d**d
发帖数: 238 | 1 现在美国农村的萧条和悲惨
Rural America Is the New ‘Inner City’
A Wall Street Journal analysis shows that since the 1990s, sparsely
populated counties have replaced large cities as America’s most troubled
areas by key measures of socioeconomic well-being—a decline that’s
accelerating
At the corner where East North Street meets North Cherry Street in the small
Ohio town of Kenton, the Immaculate Conception Church keeps a handwritten
record of major ceremonies. Over the last decade, according to these
sacramental registries, the church has held twice as many funerals as
baptisms.
In tiny communities like Kenton, an unprecedented shift is under way.
Federal and other data show that in 2013, in the majority of sparsely
populated U.S. counties, more people died than were born -- the first time
that's happened since the dawn of universal birth registration in the 1930s.
For more than a century, rural towns sustained themselves, and often thrived
, through a mix of agriculture and light manufacturing. Until recently,
programs funded by counties and townships, combined with the charitable
efforts of churches and community groups, provided a viable social safety
net in lean times.
Starting in the 1980s, the nation's basket cases were its urban areas --
where a toxic stew of crime, drugs and suburban flight conspired to make
large cities the slowest-growing and most troubled places.
Today, however, a Wall Street Journal analysis shows that by many key
measures of socioeconomic well-being, those charts have flipped. In terms of
poverty, college attainment, teenage births, divorce, death rates from
heart disease and cancer, reliance on federal disability insurance and male
labor-force participation, rural counties now rank the worst among the four
major U.S. population groupings (the others are big cities, suburbs and
medium or small metro areas).
In fact, the total rural population -- accounting for births, deaths and
migration -- has declined for five straight years.
"The gap is opening up and will continue to open up," said Enrico Moretti, a
professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, who has
studied the new urban-rural divide.
Just two decades ago, the onset of new technologies, in particular the
internet, promised to boost the fortunes of rural areas by allowing more
people to work from anywhere and freeing companies to expand and invest
outside metropolitan areas. Those gains never materialized.
As jobs in manufacturing and agriculture continue to vanish, America's
heartland faces a larger, more existential crisis. Some economists now
believe that a modern nation is richer when economic activity is
concentrated in cities.
In Hardin County, where Kenton is the seat, factories that once made
cabooses for trains and axles for commercial trucks have shut down. Since
1980, the share of county residents who live in poverty has risen by 45% and
median household income adjusted for inflation has fallen by 7%.
At the same time, census figures show, the percentage of adults who are
divorced has nearly tripled, outpacing the U.S. average. Opioid abuse is
also driving up crime.
Father Dave Young, the 38-year-old Catholic priest at Immaculate Conception,
was shocked when a thief stole ornamental candlesticks and a ciborium,
spilling communion wafers along the way.
Before coming to this county a decade ago, Father Young had grown up in
nearby Columbus -- where for many years he didn't feel safe walking the
streets. "I always had my guard up," he said.
Since 1980, however, the state capital's population has risen 52%, buoyed by
thousands of jobs from J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Nationwide Mutual
Insurance Co., plus the growth of Ohio State University. Median household
income in Columbus is up 6% over the same span, adjusted for inflation. "The
economy has grown a lot there," said Father Young. "The downtown, they've
really worked on it."
Meanwhile, as Kenton -- population 8,200 -- continues to unravel, he said he
has begun always locking the church door. Again, he finds himself looking
over his shoulder.
"I just did not expect it here," he said.
In the first half of the 20th century, America's cities grew into booming
hubs for heavy manufacturing, expanding at a prodigious clip. By the 1960s,
however, cheap land in the suburbs and generous highway and mortgage
subsidies provided city dwellers with a ready escape -- just as racial
tensions prompted many white residents to leave.
Gutted neighborhoods and the loss of jobs and taxpayers contributed to a
socioeconomic collapse. From the 1980s into the mid-1990s, the data show,
America's big cities had the highest concentration of divorced people and
the highest rates of teenage births and deaths from cardiovascular disease
and cancer. "The whole narrative was 'the urban crisis,'" said Henry
Cisneros, who was Bill Clinton's secretary of housing and urban development.
To address these problems, the Clinton administration pursued aggressive new
policies to target urban ills. Public-housing projects were demolished to
break up pockets of concentrated poverty that had incubated crime and the
crack cocaine epidemic.
At that time, rural America seemed stable by comparison -- if not prosperous
. Well into the mid-1990s, the nation's smallest counties were home to
almost one-third of all net new business establishments, more than twice the
share spawned in the largest counties, according to the Economic Innovation
Group, a bipartisan public-policy organization. Employers offering private
health insurance propped up medical centers that gave rural residents access
to reliable care.
As crime rates fell, urban developers sought to cater to a new upper-middle
class. Hospital systems invested in sophisticated heart-attack and stroke-
treatment protocols to make common medical problems less deadly. Campaigns
to combat teenage pregnancy favored cities where they could reach more
people.
As large cities and suburbs and midsize metros saw an upswing in key
measures of quality of life, rural areas struggled to find ways to harness
the changing economy.
Starting in the late 1990s, Amazon.com Inc. began opening fulfillment
centers in sparsely populated states to help customers avoid sales taxes.
One of those centers, established in 1999, brought hundreds of jobs to
Coffeyville, Kan. -- population 9,500.
Yet as two-day shipping became a priority, Amazon shifted its warehousing
strategy to be closer to cities where its customers were concentrated, and
shut the Coffeyville center in 2015.
An Amazon spokeswoman said that it didn't make the decision lightly, and
that last year it opened one of two planned fulfillment centers near Kansas
City that will create more than 2,000 full-time jobs.
Just as Amazon closed down, so did the century-old hospital in nearby
Independence, population 8,700.
The nearly one-million-square-foot Coffeyville warehouse Amazon rented has
been empty since it went on the market for $35 million, and was recently
repossessed at a value of $11.4 million after the building owner filed for
chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Coffeyville officials said the area's problem isn't a lack of jobs -- it's a
shortage of qualified workers. After Amazon said it would close, economic-
development leaders held an employment fair expecting to get up to 600 job
seekers. Fewer than 100 showed up, said Trisha Purdon, executive director of
the Montgomery County Action Council.
In the late 1990s, convinced that technology would allow companies to shift
back-office jobs to small towns, former Utah Republican Gov. Mike Leavitt
pitched outposts in his state to potential employers. But companies were
turned off by the idea of having to visit and maintain offices in such
locations, he said. Eventually, many of the call centers he landed moved
overseas where labor was even cheaper.
Although federal and state antipoverty programs were not limited to urban
areas, they often failed to address the realities of the rural poor. The
1996 welfare overhaul put more city dwellers back to work, for example, but
didn't take into account the lack of public transportation and child care
that made it difficult for people in small towns to hold down jobs, said
Lisa Pruitt, a professor at the University of California, Davis School of
Law.
Rhonda Vannoster of Independence, Kan., who is 25, has four children with a
fifth on the way. She is divorced and jobless and doesn't own a car, which
limits her work options. She said she wants to get trained as a nursing aide
but struggles to make time for it. "There just aren't a lot of good jobs,"
she said.
There has long been a wage gap between workers in urban and rural areas, but
the recession of 2007-09 caused it to widen. In densely populated labor
markets (with more than one million workers), Prof. Moretti found that the
average wage is now one-third higher than in less-populated places that have
250,000 or fewer workers -- a difference 50% larger than it was in the
1970s.
As employers left small towns, many of the most ambitious young residents
packed up and left, too. In 1980, the median age of people in small towns
and big cities almost matched. Today, the median age in small towns is about
41 years -- five years above the median in big cities. A third of adults in
urban areas hold a college degree, almost twice the share in rural counties
, census figures show.
Consolidation has shut down many rural hospitals, which have struggled from
a shortage of patients with employer-sponsored insurance. At least 79 rural
hospitals have closed since 2010, according to the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Rural residents say irregular care and long drives for treatment left them
sicker, a shift made worse by high rates of rural obesity and smoking. "Once
you have a cancer diagnosis...your probability of survival is much lower in
rural areas," said Gopal K. Singh, a senior federal health agency research
analyst who has studied mortality differences.
The opioid epidemic -- and a lack of access to treatment -- have compounded
the damage. In Hardin County, prosecutor Brad Bailey said drug cases, which
accounted for less than 20% of his criminal cases a decade ago, have surged
to 80%.
The epidemic is spawning more thefts, including a rash of snatched air-
conditioners sold for scrap metal, said Dennis Musser, police chief in
Kenton. Linda Martell, a 69-year-old who moved to Kenton from outside
Cleveland a decade ago to be near her daughter, was surprised a chain saw
and heavy tools were stolen from her garage.
When she was a young adult, she recalled, "All the problems were in the big
cities."
In November's presidential election, rural districts voted overwhelmingly
for Donald Trump, who pledged to revive forgotten towns by scaling back
regulations, trade agreements and illegal immigration and encouraging
manufacturing companies to hire more American workers. A promised $1
trillion infrastructure bill could give a boost to many rural communities.
Lawmakers from both parties concede they overlooked escalating dmall-town
problems for years. "When you have a state like Florida, you campaign in the
urban areas," said former Florida Republican Sen. Mel Martinez. He recalls
being surprised when he learned in the mid-2000s that rural areas, not
cities, were the center of an emerging methamphetamine epidemic.
During the Bush administration, lawmakers were preoccupied with two wars,
securing the homeland after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and rebuilding
New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Barack Obama's administration tried to
lift rural areas by pushing expanded broadband access, but found that
service providers were reluctant to enter sparsely populated towns, said
former Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.
Since the collapse of the housing market, real-estate appreciation in
nonmetropolitan areas has lagged behind cities, eroding the primary source
of wealth and savings for many families.
"We didn't really have much of a transformation strategy for places where
the world was changing," Mr. Vilsack said.
Meanwhile, major cities once considered socioeconomic laggards have turned
themselves around. In St. Louis, which has more than 30 nearby four-year
schools, the percentage of residents with college degrees tripled between
1980 and 2015 -- creating a talent pool that has lured health care, finance
and bioscience employers, officials say. Instead of people moving where the
jobs are, "jobs follow people," said Greg Laposa, a local chamber of
commerce vice president.
In many cities, falling crime has attracted more middle- and upper-class
families while an influx of millennials delaying marriage has helped keep
divorce rates low.
Maria Nelson, a 45-year-old media company manager who came to Washington, D.
C., to work after college, had always assumed she would someday move to the
suburbs, where she had grown up. A generation of heavy federal spending
helped make the nation's capital one of the country's highest-earning urban
centers. Its median household income rose to $71,000 a year in 2015, a 51%
increase since 1980, adjusted for inflation.
While Ms. Nelson was able to buy a brick row house in 2002, she said she
worries about younger colleagues -- let alone anyone moving in from a small
town -- who face soaring real-estate prices. "The whole area just seems to
be out of range for most people now," she said
In Kenton, Father Young said that despite their mounting troubles, he is
optimistic about his parishioners. Some of them tell him they worry about
what will happen when they die because they still provide for their adult
children.
He likes to say there is always hope. "They can find a job," he said. "
Columbus is close enough."
Write to Janet Adamy at [email protected] and Paul Overberg at paul.
[email protected]
https://www.wsj.com/articles/rural-america-is-the-new-inner-city-1495817008
http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/05/26/rural-america-is-new-inner-city-2.html | d********9
发帖数: 3927 | | w**********g
发帖数: 5486 | 3 夸张了
small
【在 d**d 的大作中提到】
: 现在美国农村的萧条和悲惨
: Rural America Is the New ‘Inner City’
: A Wall Street Journal analysis shows that since the 1990s, sparsely
: populated counties have replaced large cities as America’s most troubled
: areas by key measures of socioeconomic well-being—a decline that’s
: accelerating
: At the corner where East North Street meets North Cherry Street in the small
: Ohio town of Kenton, the Immaculate Conception Church keeps a handwritten
: record of major ceremonies. Over the last decade, according to these
: sacramental registries, the church has held twice as many funerals as
| r*******g
发帖数: 2662 | 4 买更多的导弹，丢到叙利亚去。
【在 d********9 的大作中提到】
: 川总统准备怎么帮助美国的穷人呢？有办法没有？
| m*****u
发帖数: 19562 | 5 再穷他们也是投共和党啊， 如同纽约城里的老黑， 再穷也是投民主党。
不过按说这些穷地方， 没非法移民，又保守， 为啥不能great呢？
small
【在 d**d 的大作中提到】
: 现在美国农村的萧条和悲惨
: Rural America Is the New ‘Inner City’
: A Wall Street Journal analysis shows that since the 1990s, sparsely
: populated counties have replaced large cities as America’s most troubled
: areas by key measures of socioeconomic well-being—a decline that’s
: accelerating
: At the corner where East North Street meets North Cherry Street in the small
: Ohio town of Kenton, the Immaculate Conception Church keeps a handwritten
: record of major ceremonies. Over the last decade, according to these
: sacramental registries, the church has held twice as many funerals as
|
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