On March 14, 2025, an EF3 tornado hit Cave City, Arkansas, directly, something the town of about 2,000 people had never experienced in more than a century. Mayor Jonas Anderson describes the shock of that night and the neighborly response that followed, but the story does not begin or end with disaster. Cave City had already been investing in its own center, moving City Hall to Main Street and supporting a new wave of local activity downtown. This conversation looks at how a small town’s existing relationships shaped its recovery and strengthened the work already underway.
Hey, everyone. Norm here. Before we jump into today's conversation, I want to give you a bit of context. This interview comes from our Strongest Town contest, where we had the chance to sit down with leaders from our top eight communities. As part of the contest, we featured interviews from the Final Four, and we actually released all four of those episodes at once into your podcast feed. I hope that was a burst of awesome discovery for you, or at least a good excuse to walk your dog just a little longer so you could listen to them all.
But that also meant some really great conversations didn't make it into the main series, and honestly, that would have been a shame to leave them unheard. So we're sharing them with you here. As you listen, I think you'll quickly hear just how much insight, creativity, and care these communities are bringing to the work of building strong towns.
I also want to congratulate West Allis, Wisconsin, this year's Strongest Town winner. We're looking forward to recognizing their achievement at the Strong Towns national gathering coming up in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and then sharing more of their story in a mini documentary coming out this summer. In the meantime, think of this conversation as a window into places that are doing meaningful work and will very likely be strong contenders again in the years ahead. Let's dive in.
Hello there, and welcome to Bottom Up Shorts. I am Norm with Strong Towns, and I'm excited to be able to connect this week, in particular, with participants in the Strongest Town contest. Cave City, Arkansas is a strong community that is growing and becoming ever more capable, providing a high quality of life for a lot of its residents, and seriously grappling with many of the challenges that it faces as well. With me today is the mayor of Cave City, Arkansas, Jonas Anderson. Welcome, Jonas. Do you want to share just a little bit about yourself and your community?
Thank you so much for having me. We're thrilled to be on this podcast with you and the Strong Towns crew. My name is Jonas Anderson. I'm mayor here, born, raised, and graduated in Cave City, Arkansas. I've been mayor since 2017. Before that, I served on the city council for about seven years, and just kind of fell in love with the work and the mission and everything we've got going on here in Cave City.
I'm also the Chief Technology Officer for our local bank here, which was chartered in Cave City in 1906. It's one of our long-term foundational businesses here, and it's really neat to see that kind of tie into Cave City as well. So happy to be here and really proud of this role and the work that we're doing.
You mentioned the bank and its role within the community, the presence of local patrons and local participants who are working to help strengthen the community. Can you talk about why that local self-reliance really matters? At Strong Towns, we sometimes bluntly say, "Help ain't coming." We sometimes want to look outside and say maybe someday an angel investor will show up and transform everything. But there's the recognition that not only is that less likely to occur, but that it's not even needed if we can actually address what we need within our own place. Do you want to share some of the things that you're observing in that sense?
Absolutely. Everybody hopes for that angel investor or that really big industry that can come in and really shake things up and make something even better. That does happen sometimes, but I do think it's really important not to just sit and wait on that. As we've found, and of course as other small communities across the country find, you have so much incredible talent already right there in your own community — people that want to start new businesses, that want to invest in small businesses and support those businesses.
We actually have two good community banks here in our community. We have other businesses that have been here for a long time, and it's local people that are tied into them, so their kids go to our local school district, which is a wonderful school district. It really is all about investing in yourself and seeing that circular pattern of starting businesses, supporting businesses, and then that goes right back into the community. It kind of just becomes a self-perpetuating thing once you really get it going.
Your community recently had a severe twister come through in March of last year, and disasters do tend to bring people together. There's harm, but then there's also healing that emerges from that. I get the sense from what you've shared that your community, in some respects, would say we're stronger now than we were before, even after a tornado came through and took a lot away. What has that been like?
March 14th, 2025, was the day. About 10:30 at night, which is ingrained into all of our memories now. We had never been hit by a tornado directly in Cave City in the entire history of the community — well over 100 years. I think that kind of breeds a sense of false security in a way. We had had close calls over the years, even as I've grown up here, but it just never happened. When it did, I think it was shocking, frankly, to a lot of people. It was an EF3 with 65 mile per hour winds that went right through the center of town.
In the aftermath of that, like a lot of small communities, we really don't have a choice. You have to get out there immediately and dust yourself off and start picking up the pieces, and that's what we saw. We had friends and neighbors and strangers and businesses helping each other. Not long after that, we had people from outside coming in as they could, and they provided an enormous amount of help to us. But it was that local, neighborly response that really set a lot of that in motion. I think in the last year, everyone would agree that we've definitely come out of it even stronger than we were before. No doubt about it.
The broken windows theory of policing has its own backstory, and the idea that there's no misdemeanor too small — that many things should be recognized as problems within the community. A broken windows theory of addressing what ails our communities, I think, is really valuable. I think of that especially in the context of tornado or disaster response: you actually do want to think about what are the small things we can just fix and set back to right? Where's the bench that's been flipped over that we can right again? There is something very meaningful and beautiful in taking those steps. What's so powerful in that is it democratizes who can do it. It isn't just waiting for a work crew to come. You are that work crew. You get to give yourself a label, a credit, and then have that sense of personal achievement and accomplishment.
More generally, in your work on city council and now as mayor, do you want to share some of the ways you're trying to grapple with the pretty normal challenges — like housing needs, people struggling to find homes at an income level that they can manage? What are some of the needs that are there, and maybe some of the ways you're looking to tackle that?
Of course. With a population of about 2,000 people, we don't have a lot of resources to directly impact housing as a city. We don't have the housing grants and a lot of the things that bigger cities can obviously benefit from. Any small town still deals with all the same issues, even if we don't have the exact same resources to deal with them. We are kind of a microcosm of what's going on across the country. Affordable housing especially is a problem, and a lot of small communities have a high number of rental properties. When rent goes really high and gets unaffordable, that affects us just like it affects New York City apartments or anything else you might find across the country. It's just on a different scale.
We're really just trying to encourage entrepreneurship in our community, like I said earlier, with local businesses. We're trying to be the best place that we can be. We know we can't be like our neighbors that are bigger cities, so we're really trying to be inwardly focused on our people. Quality of life is a big thing for us right now. We've been making huge investments into our city parks, and that's making a real difference. We recently got designated as a Main Street Arkansas community, which is new for us, and that's already making a big difference.
I think we are able to punch above our weight in a lot of ways, and that makes us stronger. It's because we've really focused on ourselves, and we're also building relationships with other cities and organizations so that when we come up against a problem like housing or infrastructure — which we're definitely dealing with right now — if we don't have the resources locally, we know people we can reach out to that do. That has paid off, probably more than anything else in my tenure on the city council and as mayor: having really strong connections and relationships with people not only all over the state, but really all over the country.
You mentioned Main Street — let's go into that. I remember growing up on a farm, and at some point we bought a couple of new rakes and shovels. They broke. They were not as good as the old ones that were already there when my parents bought the farm. That old stuff just worked. I feel like our main streets in particular — a lot of communities have realized that was the old shovel they overlooked, thinking they needed something new. Now they're coming around and realizing, oh, we've had this gem, this resource, this whole time, and with a little bit of TLC it can become even more vibrant and more essential.
Smaller communities especially have the luxury of saying we've always had this. In my community, we lacked the money to tear down our Main Street back in the '60s when the urban renewal craze was hitting. I'm so grateful we didn't have that money, because now we still have it, and it's a real powerhouse and a real strength within our place. Share a little bit about Cave City's Main Street and what makes it a powerhouse within your community.
You couldn't have said it better yourself. We have a lot of buildings that were built in the '30s and '40s and were really thriving, especially in that mid-century era of the '50s. There were multiple mercantile stores and multiple other kinds of businesses all up and down downtown — if you look at pictures, just cars lined up and down Main Street. We are seeing that come back in a sense. You're never going to see it come back the way it was, because that world just does not exist anymore, unfortunately, in some ways.
What we've really been focused on from day one — when I was on the council, and especially once I was mayor — is the fact that in a lot of communities, those downtown sections eventually get abandoned. The buildings become cost-prohibitive to maintain. A 1930s storefront building can be difficult to keep up, and so you see people start building further and further out from the center, from the old downtown.
What we tried to do right away was be very focused on starting in the center of the community, investing there, and then working our way out. For instance, a few years ago, we had the opportunity to get out of our city hall building. It was in very bad shape, a couple of blocks off Main Street, and it was functionally and physically obsolete. It was time to go. We were able to buy an old historic building right on Main Street that used to be a bank, with a drive-through and everything. We bought it and moved our city hall onto Main Street, and that has set off a wave of investment there over the last few years, which is what we thought and hoped it would do.
Now we're looking at a downtown that is almost full again. Whereas in the years before we did that, it was like every other small town — fits and starts of people buying businesses, trying things out, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. As I told you before the recording, right after this I'm going to watch our Chamber of Commerce director cut a ribbon for yet another new business moving in right here next to City Hall. That's the kind of thing we focused on that has really honestly strengthened us so much, especially in the wake of the tornado: focusing on the inside first and then working our way out.
I do have to ask — are you a city inside of a cave? Where did the name come from?
There is a cave here in Cave City, right in about the center of town. When a couple of families first moved to this area in the late 1800s to map out a new town, they settled right around this cave. There's a lot of intrigue and mystery to it, and I could talk forever about it, but the gist of it is: we don't know where the cave ends. There is a body of water in the cave called the Crystal River, and it is crystal-clear water.
A species of fish was found in there a few decades ago that have no eyes — blind, obviously, from being in there so long. It's a sandstone cave, so you don't get stalactites and stalagmites, but there are huge slabs. There are about four big rooms that you can go into depending on the water level. Sometimes the water level is up, sometimes it's down, and we've never really been able to figure out what causes that. Even with rainfall, it doesn't seem to affect it — it rises and falls on its own. We don't really know what that is.
There's a lot of history there. In the early days of the town, people would store food items in the cave because it's always about 58 degrees inside. They could use it for shelter if needed. The city did pump water out of it for drinking for many, many years, until things advanced and we were able to have our own water system.
One last interesting thing worth pointing out: there is a 1930s motor court that sits on top of the cave. A gentleman came in 1930 and built it, and it is made out of all kinds of unique rocks he collected from all over the area — quartz crystals, geodes, petrified wood, sea foam-looking formations, and things like that. It's a true roadside motel court with some cabins. The owners are now going through and restoring it, trying to get it back to where they can rent the rooms out, and they're making really good progress. It's the oldest motor court, for sure, in the state of Arkansas, if not the entire region. It's a very unique thing, and they give tours of the cave every summer.
Well, I'm going to have to find a way to add on to my trip to Fayetteville, Arkansas, for the Strong Towns national gathering to drive just a little bit further out to Cave City and go check it out. As we wrap up, I'd love to hear — you've been a public servant in your community as well as wearing many other hats. Do you have a bit of advice or a suggestion for other people? Something that has really helped to either ground you or give you energy to do the work, and give you that perspective on your role within the community?
It's a daunting task, not going to lie. Even in a small town, it's busy and it's weighty if you take it seriously. We talk about that a lot with our small team here at City Hall: we're not just showing up and collecting a paycheck. We're leading the future of this community, where people — hopefully long after us — are going to come and live and reap whatever we sow, good or bad. I take that very seriously.
My family has been in this area for a long, long time, back into the 1800s. My grandparents owned businesses here on downtown Main Street in the era of the '40s, '50s, and '60s. So there are a lot of deep ties here, like a lot of other people that live here have, and that's what really grounds me. I have three sons that I'm helping raise with my wife, and they go to school here. That's kind of how I got involved — I thought, if I'm going to be here and raise my kids here, and I don't really have a desire to go anywhere, I might as well make this place the best that it can be. That's what I've really tried to focus on.
I think the biggest thing to encourage other people who are doing this work is to get a network of people around you. I've had to learn that lesson myself, sometimes the hard way. I like to be very involved in all the projects, but I can't do all the projects. We had a dormant Chamber of Commerce for a number of years, and we were, in fits and starts, talking about how we really need a chamber. I would try to do some chamber-esque things, but you just can't do that well on your own.
Now we have an amazing Chamber of Commerce Executive Director. In January of 2025, we had zero Chamber members. Even through the tornado recovery and all that — which she was a huge part of — we're now at over 100 members in less than a year. Our Cave City Watermelon Festival — you can look that up — is in its almost 50th year. We draw 10,000 to 20,000 people to this little town for three days every year, and it's because we have a circle of people around us that are helping put all that on.
It's easy to get burned out. It's easy to just think, is this even worth it? But I would just encourage people to remember it absolutely is worth it. You've got to get a circle of people around you — even two or three — that can catch on to that same vision. That's what will help you keep going and not get burned out.
Well, Jonas, this has been a treat. Thank you for sharing about Cave City, Arkansas, and rallying support for your community as a strong community — really continuing to build that coalition of the willing, or the coalition of those that are able to contribute what they have to build a stronger community. Big or small, we need strong communities, and I think that's what really stands out. Thank you for making time. I really appreciate it. All the best in your upcoming meeting with your chamber and the ribbon cutting — new things opening even as old things are being rediscovered. I love that as a key asset and strength within the community.
Folks, as you're listening, head out to Cave City at some point. There is more to explore. Maybe you get there when the water is down and you can explore more of the caves and discover new things. I just love it. Thanks for making time, Mayor Jonas. I really appreciate you being on today.
Thank you so much. It was a pleasure, and we hope to see you in Cave City when you come to Arkansas.
I'll have to try to find a way to squeeze that in. I really appreciate it. I hope as you listen to this, you're just inspired. Take note of the things in your community. Even if a disaster hasn't struck, there are probably already things that you can do to begin to address many of the core needs that your community faces. So with that, take care and take care of your places.
This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.