Slow Death to Small Towns
A summary by 7654
If economists and surveys are correct, put a fork in small town America.
From the Dakotas to the Texas Panhandle, rural America has been losing people for 70 years. It’s a slow demographic collapse. Without farmers and merchants who once gave these areas their pulse, small towns are losing their very reason to exist. These small towns are desperately trying to reinvent themselves but, alas, are failing.
Rural communities seem to have lost something else as well as their population: their optimism. More than ever, people feel pessimistic about the future of these small towns, according to a recent annual study.
This may be the last generation to inhabit these small Nebraska, Kansas & Oklahoma towns according to the study. Despair and breakdown have come to rural towns, catching a ride in from America’s industrial cities. The middle class is dwindling, leaving poverty stricken towns amid large agribusinesses supported by taxpayers and government subsidies and handouts.
Towns all over struggle to stay alive, even with the best of civic intentions. It’s difficult to fight the forces. Unbeknownst to these rural dwellers, they themselves are the force behind the humbling of their towns and rural America.
Like Buffalo, many towns have taxed themselves to the maximum sales tax amount allowed by law. They stay afloat creating perceived economic development. Towns all over America are struggling with the same issues and can barely keep their towns alive and away from collapse.
Government grants seem to help. One small Kansas town of a dwindling population received a near million dollar grant which the town used to put in a fiber-optic network for telecommunications. They also closed up a grade school and consolidated it on their high school campus. They zoned 30 acres at the edge of town for industrial use and put in utilities. The empty shell of a brand new building, built with the help of another grant; $135,000, just sits there while streets are in decay, acceptable housing is unavailable, and vacant buildings are everywhere. Just outside of town is a paved and well-lighted airport runway, another grant paid for lighting and improvements, where an occasional medi-flight, and that’s about it, leaves or arrives. These Towns have to ask themselves, do these economic development grants actually, in reality, do anything for them?
These towns do the same thing, over and over. They tout their small-town virtues to urban prospects. Many of them say: “It’s a great place to raise a family” and they assemble PowerPoint presentations, boasting of union-free labor forces, a great selection of well-educated workers, and places where a three-bedroom home sells for less than $50,000 along with promises of slower-paced and care-free living. The sales pitches aren’t working. Small-town life yields a faux reality. The real world isn’t like this. Most urban people don’t want to know everybody’s name any more. People want to be left alone in their own world without influence from neighbors who, although they mean well, don’t know they’re being a bother, but are most likely despised by their new urbanite neighbors. Educated people are investing, not in small towns where property values remain low and rarely increase in value, rather in cities and suburbs, urban areas where property values rise and their investment yields visible returns. The well-educated small town workers touted in their sales pitches, long ago left for high paying jobs in urban areas across the Nation. Gated communities in the burbs, with private schools and a Beemer (BMW) in every garage is also a "great place to raise a family".
And so these small towns wait — for jobs, for business, for a future.
They wait — for families with children, for people to volunteer, for someone to start up a new restaurant, or a soccer league.
Plenty of people in these towns and throughout the rural plains say all the government money grants and the incentives are futile & misguided. Pessimists point to studies to support their position.
Studies
In nearly 70 percent of the counties on the plains, there are fewer people now than there were in 1950. Population continued to plunge in the 1990's and has fallen even faster since the 2000 census.
In about one-sixth of the landmass of the United States - the populations are at modern lows and the wage gaps with larger cities are at record highs.
”You don't have young people taking over the businesses. Businesses are closing as owners age and farmers and rancher’s children see better things available to them when they leave. Parents are telling their kids to get out! There’s very little to keep many of these towns going." said John Greenley of the Mid-America Rural Improvement Group.
State and federal governments continue to put money into these diminishing towns, trying to stem a mass exodus.
There is one positive thing, economically speaking, in the mid-section of America and that’s the poor health of the aging population. Poor health is the only growth industry.
Not long ago, these spirited towns consisted of business operations providing good jobs and a middle class. They’re all gone. These towns are simply too remote. Businesses in small towns are not profitable enough, the owners say. Retailers in small towns are unable to compete. Hundreds of these towns have the same story: we lost two car dealers, a clothing store, 6 or 7 gas stations, a shoe store and 2 grocery stores.
In many towns the main landmark of the communities are struggling to stay alive: the weekly newspaper.
The publisher of a 138 year old newspaper, the Valley News, says he’s the last of the family line. His great-grandfather started the newspaper. He has no children who want to take it over and doubts he could find a buyer for it. When asked about the future, he shrugged and said, "This is the problem for many rural towns and cities - there’s no plan for the next generation. We’ve either run off or lost the movers and shakers, the support structure of our middle class who tried to make things happen. It’s our own fault. We were in a rut and some people came here with big ideas. We were all against change. ‘Who do they think they are with their big ideas’, people would ask. ‘Who are they to tell us how to run things around here’ was the talk around town. Maybe we should have listened to them just a little bit”, said Mr. Venezia, the editor and only person remaining at the Valley News.
One of four households makes less than $15,000 a year, in small town America, according to census figures. One of four people is older than 65. Most of the jobs are tied to farming.
U.S., State, and County Government agencies are the largest employers in most towns still surviving but with the economy in a downward spiral, budgets are getting cut. Government agencies are cutting costs too. One has to ask, where’s that going to leave my town if these agencies cut their budgets?
According to the Washington Post, when the US population grew by 86 percent, in 11 of the Great Plains states without a town or city of at least 2,500 people, those rural counties lost more than a third of their population. Farm towns away from interstate highways lost the most.
Two Forces
Two forces common to rural America have transformed these towns. One is the collapse of the family farm and the subsequent rise of agribusiness. A hundred years ago, more than 30 percent of American workers earned their income from a farm. Now it is a little more than 1 percent. The big farms are getting richer, fattened by federal subsidies, and the small farms are disappearing. The United States grows more food now than it did 50 years ago, on about 25 percent less acreage, and with a fraction of the workers.
The other force is urban sprawl. As cities grow out from their center, big box stores attract the smaller, rural, population because of better values and a much larger selection of merchandise.
The Reality of Small Town Life
Stores that survive in these rural towns sell basics: gas, quick-pickup groceries, coffee, or they find a niche.
Economic trends are unlikely to reverse themselves. “All that will remain is a group of what used to be communities, now without stores, school or government." said Paul Carabuch of the Learning Network.
A University of Nebraska poll of 3,087 people in 87 counties, showed that most people in small-town Nebraska are not happy with where they live. That’s the sentiment all over mid-America’s rural section.
The average rural county loses 40% of their 18-to-49-year-olds. Studies show that this is where your entrepreneurs come from - 18-to-49-year-olds are your optimists, your future.
" I kind of want to stay here and take over my grandfather's veterinary business,” said Katie Sampson, “I love animals but this town is so boring. There are no cute guys and since it's such a small town there’s nothing to do, so people drink a lot."
Clintin Bishop, a senior in the local high school, was the only one out of 36 students interviewed who said he planned to stay in this small town of 1150 people. He has a job on a farm that pays $9.00 an hour, and that's his future. "I'm stuck here," Clintin said.
The students' attitudes and comments mirror rural attitudes nationwide. Nearly 90 percent of people surveyed in rural communities said they were dissatisfied with their community.
States have been helping these small towns by throwing money, in the form of grants, their way. Many have built or are starting industrial parks. Companies come to town, take a look around, play the game acting as if they’re interested and go elsewhere, typically to larger urban sprawl areas or to places with tax incentives.
"You can go to almost any small town all over rural America and see the same thing; empty buildings, run-down houses, pot-hole ridden roads, collapsing infrastructure, no sense of urgency by town leaders, no plan for the future, and economic development directors who can’t even define the word economy, said Mr. Greenley of the Mid-America Rural Improvement Group. "Then there are the industrial parks, vacant, with the idea that if you build it, they will come. They come alright, look around at the state of affairs, lack of business and lack of entrepreneurs, and they leave to never return. These communities have to wake up and realize that the public grant operatives do them a real disservice by making people think these incentives work. For the most part, they don’t. Oh, you’ll hear of a town getting a company to take them up on their incentives but invariably, those companies don’t stick around for very long as they tend to outlive their welcome and become unappreciated."
Economists say using America’s history, fitting it to tourism, and small companies employing 10 or 15 people is the future for rural America.
To avoid a slow death, small towns need to examine where they are now, plan for the future, educate their residents on the advantage of their local businesses, shop local & invest in their future.
Editor’s Notes:
Impact on Buffalo
A recent Oklahoma State University study, requested by Buffalo Oklahoma leaders, found that in Buffalo Oklahoma, QUOTE: “Buffalo residents are taking about 48% of their retail dollars and shopping elsewhere — a term referred to as “outshopping.” This doesn’t necessarily mean that visitors from out-of-town never shop in Buffalo, but it does imply that any of this kind of retail attraction is more than offset by the outshopping of Buffalo’s residents.”
BUFFALLO RETAIL TRENDS AND TAX REPORT
Buffalo will, in our opinion, unlikely die. Buffalo will survive as long as government agencies remain in Buffalo. This is a government Town. With the State Highway Department, and Federal; USDA and other agencies, Buffalo will be just fine. It won’t grow much, it won’t shrink much. It will be like the sewer lagoons – stagnant.
Whenever the government tosses money at a problem, as with inner city housing projects, the facts show residents become so acclimated to the environment in which they reside they can’t see it falling apart around them. They are always referred to as “the projects” because the project is always in need of becoming another government project – conditions yield conditions. People don’t need to boost up their environment esthetically or clean it up for other reasons because their lives don’t depend on it. They’ll get their government checks and have no further worries or concerns. The area in which they live becomes a blight area or poverty zone but it doesn’t matter – their check, their social welfare supplement, is always going to be there in spite of their living conditions. The “projects” survive until the government steps in and creates a new project. Only to, eventually, turn into the same thing over and over again. The only way to make conditions better is to inject the area with private funding and private enterprise - for profit – then their livelihood is dependent on conditions. Only then does it get cleaned up.
If Buffalo could retain, make that if Buffalo could recruit, businesses with owners who cared about conditions because their continued livelihood was dependent on it things could and would change.
