A State Without Small Towns?
Nathan’s post about the seemingly inexorable demise of small/medium-town Georgia raises a more existential question: should Georgia just prepare for the death of small towns?
While rural broadband expansion is a noble idea it could just be a placeholder and an expensive one at that.
All trends point to an increasingly urbanized future. The UN predicts a bleak future for rural areas globally and estimates by 2050 nearly 90% of the United States will live in urban areas.
[Source: U.S. Census Bureau]
Thinking broadly about the future of smaller towns, what would be the reason to move or remain there with fewer economic opportunities and increasing concentration of resources in urban areas?
A terrifying and unfortunate reality is that without enough natural population growth outside of cities and net migration to urban areas, Georgia may have to consider a future without small towns.
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I think you’re conflating two separate issues.
Yeah, coastal plain Georgia is emptying out, relatively speaking. So’s most of AL, MS, LA, AR, NE, KS, IL, NY and ME. That trend is nothing new. Whether the loss of population is a problem in itself should be distinct from the question of what extent the state should be involved in providing services to those who remain.
Broadband has moved to utility status imo. Not taking affirmative steps, ie spending money, to provide it to large areas of the state, is no different from denying electricity or phone service.
I know at least one small Georgia town that runs its own ISP. It’s just another line item on the utility bill. I wonder if that is even legal anymore.
It’s fundamentally different than basic phone service or electricity that have regulated rates. The GOP will avoid the word socialism in connection to the governments handouts because it’s only socialism and handouts when its other people.
People can and will always choose to live in remote areas away from the urban core. I don’t see not having small towns (government) as a issue that the state needs to spend time worrying about. People live where they want to, knowing the issues with those choices. There are many ways to get internet access that don’t include a large government investment. Technology is changing how health care is delivered and maybe you don’t need to see a doctor (virtual visits etc) for every ache and pain anyway.
Farmers and others whose profession may require them to be away from the core should build that cost into any pricing model to ensure that they have the means to keep their way of life.
There’s a whole line of research that focuses on factors that allow/prevent/encourage/provoke people to move to where they want to. Suffice it to say, for many, it is not as easy as just getting up and going where they want to. The ability to move, into or out or within a city or any other place, is a luxury many can not afford. Other times it’s just about being near family.
My issue is with the premise itself — urban vs. rural. Atlanta’s MSA (Metro Statistical Area) includes 29 counties, a good number of which have a large percentage of rural tracts. Population density varies widely between, and sometimes even within, urban cores, suburbs and exurbs,
But there will always be efficiencies of scale that will spur many to move or stay within an hour of an urban core, But you can also get smaller efficiencies with smaller towns.
I do think technology, as well as workforce cultural norms, will play important roles in guiding where some folks live. And not just internet technologies, but we should also be preparing to have better tech for water systems, energy, etc,
Small towns will continue to exist, but there will likely be less of them….that doesn’t necessarily mean that there won’t be people out in rural areas. Towns that have less than 500 in population may dwindle to under a hundred in the coming decades. This doesn’t mean that these folks should be ignored when it comes to broadband access. In fact, it might be even more vital for those sparsely populated areas to have access to a stable, reliable broadband connection.
As wireless technology becomes more reliable and faster over a larger geographical area, it should make connecting folks living in rural areas a bit more economical. Plus, there are certain industries (like IT) which would allow more flexibility on where a person is located. If that person doesn’t have to be in an office and can work from home, then it gives them a bit more flexibility in where to live—which they may choose to live in a rural small town. Not everyone wants to live the urban or even suburban life.
I’m not disagreeing with you, you’re just kind of sidestepping the issue. What’s the ROI for a costly project that won’t be ready any time soon? The data shows there’s going to be virtually no one (seriously dude, only 10% of the population living in non-urban areas) to benefit? This also isn’t taking into consideration how vast the achievement gaps are for schools in rural to non-rural industries. Manufacturing jobs are quickly becoming less about manual labor and require technical expertise. Like, great, expand broadband but you’ll still have (generally speaking) a less qualified base of workers. It’s great to have the theoretical potential of IT jobs going to Hahira or Metter or wherever else but that doesn’t really keep people from moving out/encourage people to move in/have babies.
Anyway it’s a long way of saying: I just don’t know the solution.
To me, when you say “small town”, you also silently say “agriculture”. The planting and growing of things for use in the food chain. If you look back at the physical structure of places, their basic unit of measure is the acre, which classically was the amount of land that a pair of oxen could plow in a day.
Surrounding those acres were homes and families that used those oxen to raise crops. To support those families, small towns were built nearby that had shops and services. Schools were built originally in “townships”, units of measure that had numerous families to plow the fields and tend the crops.
Especially in the Midwest, these townships formed large squares that formed counties. In the middle, a days ride from many of the outlying townships, was the county seat, complete with courthouse and related support structures. And more and bigger stores.
These days, the townships are almost irrelevant because there are fewer families necessary to farm the land. If they’re still there, the little township schools are now residences or farm structures. For better or worse, modernization has brought us huge tractors with GPS and air conditioning, computer monitoring of crops, and the need for fewer people to tend them.
As a result, the small towns are dying. I’m thinking of a specific town in Missouri, not far from where my people farmed the land in the late 1800’s. The main street is lined with gorgeous buildings, all built to survive the hard Midwestern winters. They are beautiful structures with cut stone facades, and they are all now vacant, boarded up and unused. People now drive to another town about twenty miles away to do their shopping. Amazon brings a lot of it now.
There’s something powerful in the American psyche as it relates to small towns. It represents all of the values that you love about America; hard work, honesty, and enterprise. If you’re going to till the land, those values will get you through the hard times that are sure to come. And it is slipping away because things change.
It is the same powerful nostalgia that makes us fondly remember the old streetcars and interurbans. But as roads were improved, the 20 mile per hour interurban speeds were exceeded by the automobile. And you didn’t have to wait for them to arrive when you could get in your car and drive 50 miles per hour to town.
One of the best things about studying history is that you develop an appreciation for what things and people were like. You go to small town Georgia and look around. The hardware store used to be there. The church over there. The library built by the Civilian Conservation Corps. used to be on that corner. And you look at the foundations of what once was, and you grieve for what once was.
At the same time, that acre that took a pair of oxen all day to plow is now handled by a giant farm machine in ten minutes. Not very romantic, but a sign of what will be.
How very white you are. Small towns also represent all the values I fear about America: racism, xenophobia, sexism, parochialism.
Those fears are common to rural areas throughout the world. That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be grieving for the good elements that have been lost—those elements weren’t necessarily bound up with fear.