Connecting Communities One Rental at a Time

There’s a cemetery caretaker in Sheffield, Pennsylvania named Lee Goldthwaite who’s busier than he’s ever been. Not because the town is growing—it’s the opposite. Deaths are dramatically outpacing births, and every time he buries another longtime resident, he wonders how this place that once drew scores of young families will survive. Keep reading to see how Rentah can make it change in many communities.

“We already lost our bank,” he told a reporter last year, taking a break from trimming grass around headstones.

Sheffield isn’t alone. Neither is Erie, Pennsylvania, where residents call their city “a sinking ship.” Or Gary, Indiana, which lost 25% of its population between 2000 and 2016. Or the 284 rural counties—nearly a fourth of rural America—that have watched their working-age populations shrink by 5% or more for two straight decades.

This is the America nobody talks about at tech conferences. The one where 67% of rural counties lost population between 2010 and 2020. Where 81% of rural counties now have more deaths than births. Where entire regions are experiencing what researchers call “reverse gentrification”—high-income neighborhoods contracting inward while middle-tier areas hollow out, leaving economic dead zones in their wake.

Detroit lost more than 40% of its population over four decades. So did Buffalo, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh. Youngstown, Ohio. Flint, Michigan. Rockford, Illinois. The list goes on—city after city that was once the backbone of American manufacturing, now struggling with what comes after the factories close.

And here’s what most people don’t understand: you can’t fix these places with a new highway or a tax incentive. The problem is deeper. It’s social. It’s about what happens when the fabric of community—the thing that makes a place feel like home—starts to fray.

What Dies When Communities Shrink

The numbers tell part of the story. But they don’t tell you what it feels like to live in a place where you can’t find anyone to fix your furnace because the last two plumbers retired and their kids moved to Columbus. Or where you need to borrow a cement mixer for a weekend project, but the hardware store closed three years ago and the nearest rental place is 45 minutes away—if you have a car.

In Hartford, Connecticut, population down 0.5% and falling, the problems are “both cultural and economic,” as one analysis put it. Crime is up. Jobs are scarce. Young people leave. And with fewer young people having kids, there’s nobody to replace the aging population. It’s a death spiral—literally. More deaths than births, a shrinking tax base, fewer services, which drives more people to leave.

The middle part of America is hollowing out. Not just economically—that’s been happening since the 1970s—but socially. The connections that used to exist between neighbors, the informal networks of borrowing and helping and knowing each other’s names, those are disappearing too. When everyone under 40 moves to Nashville or Austin or wherever Amazon just announced they’re building a headquarters, what’s left is isolation.

The Tools in Your Garage Could Save Your Town

Here’s where it gets interesting. And I know this sounds almost too simple, but stay with me.

What if the power drill sitting in your garage, the one you use maybe twice a year, could be part of rebuilding community in places like Erie or Youngstown or Sheffield? What if the camping gear gathering dust in your shed, the folding tables you bought for your daughter’s graduation party five years ago, the carpet cleaner you’ve used exactly once—what if all of that could become the foundation for the kind of social infrastructure that keeps communities alive?

This isn’t about capitalism or commerce, at least not primarily. It’s about creating reasons for neighbors to know each other again. To talk. To trust. To need each other.

In Des Moines, which somehow grew 12.9% between 2010 and 2017 while most of Iowa’s 99 counties contracted, something interesting happened. The city didn’t just attract jobs—it built a sense of place. Neighborhoods where people actually interacted. Where young professionals moving in from smaller Iowa towns found community quickly, through informal networks and shared resources.

Compare that to Muncie, Indiana, or Rockford, Illinois, or any of the dozens of shrinking towns where the social infrastructure has collapsed along with the economic base. Where you don’t know your neighbors because they’re either elderly shut-ins or they moved away last year. Where borrowing a ladder would require driving to a Walmart 30 miles away because there’s nobody left to ask.

What Rentah Actually Is

Let me be clear about something: Rentah isn’t going to save the American Rust Belt. No app is going to do that. But here’s what it might do, and why it matters.

Rentah is a platform for hyperlocal rental—neighbors renting to neighbors, skills being shared within communities, tools and equipment circulating through blocks instead of sitting idle. But underneath the transaction is something more fundamental: it’s a reason to knock on your neighbor’s door. To have a conversation. To build the kind of trust that used to exist naturally but now needs infrastructure to support it.

In Buffalo—which lost more than 40% of its population but is showing some signs of stabilization—the neighborhoods that are holding on aren’t the ones with the fanciest new developments. They’re the ones where people still know each other. Where block clubs still meet. Where there’s still enough social cohesion that when someone needs help, they know who to ask.

That’s what’s been lost in so many shrinking cities and dying towns: the connective tissue. The relationships. The feeling that you’re part of something bigger than yourself, something that would notice if you left.

The Economics Nobody Talks About

Here’s another thing: when places are dying economically, every dollar matters even more. If you’re living in a county where the median household income has fallen along with the population—which describes most of the Rust Belt—spending $250 on a tool you’ll use once is the difference between making rent and not making rent. It’s groceries. It’s medication.

But renting that same tool from a neighbor for $30? That’s manageable. And that $30 goes to someone in your community, probably someone who also can’t afford to let $250 equipment sit idle. It’s not Amazon extracting value. It’s neighbors helping each other survive.

Multiply that across every tool, every piece of equipment, every service, every skill, and you start to see how local economies could function again even when the factory isn’t coming back. Even when your town has been bleeding population for decades. Even when the tax base has shrunk to the point where the city can barely keep the lights on.

Pittsburgh managed to transform itself from a dying steel town to a tech hub, but that took universities and billions in investment. Most places don’t have that luxury. What they do have—what every community has, no matter how small—is people with skills and stuff they’re not using. That’s the raw material.

Reverse Gentrification and Mutual Aid

There’s a term researchers use for what’s happening in cities like Cleveland and Detroit: “reverse gentrification.” It’s the opposite of what you see in Brooklyn or San Francisco. Instead of wealthy neighborhoods expanding outward into poor areas, you see wealthy neighborhoods contracting inward, abandoning their borders to decay.

The middle-tier neighborhoods—the ones that used to be working class and stable—those are hit hardest. Incomes fall. Houses sit empty. Services disappear. And the people who remain get more isolated.

But here’s what’s also happening, quietly, in pockets: mutual aid. Neighbors organizing to help each other survive. Not through government programs or nonprofit initiatives, but through informal networks of sharing, lending, bartering, and supporting.

In Chicago, there are multiple neighborhood-based mutual aid networks—Edgewater, McKinley Park, Northwest Side—that coordinate tool sharing, skill exchange, and resource distribution. In New Orleans, there’s a network doing similar work. In Brooklyn, South Brooklyn Mutual Aid has 900+ volunteers delivering 30,000+ grocery boxes annually.

These aren’t charity programs. They’re community self-defense. People refusing to let their neighborhoods die without a fight.

And what do they all need? Better infrastructure for coordination. Better ways to match people who have stuff with people who need stuff. Better systems for building the trust that makes these networks possible.

That’s what Rentah could be in places like these. Not a profit-maximizing venture capital play, but a tool for community resilience in places that desperately need it.

The Small Town Housing Paradox

In Humboldt, Kansas—population just under 2,000, down more than 6% in the last decade—there’s a weird problem. The town actually has some demand from people who want to move there. There’s a new brunch place with “vibrant, creative, bright urban energy in a small town.” Some younger folks are trying to bring the place back to life.

But there’s a housing shortage. Not because there aren’t empty houses—there are. But there’s not enough demand to justify building new ones, and the old ones are falling apart because nobody can afford to fix them up.

You know what would help? If there were easy ways to rent the tools and equipment needed for home repairs. If neighbors with construction skills could easily connect with people who need work done. If the guy who owns a generator would rent it out so the woman fixing up the old house on Main Street doesn’t have to buy one for a weekend project.

Small things. Local things. The kind of economic activity that doesn’t show up in Commerce Department statistics but makes the difference between a town stabilizing and a town dying.

Ken Johnson, a demographer at the University of New Hampshire who studies rural decline, is blunt: “So many rural counties, especially rural farm counties, typically are more likely to lose young adults than anyone else.” They leave for college or better jobs. And once they leave, they don’t come back.

But what if there were more reasons to stay? Not just jobs—you can’t will a factory into existence—but community. Connection. The feeling that you’re not isolated in a dying place, but part of something that’s trying to survive and maybe even thrive.

What Works: The Success Stories

Not every Rust Belt city is dying. Columbus, Ohio grew by more than 9% between 2010 and 2017—faster than the national average. Grand Rapids, Indianapolis, Madison, Minneapolis—all growing at 7%+. Even Detroit, poster child for urban decay, is showing signs of life. It now ranks 30th on the Kauffman Innovation Index for new entrepreneurs and startups, up from 35th just a few years ago.

What do these cities have in common? It’s not that they found new factories. It’s that they rebuilt social and economic infrastructure. They created reasons for people to move there and stay there. They invested in downtowns that feel alive. They supported local businesses. They built communities where people actually want to live.

And critically: they made it affordable. Pittsburgh, Baltimore, St. Louis, Cleveland, Cincinnati—these cities are among the few places in America where middle-class families can still afford to buy homes. Where young people aren’t spending 50% of their income on rent. Where there’s still economic possibility for people without trust funds.

But affordability alone isn’t enough. You also need community. You need to know your neighbors. You need the social infrastructure that makes a place feel like home.

The Question Nobody Wants to Ask

Most of America’s rural areas are not going to grow. That’s not pessimism; that’s demography. Between 2008 and 2017, metropolitan areas captured 99% of all job and population growth. The remaining 1% went to micropolitan and rural areas—and more than half of those counties lost population anyway.

Academics who study this are pretty clear: “Most of the nation’s smaller urban and rural counties are not growing and will not grow.” The U.S. has been urbanizing for 100 years, and nothing suggests that’s reversing.

So what do you do? Do you abandon these places? Do you write them off as inevitable casualties of economic progress?

Or do you ask a different question: How do we make sure the people who remain—the millions of Americans living in places that are shrinking, aging, and losing economic vitality—how do we make sure they can still live decent lives? That they still have access to services, to community, to dignity?

That’s not a tech question. That’s a human question. But technology can help.

What One Rental Actually Does

Here’s what happens when you rent a pressure washer from your neighbor through Rentah instead of buying one from Home Depot or renting from a corporate rental center 30 miles away:

You save $220 (and you probably need that money)
Your neighbor makes $30 (and they probably need that money too)
You meet your neighbor (maybe for the first time)
You have a conversation (about pressure washers, but also about the neighborhood, the town, life)
You build trust (because the transaction worked, the equipment worked, you both behaved decently)
You create a relationship (next month maybe they need something you have)
You strengthen community resilience (because now there are two people in the neighborhood who can help each other)

Multiply that by 100 transactions across a small town in decline, and something interesting starts to happen. People know each other again. They rely on each other. They have reasons to stay in touch. They’re not just isolated individuals in separate houses watching their community die—they’re a network.

And networks are resilient. They survive shocks. They adapt. They find solutions to problems that formal institutions can’t solve.

The Rust Belt Isn’t Rusting—It’s Reorganizing

There’s another narrative emerging about places like Buffalo and Cleveland and Pittsburgh: they’re not dying, they’re transforming. The manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back, but something else might be possible.

Baltimore has one of the largest healthcare job clusters in America. Pittsburgh is attracting tech and finance. Cities across the former Rust Belt are seeing new kinds of economic activity—smaller scale, more distributed, more service-oriented.

But that transition requires social infrastructure. It requires networks. It requires communities where information flows, where people can find opportunities, where trust exists.

You know what builds trust faster than anything? Successful transactions between neighbors. Borrowing working. Lending working. Keeping your word. Being reliable.

That’s what Rentah facilitates. Not just access to stuff, but the building blocks of community.

Why This Matters Now

Here’s the urgency: the demographic trends are accelerating. Fifty-five percent of rural counties now have more deaths than births—up from 37% just a decade ago. And that was before COVID, which hit rural America especially hard.

The median age in 89% of rural counties is higher than the national median. More than a third of rural counties saw their median age increase by two years or more in just a single decade. These are communities aging into extinction.

And every year that passes without intervention, the social infrastructure decays further. The guy who used to fix everyone’s cars—he dies, and nobody replaces him. The woman who organized block parties—she moves to be near her kids in Atlanta, and the parties stop. The networks fray. The connections dissolve. The community becomes a collection of strangers waiting to die.

That sounds brutal, but it’s real. Talk to people in places like Sheffield or Erie or Gary. They’ll tell you.

And here’s what else they’ll tell you: they want their communities to survive. They want reasons to hope. They want to believe there’s a future that isn’t just managed decline.

What Rentah Gets Right

There are a thousand platforms trying to “disrupt” something or other. Most of them are bullshit—rent-seeking middlemen extracting fees from transactions that used to happen naturally. But once in a while, technology actually solves a real problem.

The problem Rentah solves isn’t “access to tools.” You can solve that by driving to Home Depot. The problem Rentah solves is rebuilding local social and economic networks in places where those networks have collapsed.

It makes it easy to rent from neighbors. It creates reputation systems so trust can scale beyond personal relationships. It keeps money circulating locally instead of bleeding out to Amazon or big box stores. And critically, it gives people reasons to interact with their neighbors again.

In a place like Des Moines, which is actually growing, Rentah might be a nice convenience. In a place like Youngstown, which has lost half its population since 1950, it might be the difference between a neighborhood that stabilizes and one that collapses entirely.

Because here’s the thing about shrinking cities: they can’t compete on economic growth. The jobs aren’t coming back in sufficient numbers. But they might be able to compete on quality of life, on affordability, on community. And that requires infrastructure—including infrastructure for neighbor-to-neighbor economic activity.

The Path Forward

I don’t have a grand solution for American decline. Nobody does. The forces that are hollowing out rural America and shrinking Rust Belt cities are massive—globalization, automation, urbanization, demographic aging. You don’t reverse those with an app.

But you might be able to make them survivable. You might be able to build enough resilience at the local level that communities hang on, adapt, and find new equilibria that work.

That’s what mutual aid networks are doing in Chicago and New Orleans and Brooklyn. That’s what some of the successful Rust Belt cities did—they rebuilt social infrastructure even as economic infrastructure collapsed.

And that’s what Rentah could enable in communities across America that are facing demographic and economic headwinds: a way to rebuild the networks, relationships, and economic exchanges that make a place feel like a community instead of just a collection of isolated houses.

One rental at a time. One conversation at a time. One relationship at a time.

It won’t save every town. Nothing will. But it might save some. And for the people living in those places—the ones everyone else has written off—that matters more than anything.

Sources

The Washington Post: “‘Too many old people’: A rural town reckons with population loss” (June 2024)
CBS News: “12 major American cities that are shrinking” (June 2017)
Cleveland Federal Reserve: “Urban Decline in Rust-belt Cities” (May 2013)
Britannica: “Rust Belt” (August 2022)
World Population Review: “Rust Belt Cities” & “Rust Belt States 2025”
City Journal: “The Rust Belt’s Mixed Population Story” (March 2023)
NBER: “Global Evidence on the Decline and Recovery of Rust Belt Cities”
Recruitonomics: “Is the American Rust Belt Primed for a Resurgence?” (September 2023)
U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service: “Rural Areas Show Overall Population Decline and Shifting Regional Patterns of Population Change”
University of New Hampshire Carsey School: “Rural America Lost Population Over the Past Decade for the First Time in History” (June 2024)
NPR: “Fighting population loss in the shrinking rural U.S.” (July 2023)
Brookings Institution: “A Population Slowdown for Small Town America” (July 2016)
The Conversation: “Most of America’s rural areas are doomed to decline” (April 2025)
FWD.us: “Immigration can reverse rural population decline”
RSF Journal: “Depopulation, Deaths, Diversity, and Deprivation: The 4Ds of Rural Population Change” (January 2025)