How to Heal the Heartland
Timothy Egan, NYT
APRIL 10, 2014
It’s tornado season, the springtime tempest, which means the Big Empty of the United States will get another cameo on the nation’s stage. Prepare for the annual montage of heartbreak and houses tossed to the wind, of schools scalped of their roofs and trailer parks reduced to rubble.
What most of us know about the heartland barely extends beyond Dorothy’s house in Kansas, or Sarah Palin pablum about “real Americans.” That’s a shame, because there are two big stories shaping the Great Plains — one of steroidal growth and disruption in the energy boom, the other of the slow death of small-town life. Incongruent as it seems, both are going on at the same time, in the same states.
The oil and natural gas bonanza has made housing in places like Minot, N.D., as competitive as rent-controlled apartments in Manhattan. Of the nation’s 10 fastest-growing metro areas last year, six were in the greater Great Plains, according to the Census Bureau. That includes Fargo and Bismarck in North Dakota and Odessa and Midland in Texas, for those of you seeking full employment in the industrial flatlands.
For all of that, a record one in three of the nation’s counties are dying off — more deaths than births. The emptying of America is happening in Maine and West Virginia, in Michigan, western Pennsylvania and upstate New York. But the most depopulated area is right down the midsection of the United States. An hour’s drive from a boomtown with a spaghetti tangle of pipelines is a ghost town with a grade school that hasn’t seen a kid in 50 years.
(More here.)
APRIL 10, 2014
It’s tornado season, the springtime tempest, which means the Big Empty of the United States will get another cameo on the nation’s stage. Prepare for the annual montage of heartbreak and houses tossed to the wind, of schools scalped of their roofs and trailer parks reduced to rubble.
What most of us know about the heartland barely extends beyond Dorothy’s house in Kansas, or Sarah Palin pablum about “real Americans.” That’s a shame, because there are two big stories shaping the Great Plains — one of steroidal growth and disruption in the energy boom, the other of the slow death of small-town life. Incongruent as it seems, both are going on at the same time, in the same states.
The oil and natural gas bonanza has made housing in places like Minot, N.D., as competitive as rent-controlled apartments in Manhattan. Of the nation’s 10 fastest-growing metro areas last year, six were in the greater Great Plains, according to the Census Bureau. That includes Fargo and Bismarck in North Dakota and Odessa and Midland in Texas, for those of you seeking full employment in the industrial flatlands.
For all of that, a record one in three of the nation’s counties are dying off — more deaths than births. The emptying of America is happening in Maine and West Virginia, in Michigan, western Pennsylvania and upstate New York. But the most depopulated area is right down the midsection of the United States. An hour’s drive from a boomtown with a spaghetti tangle of pipelines is a ghost town with a grade school that hasn’t seen a kid in 50 years.
(More here.)
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1 Comments:
Let's see,... those on the left side of the aisle demand the right to unrestricted abortions and then seemed concerned that there are more deaths than births. Interesting 'logic.'
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