Can a Southwest Virginia Coal Town Reinvent Itself?

Grundy, Virginia.

Here in Virginia rural area politicians continue to run on an agenda of "god, guns and bashing fags" and a majority of residents support Donald Trump who promised to bail them out of their economic plight but instead has mere made a show of hating the same people they hate: non-whites, gays, non-right wing Christians and, of course, liberals. Meanwhile their economic fortunes continue in a death spiral and the younger generations leave for more urban areas and a better financial future.  A lengthy piece in the New York Times looks at the efforts of one Southwest Virginia town's efforts to reinvent itself.  Lots of state and federal monies have been poured in seemingly with little success. The reason, in my view that the article does not address? The area remains very unwelcoming to outsiders and those in the racial and social demographic groups the residents and Trump hate and far too many of the residents cling to form of right wing Christianity that is nothing short of scary to progressive forward thinking people and businesses. No amount of economic development funding is going to change this obstacle to economic rebirth.  Thus, the economic decline and depopulation continues.  Here are article highlights:

GRUNDY, Va. — Jay Rife surveys the landscape — hundreds of flat, grassy acres reclaimed from a spent mountaintop mine once operated by the Paramont Coal Company. A few handsome homes stand on one end of the project. An 80,000-square-foot shell, to house some future manufacturing operation, is being built on another. For the intrepid, there are trails for all-terrain vehicles. There’s an R.V. park. The whole site has been wired for broadband. Elk have been imported from Kentucky for tourists to look at.

Buchanan County, where Grundy sits, has spent $35 million to $40 million on the development, called Southern Gap, some seven miles from town along U.S. 460. Mr. Rife, the head of the county’s Industrial Development Authority, says the project “is going to be the salvation of Buchanan County.”

Few places have had as many shots at deliverance. None, so far, have succeeded in stemming Grundy’s inexorable decline.

This corner of southwestern Virginia has long sought alternatives to coal as a source of sustenance. The Appalachian School of Law, which opened in the 1990s in the shell of Grundy Junior High School, was heralded as a new economic engine, lubricated — of course — with taxpayer funds. So was the Appalachian College of Pharmacy, founded in 2003 some 20 minutes down the road in Oakwood. County officials considered a dental school, but figured it was too expensive. . . . Then there is downtown Grundy itself, much of which was moved up the hill to avoid periodic floodwaters from the Levisa Fork, a tributary of the Big Sandy River.

Virginia estimates that the relocation and flood-proofing projects, started almost 20 years ago, cost $170 million in federal and state funds, more than $170,000 for every woman, man and child living in town today. The Army Corps of Engineers shaved off the flank of a mountain across the river to create an elevated platform on which the new commercial district would sit. Virginia’s Department of Transportation bulldozed much of the old downtown and routed U.S. 460 through it, built on top of a levee protecting what was left of Grundy’s old center. Finally, in 2011, Walmart opened a superstore to anchor the new site, perched somewhat oddly above a two-story, publicly funded parking lot.

Still, the effort does not quite amount to a reinvention. The economic engine is still the one that carried this corner of Appalachia through the 20th century. “We are a one-industry community, and that’s coal,” Mr. Rife said. A few steps from Walmart, an office of Welmore Energy, a coal-producing subsidiary of the Ukrainian steel conglomerate Metinvest, serves as a reminder of that dominance.

And that, today, is a problem. At the peak of coal’s fortunes in the 1970s, more than 35,000 people lived in Buchanan. Over 5,000 worked in the mines. Mr. Rife remembers downtown sidewalks in Grundy, the county seat, packed with thousands of people on weekend shopping expeditions. Karen Brown, the principal of Grundy High School, recalls Porsches and Mercedes-Benzes parked in the high school lot when she went to school there.

Coal is still the most prominent business, employing one in six workers in the county and accounting for one-third of its total wages. But it can no longer support such living standards. . . . The county population has declined to under 22,000, of whom almost 3,500 people receive disability benefits. Over a quarter live in poverty. And it is getting old. The only age group that has grown in the last two decades is the population over 55.

Grundy is hardly unique. It is one of many victims of globalization, technology and other economic dislocations that have wreaked havoc with small-town America. For years, most economists argued that rather than spend millions in pursuit of a new economic engine for such places, it would make more sense to help residents seek opportunities elsewhere.

But the proliferation of towns like Grundy across what used to be the nation’s industrial heartland — stymied by joblessness, awash in opioids and frustration — has prompted a new sense of alarm. . . . Lawrence H. Summers, once a top economic adviser to President Barack Obama, put it this way: “There is probably no issue more important for the political economy of the next 15 years, not just in the United States but around the world, than what happens in the areas that feel rightly that they are falling behind and increasingly left apart.”

Migration, as economists would have predicted, has become an increasingly compelling option: Those lucky enough to find work somewhere else leave. They include Ms. Brown’s two daughters — Peyton, 23, and Bailee, 25 — who last summer followed their husbands from the coal industry to more stable jobs at the Toyota plant in Georgetown, Ky.

Overwhelmingly, they support President Trump, who promised to bring coal back. But it doesn’t look as if they have much faith in the promise. As Hoot Dellinger said, leaning over the edge of his booth, “This community will never prosper again.”

Without prosperity, who will stay? “Ninety percent of the girls become nurses and leave,” Mr. Ward said. “We’ve seen a lot of guys chasing gas up in the Marcellus Shale.” But even moving doesn’t always work out. As shale jobs there have waned, Mr. Ward added, “a lot of them are trying to come back, and there’s nothing to come back to.”

I do not know what the solution is since, far too many refuse to accept that their mind set and right wing religious and social views are perhaps among the biggest obstacles to positive change. 

Rural Virginia Demonstrates Why It is Dying Economically

Both Governor Ralph Northam and his predecessor Terry McAuliffe have pushed for a Virginia that is "open for business and welcoming to all" as part of their successful effort to attract new businesses and investment to Virginia. It's an approach that recognizes that businesses are only going to relocate to areas that will be welcoming to and where transferred employees will want to live.  This simple concept has not sunk into the minds of much of the population of rural Virginia - especially Southwest Virginia - who demand that the state government (and the rest of the taxpayers in the state finance) do something to turn around the continued economic decline of their region.  Yet perhaps the biggest deterrent to an economic turn around is the residents themselves many of whom continue to be racist, elect racist and homophobic representatives to the General Assembly who seek to disenfranchise minority voters, and who are hostile to those they deem "other" - which translates to any non-white and non-right wing Christian. 

Now, with Democrats in control of state government and poised to pass legislation long backed by a majority of Virginians, including sensible gun control laws, the rural areas are vowing to refuse to enforce any new gun control laws and showing themselves to be precisely the types of areas new progressive businesses would want to avoid. And the avoidance is not limited to businesses.  One couple I know moved to a rural county thinking they'd like living in the country.  Now their plan is to move to the Richmond area since they do not want their children to grow up in such a racist and bigoted environment. The Washington Post looks at the rural insanity that will only help these areas to die even more economically.  Here are highlights:

AMELIA COURTHOUSE, Va. — Families, church groups, hunt clubs and neighbors began arriving two hours early, with hundreds spilling out of the little courthouse and down the hill to the street in the chilly night air.

They were here to demand that the Board of Supervisors declare Amelia County [population 13,020] a “Second Amendment sanctuary” where officials will refuse to enforce any new restrictions on gun ownership.

A resistance movement is boiling up in Virginia, where Democrats rode a platform on gun control to historic victories in state elections earlier this month. The uprising is fueled by a deep cultural gulf between rural red areas that had long wielded power in Virginia and the urban and suburban communities that now dominate. Guns are the focus. Behind that, there is a sense that a way of life is being cast aside.

In the past two weeks, county governments from the central Piedmont to the Appalachian Southwest — Charlotte, Campbell, Carroll, Appomattox, Patrick, Dinwiddie, Pittsylvania, Lee and Giles — have approved resolutions that defy Richmond to come take their guns.

Some of the unrest is fanned by gun rights groups, such as the National Rifle Association and the Virginia Citizens Defense League, which have used social media and old-fashioned networking to offer boilerplate language for resolutions. But the movement is speaking to the anxieties of many who are unsettled by a state that has shifted from red to blue with shocking speed.
 All of the top leaders in the new Democratic-controlled legislature hail from urban or suburban districts in Northern Virginia, Hampton Roads and Richmond. The liberal suburbs outside Washington have the largest delegation in the legislature. And the status of lawmakers from rural red parts of the state has never been lower. “We need to send a signal to Richmond about Northern Virginia. We don’t want their influence to affect us down here. We’re very different people,” said Clay Scott, a 25-year-old construction project manager whose family has lived in Amelia for generations. When the General Assembly convenes in January, Gov. Ralph Northam (D) has promised to move quickly with Democratic leaders to pass measures such as universal background checks, limits on the types and numbers of firearms that can be purchased and a “red flag” law allowing authorities to seize weapons from someone deemed a threat.

The proposals “were essentially on the ballot in November,” said Brian Moran, Northam’s secretary of public safety. “And the people have spoken through their votes.”

Refusing to carry out a judge’s order to seize weapons from someone would be breaking the law. That could mean jail time. Local agencies receive funding from the state, so even adopting the stance is provocative.

“The notion that law enforcement would not follow the law is appalling,” said Lori Haas, a longtime activist with the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. “I suspect that many of these counties and their elected officials are posturing in front of certain voters.”

As the sanctuary movement has spread around the country, Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence found that it generally has not led to active resistance. “As a practical matter, these are largely symbolic,” said Adam Skaggs, chief counsel and policy director at Giffords. “We haven’t seen cases where there are folks that are outright defying the law.”

Only one person out of the dozens who spoke expressed a different point of view. Allison Crews, 44, . . . The main thing that impressed her about the public hearing, she said, was the number of people who showed up — far beyond anything she had seen in years of attending county meetings.

“I wish we’d see those crowds for things like water quality in the town, or the school system,” she said.

So many of these rural residents are their own worse enemies yet are too blind to grasp that reality.  The Amelia County website describes the county as an "undiscovered treasure" yet with residents like those attending the meeting described in the article, most tourists - who will come from urban areas the residents despise - will likely avoid it like the plague.

Economic Change Rattles America and Europe

One constant throughout history is that change over time is guaranteed and that changes in technology and industry are constant, often at the expense of many classes of people who find their economic world turned upside down as industries and economic ways of life they thought unchangeable begin to die and wither away.  The resulting angst and financial distress are causing convulsions across the developed world, especially in rural areas that have not embraced and/or been able to change see their social and economic reality crumble.  The first glimpse of the danger posed by the phenomenon was the British Brexit vote that was sold to many on the deliberate lie that the exit from the European Union would allow the recapture of a glorious past.  The reality is that Brexit will constitute a form of economic suicide for many Britons, especially those in rural areas.  Next we saw the convulsion in the United States that put the thoroughly corrupt and unfit Donald Trump in the White House.  Now, we are seeing convulsions in France where those left out of the new economic model are violently protesting.  I totally understand the fear and anxiety of those reacting to change, but trying to resist the inevitable is not the answer and, indeed, threatens long term economic and political stability - and sets the stage for dangerous demagogues - as a column in the New York Times notes.  Here are excerpts:

Ever since World War II, the liberal global order that has spread more freedom and prosperity around the world than at any other time in history has been held up by two pillars: the United States of America and the United Nations of Europe, now known as the European Union.

Both of these centers of free markets, free people and free ideas are being shaken today by rural and beyond-the-suburbs insurgencies of largely white working-poor and anxious middle classes, which have not generally benefited from the surges in globalization, immigration and technology that have lifted superstar cities like London, Paris and San Francisco and their multicultural populations.

Having just seen the shocking sight of Parisian stores boarded up right before Christmas to protect against rioting along the Champs-Élysées by some of France’s yellow-vested protesters; after being told in Rome a few days earlier that Italy, a founding member of the E.U., could conceivably shuck off both the E.U. and the euro one day under its new bizarre far-left/far-right governing coalition; after watching Britain become paralyzed over how to commit economic suicide by leaving the E.U.; and after watching President Trump actually cheer for the breakup of the E.U. rather than for its good health, it is obvious to me that we’re at a critical hinge of history.

The core challenge for both the U.S. and the E.U. is the same: These rapid accelerations in technology and globalization have brought many more immigrants into many more remote corners of their societies — public housing in Paris today is dominated by immigrants — at the same time as many long-frozen social mores have changed — like acceptance of gay marriage and transgender rights — and as average work no longer returns an average wage that can sustain an average middle-class lifestyle.

The middle classes that powered the growth of the U.S. and the E.U. in the 20th century were built on something called a “high-wage, middle-skilled job.” But robotics and artificial intelligence and outsourcing and Chinese imports have wiped out a lot of middle-skilled routine white-collar and blue-collar work.

Now there are high-wage, high-skilled jobs and low-wage, low-skilled jobs. But high-wage, middle-skilled jobs are vanishing, leaving a considerable cohort of people with stagnant incomes and burning resentments at the globalized city slickers who they think look down at them and have mastered the nonroutine skills required for a high-wage job today.

When you simultaneously challenge all these things that anchor people — their sense of home, their job security, their prospects for growth and the social norms that, for better or worse, defined their lives — and then amp it all up with social networks, you can get a really ferocious blowback, as France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, saw across his country.

It is going to take extraordinary leadership for the U.S., Britain and the E.U. to come up with a strategy for these grievances.

It has to balance the need for economic growth and redistribution, the need to take care of those who have been left behind without burdening future generations, the need for free-flowing borders to attract new talent and ideas, and the need to prevent people from feeling like strangers in their own homes.

But that leadership is not present. I get why a slim majority of U.K. citizens voted for Brexit — as it was sold to them. They were told they could curb all the stuff they didn’t like — such as a flood of 2.2 million foreign E.U. workers — and still keep all the stuff they liked — mainly Britain’s free access to the E.U. market — and give up nothing. But it was all a lie.

And to now watch the Conservative Party hacks who pushed that lie, led by Boris Johnson, continue to demand that their prime minister deliver this fantasy Brexit in the face of the reality that it’s impossible — and in the face of how bad even the second-best option will be — is to watch a once-sane country write a suicide note in a moment of irrationality and then argue endlessly over how to carry it out — death by hanging, poison or a gunshot to the head. They’ve got to reconsider. Disconnecting in a connected world is nuts.

Macron, by contrast, dared to do the right things to unlock growth in France, at the right time, “but he did not understand the difference between being right and doing it right,” a French economist, Ludovic Subran, told me. And he did not understand how his policies differently affected “the beer drinkers and the wine drinkers.”

Macron pushed through four vital structural fixes that fostered growth: pro-investment tax reforms, reduced pensions for the bloated railway union, relaxed labor rules to make it easier to fire and hire workers, and big new public investments in skills and education for the most disadvantaged.

To save his presidency, a shellshocked Macron busted his budget and canceled the fuel tax hike, raised the minimum wage by 100 euros ($114) a month and scrapped a planned tax on pensions under 2,000 euro ($2,272) per month. But because the Yellow Vests have no leader, no one knows what happens next.

“France today has a leader with no followers and an opposition with no leader,” said U.S. foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum.

And the reason that matters is France and Germany were always the two adults whose partnership and adherence to the E.U. budgets and standards were the cement that held the whole E.U. pillar together.

I think the countries that will thrive in this era are the ones that have the most nimble cities, with the most nimble local leaders, who build adaptive coalitions of businesses, educators and social entrepreneurs, who can compete locally, regionally, nationally and globally.

In this world, highly centralized countries will fare much worse than decentralized ones. That’s the real shift France has to make, and, if it can’t, watch out for falling pillars. France matters.

Dominique Moïsi, one of France’s top foreign policy analysts, put it to me like this: At a time when America, which was always the European Union’s life insurance policy against predatory threats from the East and was the world champion of democracy, begins to withdraw from the world; when Russia returns with a vengeance to global politics; when Germany turns inward and Italy rebels against E.U. spending limits and moves closer to autocratic Russia; when so many roads now lead to Beijing; and when the U.K. is hellbent on suicide, “suddenly what happens in France goes beyond France. We are the last barrier protecting the European idea. If Macron fails, it can bring the end of Europe.”

Frighteningly, lurking among those feeling dispossessed is the same sort of nationalism and xenophobia that gave rise to WWI and WWII.  All that is lacking for now is a dangerous demagogue ready to light the fuse. 

Hard Truths of "Saving" the Rural Economy

A lengthy piece in the New York Times looks at an issue plaguing large swaths of the country, including Southwest Virginia and Virginia's "Southside": economic decline in rural areas that seems impossible to reverse.  The piece looks at economic forces, especially the synergy of urban tech centers that works against rural areas, population decline and lower academic achievement that afflict many rural areas.  Here in Virginia, the economic mantra coming from the Northam administration is "all welcoming," yet in Southwest Virginia, the motto is seemingly "only white conservative Christians need apply."  All of the causation enumerated in the article are true, but nowhere are experts willing to call out what to me is another major cause of rural decline: right wing, hate based religion and an often too willing embrace of ignorance.  Progressive businesses want the best and brightest employees and care little about race, sexual orientation or religious belief - a mindset that is the opposite of what finds in Southwest Virginia. Here are article highlights:

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.

The election of Donald Trump, powered in no small degree by rural voters, has brought the troubles of small-town America to national attention, with an urgent question: What can be done to revive it?

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. And its share of the population is shrinking: the United States has grown by 75 million people since 1990, but this has mostly occurred in cities and suburbs. Rural areas have lost some 3 million people.

These days, economic growth bypasses rural economies. In the first four years of the recovery after the 2008 recession, counties with fewer than 100,000 people lost 17,500 businesses, according to the Economic Innovation Group. By contrast, counties with more than 1 million residents added, altogether, 99,000 firms. By 2017, the largest metropolitan areas had almost 10 percent more jobs than they did at the start of the financial crisis. Rural areas still had fewer.

The Economic Innovation Group measures “distress” as a combination of data ranging from joblessness and poverty to abandoned homes and educational attainment. Since the 1990s, there has been an “intensifying ruralization of distress,” said John Lettieri, the group’s president.

[N]obody — not experts or policymakers or people in these communities — seems to know quite how to pick rural America up. 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.

[F]actory jobs can no longer keep small-town America afloat. Even after a robust eight-year growth spell, there are fewer than 13 million workers in manufacturing across the entire economy. Robots and workers in China put together most of the manufactured goods that Americans buy, and the high-tech industries powering the economy today don’t have much need for the cheap labor that rural communities contributed to America’s industrial past. They mostly need highly educated workers. They find those most easily in big cities, not in small towns.

In a report published in November, Mark Muro, William Galston and Clara Hendrickson of the Brookings Institution laid out a portfolio of ideas to rescue the substantial swath of the country that they identify as “left behind.” They identify critical shortages bedeviling declining communities: workers with digital skills, broadband connections, capital. And they have plans to address them: I.T. training and education initiatives, regulatory changes to boost lending to small businesses, incentives to invest in broadband.

Wisely, they suggest that any federal government effort must choose its targets carefully. Better to focus on middle-sized places that are near big tech hubs and have some critical infrastructure, rather than scatter assistance all over the landscape. . . . . however, even the authors concede that they may not be up to the task. “I don’t know if these ideas are going to work,” Mr. Galston acknowledged when I pressed him on the issue. “But it is worth making the effort.”

This is the inescapable reality of agglomeration, one of the most powerful forces shaping the American economy over the last three decades. Innovative companies choose to locate where other successful, innovative companies are. That’s where they can find lots of highly skilled workers. . . . . This dynamic feeds on itself, drawing more high-tech firms and highly skilled workers to where they already are.

In hindsight, no amount of tax incentives would have convinced Amazon to expand in a medium-sized city such as Columbus, Ohio, rather than Northern Virginia and Queens,which sit in some of the largest pools of talent in the country. If even medium-sized cities find it difficult to compete, what are the odds that, say, a small town like Amory, Miss., where 14 percent of adults have a bachelor’s degree and a quarter of its 2,500 workers work in small-scale manufacturing, have a chance to attract well-paid tech jobs?

What if nothing really works? Is there really no option but to do nothing and, as some have suggested, return depopulated parts of rural America to the bison?

Instead of so-called place-based policies to revitalize small towns, why not help their residents take advantage of opportunities where the opportunities are? Geographic mobility hit a historical low in 2017, when only 11 percent of Americans picked up shop and moved — half the rate of 1951. One of the key reasons is that housing in the prosperous cities that offer the most opportunities has become too expensive.

[T]he costs of rural poverty are looming over American society. Think of the opioid addiction taking over rural America, of the spike in crime, of the wasted human resources in places where only a third of adults hold a job.

And if today’s polarized politics are noxious, what might they look like in a country perpetually divided between diverse, prosperous liberal cities and a largely white rural America in decline? As Mr. Galston warned: “Think through the political consequences of saying to a substantial portion of Americans, which is even more substantial in political terms, ‘We think you’re toast.’ ”

The distress of 50 million Americans should concern everyone. Powerful economic forces are arrayed against rural America and, so far, efforts to turn it around have failed. Not every small town can be a tech hub, nor should it be. But that can’t be the only answer.

The irony, of course, is that the funds used by state and federal programs trying to revitalize rural areas come from the the diverse urban areas and the very people that so many rural voters view with contempt or worse.