The dark side of rural decline - West Virginia's drug epidemic

West Virginia - mountain mama's drug den

I'm often cynical about moral panics around drugs and drug use as they tend to exaggerate or make use of tragic anecdotes to fuel the idea that it has reached epidemic proportions. I do, however, think the problem in parts of West Virginia is genuinely shocking:

Huntington, the second largest city in West Virginia, once had a population of more than 100,000 people, but that number has reduced to some 48,000, and almost one-quarter of these, some 12,000 citizens, have either latent or active substance-use disorders.

Here we see the trend of rural depopulation combined with a widely reported and discussed US problem with opiates. As with other rural and small town places where the reason for there being a population - agriculture, mining, forestry - has ended, those with any get up and go have got up and left. What's remains are the old, the poor and the sick (including some who tick all of these boxes) - and, for reasons ranging from broken families and poor education to the lack of jobs and ill health, what we've got is a drugs problem:

Beyond the numbing accountancy, though, the epidemic has done little to impress itself onto the wider American culture. So far, OxyContin has produced no Hogarth, no Coleridge, no De Quincey, no Easy Rider or Drugstore Cowboy, no Junkie or The Long Weekend. There is no country music equivalent of Bowie’s Berlin period, or not one with any wattage. There is some book-length journalism, a sliver of fiction, some recovery-themed Christian hip-hop and, perhaps by analogy, the zombie-themed television series The Walking Dead. Then a blank. The destruction of much of working-class America by opiates and opioids has happened silently. There seems almost nothing creative to say about it, or no way to say it.

To be fair this might not be so true of country music as a survey by Addictions.com shows country is now the genre most likely to reference drugs in its lyrics:

Out of eight categories, country leads the way with 1.6 mentions per song on average, followed closely by jazz and pop music. Hip-hop actually falls in the last place at less than 1.3 mentions behind folk, challenging the assumption that all rappers are lyrical drug peddlers.

And some of those lyrics - even back in 1980 - speak directly to that rural decline and how getting out, for all the homesickness, is the only option for most folk:

When I was in school I ran with a kid down the street
And I watched him burn himself up on bourbon and speed
But I was smarter than most and I could choose
Learned to talk like the man on the six o’clock news
When I was eighteen Lord I hit the road
But it really doesn't matter how far I go

There's a magic about rural places, a sort of ache in our hearts to return to a better, clearer, less crazed world. A world where waiting - dreckly as the Cornish say - is a reminder that that's how good things come. But the truth is that this life isn't real, it's the worst sort of bucolic myth because it means that the pain in rural places is ignored - as Steve Knightley wrote in his song 'Country Life':

My old man is eighty four
His generation won the war
He left the farm forever when
They only kept on one in ten
Landed gentry county snobs
Where were you when they lost their jobs
No-one marched or subsidised
To save a country way of life

It's not straightforward - not everyone trapped in rural or small town poverty turns into a junkie or a drunk - but if you take away the means of making a living from a community then there's a big chance it's going to fall apart. Mostly this is about people leaving (and, as J D Vance described in 'Hillbilly Elegy', taking their dysfunction with them) but the literally left behind see that old working class certainty gone with any work being poorly paid, temporary and wholly without the prospect of that good American - or British, or Italian - life they were promised.

The worst part of all this, whether it's in West Virginia, the Welsh valleys or Sardinia, is that the problems of these places are literally 'out of sight, out of mind'. No-one goes there because there's no reason to do so, nobody sees the collapse of community and the decline of rural life. In the USA, the election of Donald Trump, supposedly on the back of votes from the 'left behind' in places like West Virginia, at least pointed the attention of city dwelling folk to these communities. I've a feeling though that, just as we see everywhere else, grand folk will swan into town write some reports and swish away leaving behind a bit of regeneration cash that will tart up some buildings and fund some social sticking plaster for a year or two.

I guess there's a race on between the despair of drugs or hard drink and the hope of education, social support and an economy that works. Right now the dark side is a long way ahead mostly because there's really no purpose to a place that has no jobs and no prospect of jobs. When we did a master plan for Airedale, the bit of West Yorkshire that runs north-west from Bradford up to Skipton, one of the comments was that the towns looked inwards to their industrial history not up onto the hills to see the salvation of being a beautiful place. Maybe the long term for deep rural places lies in rediscovering the wild and forgetting about digging coal, felling pines or growing corn?

In the meantime, we (that is rich city dwelling folk) have a bit of a duty to pay more attention to these places, as much attention as we give to the problem places in the city. If we don't their pain will continue and so will the anger of many who live there - an anger directed at their city-living lords and masters.

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On rural depopulation - If old people are all that's left, become an old people's home?

From El Pais about Pescueza, a Spanish village in the Extremadura:

The premise behind the project is to provide support for elderly people, without requiring them to give up their homes. The program has been running since 2011, and is funded by the Friends of Pescueza Association, the Democratic Pensions Union (UDP) and the regional government of Extremadura, according to the regional newspaper Hoy.

“There are seniors here. We have to take advantage of that,” explains Vicente. “When a grandparent closes the door to their home to go to a nursing home, all of their memories are left behind. We created a village care center, where their very own houses and streets are adapted for their needs.”

A creative approach to the problem of having two-thirds of your (declining) population over the age of 60. On a more general point, some of the ideas - having a local focus to care at home, providing technology support to people and adapting the environment not just the home - are worth thinking about wherever we're looking to improve care and support for the elderly and disabled in a community (without the fall back of putting them in a home).

Like rural areas everywhere across Europe, Spain's remoter places have depopulated leaving behind the old and the poor:

Aguilar de Anguita, a small community in Guadalajara province, around 140 kilometers northeast of Madrid. The village is just six kilometers from the main Madrid-Barcelona highway, but Ángel Álvarez Gago, his wife, and their two daughters, who run Casa Juan, a roadside restaurant, are among the last remaining inhabitants. The streets are clean and its houses well maintained, but the place is silent and empty. Take the road out of the village at night in the direction of Valencia, and for the next 50 kilometers until Molina de Aragón, the villages are all empty; the only light comes from street lamps.

Cities have devoured rural communities as younger generations seek out a better life (or at least a richer life) leaving behind this emptiness. For those of us passing through it all seems strange- many of the villages have all the old world charm we associate with rural life but, in the end, these places are too remote, too lacking in amenities and too full of old people. Maybe making them into old folks' homes isn't such a bad idea after all?

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The real population timebomb - and why we need a more family-friendly society

Depopulating trends are global, across the developed world. After decades of worrying when Paul Ehrlich’s “population bomb” would go off, we are seeing a rapid decline in child-rearing, so much so that, for the first time, there are more grandparents than grandchildren on the planet. The lower birthrates are leading some demographers to suggest that global populations, instead of growing into the next century, will start to decline as early as 2070.

There is a profound and growing population crisis in the developed, urban world and it isn't what most of you think it is - we are no longer, indeed haven't been for a long while, replacing ourselves. It's not just headlines like the one about there being more grandparents than grandchildren but an accelerating decline in communities outside big cities and, without immigration, the growing inability to provide the care and support those grandparents will require.

Here's what it means:

According to a 2016 Italian environmental association report, there are nearly 2,500 rural Italian villages that are perilously depopulated, some semi-abandoned and others virtual ghost towns.

From the 1850s through to 2004 the population of the village always hovered around the 80 to 100 mark, but since 2004 the population has dropped to 50 and only 20 of those are under the age of 60.

Those living in the village are losing hope that the village – and indeed all of rural Ireland – can be saved.

In Hara-izumi, there's no worry about an influx of foreigners. There are no immigrants here, nor the prospect of any. A bigger issue now is wildlife: The village's population has become so sparse that wild bears, boars and deer are roaming the streets with increasing frequency.

The Alpine hamlet of Albinen is so desperate for new residents that it has voted to offer $70,000 for a family of four to settle in the southern Swiss community.

In the first referendum of its kind, 100 of Albinen's 248 residents showed up to vote Thursday, and 71 approved a proposal to pay $25,000 to each adult and $10,000 per child to live in their picturesque village.

"Only the elderly stayed behind, the parents of those who left, and over time they grew older and died," he said as he stumbled across rubble to reach his dilapidated former office. He said Kalna's population had shrunk from 4,000 to 1,000.

Just take the figures: 85 out of the town's 820 houses are empty. The town had 3,000 inhabitants not too long ago, but now there are only 1,900. When elderly citizens have passed away, there has been no one there to replace them.

"Nobody lives there anymore either," Daum says, pointing to a mint-green single-family house. The industrial bakery moved to the east, he explains, and the area in front of the former garden furniture factory is full of dandelions. The Edeka grocery store closed its doors for good last year, and no trains have passed through the town since 1994.

I could continue - these examples from Italy, Ireland, Japan, Switzerland, Serbia and Germany could be joined by others from Poland, from Canada and from the USA. Our cities are, where they've sustained their economies, thriving but the people making that thriving possible are the ones who've left these small towns and rural villages. All this sits against a background of concern about immigration and integration for the people who - because there's far fewer young people in these rich nations - are filling the gaps left by those empty villages.

Eighty percent of US counties, notes a study by Economic Innovation Group, with roughly 150 million people, have seen their labor force decline in the past decade. The demography of the United States will become more difficult in the next quarter century, with an increase in the working population (15-64) of 18 million projected to be swamped by 28 million new senior citizens, according to the United Nations.

For Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox, whose article the quote above comes from, the problem isn't how you square the need for labour with local resentment of immigration but rather how we create a society and economy that allows population replacement. Not the explosive population growth of the past 200 years but a recognition that, if we're to continue the betterment of humanity, we need to achieve a steady state. Kotkin & Cox point to housing policies as a key component but we should also ask questions about policy and attitudes towards families, to childcare and to a more dynamic work environment allowing people to move in and out of paid employment. Above all we need to recognise the value of family and that it cannot really be measured in purely economic terms.

We need to place community and family policy right there alongside climate change, the impact of technology and long term healthcare as one of the 21st century's biggest challenges. If we don't we will see more and more of these shattered, even abandoned, communities, places filled with old people trying their best to look after very old people.

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More on trying to rescue rural places from depopulation - Japanese craft beer

I've written a few times about how rural places in the developed world are depopulating, leaving behind the old, ill and poor, as people move to the city. And the local governments of these depopulating places - in Ireland, Switzerland, Devon, Sardinia and Calabria - are trying new ways to get folk back living in remote towns and village. Most of this is about straightforward bribery - we'll pay you to come and live here, we'll give a free house, we'll provide a variety of financial incentives.

This one from Japan is a little different and involves art, beer and broadband:

It’s not just craft beer that has attracted young urbanites to Kamiyama. However, the Kamiyama Beer Project is symbolic for chiho sosei (creating life in the countryside), a set of government measures to attract a younger population to Japan’s rapidly shrinking rural population. Kamiyama’s population has decreased from 21,000 in 1955 to around 6,000 today. But, a slow increase is on its way as the town recently introduced high-speed broadband Internet, satellite office spaces for city-based companies, an artist in residence program, a local farming project, and a craft beer brewery.

I wish them well - technology ought to make living in cities less necessary but it still seems that the lure of the bright lights pulls the young away from fields, farms and tranquillity.

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Sell it off cheaply? More desperation in depopulating villages

We've seen a variety of creative approaches used by villages and small towns in Italy (plus Switzerland and Germany) to try and stem decline and abandonment. From 'recruiting' immigrants through cash incentives for families local authorities have sought to stem depopulation. In the end, this is about money and access - how cheaply (even negative rents) can we make living in a place that's far removed from the places where the jobs, social activities and culture live. Here, from Sardinia, is a pretty blunt approach:

On the Mediterranean island of Sardinia, the old village of Ollolai is at risk of turning into a ghost town.

Over the past half-century, the town's population has declined from 2,250 people to just 1,300. And now, there are hundreds of abandoned homes.

In an effort to lure new residents, Ollolai's government is selling 200 of these homes for $1.25 each.

That's one Euro for a house (although you'll need to spend some money refurbishing that house) which is great if you can run your life and business from what can only be described as the 'back of beyond' - Ollolai is bang in the centre of Sardinia, off the main road, with the nearest airport at least an hour away. And this is the problem with these offers, for all that we look at a delightful stone cottage in an ancient hill top village, we shortly after ask questions about schools, hospitals, airports, ferries, theatres, trains, supermarkets and shopping malls. With the result that, despite the financial offer and its appeal, we opt for a more expensive place that means we can reach some or all of that list with some ease.

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Would you come and live here if we give you fifty grand?

I mean who wouldn't want to live with your family in an idyllic Swiss village - even though it lacks things that might be useful, like a school, for example:

The Swiss town of Albinen, located in the scenic canton of Valais, wants to pay people 25,000 Swiss francs (£18,900) each to move there.

The council will soon be voting on the new initiative, which aims to repopulate a community that has dwindled to just 240 residents, reports The Local.

Under the scheme, each new adult resident will be paid the fee, with an additional 10,000 Swiss francs (£7,600) per child. For a family of four, that’s more than £53,000.

So you've to build or buy a house and commit to living there for ten years but (and I do hope they've thought this through and have half-way decent broadband) if you're in a business where remote working is easy and are fed up with the hustle and bustle of the big city, why wouldn't you?

This offer masks a bigger issue with Europe's countryside and small towns - people are leaving them unless they're close enough to the city for people to be able to commute. And they're leaving because there's no work, no decent amenities and everything is more expensive. Perhaps the coming world of driverless vehicles, drone deliveries and robots will change things and make it appealing to live in a remote village, but right now it isn't and paying people to become residents is the only way to keep the population levels.

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Self-employed remote workers should check out Italian negative rents

 
Italy has a load of problems - banking crises, unsustainable immigration, corrupt government - but one of its biggest is depopulation:

FOR ALL THE ANCIENT Italian hill towns and villages that delight the traveler — the San Gimignanos, Montepulcianos and Fiesoles — there are scores of others (many equally or more beautiful) where few venture and in which very few reside today. According to a 2016 Italian environmental association report, there are nearly 2,500 rural Italian villages that are perilously depopulated, some semi-abandoned and others virtual ghost towns.

One of these towns is Candela in Puglia - and the result is what amounts to negative rents with the town paying you to live there:

The mayor of Candela wants to reverse the declining fortunes of his town, once known as "Little Naples" for its crowded streets, which has seen its population plummet from more than 8,000 to just 2,700 today.

The town is offering €800 [£716] for singles, €1,200 [£1,075] for couples, €1,500 [£1,344] to €1,800 [£1,613] for three-member families, and over €2,000 for families of four to five people who are willing to up sticks and embrace la dolce vita, CNN Travel reports.

There are a few caveats (such as having at least €7,500 in annual income and a job) but it's clear that if you've a portable skill or can work remotely this is a great little offer. And it's Italy's south - so wine, weather and history in spades.

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