Cullingworth nestles in Yorkshire's wonderful South Pennines where I once was the local councillor. These are my views - on politics, food, beer and the stupidity of those who want to tell me what to think or do. And a little on mushrooms.
Showing posts with label rural communities. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rural communities. Show all posts
Offcumdens we call them up here in Yorkshire. Grockles is the preferred term down in the West Country. And I'm absolutely sure there's a suitably perjorative term in Welsh. Stewart Dakers, in his anonymous Home Counties town, says this:
And there are hundreds more Glorias, Regs, Janes and Charlies, the lifeblood of community, all priced out by the ballooning property market inflated by metropolitan demand. Their replacements from central London haven’t the time or the inclination to commit to civic duties,- and besides, their friends live in Notting Hill.
It's a familiar litany, one captured in Steve Knightley's song 'Country Life':
And the red brick cottage where I was born Is the empty shell of a holiday home Most of the year there's no-one there The village is dead and they don't care Now we live on the edge of town Haven't been back since the pub closed down One man's family pays the price For another man's vision of country life
I've a load of sympathy for people looking on as rural England declines - either emptying entirely as folk leave, the pubs shuts, the shops goes and the school is closed or else backfilling with wealthy retirees and city second-homers. For Stewart Dakers' home counties place, the future should be better than places too far from the big city to make a commute practical. The first clue to this failure comes in the article:
This is not gentrification, but rather social cleansing on a grand scale, and it won’t end well. As that pub-goer foretold all those years ago, able, qualified and dedicated job-holders are being displaced. Ten years ago it was bin men and classroom assistants pushed to the periphery of Home Counties life; now it’s teachers, nurses, physiotherapists. Anyone on an average wage is increasingly unable to afford to live within a reasonable commuting distance of their workplace, meaning our suburban utopias will soon become dystopias of understaffed services.
I know it's all a bit polemical but it hints at the problem - people, including very rich people, want to live in Stewart's Home Counties Idyll. And we've decided that we're not going to make that easy by stopping anyone building new homes there. The 'social cleansing' is pretty much the direct consequence of high demand for the few available homes. Add to this that the local council can't build new houses for rent because national government won't let them borrow and that that same lack of land stops housing associations or even groups of local worthies from building homes for those vital key workers like bin men, teachers and so forth.
Home Counties folk can cry as much as they want about how immigrants from some other place are destroying their nice community (how familiar the language used sounds to us folk in places like Bradford) when they have the capacity to get off their backsides, walk down to the council and tell them to draw up a local plan that makes the necessary land for that much needed housing available. It's a bit different deeper into rural England where the problem is no families, no amenities and dead places in beautiful landscapes, but in Surrey, Sussex and Hertfordshire those local people have every incentive - and the means - to get the homes built.
In the opening chapter of 'Starman Jones', Robert Heinlein sets the scene with the young hero, dreaming of space, watching the Chicago, Springfield & Earthport Ring Road - essentially a high speed inter-city transit:
"The incredible sight and the impact on his ears always affected him the same way. He had heard that for the passengers the train was silent, with the sound trailing them, but he did not know; he had never ridden a train and it seemed unlikely, with Maw and the farm to take care of, that he ever would."
In this short chapter, Heinlein not only sets the scene for 'Starman Jones' but describes the chasm that divides rural and urban America. It's true that, in American Dream style, Max Jones, Heinlein's hero does escape from his rural isolation such that the book closes with Max on one of the trains. But we need to be interested in the rest of Max's world, in the people who stay on the farm. These people, rednecks, provincials, the "left behind" have suddenly become important folk. Not individually but collectively.
The election of Donald Trump, the UK's vote to leave the EU, the growing support for France's Front National and similar trends in Holland, Denmark, Sweden and Germany all focus on people who aren't living in the shiny world of what Ishaan Tharoor in the Washington Post calls "the West's major cities". And the world beyond the cities is filled with reactionary forces aimed at stopping the glorious people in those shiny cities from dominating the world - there's even an "if mayors ruled the world" group that says this:
“These reactionaries,” Barber said, “are the last wave in a series of
political attempts to pretend that sovereign states still work.” The
nation-state isn't about to disappear, he cautions. But Barber envisions
a future where there'll be a “rebalancing of the relationship” between
nations and cities that will enable greater local governance across the
world for the benefit of all.
By greater local governance, Barber doesn't mean a local municipality at some sort of human scale but rather grand 'city regions' ruled by elected but autocratic mayors. And some places will be left outside these 'Great Cities of the West' struggling in rural decrepitude or small town decline. Other rural places will tag themselves onto the great cities, stretching their boundaries so as to get some small crumbs from the mayor's table. Soon these latter places will realise they've the worst of both worlds - higher taxes, more regulations and the envious sight of money pouring into super-rich inner suburbs and city centres. Places the residents of the city region's remoter outposts seldom visit and that's often merely to gawp at the beautiful people as they enjoy their playground while shrugging at the unaffordability of all this stuff.
Since the West's population is increasingly concentrated in cities, we've come to assume that the city is the demographic and, therefore, political form of the future. There's a hankering for the idea of the city state - essentially autonomous places within a weak state - and, in this, with the idea of strong, enlightened leaders elected by those cities' wise and enlightened electorates. The result - or rather the objective of the 'Mayors Should Rule the World' advocates - will be a fragmented, divided polity dominated by the needs and preferences of those ruling mayors (or rather those with access to these mayors).
Returning to 'Starman Jones' for a second, we see the manner in which the human world's design intentionally favours the city as a form. It's not just that the train swished through Max Jones' rural America but that the design of such systems today is creating such a world - England's HS2 is designed to connect London to Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield and Manchester. What lies between the cities is irrelevant except as a place filled with ghastly NIMBYs who oppose the railway for spoiling the countryside. But why should someone in an old mining village like Havercroft or Fitzwilliam look kindly on HS2? Like Max Jones they'll be watching the fast trains whoosh by while wondering where their children and grandchildren will get a job that's better than in a warehouse or serving on at a cheap restaurant (assuming that the robots and minimum wage rises haven't killed those jobs).
There's no actual reason, other than our sociable nature, for us to live in those 'Great Cities of the West'. Indeed, they're filled with untypical humans. There are the brave few who upped sticks and travelled thousands of miles to live poor quality lives on the fringes of the gleaming, sparkly city hoping for a lucky chance. We've the fortunate beneficiaries of inheritance or beauty who can skim across the surface of the city enjoying its lights and pleasures while affording the means to avoid its darkness. And there's a vast mass of clever, skilled, hard-working people who turn the wheels of the city's economy but can't get a stake in the city, can't find the means to settle and have a family, and who justify this on the basis that they can get to see the beauties in their plays, galleries and stadiums.
If this - 'The Great City of the West' is the future of mankind then it isn't a future, it's a dead end. Because the great mass of the city dwellers can't afford a family, the only way to provide the services is to import more people from elsewhere. But what happens when those elsewheres don't provide people any more? The city grinds to a halt when economic growth in other places reduces the imperative to migration. So perhaps this explains the enthusiasm of the great and good of such places for elsewheres to remain poor - not starving but just poor enough for the stream of migrants not to dry up. But this is a false perspective - even the gradual rising of economies results in reduced birth rates so the city cannot win if it does not breed.
And cities are, in everything they do, anti-child:
...localities with higher densities and higher prices — the two are
often coincident — have considerably lower birth rates than areas with
lower prices. This becomes even more evident when one considers the segment of the
population between 5 and 14 years old, when children enter school. In 2012, urban areas with the highest percentage of children are
predominately lower density and lower cost, including Houston,
Dallas-Fort Worth, Riverside-San Bernardino, Atlanta, and Phoenix. Urban areas with the lowest percentage of people in these age groups
were also the New Urbanist exemplars, such as Boston, San Francisco, New
York, and Seattle.
And who would - without necessity or accident - have children in a high-rise environment featuring fug-filled air that causes asthma, streets filled with rushing vehicles, public spaces designed for adults, and places dominated by strangers. In San Francisco and Berkeley over 70% of households are childless. And we're supposed to see dense urban living as a better model than the sprawl or the suburbs, the comfort of the small town or the community of the village?
The problem isn't just that the rural and small town West has rebelled against the city but that the city is a failing model - at least the idea of the concentrated, centralised, mayor-led city. These things are parasites, sucking away all the good from small towns with the promise of riches, opportunities and better bars while giving little back when it comes to the long-term quality of our lives. Urbanists talk about 'liveability' and 'walkability', about public spaces, even about play - yet the reality of the city is selfish, focused on the here and now rather than on creating places to which people can relate, where they might want to spend their whole lives.
Planners rejected suburbia as somehow too naff, 'not our sort of place' and then justified their rejection with tales of sustainability, sprawl and the curse of the motor car. Yet suburbs - at least the one I was brought up in - were liveable, open and child-friendly. They might have been a bit boring for childless, young adults but they weren't boring for children and, mostly, weren't so for grown ups with sheds to do hobbies in, gardens to keep and associations to join.
So no, the city is not the West's defence "against right-wing nationalism" but rather one cause of that right-wing nationalism existing in the first place. If your billions of infrastructure spending excludes most of the country they won't thank you for it. If every policy you espouse is designed for the child-free world of the city, the provincials will hate you for it. And if your attitude to people who don't live in the 'Great City of the West' is sneering, dismissive and patronising don't be so surprised when they kick out at you.
This idea of a the city as a place piled on top of itself, crowded, expensive, frantic, is a dead end. It is a model that will fail and in doing so may threaten what we choose to call western civilisation. The lesson in all this is to understand that, as one commentor obeserved, cities come with a huge barrier called "cost of living", a barrier that far from making the city a solution sets it up as a parasite.
Right now the only route to success in the city for the likes of Max Jones is still to borrow your uncle's space suit and save humanity. And given that few provincial folk have uncles with space suits (or other opportunities to save mankind come to think of it) they'll stay in declining rural and small town communities sneered at by people in cities who think the future of humanity is having shiny things but no children. It won't end well.
The election of Donald Trump has led to a veritable stampede of chicken lickens rushing wildly about crying that the sky has fallen in. I'm pretty sure they're wrong and that, for all Trump's manifest failings, we aren't heading towards nuclear war, chaos and depression. What's interesting is why, faced with the election of Trump, we are getting this reaction. Partly it's not a new phenomenon - my sister reminded me that in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected president they (Frances was a student at the Royal College of Music back then) held an 'End of the World Party'. But mostly it's quite simply a fear of 'them', of 'others' - just the same fear as we point to in people supporting Trump.
“You know, you’re the first professor from Madison I’ve ever met, and you’re actually kind of normal.”
The comment comes from Kathy Cramer, who is a professor from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and reports her meeting people in rural Wisconsin as part of a long term study leading to her book "The Politics of Resentment". Just before this comment, Cramer had said:
Thank God I was as naive as I was when I started. If I knew then what I know now about the level of resentment people have toward urban, professional elite women, would I walk into a gas station at 5:30 in the morning and say, “Hi! I’m Kathy from the University of Madison”?
And here we have the first glimpse of our problem - not just the resentment of rural communities towards urban elites but the belief among urban professionals that such resentment will play out like the less savoury scenes from 'Deliverance' complete with a sinister banjo soundtrack. Here's David Wong from Cracked talking about how half of America lost its mind:
Every TV show is about LA or New York, maybe with some Chicago or Baltimore thrown in. When they did make a show about us, we were jokes -- either wide-eyed, naive fluffballs (Parks And Recreation, and before that, Newhart) or filthy murderous mutants (True Detective, and before that, Deliverance). You could feel the arrogance from hundreds of miles away.
Many Americans only ever fly over or drive through rural America and their image of the communities out there come from books, from films and above all from TV. The image of the thick redneck, the hypocritical preacher and the associated sneering put down of Christianity all play to a belief that the values of folk out there in the backwoods just ain't the same as good progressive folk in the cities. But what are those values? Here's David Wong again:
Basic, obvious truths that have gone unquestioned for thousands of years now get laughed at and shouted down -- the fact that hard work is better than dependence on government, that children do better with both parents in the picture, that peace is better than rioting, that a strict moral code is better than blithe hedonism, that humans tend to value things they've earned more than what they get for free, that not getting exploded by a bomb is better than getting exploded by a bomb.
Or as they say out in the country, "Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining."
The foundation upon which America was undeniably built -- family, faith, and hard work -- had been deemed unfashionable and small-minded. Those snooty elites up in their ivory tower laughed as they kicked away that foundation, and then wrote 10,000-word thinkpieces blaming the builders for the ensuing collapse.
And the sad truth is that, as Kathy Cramer found out when she talked to them, people in rural America aren't so very different from those living in the cities. Cramer also talks about the nature of that resentment - things like:
All the decisions are made in Madison and Milwaukee and nobody’s listening to us. Nobody’s paying attention, nobody’s coming out here and asking us what we think. Decisions are made in the cities, and we have to abide by them.
This still makes sense to me if I switch the words Madison and Milwaukee to Bradford and Leeds. As a local councillor serving a ward called Bingley Rural for 21 years, I've heard this sentiment time and time again especially in the most rural, most working class parts of my ward. A sense of 'being done to', a belief that other people (and, yes, there's a racial element to this in Bradford just as there is in Wisconsin) are getting the benefits of decisions, spending and attention. Some of this is true - always and everywhere, governments are most fearful about how people living in cities will respond so give them more attention - but much of it is either a function of isolation or the cost of service delivery in remote rural areas.
The problem is compounded by the economic decline of those rural areas. Some, and we see this in the UK, become places of rural retreat and second homes for that urban elite (creating a whole new set of resentments) but the places that aren't pretty enough or accessible enough simply decline. The best and brightest depart of the city leaving behind the old, poor and ill. And, as Aaron Renn - one of the best and brightest who left rural Indiana - describes, the result isn't pretty:
In Medora we see not only poverty, but nearly complete social breakdown. I don’t recall a single player on the team raised in an intact family. Many of them lived in trailer parks. One kid had never even met his father. Others had mothers who themselves were alcoholics or barely functional individuals. They sometimes bounced around from home to home (grandmother, etc.) or dropped out of school to take care of a problematic mother.
This is the stark picture of rural America's failures but we also see - reported by Kathy Cramer and described by many others - a bunch of rural folk doing what Americans always felt was the right thing: working hard, looking out for the neighbour, sticking by the family. Problem is that, for too many such folk, this doesn't seem to be working quite so well these days:
28.3% of poor families receive child-care subsidies, which are largely nonexistent for the middle class. So my sister-in-law worked full-time for Head Start, providing free child care for poor women while earning so little that she almost couldn’t pay for her own. She resented this, especially the fact that some of the kids’ moms did not work. One arrived late one day to pick up her child, carrying shopping bags from Macy’s. My sister-in-law was livid.
Again, any English politician with ears will have heard the same resentment. I remember a colleague - and I worked for a charity helping people into work at the time - angrily condemning some of her relatives because they'd a car that worked and a foreign holiday but were "on welfare" whereas her and her husband, both working, felt they were barely scraping by.
There's nothing new in all this, it has been gently simmering away in places too many commentators choose to patronise as "left behind" but what has happened over the last ten years or so is an accentuation of the difference and the 'othering' of those communities as, well, just a bit backward. Worse urban-driven, progressive policies actively damage the economy of 'fly over ' USA.
Geographer, Joel Kotkin, describes two Americas - urban 'Ephemerals' in the Democrat-voting coastal states dependent on new media, software and moving money about, and a 'New Heartland' that depends on tangible goods production. Assertive climate change policies, for example, directly impact the economy of this 'New Heartland':
Climate change increasingly marks a distinct dividing line. Manufacturing, moving goods, industrial scale agriculture, fossil fuel energy all consume resources in ways many progressives see as harming the planet. Progressives threaten these industries with increasingly draconian schemes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Gone are the days of supporting moderate shifts -- which could work with some Heartland economies -- from coal to gas and improving mileage efficiency.
Instead the demand from the left is for a radically rapid de-carbonization, which will reduce jobs in the Heartland and lower living standards everywhere. In California, Jerry Brown is fretting about ways to curb cow flatulence, an obsession that is unlikely to be popular in Kansas, Nebraska or Iowa.
The result of this is that more small towns lose their reason for existence more quickly - it all feels a bit like 'Other People's Money', the 1991 Danny DeVito, Gregory Peck film about a declining business in small town American. Back then it was an attack on heartless, uncaring capitalism but looking at the film now, it has the same concerns as Trump has hit on in rural America - loss of community, unemployment, off-shoring and wealthy untouchables swishing out from the cities to dump on struggling communities.
But it's no so simple as looking back to a golden age through rose-tinted glasses however much the progressive want to believe. People living in the rural and small town places are looking to a troubled future:
Economic anxiety is about the future, not just the present. Trump beat Clinton in counties where more jobs are at risk because of technology or globalization. Specifically, counties with the most “routine” jobs — those in manufacturing, sales, clerical work and related occupations that are easier to automate or send offshore — were far more likely to vote for Trump.
This reminds me of a recent post of mine asking what we'd do about 'proper jobs for proper blokes' - those routine jobs that are crucial to places like Bradford but which will be the ones our digital, robot-run age will kill off first. But in the city we've the chance to catch up with ourselves - as David Wong points out, this is pretty tricky in a small place:
See, rural jobs used to be based around one big local business -- a factory, a coal mine, etc. When it dies, the town dies. Where I grew up, it was an oil refinery closing that did us in. I was raised in the hollowed-out shell of what the town had once been. The roof of our high school leaked when it rained. Cities can make up for the loss of manufacturing jobs with service jobs -- small towns cannot. That model doesn't work below a certain population density.
The thing is that, while there's plenty of displacement, poverty and loss of work in urban areas, it feels like we can fix that problem, indeed that the government is trying to do just that. Up in the hills away from those big cities is doesn't look that way. Tatty boarded up places linger on and the only change seems to be the buddleia colonising every untended nook and cranny. For some places there's a roll of sticking plaster - the UK's coalfield communities (unlike America's - another argument in the Trump camp) got a load of regeneration cash and this has smartened such places up. But the problem's still there - just as Aaron Renn described above, anyone with any get up and go, got up and went, leaving behind a community in a place with no purpose.
None of this represents the whole reason for Trump's election (any more than does accusations of racism, xenophobia and general horridness) but it has thrown a light on a challenge facing every developed nation - in a time of economic change how do we protect the idea of community and can we create purpose for places that, right now, are losing their reason for existing. And, even if we recognise that places must die if they have no purpose, are we doing enough to ease the transition for the people who're from those places:
The vast majority of possible careers involve moving to the city, and around every city is now a hundred-foot wall called "Cost of Living."
I have a new explanation for Trump's win that does not involve Weiner or talking about Deplorables or emails. California's zoning codes caused the win. If California had Texas style housing regulations, then 80 million people would live in California and the state would have 100 electoral votes. The state would still vote Democrat (because of the composition of these new voters) and Clinton would have won.
There's some truth in this. Planners - of all stripes - helped created the sort of divided world that made Donald Trump's election possible. And if you think this is a problem, ask how you bring on side those who are victims of those planners, folk patronised by left-wing academics, sacked by climate change policies, and insulted as racists or xenophobes day in and day out by the punditry. What I fear is that you won't do this, you'll call them 'morlocks' and punish them for having an opinion you didn't like.
