Census 2000 – America bails out of the boondocks

Since the first Census 2000 numbers started trickling out about two months ago, newspapers throughout the county have cranked out roughly 1,000 stories with the “what it means for us” local angle. (The 1,000 figure, incidentally, isn’t just a wild guess – it is the result of a couple of hours I spent skimming through computer databases that track such things, a semi-thoroughness balanced with not wanting to read the “what it means” ruminations of every blessed Corn Belt weekly.)

The stories pose a heap of questions centered on the freshly counted 281 million Americans and how where they choose to live affects the well-being of the particular state or locality under consideration. The short answer, offered by University of Louisville researcher Ron Crouch to his local newspaper, is: ”If you live in an urban area or along an interstate, you’re doing pretty well. If you don’t, you’re losing.”

The story here in Maine is so obvious you don’t even have to read a newspaper to know it (although, just on principle, reading a newspaper is always a good idea). Uncluttered by newcomers (the current population of 1.27 million is a measly .05 million more than it was in 1990), Maine can look at its Census data and see numbers that quantify what the eye can see – we’re not growing, just shifting. The northern counties are moving south, many of the kids – Maine’s next generation of business owners, builders, workers, investors and parents – are moving even farther. They’re just plain moving out.

If misery truly loves company, we’re not alone. One thing Census 2000 makes perfectly clear is that rural America is in free fall. Whether it’s New England, the Deep South, the Great Plains or the Far West, people are bailing out of the boondoocks. Other than a few isolated examples of remote places that attract affluent retirees (the Bar Harbor region here, upscale spots in the Rockies, etc.), there is no rural area in any state that is not losing people, especially young families, at a shocking rate.

Take North Dakota, the only state that had no measurable growth in the last decade, one of only three states with less growth than Maine. All but six of the state’s 53 counties lost population, thousands of families that once farmed rural North Dakota and kept its small towns alive now are packed into the housing developments ringing Fargo and a handful of other small cities.

North Dakota has lost more than 2,000 farms since 1990; throughout the nation’s breadbasket, from Indiana to eastern Colorado, the loss is estimated at 100,000. The prevailing media view in those agriculturally oriented regions is that, with farm income at historic lows, farmers have just plain had it and the children of farmers can’t wait to get a taste of the bright lights, even if the big city is only Des Moines.

With the survival of the small communities and the schools, hospitals and other necessities that make them livable unlikely, several newspapers in that region quoted experts as saying the only hope of reversing this death spiral would be a marked increase in federal farm aid. The experts, without exception, then concede that hoping for such an increase is just plain silly.

Here’s another case of unwarranted wishful thinking. In Washington, D.C., there is much talk among the political class about increased use of coal to avert a potential energy shortage. Newspapers in the coal-mining regions of West Virginia and Kentucky are saying – fairly shouting – that their population is so depleted there aren’t nearly enough miners left to do the job.

I couldn’t read these dispatches from the sticks without thinking of “The Ends of the Earth,” Robert D. Kaplan’s excellent 1996 travelogue documenting his holiday-in-hell journey through some of the world’s worst slums, from West Africa to the Middle East to the former Soviet republics of Central Asia and finally to Cambodia. Although each of these places suffered greatly at the hands of history (slavery and tyranny are common themes), Mr. Kaplan identifies one reason they remain, years, even decades later, mired in crushing poverty, disease and crime – the failure of governments to invest in their rural regions made those regions utterly unlivable and the uncontrolled stampede to the cities soon made the cities unlivable as well. It’s not as though the suburbs around Des Moines, or Portland for that matter, are about to become an Ivory Coast shantytown, but the countryside could easily become just as empty.

On the other side of the issue is what happens at the other end of the population shift and how booms aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Huntsville, Ala., is home to NASA’s Marshall Space Center and a nice little regional high-tech center. Census stories from that region suggest that the outlying countryside is in such galloping decline that people are moving into the city and its suburbs without jobs, without any job prospects or non-farm skills, filling schools to overflowing, overburdening social services and merely trading their rural squalor in for an urban variety. Las Vegas, Nev., the nation’s fastest-growing city the last decade, is so overburdened with newcomers – smog, water shortages, traffic gridlock, overcrowded schools – that local officials are using the good old “cross fingers” strategy. “Any city that can build a billion-dollar hotel that looks like the Taj Mahal can built its way out of this,” one said.

Both sides of the boom-and-bust equation agree that as the population shifts to city and suburb, so does political clout. That’s good if you want Congress and your state legislature to help you build your way out of a population explosion. To rural America, it means the chances of getting the schools, the health care, the business assistance – yes, the interstate – to revive your region get smaller every day. Or at least every Census.

Bruce Kyle is the assistant editorial page editor for the Bangor Daily News.