Essays from West of 98: Local Independence
š·: historic downtown Stamford photo via Roy Weaks
What does it take to actually revitalize a rural community?
This is obviously a question that I have wrestled with for quite some time. āAttract more peopleā is the easy answer, right? In a way, yes, but that answer is both incomplete and insufficient. People donāt move to a new place in droves without a reason, usually an economic one. It is one challenge to get them to move there. It is an entirely different challenge to get them to stay. There is a trail of wreckage across the American West of boomtowns that failed to present a lasting reason for the population to stay and then quickly turned to ghost towns, usually worse off than they were before the people came.
Thereās another factor as well. If a community explodes in size but the growth changes its very essence, it wasnāt truly revitalized. It was replaced by something different altogether. Countless suburbs across America have faced this very phenomenon. After years of sprawl and growth, they retain only a shred of their original character.
A few days ago, someone asked me to sum up my vision for Stamford in a single sentence. Setting aside my wifeās reasonable concern that I could do it in a single sentence, I arrived at the following:
āTo restore Stamfordās ability to thrive independent of outside forces and provide opportunity for all its citizens.ā
Substitute Stamford for your communityās name and I think this is a reasonable vision for most rural communities. There are two key components of this vision.
The latter component is providing opportunity for all citizens. They say that a rising tide lifts all boats and it often does. But a rising tide can also drown some of the boaters. Across the American West, many communities are booming but the cost of living and housing is soaring too. It has made those communities unaffordable for the blue collar and service workers that keep the communities operable. Justin Farrellās 2020 book āBillionaire Wildernessā is a great read on this conundrum that often accompanies growth.
The other component is the title of this essay: independence. In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville toured America and studied its political system, writing the classic āDemocracy in Americaā as a result. He observed that local town meetings were the quintessential spirit of American liberty. In those settings, people learned how to use and enjoy this notion of liberty that was such a radical idea to the political order at the time. 1830s America was far from perfect, donāt misunderstand Tocqueville or myself. Government at all levels was mostly confined to landowning white men. The rest of the citizenry was excluded.
The underlying notion remains critical, however. At the local level, people understand their individual needs and circumstances. People in one small town use the tools of democracy and liberty to make decisions for themselves based on their needs and circumstances. As a result, those decisions may be very different than decisions in a similar small town in another part of the country. If each makes wise decisions based on their individual situations, then both communities may well flourish and prosper.
This concept is economic as well as political and the idea of local economic independence may be even more important. If a local economy serves its people, the economy is oriented around the needs of those people. The people provide jobs to one another and sell goods and services to each other and the wider world. If the peopleās needs change, they adjust the local economy accordingly.
If you want to know why rural economies and populations have cratered in the last half century, hereās your answer. New technology and other changes in the world ushered in an era in which local economies ceased to serve local people. As a result, the prosperity of the local people no longer mattered.
This is no Luddite call to dispense with technology and bring back the mythical āgood old days.ā In fact, itās much the opposite. But rural communities cannot thrive independently again without local economies serving their people.
James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and podcast. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to West of 98 wherever podcasts are found.