Doctoral candidate Jean Hardy wrote an essay for the CityLab.com website last December, complaining about the essential inaccuracy of a New York Times op-ed By Eduardo Porter. Porter’s op-ed begins with this question:
Can rural America be saved?
There are 60 million people, almost one in five Americans, living on farms, in hamlets and in small towns across the landscape. For the last quarter century the story of these places has been one of relentless economic decline.
You can’t believe everything you read in the newspapers. For the last quarter of a century, the small town of Pagosa Springs has been squarely located in a very rural area of Colorado, but its story has not been one of “relentless economic decline.”
We’ve seen certain elements of “decline” in Pagosa Springs, but “economic” has not been one of them. As evidence of this fact, we can look — for example — at the sales taxes collected by local governments. Back in 2005, the total sales taxes collected by the Archuleta County government amounted to about $5.8 million. Last year, the collections had grown to about $10.4 million. (Sales tax is shared 50/50 with the Town of Pagosa Springs.)
Even property tax collections have shown a noticeable increase. The County government pulled in about $4.3 million back in 2005. The collections in 2018 were about $5.7 million… a 33% increase. (The Town government collects relatively little in the way of property taxes. About $53,000 in 2005… and about $86,000 in 2018.)
Meanwhile, certain other comments in the New York Times article might be more pertinent to Pagosa Springs.
Rural America is getting old. The median age is 43, seven years older than city dwellers. Its productivity, defined as output per worker, is lower than urban America’s. Its families have lower incomes…
The median age in Pagosa Springs has indeed been headed in a geriatric direction, according to the US Census Bureau, who recently put Archuleta County’s median age at about 50 years old. Compare that to Denver (37 years) or Albuquerque (36 years) or Phoenix (34 years).
Lower incomes? The US Census calculates the median household income in Archuleta County at about $48,000 per year, which is considerably lower than Denver ($65,000) and Phoenix ($61,000) but slightly higher than Albuquerque ($47,000). The Census also says, for the entire state of Colorado, about 10% of the population live in poverty; in Archuleta County it’s about 12%.
From the Mr. Porter’s New York Times article:
States, municipalities and the federal government have spent billions to draw jobs and prosperity to stagnant rural areas. But they haven’t yet figured out how to hitch this vast swath of the country to the tech-heavy economy that is flourishing in America’s cities.
If we click the link provided by Mr. Porter regarding ‘the tech-heavy economy’, however, we find a New York Times article about ‘artificial intelligence’ researchers in Cambridge, England — a university town that’s apparently striving to become Europe’s ‘Silicon Valley’ and companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, Samsung, and Microsoft have created research centers there, spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the process.
Mr. Porter seems to be arguing that, if rural America doesn’t soon get on the technology-artificial-intelligence bandwagon, we will dry up and blow away.
Author Jean Hardy has a different take on the situation:
A focus on single industries, such as mining in the upper midwestern United States, already destroyed many rural economies (and their environments) in the 20th century. Progressive rural communities that are thinking about these problems don’t see tech as a sole savior…
We might ask, is Mr. Hardy talking about places like Pagosa Springs? Are we a ‘progressive rural community’?
Mr. Hardy continues:
We live under economic regimes that have decided that success is perpetual economic growth, while simultaneously divesting from the communities where investment is needed the most. What if an overarching economic mission of growth isn’t actually what rural places want or need?…
Instead of portraying aging and stagnant populations as a problem that needs to be fixed, what happens when we think of them as opportunities to learn about sustainability and the future?…
We treat rural communities as if they are just behind the times and waiting to catch up. When we turn to emerging American supercities as bastions of the future, we lose what we can learn from rural communities…
These comments by Mr. Hardy seem considerably more applicable to Pagosa Springs that the doom and gloom of the New York Times op-ed, with its urban-based implication that ‘a technology-based economy’ is the only future worthy of consideration.
But before we get too far into this discussion, let’s define the term “rural”… as used by commentators living in big cities, offering their advice on how to save rural America. Apparently, the most common way to define “rural” is: everything that’s not urban. And there are three common but different concepts that produce three (sometimes very different) definitions of “urban”:
- The ‘administrative’ concept, used by many USDA rural development programs, defines urban along municipal or other jurisdictional boundaries.
- The ‘land-use’ concept, used by the Census Bureau, identifies urban areas based on how densely settled the area is – the picture of settlement you would get from an airplane.
- The ‘economic’ concept, used in rural research applications, recognizes the urban influence on labor, retail, and media markets that extend beyond densely-settled city centers to include broader ‘commuting areas’ outside the urban core.
These three concepts produce urban ‘boundaries’ that often differ considerably from one another. For instance, back in 2000, Peoria, IL included about 112,900 people — if you defined it by its actual municipal boundaries. But as an ‘economic region’, it included nearly 366,900 people. Using a land-use concept resulted in an area with a population between these two extremes.
If “rural” means “everything that’s not urban” then we should probably begin by asking which approach writers like Mr. Porter and Mr. Hardy are using when writing about saving rural America. They didn’t specify that in their articles.
In the case of Pagosa Springs, however, we really don’t need to ask. Everybody and their grandmother would, I think, classify all of Archuleta County as “not urban.”
So let’s set out from that perspective, and see what the future might hold, in terms of ‘saving Pagosa.’
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.