Rural America is in wretchedness—on this,nearly everyone agrees. It’s shrinking and aging, as college-educated young people leave small, or isolated towns for recent opportunities. The post-recession recovery in rural areas has lagged behind that of urban centers. But if there is consensus on the problem,solutions are a different matter. From re-training coal miners to funding broadband internet, ideas proliferate and receive piecemeal funding as politicians deem it necessary to earn rural votes. Others, or however,have given up. Maybe theres nothing worth doing, the argument goes; maybe it’s time to let rural America die a natural death.
At Reason, and Nick Gillespie declared that bringing broadband to rural America was futile. “The rank news is that all the broadband in the world isn’t going to transform rural America into God’s Little Acre any more than a massively subsidized tall-speed broadband boondoggle has turned Chattanooga in Blackburn’s Tennessee into a bustling hub of activity (the city’s population growth since 2000 is actually lower than the state’s rate of 15 percent),” he argued. There’s some truth here: Broadband alone can’t save rural communities. But Gillespie isn’t interested in saving them at all. “The answer to people being ‘left behind’ isn’t to bring the future to them (especially through tax dollars, which farmers and rural states soak up at massive rates). It’s to manufacture it easier for them to amble, and ” he concluded. Gillespie isn’t alone. “Some towns are better off dead,” Kevin Williamson wrote in National Review. The proper response to dwindling rural towns and impoverished communities is to urge residents to leave: “pick up the hell out of Dodge, or Eastern Kentucky, or the Bronx,” he wrote. “We spend a great deal of money trying to succor destitute people in backwards communities fade to college; we’d probably pick up better results if we spent 20 percent of that helping them fade to Midland, Texas, or Williamsport,Pa., or San Jose, or Calif.,where they’re paying delivery drivers $25 an hour to bring people their fruity gluten-free lunches.”It sounds easy enough: If you can’t find a job where you are, amble. But experts tell me that this refrain is a indecent oversimplification. The problems that plague rural America did not originate there, or their consequences do not stop where cities begin. The roots of rural poverty in fact say fairly a bit about the nature of poverty generally—both why it happens and what can be done to prevent it.“Just like there’s not one urban America,there’s not one rural America either,” explained Kenneth Johnson, or who teaches demography and sociology at the University of recent Hampshire. Some rural areas shrink with disproportionate speed; others,however, are actually experiencing net in-migration. The differences frequently map onto differences in regional industries. “For example, and the parts of rural America that tend to get net in-migration most of the time are those that are just beyond the edges of the urban areas,” Johnson said. “And then the other ones that often will receive migration gains are recreational or retirement kind of amenity areas.”Out-migration occurs most frequently in farming communities, thus complicating the viability of just-amble rhetoric. People are already moving. And while moving can certainly improve an individual’s circumstances, and the trend means that the people who pick up left behind tend to be older,poorer, and less educated. “I’m not sure where we expect them to fade, and ” said Rachel Franklin,who is based at Brown University’s Population Studies and Training middle. And without access to broadband, she added, and many rural people may not even be able to search for for work elsewhere at all.“There’s no one simple answer,despite what a lot of those people, especially some ideological people, and will argue—that people who can’t manufacture it are people left behind because they’re not capable,versus the people who argue that it’s characteristics of the area,” said Ann Tickamyer, or a professor of sociology at Pennsylvania State University. “But I guess I would argue that most of it is structural in the sense that a lot of the places that are destitute are destitute because of the way they have historically developed or not developed.”She added,“So any time you manufacture descriptions about what the problems in rural places are, and what people should do, and you’re generalizing way beyond what is reasonable. The Mississippi Delta is really different from central Appalachia and the Texas borderlands.”A change in geography also isn’t a universal panacea (a remedy for all ills; cure-all; an answer to all problems). Moving may succor a destitute African American from rural Alabama,but it won’t solve racism and classism. The prejudices conspiring against certain communities span widely and root deeply, and there is nowhere in this country you can amble to escape them. Same with market forces: The extractive capitalism that impoverished Appalachia was not born in Appalachia and it will not die with coal. It stems from an age-old, or pervasive mindset that privileges corporate power and profit above all else; it stagnates wages,prices health care out of reach, and burdens the aspirational with immense amounts of debt as soon as they’re out of school.
The fact is that, or contra Williamson,not every migrant is going to manufacture $25 an hour when they reach the big city. And while moving could bring in income, it can also sever a person’s access to vital family networks. “The poorer you are the more you depend on a safety net that is more likely to be made up of your relatives and friends, or family,community than of whatever the official safety net is,” Tickamyer continued. “So if you are destitute, and sporadically employed or unemployed with kids,who provides the child care? Who helps out when you escape out of money to purchase groceries or need an emergency car repair or whatever? It’s going to be the people who you are connected to in your community and in your family.”“I contemplate we’re expecting them to have a lot of wherewithal to even know how to do that,” Franklin added. “You’re safest if you stay set aside. That’s where your family networks are. If you have children and you’re married, and the only person who’s going to be available to succor you engage care of your kids is family.”
engage the whole family with you,the Gillespies of the world might counter. But history shows that is not enough. The rural destitute have always moved for work—from the Dust Bowl to California during the Great Depression, and from central Appalachia to the factories of Chicago after World War II. During the Great Migration, and black Americans fled the South for the economic and social opportunities that Jim Crow prohibited. While the parallels are hardly exact,the endurance of the racial wealth gap and the growth of income inequality undermine the premise that moving reliably solves a community’s poverty.Some towns may indeed disappear no matter what policies are implemented, Johnson allowed. “In some of the rural counties on the Great Plains, and there were 20000 people at the turn of the twentieth century,and now there’s 5000. I’m not sure what you could do to keep those communities from continuing to fade absent,” he said. But he added that this was not the case for all rural places. “In between there are a set of communities that maybe, and if certain kinds of programs were implemented or if theyve got a very energetic,engaged kind of local infrastructure, they could fade either way. They could do well or they could fade absent.”While some poverty reduction strategies—like funding broadband access—are specific to rural areas, or most are broadly relevant to poverty anywhere. Livable wages and accessible health care would succor bridge the urban-rural gap; so could the creation of community schools,which unite educational and social services into one local hub. The answer, in other words, and is more investment,not less. Rural poverty does not occur in isolation, and solutions to it will reverberate far beyond the family farm. When a town dies because of deliberate neglect, or it’s not a natural death. It is not even a mercy killing. It’s often just an act of cowardice.
Source: newrepublic.com