Two questions that come to mind: Why did your town die? Why is it worth saving? In this case NPR failed to answer both. Generally I dont see a problem with towns dieing, its really the only way to get rid of unsustainable infrastructure, debt and corruption. Towns can/should fail its normal, not all locations are viable for a population and if the location in question has no competitive advantage why should it exist? At some point poorly built buildings and infrastructure actually have a negative value and at that point there is no reason for the town to exist.
I don't know what it is about this morning, but something snapped. FUCK YOU, "THE MIDWEST." You know what's a thing? Ghost towns. It's a cute thing. Here's a Travel & Leisure article about touring them. It's the mythos of the West. It's the "let's hike to a community that's fuckin' dead" weekend jaunt where you take your selfie stick and your instagram filters. But it's not "urban exploration" because that has to be the recently dead. No, no. Ghost towns are something your grandparents tour. For the kitsch. I fuckin' grew up with ghost towns. Everybody in the Southwest did. Mining done? Ghost town. Well dried up? Ghost town. Railroad stopped running? Ghost town. Highway hit the next town over? Ghost town. I spent the summer in a town with a AAA high school from the '50s that had a 1997 population of 37 people. It was on its way back to tourism because the Hell's Angels came through in the '70s and squatted there. But since that was Arizona? Instead of Illinois? It's the way of things not a fuckin' existential tragedy. My grandparents ranched 500 acres in Claunch, NM and then it stopped raining. So my grandparents became loggers and plumbers and manual laborers and telephone operators and went somewhere else. Lots of somewhere else. My dad will occasionally talk about the 22 schools he went to in 14 months when he was "around" fifth grade. When my grandparents scraped up enough for a place to live, you know what their number one priority was, as a plumber and a telephone operator? water rights. Behind that, acreage. Back in the '50s it wasn't called "prepping" it was called survival. And it's not a slow process. I drove from Prescott to Quartzsite in 1998. Then I rode from Quartzsite to Prescott in 2011. In that eleven years, 90% of the townships along that road have become vacant. Where was fuckin' NPR then? What's that? No one wants your paper mill anymore? Here's a charming '50s memoir with Leo DiCaprio and Bob DeNiro that takes place in a town that has experienced a population crash since the events of the film. Concrete, WA, population 732. So I'm sorry your town is fucking dying but cry me a river. I grew up around dead towns and I'm here to tell ya - towns die. I guess the difference between the East and the West is the West learned long since that nobody's gonna do a fuckin' thing about it so enjoy your new president, fuckers.
Alternately, you can reinvent your town and take some goddamn responsibility for yourself and the fact that the world changes. It always has, and always will. Like Branson, MO Like Tieton, WA Like Furnace Creek, CA Like Austin, fucking, Texas! There is a LONG list of towns that were dying out, took evasive action, and are now thriving destinations, and a much longer list of towns that are currently digging themselves out of dire straits. (Detroit, anyone?) It's funny how much you can see when you look around the eyepiece of your hyper-focused telescope.
I'd like to think that any town that has a productive community that is concerned about their continued well being will do everything they can in their power to turn things around. Chances are for many the circumstances they face are insurmountable, even with dedicated and creative leaders trying to see things through.
Smart Ass Response Now: Don't read this Guardian article. More Serious Response: Formulating. Will post tonight when I get home from work.
'cuz there's no minorities in the west, right? Certainly no Native Americans or Hispanics. There's the difference- nobody has ever bothered to value the West. It's apparently too far for the overwrought narrators of the Eastern Seaboard to travel.Moving is also far easier said than done. For some, it means having to give up on a place and family that is all you know and all that values you. In Gary, the conflict between wanting and needing to stay, and understanding you might have to leave, is especially strong.
First and foremost, while I wouldn’t necessarily accuse NPR of making clickbaity articles (though I’ll totally admit that the Guardian really seems to enjoy skating along that line sometimes), this seems to being an ongoing conversation for a lot of news sources because they get page views and page views drive revenue of course. A lot of these conversations, from opioids to declining manufacturing to decaying cities seems to involve the midwest because I guess that’s where everyone assumes things are happening. Right now it really could be the social trend of “if it bleeds, it leads.” You, and snoodog and anyone else that wants to chime in about how dying towns aren’t anything new are totally right. Hell, I come across them all the time when I’m out for my country drives or out antiquing. Some are etched in my memory as no stoplight towns with one gas station, a Subway, and a laundromat as the only businesses in sight. Some are etched in my memory as total speedtraps or that place with that really awesome pizza that if it was near a college campus they’d be raking in dough every damn day of the week. Some? Some aren’t even in my GPS or Google Maps and I wonder if they still qualify as a town or something else entirely. That said, those places all stick out in my mind because they all have this atmosphere to them that says “dying town.” The majority of places I come across? They’re kicking and doing awesome with all sorts of advertisements for summer festivals and nice looking downtowns and what have you. So, I dunno. They’ve existed for a while and I’ve never stopped to consider them, not even when I’m reading this article. Which is weird. Because while I haven’t lived in any dying towns, there’s always been some right near by and everyone seems to know it even if no one wants to openly talk about it. I wonder though, if this focus NPR has on the Midwest, might have a lot to do with the decline of manufacturing. The two seem to go hand in hand for obvious reasons and I think the distinction between dying towns the in the west and dying towns now in the midwest is that for the west, the ephemeralness of towns was kind of expected from the get go, where in the midwest people assumed that this kind of stuff wouldn’t happen. Which is weird, cause manufacturing has been on the decline ever since I was old enough to understand the meaning of the word “economy.” It’s like everyone thinks that factory closings were something that happens to other people and while everyone totally saw it coming, everyone acts like they totally didn’t see it coming. Which is dumb. Economy 101 is don’t put all your eggs in one basket. On a slight tangent, but related in ways that I probably don’t understand because the thought crept into my head when I was thinking about all of this, there seems to be an every growing distrust of authority, and not just “Watch out for the IRS” levels of distrust. There’s distrust that the jobs that are here this year will be here next year. There’s distrust that retirement funds will still be around, even for people who retirement is just around the corner. There’s distrust in the stock market, in housing prices, in the governments’ (local, state, and national) abilities to really do anything. Everyone I seem to talk to, there’s this growing fear of frailty and risk and temporariness and that the next change, while unknown, is expected to be bad. Maybe for NPR and The Guardian and whoever else, they want to tap into that fear, and for them, The Midwest is their boogyman.
It's the entire goddamn media landscape, the fundamental makeup of the country, the basic elitism of everywhere that was a state prior to 1872. It's the fact that oh holy shit the coal miners are starving now as if it didn't happen to the peat miners in Scotland before them. I grew up surrounded by Anasazi ruins. Careful where you hike, there's a pitfall dug a thousand years ago over there. What happened to the Anasazi? Drought, cannibalism, internecine warfare and collapse. What rose up? The Pueblo indians (farmers) and the Apache and Navajo (reavers). And the farmers fortified against the reavers and then the Spanish came and wiped out the farmers and the reavers got guns and it wasn't until the US Army bribed them with cattle that they stopped harassing farms because fuckin'A that had been their way of life since 1100AD or so. I also grew up with gas stations that no longer exist, farmsteads that vanished when the water rights were traded away, barbed wire fence that haven't been tended in 60 years because nobody's running cattle on this land anymore and guys who would shoot at you if you decided to hike across their bazillion-acre ranch (now one of the principle filming locations of Longmire, I might add). And whenever somebody left their land, they were ruined, pure and simple. It's not like they got a realtor to sell it to some other bastard. Nope. That shit's gone. Wanna see the kleinbl00 family homestead? Google up Claunch, NM and have yourself a street view. Perhaps you'd prefer Hope, AZ? Pick just about any place you've never heard of. You wanna know what global warming looks like, have yourself some virtual tourism in AZ. But OH FUCK any of that shit starts happening east of the MIssissippi it's a goddamn cataclysm. And I can tell you why. Gary, Indiana, mutherfucker. A '60s interpretation of a '50s vision of a '20s America in which Norman Rockwell painted the beautiful white truth of wholesome families and the permanent, perpetual safety net of Midwest American manufacturing and agriculture, a glorious post-war retconning of America Fuck Yeah for the 'boomers to hold close to their heart and understand that the USA was the greatest nation on earth and always would be and change would never come for them no matter how much Ike started ranting about a military-industrial complex, so long as we keep the Commies from corrupting our kids it's all gonna come up Rogers and Hammerstein. Because that's America, you see. Tom Joad? he's a fictional character. Dust Bowl? That happens to other people. Change? Well, the West is dynamic. Chicago is now and shall always be the 2nd largest city in the world, second only to the New York (and without all those pesky immigrants). And now they're addicted to heroin and their life expectancy is dropping and their kids scooted as soon as they were able to those Sodoms and Gomorrahs full of gay marriage and needle exchanges and abortion and if we just vote angry enough the Music Man will come back.
It's not super clear what they're looking for in this situation. If they were given funds to become a port authority, wouldn't the money just land in the hands of the people who put them in this position again? If they had a workable plan, they could attract business to help them. But it would have to be a benefit for both sides.Corruption has been a big problem here. Cairo has also struggled with a lot of racial tension over the years.
What value does the Cairo area bring to a potential employer? No workforce, highly skilled or otherwise. No infrastructure to speak of, well developed or otherwise. Basically any corporation that moved in would have to turn the place into an old-school company town, at massive cost. We live in an era where factories are closed in the US and opened in Canada because GM doesn't have to pay for the canadians health insurance, and yet someone thinks that there is going to be some kind of 'boom' to save places like this?
I'm not sure if you're responding to me, but I'll try to answer your question based on the article. According to an embedded article, Cairo was a thriving town because of its geography. Cairo is uniquely situated between two rivers. It was a shipping hub. They hope to transform the town back into a shipping hub. The governor of the state signed a bill to designate the town as a port authority, but there were no funds that went along with the designation. The town doesn't have to attract one potential employer if it can create a plan to become a transportation hub. The movement of goods through the shipping lanes and through the port could allow more job opportunities. They could attract funding if the plan to become a transportation hub is viable.What value does the Cairo area bring to a potential employer?
The port district will spur job creation and promote economic development in Southern Illinois by creating new foreign trade opportunities in the state, officials announced Thursday afternoon during the signing ceremony of the bill along the Ohio River in Cairo.
Given its location as a hub on the inland river system at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, railroad lines and Interstate 57, Cairo is well-positioned to take advantage of increased shipping activity that is expected as a result of the establishment of the new district, Quinn noted.
Jade, that value is perceived by the town authorities but not by actual businesses. If there was a viable need for a shipping hub why wouldn't amazon or someone else just plop down a warehouse there and start operating. Its probably because there are other problems, local corruption, location not as good as local authorities want you to believe, existing port already located elsewhere etc. Towns are formed because there is a need for X and the town people pool resources and provide X. Not the other way around where the town does nothing, hopes somebody gives them X and also hopes somebody needs X which is where Cairo is at. Why cant Cairo take a loan to build their shipping hub? If the hub has a business case I'm sure banks or state/federal gvt would give it to them. More likely the case for this hub sucks, its not viable without a massive government giveaway and Cairo wont even be able to afford to do basic maintenance.
snoo, you may be right. You're probably right. But there's not enough information in the article to be sure. That's why my first comment was that they're not clear enough in what they're asking. But both of us are just guessing about the facts of what's happening there because there aren't enough to determine what's really going on. So I'll play devil's advocate with hypothetical facts that might have played the opposite way that your hypothetical facts played out. I disagree with you about how towns are formed. Towns are formed when the area has something that people want. It's not the people providing the something. In this case, it's access to transportation and shipping. In other cases, it's a business, gold mines, oil fields, etc. When the reason for the town gets outdated as in the case of gold mines, for example, then it's up to the people still in the town to reinvent themselves if they want to stay. They might set up tourist attraction gold mines or other ways for the town to exist. In the case of Cairo, it's still at a geographically advantageous spot. They just need to find a way to make that more attractive to businesses. You're making the assumption that if something was great, people would have already flocked to it. That's not always the case. They may not know it exists or don't realize that people are backing it. Businesses might be overlooking the port because they always have and don't see any reason to change. It takes someone or a group to make the business case that the plan is workable. Then it takes advertising or publicity for other people to find out about it. That's why business start ups are difficult and often require capital. Even if the business has a great product, they have to be able to convince enough other people that the product is good enough to invest in and then convince a whole bunch of other people to buy it. It doesn't necessarily mean they don't have a good product. It might mean that they haven't convinced enough other people of it. There are a lot of good products out there that fail for lack of advertising and a viable business plan. As for the corruption problem, that's less of a problem if they're dealing with businesses than if they're dealing with the government. With the government, there's no oversight. Businesses deal with corruption all the time, even overt corruption that can happen in foreign countries. That's not necessarily a deal breaker. You may be right that Cairo's business case is inadequate for funding. It may also be the case that there's not enough expertise in the town for anyone to have put up an adequate business case. It may just take someone with the expertise to see the value in it and advertise it adequately. As I'm watching the government events lately and the counter-reactions that have been happening, I've become acutely aware that sometimes it just takes people to have knowledge of a problem, understand how it affects them and then to mobilize around the solution. In the case of Cairo, it may be that there's not a solution or it may be that people haven't mobilized around the problem. There are not enough facts in the article to know either way.