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Posted on 08/04/2022 2:27:02 PM PDT by Noumenon
The post-COVID recovery will be change not restoration. We’ll be forced to rebuild where we are.
Years ago, I moved from a somewhat larger small town (pop. 30,000) in upstate New York to a smaller small town (pop. 2,500) 15 miles east in order to establish a little homestead with gardens, fruit trees, and chickens. I found this three-acre property literally on the edge of town, a five-minute walk to the center of Main Street.
If you’ve been following this column on urban design the past year, you know I’ve said we’re entering an era of stark economic contraction that will change the terms of daily life in America, and one feature of it is that the action will shift from the big cities and sprawling suburbs back to America’s small towns. The COVID-19 virus has accelerated this trend, actually drawing a sharp dividing line between “then” and “now” that historians will recognize—but that many contemporary observers are missing.
My little town was badly beaten down when I got here in 2011 and actually sank a bit lower over the years since. The last Main Street shops that sold anything not previously owned shut down. The two last suppertime restaurants folded. The tiny local newspaper ceased publication, and the DOT put a concrete barrier across the tracks of the little railroad spur line, which hadn’t run trains, anyway, since the 1980s. The several factories on the river that runs through town—a tributary of the mighty Hudson—had all shuttered in the 1970s, and only one even still stands in the form of ruins, the rest demolished, wiped off the map and out of memory. In the century and a half previous, they’d gone through iterations of making textiles—first linen, which was grown here, then cotton, which was not—and then paper products (finally, and not without irony, toilet tissue).
What’s left in the town is a phantom armature of everyday life tuned to a bygone era with all its economic and social functionality removed, like a fine old piano with all its string cut. The bones are still there in the form of buildings, but the activities, relationships, and institutions are gone. The commerce is gone, the jobs are gone, the social and economic roles have no players, the places for fraternizing and public entertainment gone, the churches nearly empty. There’s a post-1980 shopping strip on the highway leaving the west end of town. That’s where the supermarket is (it replaced a 1960s IGA closer to the center, which replaced the various greengrocers, butchers, and dry goods establishments of yore on Main Street). There’s a chain pharmacy, a Tractor Supply, a pizza shop and a Chinese take-out place out there, too. The Kmart closed in 2017 and two years later a Big Lots (overstocked merch) took its place.
The local school system may be the town’s largest employer these days; it’s also the town’s leading levier of taxes. Some people drive long distances to work in other towns, even as far as the state capital, Albany, where jobs with good pay, real medical benefits, and fat pensions still exist—though you can’t claim they produce anything of value. Quite a few people scrambled for years with marginal small home-based businesses (making art, massage, home bakeries, etc.), but the virus creamed a lot of them. It’s hard these days to find a plumber or a carpenter. A few dozen farmers hang on. There is a lively drug underground here, which some can make a living at—if they can stay off their own product—but it’s not what you’d call a plus for the common good. Federal cash supports of one sort or other account for many of the rest who live here: social security, disability, SNAP cards, plain old family welfare payments, and COVID-19 checks (for now), adding up to a quasi-zombie economy.
In short, what appears to be a town now bears no resemblance to the rich set of social and economic relationships and modes of production that existed here a hundred years ago, a local network of complex interdependencies based on local capital and local resources—with robust connections (the railroad! The Hudson River and Champlain Canal!) to other towns that operated similarly, and even linkage to some distant big city markets. The question I’m building up to is: How do we get back to anything that resembles that kind of high-functioning society?
The answer is trauma, a set of circumstances that will disrupt all the easy and dishonest work-arounds which have determined the low state of our current arrangements. You can be sure this is coming; it’s already in motion: collapsing oil production due to the insupportable costs of the shale “miracle,” the end of industrial growth as we’ve known it, the limits of borrowing from the future to pay today’s bills (i.e., debt that will never be paid back), widespread household bankruptcy and unemployment, and the consequent social disorder all that will entail.
That reality will compel us to reorganize American life, starting with how we inhabit the landscape, and you can bet that three things will drive it: the necessity to produce food locally, the need to organize the activities that support food production locally, and the need—as when starting anything—to begin at a small and manageable scale. It will happen emergently, which is to say without any committee of experts, savants, or commissars directing it, because the need will be self-evident.
For now, the broad public remains bamboozled, distracted by the terrors of COVID-19, the uproars of race-and-gender tension, the dazzle of Federal Reserve hocus-pocus, the anxiety over climate change, and, of course, the worsening struggle of so many ordinary citizens to just keep paying the bills. When you’re in a ditch, you don’t call the President of the United States. You need a handful of friends and neighbors with a come-along.
That’s how it’s going to work to bring our small towns back to life. When the chain stores choke on their broken supply chains, some attentive persons will see an advantage in figuring out how to get and sell necessities by rebuilding local networks of supply and retail. Farming will be rescued from its artificially induced senility when the trucks stop delivering pallets of frozen pizza and Captain Crunch as dependably as they used to. And then the need for many other businesses that support farming and value-added production will find willing, earnest go-getters. The river still runs through town and it runs year-round, powerfully enough to make some things, if there was a reason to, and a will, and a way. And after a while, you’ll have a fully functioning town again, built on social and economic roles that give people a reason to think that life is worth living. Wait for it.
The author asks the key question:
"The question I’m building up to is: How do we get back to anything that resembles that kind of high-functioning society?"
"The answer is trauma, a set of circumstances that will disrupt all the easy and dishonest work-arounds which have determined the low state of our current arrangements."
Some of us have already performed an exit, a stealth bug-out to small town, rural America. We have done so in the knowledge that urban life will become a hellscape of disease and disorder, of starvation and savagery. When the lights go out, when the toilets stop flushing, when the grocery store shelves are bare, urban/suburban Anywhere will be no place to be.
bfl
I think the population of my little tiny town is set to more than double just this year. There were numerous twenty-five-acre plots near my house, now they’re full of zero lot line houses. Although the city put in some traffic circles, all the same two-lane roads are going to service several dozen times the traffic as The People’s Republic of Tallahassee is only twenty miles from here.
While Tallahassee was bolted down with masks, mask police and one-way arrows on store floors, you wouldn’t have known any of that foolishness was going on in our local stores. A few people were wearing masks, but that was of their own accord. The Sheriff did shut down a restaurant for failure to separate people, but I suspect that was more political than health related. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of a country politician.
I certainly agree with his point. I can understand why young people flock to cities, but I cannot understand why they stay in them. With remote work opportunities and fiber optic communications, the cost of living advantage of living in small towns is very compelling at today’s price points.
American businesses should outsource work to rural America. Real estate is crazy cheap in American towns, and an exodus is overdue from Brooklyn to Bettendorf
Galts Gulch here I come!
We’re all 5 and 10 acre zoned here in the are of Bonner County, Idaho where we live. Everyone has their own septic system and well, power’s from Avista for the most part and we haul our own garbage that we don’t burn. Albeni Falls dam is nearby and produces power, so we can maybe, probably revert to local after a while. But who knows. Lots of local farming for ag and livestock.
“the insupportable costs of the shale “miracle,”
Well, he did say the drug underground was active.
Seems he may also be a customer?
I also live in a small town surrounded by farmland.
But folk are not going to thrive on a diet of onions, garlic, cabbage, and hemp.
So the trucks have to continue rolling even if they have to be converted to steam power.
We may avoid this dire prediction by simply refusing in mass to follow the Lib dictat.
We stop letting them tell us what to do and their power is gone.
And don’t forget common sense that is common where you live.
Just from the photo, I think I know his town. I don’t live far away.
Indeed, all of NY State is in an absurd situation. The best jobs, pensions and health care (besides the relative few on Wall Street) are with government. Everyone just accepts it. In all ways, including weather, it reminds me of softer version of late-communist Eastern Europe
If you can earn a living, and can avoid taxes - Upstate NY is a pretty good place to live. Leftists have mostly avoided flooding small towns with rootless migrants. Cost of living is low (besides taxes) and people are long-term and stable.
Sometimes it just takes a crisis.
When you are young, the cities are where it’s at. The country is dullsville. When you get older, the opposite becomes true. 🙂
The author lost me with this nonsense.
It is simply, factually, false.
We have not had primary local food production since the 1920's, and we will not fall back to that level.
It could happen *if* government enforces it, such as the Greens and the Biden administration appear to wish.
I live in just such a place, it’s fantastic. Like being back in the 50’s-60’s right down to some of the cars, trucks and tractors that drive by. Teenagers hold doors open for me and call me sir. When you hear “dream come true”, this is it.
Strickly depends on where you are. Sure not cheap around here and small acreage is scarce.
Sounds wonderful. Hoping we can move out to a small town when Mr. B retires. Want to be close enough to keep going to our church and close to adult kids, but out of the inner loop of suburbs where we are now. It’s still very nice here, I just dont think it will be in 10 years.
Those who can will step up to the task. In my area, we already have thriving local producers. We also have scalable grwnges and co-ops. No doubt that hard times are doming. A lot of folks are going to perish of disease and starvation. But not everyone. Those who have skills will do well. We’ll still need teachers, historians and beer brewers. Im all three.
Couldn’t agree more, I live in such a place as well.
Think Clarksdale, Mississippi, birthplace of the blues. Businesses are on the outskirts of town. Cheaper to develop than refurbish. Perhaps one business open on every block downtown. It’s the chains taking the path of least resistance. All the colorful history. Cottons not the same.
I agree. The older I get the lower population density I want.
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