in general pretty rich. Although I guess this could go along with gentrification. It's a family owned ish company, but the patriarch is in charge. It's difficult to replace them, something that is wrapped up in the individual and the family (maybe through land or home ownership). The problem is, I don't want a multinational corporation necessarily; I initially had mines in mind (or mills), but it's not the 1980s anymore and it feels like those kind of areas have gone completely to outsourcing. That's the other - and perhaps most difficult? - part: it needs to be something at the peak, or almost at the peak, of its powers. They are rich, but also influential. Are there any industries who even work like this on a local scale anymore and could create both wealth and influence?
 
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Woollybear

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Bitcoin?

Facemasks/toilet paper/grocery-delivery-service?

I think a localized resource for a new economy could work. If your guy lives near a hot spring or other thermal features, and owns the land, he can rig up a power generation system for the upcoming green economy.
 

Introversion

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Somewhat depends on what economic model you’re trying for. Brute unregulated capitalism tends to impoverish everyone but a few. If your family-in-charge (FIC) is more inclined to US capitalism of the (say) 1950s, rather than the 1980s onward, perhaps they share the wealth by paying their employees very well? Perhaps the locals have a good pool of skills that are hard to find elsewhere, and the FIC knows it. Gemstone polishers, perhaps of an exotic type only found locally, and hard to work with? (Is this other-world SF/F, or more contemporary Earth?) Maybe the locals have a long history of working this material, but mostly for themselves, and the FIC are exporters who found new markets for them?
 

lonestarlibrarian

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Look at the historical industries that have done that for areas in the past. You had Ford and Detroit; Pullman and Chicago; Hershey and, um, Hershey, PA; Gates and Jobs and the Bay Area; the Waltons and Bentonville. Or look at prominent families: Heinz (ketchup), Hilton (hotels), Lay (potato chips). Don't think about billionaires who come from investments or information-wrangling, but think about billionaires who produce doohickeys.

Now look at all of the products that have been outsourced since the 80's. 100% of the light bulbs, Gerber baby food (80% of the market share), 100% of the rebar, all major shirt brands with significant market shares, all of Mattel, pretty much all cutlery/silverware, most aspirin--- etc, etc, etc--- all that is made overseas, and a lot of it is made overseas because of domestic EPA regulations that make it difficult/impossible to continue manufacturing here.

At the same time, one of the problems rural areas have in attracting business to their areas, is the lack of skilled workers. You need people who are able to produce doohickeys with a high-school-dropout education, rather than someone who needs three degrees. Because the people who have three degrees are usually not thrilled at the idea of moving to podunk-nowhere, with the lack of school variety, the lack of entertainment, the lack of restaurants, the slow internet, and so on... :)

So, pick a thing. It might be a vitamin supplement that everyone's gone crazy about. It might be a deposit of rare-earth minerals at the bottom of the lake. It might be a ginseng farm. It might be a superior kind of screw/bolt/fastener that the construction industry has flocked to adopt. It might be a nursery that has the contract to supply starter plants to [mega-corporation].

I live in a teeny rural town. Our major employers of the past 40 years have included airplane manufacturing, RV manufacturing, clothing manufacturing, aluminum extrusion, screen doors, and a factory that produces things for kids to sell at school fundraisers. There were four of those still here when we moved here 14 years ago... now we're down to three. At least one of them has to send a bus away to a larger city 40 miles away to find people to come work, because the work is physically demanding, and they chew through the locals pretty quickly.
 

ChaseJxyz

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Look at Disney, in both Anaheim and Orlando. The park brings in millions of people to visit the parks, they stay at local hotels, they eat at local restaurants, when they get hurt they go to local hospitals. Disney being closed hurts them, yes, but it also hurts all the local businesses that rely on tourist dollars. No one is going to Orlando for Sea World, they go to Sea World since they're already in the area for Disney (ditto with Universal before they did Harry Potter world). Before the parks, the areas were woods/swamps/citrus groves, and there was no reason for anyone to go there. Disney is the economy in these areas, they have special sections of the police department just for them.

Now think of golf courses or ski resorts. Think of Tahoe or wine country. Your family can own the mountain that's the only good place to ski in the area (like state or even country). They can own a bunch of land and grow wine grapes, or they have a private "wildlife preserve" with rare animals that you can hunt. It should be something that middle class and rich people want to do, especially if it allows them to show off how rich or cool or cosmopolitan they are. They can pull a Larry Ellison and own an entire island in Hawai'i even. Since they're essentially the only business in the area, they are going to be most of the tax base, so the local government won't want to upset them. The family has enough money stashed away that they can shut down operations for months (or even years) and be fine but everyone else in the town will go out of business because of the lack of tourists.

In the modern day, mines are still really important. If you look into electronics/semi-conductors, they need rare materials, not just silicon and copper. My dad was a micro-electric engineer and would tell me about how one mineral only had two mines for it in the entire world, one in Australia and one in Africa, and the one in Africa was flooded and essentially a dead-end. The company did all that bad stuff in Avatar for Unobtanium, which was a semiconductor that had ridiculous properties (which is why those rocks were floating) which made it an important part of technology back on Earth. It was so valuable it was worth the money (and bad press) to ship in military people from another solar system to kill the natives. So it doesn't need to be as cool/sci-fi as that but it is realistic (you'd have to do research on what those minerals would be though). You could combine this with the above, where the family leases parts of their land for mining/oil extraction but since it's so rare they can charge a ridiculous amount for the rights. Or they have some sort of natural feature that is worth scientific monitoring (like to put a telescope, tectonic plates etc) and they can twist the arm of the government so they also have to pay for that (or not come after them for whatever nefarious things they do, like wage theft or tax evasion or EPA violations).
 

frimble3

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Know what they're not making any more?
How 'bout real estate? He was the first guy in the area to realize the location could be valuable and staked claims for as many as his family members as he could, bought as
much as he could get. Probably at a natural crossroad or bottleneck, so people couldn't avoid him. Maybe he originally ranched or farmed as a sideline, but as traffic increased, he built a hotel for travellers, etc, essentially starting the town, and as the population, and demand built up, he leased, not sold, the land. Always retaining control.

Those leases made him rich, so he encouraged building, again, on leased land.
When times changed, he got a dam built - steady, clean water supply, and the first electrification in the area.
Business needing easy movement of materials and cheap electricity came, and needed places to build. Etc.

I'm thinking you need a river and a mountain, for the hydro-electric, and a natural bottle-neck ie a mountain pass, to direct people there. All else follows.
It could be either an industrial center, or a gorgeous mountain resort for the rich (this would have come later, with the railroad that would have found the pass useful for their routing.
 

neandermagnon

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Having read some replies - what side of the Atlantic is it set? Your location's England but a lot of suggestions are things that would work in the USA but don't seem that plausible for the UK. Or don't take into account the feudal nature of English property law.

IF it's set in the UK and you want a rural location,have them own loads and loads of buy to lets, i.e. houses/flats that they own and let. Maybe if it's a rural location that's also a tourist spot, let some of them out as holiday homes, although this would mean less business during winter. Maybe own the best hotel in town as well. Hotels round where I live (Dorset coast) seem to do a reasonable amount of business in the winter, however it's pretty urban here. (Urban, but still Dorset - feels damn rural compared to London... and only about 20 mins drive from proper dirt tracks with single lane traffic and no road markings kind of rural.)

There is potential for an individual or family to make a lot of money in buy to lets, and it's possible to start from just owning your residential property and end up owning loads of properties. Someone could start, for example, by moving out of their residential property and letting it out while they live with family or their partner. (Note: if you do this and have a residential mortgage, you need to get permission to let it out and they will charge you a higher interest rate.) then they can get a mortgage for a 2nd buy to let, let that out, and the more properties you rent out, the more passive income you get and that can be invested in more properties etc. There are some landlords that end up with a very large portfolio of properties and if they live in a small rural area, they could end up owning a significant number of properties in the area and be known locally as a very wealthy person with a lot of influence. If a family all own properties as individuals, each individual may not have that many properties but collectively they could own a significant chunk of the local property. (Note: lenders get jumpy if one person has too many mortgaged properties in the same area because if they go bankrupt it'll be harder to sell all their repossessed properties.)

They could increase their influence if they also get themselves elected as mayor or something (or chair of the parish council if it's somewhere too small to have a mayor). If you want them to also bring lots of wealth to the area, then have some of their properties be let out as holiday homes, which brings in the tourists who spend money in the town. Maybe they also organise tourism events and make money twice over, i.e. the events bring more tourists to rent out the holiday homes, and the events themselves make a lot of money.

Also, beach huts. Maybe the character or someone in the family could buy up some land on the sea front and build a load of beach huts. They sell and rent for ridiculous prices in the town where I live, albeit it has one of the best beaches in Europe, YAY! At least when people aren't abusing it in the middle of a coronovirus pandemic (throws angry glances at the rest of the country).

Having multiple facets to the business - ordinary buy to lets, holiday lets, beach huts, organising events that bring in tourists - all kind of feed off each other and end up making more money and bringing in more tourists, which brings in business for everyone. If there are more tourists, there are other small business in the area unrelated to this family that will benefit. Run markets for local businesses alongside the event or events.
 
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TrapperViper

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Know what they're not making any more?
How 'bout real estate?

+1

Real estate was the first thing I thought of too, and with your gentrification concept it could fit very well pending on the time period.

Family inherited land/buildings that are run down and in a poor part of the community. They seek TIF from the municipality (tax increment financing) that allows them to develop large apartment buildings with retail space without having to contribute any down payments funds to the project. They become very wealthy and influential within the community.

Not a unique story, but telling it would seem sort of fresh in today's world. Most people aren't too familiar with TIF projects and how they are funded.

If you wanted to go very current you could do something with Opportunity Zones too.

- - - Updated - - -

Oh boy...I think I missed the part about the setting being UK. My bad...
 
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neandermagnon

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Oh boy...I think I missed the part about the setting being UK. My bad...

I don't think the OP said where it's set... but because her location is England I gave some UK-orientated suggestions and south coast of England orientated suggestions.
 
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WeaselFire

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Quite a few factory towns and mining towns still exist in the world, do you have a specific region? Gentrified wealth and family rule comes down to control of the primary resource, whether it's mines, water, land, manufacturing or whatever. The family rules because the rest of the town is dependent on what they control.

Jeff
 

Debbie V

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A new agricultural resource could do it too. Think about tobacco and coffee---of course the people who got rich off of these were abusive to the natives. Gold and diamonds had a similar effect, leading to towns named for the discoverers and the like. Owning the land seems to matter a lot.
 
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