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.
Just one of dozens of economically depressed Upstate NY canal towns.
Beautiful architecture in most of them. You can tell that at one point they were thriving, prosperous places to live.
Then NYS government happened.
Those small towns will remain a thing of the past as long as NYS hangs onto its corrupt and immoral government.
Just another reason we moved out of NYS.
What planet do you live on?
Generally, the only power people have over you is what you let them have.
Yes, I realize there are exceptions, but if more people en mass stopped obeying unlawful orders from politicians, we’d be freer and better off.
While we have left CNY and are glad for being away from the government and the dreary weather, there are some stunningly beautiful areas of Upstate and I do miss the agriculture and other aspects of the state.
There was a lot to do in Upstate and I enjoyed the rural life there.
My kids have had that epiphany.
We just closed last week on 5.75 acres 67 miles north of Where we live now which is the N Atlanta burbs. We are working night and day to get it set up to move to ASAP. Its a rural community of like minded folks. The city is getting really bad. Crime is soaring.
Well, welcome to the neighborhood!
Glad you are getting out while the getting is good.
Up here in North Idaho, we have the opposite problem. All our small towns have doubled, tripled, or more in population the past 10 to 15 years. The growth is horrendous and people wish it would stop and we can go back to what we had.
Upstate New York has been on a downward trajectory forever. I grew up there and did a lot of business there in the 80s and 90s. All sorts of business incentives have been tried to arrest the decline, but nothing works. The state was and still is very business-hostile. Like California. They simply cannot jettison their woke-liberal ways to save their states. It’s the same all over the country.
“Real estate is crazy cheap in American towns”
That was true until about 2018 or 2019. All over the US, locals are squeezed out with soaring real estate prices. Real estate has almost tripled here in North Idaho in that time frame. The paper and NextDoor app are full of people bemoaning the lack of affordable housing.
Have you had V-Bar-X ranch meats? They have the best bacon!
“Teenagers hold doors open for me and call me sir”
Yep, it’s the same here in North Idaho. The kids at the restaurants and markets all ask “How’s your day going? Doing anything interesting today? Got any plans” and they all mean it. It isn’t just a put-on taught them by the store manager.
We're seeing a LOT of California / Oregon / Washington refugees moving in. Our new next door neighbors came from Vancouver WA and they're solid folks, thank heavens. So not all of the noobs are garbage people, but some certainly are. Usually, all it takes is one or two Panhandle winters to send them elsewhere.
It's anyone's guess how this is going to go down, but go down it will. No guarantees, but the solid, dependable, skilled and resourceful among us will pull through.
😎
I bought an 80 acre parcel far from "civilization" about five years ago. Built a house and integrated myself into the community. My Mennonite neighbors have told me they will feed me if things get that bad. I own a 65 acre forest with millions of BTUs of stored energy. I have a well.
I have become a simple observer of the fall of the West. Personally, I will not participate.
“Upstate NY is a pretty good place to live.”
Small towns in western NYS also are very nice — where I grew up. They’re actually more “Tennessee” than Tennessee is in some ways. When we visit, we see more Confederate flags there than we do in TN — seriously. (THEY know the flags don’t represent slavery; THEY know they’re symbols of rugged individualism and freedom.)
“the need to organize the activities that support food production locally,”
Sounds a LITTLE like the socialist Grange my ancestors were involved in decades ago.
Throw in some Black Angus beef, some dairy, a few chickens for meat and eggs, and some fish and, yes, they will survive on that diet.
The trucks have to run to the factory farms with their inputs and then from the factory farms to the cities to feed the multitudes. People in rural areas only need the things they cannot produce or gather themselves. Salt, sugar, and baking powder come to mind.
In my local community many families produce virtually all their food and are happy to sell a vast surplus. This is in a fairly harsh climate with poor soil.
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