Rural

Although the economic forces that are battering our country are bringing recession to communities all across the country, it would be a mistake to assume that they are hurting small towns in the same way that they are felling our big cities. Ask a local from a small town, and they will tell you that times have been tough for years.

Our best minds have moved to big cities to pursue big jobs and the joys of culture. Our economy followed them, providing those people with good loans to buy big homes and lots of work in their creative economies. Some of those chances have been short-lived, and now there are foreclosures and job cuts.

But small towns never got those jumbo mortgages or big paychecks. In our backyards, they have struggled with the issues, both real and perceived, of being “left behind.” Yes, not all of the smart folks left, but very few corporations want to give a small town a chance with a new research lab. Maybe some young people stay, but plenty decide that their best shot is in a big city a few hundred miles away. The perception becomes concrete.

There is a different path driving these places.

Years ago, lots of American families put their faith in the set of goods in small towns. They were affordable places to live. They were safe. Small towns had good schools, and more often than not they still had a few joys to bring relief to your life – a symphony, or a small theatre, or maybe a few good restaurants. It was a chance to be a part of a community.

If you drive through a small town today, you will probably pass a Wal-Mart on the business loop that has more square feet of retail space than all of the offices and shops in the whole downtown center. The symphony is gone. Many of the steak houses are too, although you might be surprised to find a few good taqueiras. The change is dramatic and in most cases, a substantial endeavor that took place over years.

The mistake that many people make is to view a small town from the perspective of a person from the big city. Although they are small, these places can still be full of individuals who disagree, who are far from unified, and who are hardly homogenous.

We tend to treat our small towns with the kinds of quick fix, take your medicine schemes that aren’t too well thought out, sort of like the way that that a mother-in-law comes at you with Dr.Laura-inspired solutions to your children’s troubles. The temptation is for out-of-towners to propose some idea that will fix up the small town, once and for all. “Let’s give them a prison!” is how it usually goes. “How about a new landfill!  That will bring a lot of steady jobs. “ Or, its something even less glamorous: “Let’s finance a new chicken plant expansion! Someone’s got to make the nuggets.” The town grows more dependent and ultimately more vulnerable with each fix.

How does our country address the economy in small towns? The issues are different than in big cities. It starts with young people. The “brain drain” problem doesn’t impact the places in today’s headlines – places like Southern California or the coast of Florida – these communities have lots of universities and creative firms.

Small towns have to convince their young people that it is worth staying there. Ask a high school graduate if they would rather have a job in a hair salon or a factory, and they will tell you the former, even in the face of lower pay. Creativity isn’t something that people value only after they get a college degree. We have to support small businesses. A small town entrepreneur with a good idea for starting a small business would probably need to take his plans elsewhere to make them a reality. It is unlikely that the local bank is courting a lot of business.

Small towns still have a lot going for them. Plenty of people realize it. Yet, all too often, the children of the families that grew up in small towns in the middle part of the century are not the same ones who stay. Something is lost when generations cleave from their past. Distance separates, memories slip.

Who has taken up the mantle of making small towns the place to find the American Dream? In recent years, that has increasingly been a decision made by immigrant families. All of the reasons that motivated Americans to build lives in small towns as recently as the 1960s (safe, good schools, affordable place to buy a home, jobs) are still legitimate to a Mexican moving from Juarez or a Guatemalan from Huehuetenango. These small towns do have better schools than in the countries where many of our immigrants have come from. They have the same kinds of factory jobs that dot the other side of the border in Mexico, only they pay higher wages.

The alternative is dark and disquieting to anyone who remembers how good our small towns used to be. We can make our rural areas large open areas, that are largely unpopulated. Some economists have proposed making a national park out of the Upper Plains, from the Dakotas through Wyoming (the “Buffalo Commons”). It would probably help to bring efficiency to agriculture. It makes no sense to isolate opportunity in only some of our regions.

The American Dream is tied up in our small towns. To the extent that it prospers or fades in the future will depend on if our nation turns its attentions or its back to these communities.