CHAPTER 1: Rural Decay
The Story of Gardner, Colorado:
I became interested in looking at the topic of rural decay and the breakdown of small communities because these are issues that have affected me personally. I grew up in a very small, rural town called Gardner, located in the South Central part of Colorado. I lived there from the time of my birth in January of 1983 until I moved to New Jersey in 1998. Since my move I go back at least twice a year to visit with my parents and my grandma and to see some old friends that have lingered in the area. Over the past 26 years, I have witnessed enormous changes in the political, social, and economic structure of this area. Sadly, most of these changes have been for the worse, and have had a crippling effect on the town. Even more upsetting is that this phenomenon of rural decay is not restricted to my town but has become an ever-increasing trend in the United States.
Some people would say, “why care about rural decay?” They believe that it is a necessary part of evolution for people to leave rural areas and head for urban centers. It is true that some rural areas can be “backward places” that have higher amounts of poverty, racism, and other issues that can make them difficult locations to live in. There are some who would say that for these reasons rural places should become a thing of the past. However, there issues occur all over the world and in all types of living situations. There are certainly poverty and crime in cities and suburbs; these are not site-specific issues. What makes rural areas so nice and appealing for some people is the lifestyle. It is quieter in the country. There is room to have a farm, let the kids wander down to the river, and do all sorts of outdoor activities. Also, the cost of living tends to be a lot lower so people can get by on less money. Rural areas have the potential to be happy healthy places where people can raise children, have a garden and be a part of a strong community. Just because they also have the potential to be “backwards and slow” places does not mean that they always are. Just like inner city areas that have poverty and racism issues, they can change and become something wonderful.
In order to put the issues of rural decay into perspective it will be best to tell how these changes took shape visually in Gardner. Growing up in Gardner during the eighties the town felt a lot more alive. Yes, I was a child, but from speaking with my parents, other people in the area, and friends, I have found that this is a fairly widespread opinion. The area only had a population of a little over 500, but there were two gas stations, three churches, two restaurants, a co-op, a couple of bars, the post office, a community center that hosted events at least every month, a school, many small farmers who sold their food locally, and a health clinic that was open bi-weekly. This may not sound like much from an urban perspective but for the amount of people in the area it was fairly substantial.
A lot of this infrastructure had been built by an influx of farmers, Mexicans, and hippies that had come in the early seventies and again in the early eighties. There also was a large population of Native Americans in the area. This unusual mix of people may not sound like it would mesh very well, but it did. The educated hippies had left home to find a simpler more communal way of living, and while they did not know much about farming, they were able to fund the building of the school and the clinic and provided the educated work base needed to run both of them. The farmers provided local food and a source of knowledge for the urban hippies on how to grow some of their own food supply. The Mexican immigrants were also well acquainted with the land and supplied the much-needed skilled labor for building and infrastructure maintenance. The Native Americans were the most knowledgeable of all these groups. They taught much of the community which foods to grow, what time of year to grow them, what plants could be harvested and used for medicinal purposes, and they also provided a very rich culture that helped to shape the area. Together these three groups prospered for two decades, but then it started to fade.
The latter half of the 80s marked the downfall for this small community. The clearest distinction for this in my mind was the night the Agnes burned down. The Agnes was one of the two gas stations and restaurants that we had in town. It was rumored that the fire was not an accident and had been set by the owners themselves to collect on the insurance, so this was not an actual cause to the decay that followed but more likely a symptom of it. However, I distinctly recall my father saying afterwards, “there goes the town,” and this stands out in my mind as a bad omen for things to come.
Anyway, in the two decades that followed it seemed that half of the town kind of shut down. The only other gas station started running out of gas on a continual basis, the co-op stopped stocking many fruits and vegetables and started selling commercial products, and the other restaurant kept shutting down and reopening with new owners. The younger generation started moving away and into the cities to look for better education, work, or to be closer to health care services. This in turn, started a downward cycle of fewer educators, skilled workers, and health care providers since many of these people did not return to the area.
The farmers started moving away as well and selling their land to bigger cattle ranchers. Environmentally this led to a more intensive use of the land, increased water use, and in turn caused soil degradation and desertification. Socially it caused the area to become a food desert since there were less local farmers to supply the town with fresh food, and people were forced to drive farther and farther away to do their shopping, or were forced to eat only the processed food that was still being sold in the town.
Rural Decay- in depth look at the issues:
As you can see there are many issues that come through when looking at rural decay, which makes pinpointing any one cause extremely difficult. Complicating things further, it is also hard to tell cause from effect since most of the problems are interrelated or meshed together. As author Osha Davidson writes in his book Broken Heartland, The Rise of America’s Rural Ghetto, “the most insidious part of this process [the process of rural breakdown] is its self-reinforcing nature; each downward step makes the next one more likely.”{1} This is probably why rural decay is so scary; once this downward spiral starts, it is really hard to reverse. Population decrease can lead to a decrease in education, health, and other services, which can lead to more population decrease. You can see where any one step in this cycle increases the likeliness of the next step, and it makes it very hard to draw a dividing line between the cause and effect.
POPULATION DECLINE
I will start by looking at population decline since this is the most measurable issue. This is a concern that has been called a cause of rural decay and also a symptom of it. It is one of those issues that is especially hard to label. From the year 1990 to 2000 there has been an increase of population in Gardner by 8 people.{2} Imagine that, in ten years population has only risen from 575 people to 583 people. Furthermore, when you count the whole county subdivision, which spans about 15 miles around Gardner, not just the town itself, the population has actually decreased by one. This is especially striking since in general there has been a huge population growth in Colorado during this time, from 2000-2007 population for the state has grown by over 430,000 people.{3}
Aside from the extremely low population growth, there has also been a change in demographics. There has been a twenty percent decrease in the number of people under the age of 44. This means that most of the young people have left the area, to be replaced with an aging population.{4} I can attest to this trend, since I myself am one of these statistics. I left when I was a teenager, as did many of my friends. In fact, whenever I go back it seems that one of my friends has moved away, leaving only younger siblings or aging parents behind. The worst affect that the decrease in people under the age of 45 has had is to decrease the labor pool, so that there are fewer teachers, health care providers, skilled laborers, farmers, storeowners, and less people to add to the economy of the area. Basically this change in demographic makeup of the population has led to a decline in the number and quality of services, such as health care, education and a breakdown in infrastructure.{5}
This change in demographics is also true for farmers; in 1992 the median age for farmers was 53 years old and this has only been increasing.{6} This shows that most of the younger generations are leaving the farm. This coupled with government policy has led to a consolidation of farms and a decrease in the local sale and access to fresh foods.{7}
The map below on the left shows population change in Huerfano County. Dark blue represents negative change (this is where Gardner is located) and the red portion shows a growth of only 75 persons. The map below on the right shows age in the county, with pink being the oldest median age, 50 years, and the yellow area is 45-48 years. In general the median age for Colorado is much younger, especially in city areas.
Data from ESRI GIS data files & Tiger Data
The two maps below show population change in Colorado by county and in the United States by state. For the map of the United States the highest population growth is shown in red and represents states with a growth of over 400,000. In the Colorado map it is easy to see that population growth has been higher in the north where more cities are located.
Figure 4: Population Change in Colorado from 2000-2007
Data from ESRI GIS data files & Tiger Data
Figure 5: Population Change in the United States from 2000-2007
Data from ESRI GIS data files & Tiger Data
Population decrease in rural areas has happened all across the United States. At the beginning of the 20th century most of the population lived in rural areas, and in 1950 that number shrunk to half, now around 80 percent of the U.S. population resides in urban and suburban areas.{8} Richard Wood, author of Survival of Rural America, states that, “the seemingly inexorable migration of people from rural to urban areas is a primary reason why so much of the history of rural towns is a history of despair, defeat, and desertion.”{9} You can see the effects of this in Gardner itself, where depression and drug abuse seem to be as common as abandoned buildings.
The map below shows the population change from 2000-2007 in counties all across the country, with red representing a higher growth and blue representing negative growth. The map also shows all major U.S. cities and as can be seen most population growth has occurred near cities with negative growth occurring in rural areas.
Figure 6: Population Change in US Counties from 2000-2007
Data from ESRI GIS data files & Tiger Data
As can be seen clearly from the data population has been shrinking in rural areas or at least aging. However, you do not need empirical data to point this out; one must only visit these places to see that they are becoming more deserted. They are turning into a place for retired elderly or summer homes. I would argue that this is more of an affect of rural decay than a cause of it. Rural areas showed in the past that you did not need a large population to have a thriving, healthy community, but as will be shown small towns are becoming unhealthier as time passes.
EDUCATION
Education levels in Huerfano County are lower than the Colorado average, for most grade levels, but especially for higher education. This is due to the lack of education facilities nearby and the lack of capital needed to send children great distances to school. I myself left for this reason. The nearest high school to Gardner is half an hour away and is not very well funded, so I moved to New Jersey to live with relatives there because I would have access to a better education. Other people are also leaving to search out better education, and sadly the majority does not return.{10}
The other reason for lower education is due to the fact that education is urban biased, meaning that it prepares people for jobs in urban settings. Rarely do universities teach students how to run a small business, work on small acres of land, or any skills necessary for survival in rural areas. The renowned small farm activist Wes Jackson often speaks to this aspect of educational bias in universities as contributing much to the decline and depopulation of rural areas. He says that, “little attention is paid to educating the young to return home and contribute to their communities.”{11}
HEALTH
There is a long list of health issues in Huerfano County and especially in Gardner. The number of diseases, the proportion of sensory-disabled, physically-disabled, and self-care disabled residents, as well as the number of people collecting employment disability are all quite high as compared to Colorado as a whole.{12} Some of this is attributed to there being more elderly in the area, but a proportion is caused by the lack of preventative health care. This decline in rural health is not limited to Gardner, as Nina Glasgow writes, “rural areas have a higher percentage rate of heart problems, hypertension, diabetes, emphysema, cancer, arthritis, ulcer, bronchitis, vision problems, hearing aids, and many other health diseases.”{13}
This is due in large part to the decrease in medical services provided to these areas and the lack of preventative education, but Glasgow also finds in her book that the health of the area can be directly linked to the type of agricultural practice. In areas with a greater employment in industrial agricultural production or meat processing the socioeconomic indicators, such as children’s health, are inferior to those that are based on family production. She attributes this to the fact that family production areas have a “greater farm proprietorship, household income, and employment in education, health, information, and communication services than areas with more industrial agriculture.”{14} Furthermore, rural people are more at risk for developing cancer from exposure to pesticides than consumers in general, due to their closer proximity to farms.{15}
INCOME, POVERTY LEVELS & UNEMPLOYMENT
In 2007 twenty seven percent of the population in Huerfano County was below the national poverty line, compared to the Colorado average of 12 percent. The median household income was $28,852, whereas the Colorado average was $55,212. The average for salaries and profits made from businesses was about half the state average. This has also been the case in most rural areas; they now have the highest poverty rates of any area in the United States, even higher than inner cities.{16} On the other hand, the cost of living is lower in these areas, but this still does not make up for the disparity.
In the past, social capital{17} would have replaced economic capital, by providing people with a support system when they were low on funds. When you were out of eggs your neighbor would have lent you some or traded you something for them. Now this has been replaced by government-funded efforts, such as food stamps, unemployment, and disability. These programs have been very helpful in rural areas. However, they are highly contingent on funding that is available and might not be as reliable as older systems of neighborliness and family support.{18} It can also be argued that welfare programs are just treatments for the problem not actual solutions to it, like putting a band-aid on a gaping wound.
DECLINE IN GOODS AND SERVICES
Another aspect of rural decay is the decline of basic goods and services. This is a particularly distressing issue considering that a majority of goods were once produced in rural areas, but even food, which is still produced locally, is also becoming less accessible. The author Wendell Berry writes about this decline in his book Citizenship Papers saying that, “the rural people who remain in the rural communities and economies are always traveling farther and paying more for essential goods and services. Some of these goods and services once were provided by their own farms, families and communities as a matter of course and at no monetary cost.”{19} This is especially true in Gardner, where in the past food could be bought locally, or there was enough of a collective effort to make bringing in essential foods economically feasible through a communally run co-op. Now people have to travel half an hour to find a supermarket, and if they want organic food, clothing, or other products they have to travel 1 & ½ hours.{20}
Moreover, there has been a break down in infrastructure for the area. Almost 20 percent of houses in Gardner lack plumbing and kitchen facilities, and house and property values are a lot lower here than for other areas.{21}
ENVIRONMENAL DEGRADATION
Environmental degradation has happened throughout Gardner. In the past it was mainly due to the various mineral mines, which polluted rivers and eroded soils. Recently, mining in the area has plummeted dramatically only to be replaced with intensive farming and cattle ranching{22}, which gave rise to new environmental issues. Increased irrigation and harmful irrigation techniques such as flooding or high flow sprinklers, led to less penetration of the soil by the water and higher levels of evaporation, causing a decrease in water levels for the area. This over-irrigation and intensive agriculture techniques coupled with increased pesticide, herbicide, and fertilizer use has also led to contamination of the water tables. Also, cattle are usually given access to rivers and streams and that has led to even more contamination of the water through fecal matter. Furthermore, intensive grazing and cropping techniques that do not allow for a rotation of the animals or crop types, and non-practice of cover cropping has led to an increase in soil degradation and erosion.
The below GIS table shows US Department of Agriculture (USDA) testing of soil done in Huerfano County. Red areas show salinated and sodic soil, blue shows waterlogged soil, yellow is eroded areas, and grey shows where the soil has exposed bedrock or is very rocky.{23}
Figure 8: USDA Soil Samples from Huerfano County