Are America's Small Towns Really Struggling?
Вставка
- Опубліковано 23 жов 2016
- The job market in the United States is constantly shifting-especially in small towns that were once totally reliant on large factories for jobs. While politicians focus on failing industries, things looks different from the local perspective. Atlantic national correspondent James Fallows and contributing writer Deborah Fallows travelled to Pennsylvania, California, and Kansas to understand what transformations were happening in various industries. “These perceived weaknesses are actually our strength,” says one young resident of Erie, Pennsylvania.
This documentary was produced for American Futures, an ongoing reporting project from James and Deborah Fallows. The couple has spent three years exploring small town America by air, “taking seriously places that don’t usually get registered seriously.”
Subscribe to The Atlantic on UA-cam: bit.ly/subAtlanticYT - Фільми й анімація
Lesson to have learned local governments: "Don't be a one industry town.. diversify."
Instead of depending on private business to decide whether or not to station themselves in that town, maybe the local government should step up to the plate and form their own small business using some tax money and employ the locals. You never know, it may become successful and you can employ the entire city to sell the goods to other states. But I guess that would take work and less greed as the local politicians aren't getting bribes from corporations.
This is so true. We live in Tucson, the only city with more than 7,000 people for over 100 miles in one direction and 300 miles in the other. Tucson currently has over 550k and growing. We are surrounded by dead little ghost towns. Why did we survive? The answer is: Tucson never put all of its stock in mining like everyone else did. It was a whistle stop and a cow city and eventually it become more than that. It diversified and took on the state's first university, engineering firms, even the mafia at one point. It kept growing. It has its problems, but it also survived despite starting out as tiny as every little town around it which failed. Put your eggs in one basket, and you will have nothing.
Even just two and three industry towns like the 1 i live in worland WY can paint themselves in a corner.
It’s kinda hard when no other company wants to move in
True, but that's easier said than done when it was hard enough to attract one industry. Small towns are never going to be able to beat more populous areas when it comes to things like economy of scale and infrastructure.
It's kind of ridiculous to think that these tiny t-shirt design companies and advertising firms that replace large industry.
Thought the same. Romanticized bullshit!
everybody needs shirts
They are a positive start. The object is making themselves competitive on the global marketplace.
Why is it ridiculous? The American economy, the British economy, many economy's existed before massive industries took over. Why do we have to buy everything from big companies? We don't have to buy everything from corporations. They don't have our backs. They don't invest our money back into us. They're not getting more of my money.
Small business and cottage industries are the type of industries that have dominated human society for hundreds to even thousands of years so not that surprising when you think about it.
I just moved to a Rural no where.
Seems to me that the #1 reason why small town jobs SUCK, is because of big corporations who hire %5 of the town while giving NO ONE more than Part-Time, so no one makes any money or gets health coverage and does not ever qualify for Over-Time Pay.
The only good jobs are LLC plumbing apprenticeships.
Dr Chilapastroso Dr Las Macas Electricians as well.
People who choose not to educate themselves are not worth the money.
Stop voting republican the party of hate.
@@yaktown1985 Stop voting liberal, the victims with their hands out and asking for more welfare and freebies. All from ppl who arent crap and dont get paid crap because of it. Support the invaders yourself bud....
truth.
so I remember a story i saw on a Japanese TV show about a college student who spend 3 years in Norway working for free on a reindeer farm. He then flew back to Hokkaido with a suitcase and very little money. An old man by accident met him on the street in town and started a conversation with him. He ask him what he did. what he can do. what he wants to do and why is he here. The young student wanted to start his own Reindeer farm in his hometown but he don't have the money or the connections. so the old man got him with the " elderly" men in the town and gave him a small plot of land to live, invested into his Reindeer farm. the first 2 years was him and his 2 reindeer. 1 male, 1 female. 8 years later he as a dozen reindeer and a wife. a school teacher the "elders" introduce him to. they live in on a farm now with their 1 daughter together.
American towns have wealthy individuals who really don't care to invest in their young kids or their towns' future. They much rather pay millions to politicians to sell their doctrine of greed is good because rich white American are haters. they hate their own kind. they hate the idea you have to put efforts into taking care of the people in town like they're your family. aka pull them up by their booth strap if you have no boots.
Sometimes I think that the White elites hate us because most of us are C students and they want to be a super Elite group with average collective IQ 20 points higher.
@@Jj-gi2uv Michael Jordan was not born in Flint Michigan he was born in Brooklyn, New York, sorry.
i want to live in a town WITHOUT walmart!
Seattle doesn't have a walmart
No the fuck you don't.
Then don't move to the south XD. The northwest and much of California is Wal-Mart free.
My town has never even had a walmart
Alan Mirell good luck !
Small towns die off because people have gravitated toward big cities where jobs are. This happened everyday everywhere. If American think they are unique, make a second guess?
Something must be done. I heard that China reversed it by building more high-speed train, better highway. Now many Chinese can afford to live further than their job and get at time for work.
Americans like to isolate themselves with their big cars and once the weather gets bad, no one can move across the country. Highways are slow, it takes just one car in a traffic accident to block the circulation while trains move far more people and are now faster than train, if I take the Japanese bullet train.
Or else, maybe it's part of the government plan strategy to let die small cities in order to keep everyone in mega cities for better controlling them
I feel like people don’t understand that towns have to cycle to stay alive. To cycle you gotta have people, and you gotta keep making relevant professions in your town, invest in making the town as easy to travel through as possible and you’ll never die. Shit will change but the town won’t die.
Hard to get laid in a small town.
Small towns need to become more welcoming to diversity and different ways of thinking and doing things. Otherwise they will continue to decline and die out. Most small towns are way too conservative for their own good. That is why so many of their better educated residents move away and never look back.
Small town life looks so peaceful and great in the movies. But in real life they are barely getting by if at all. Im tired of the city life and i want the slow pace country life but everywhere i look and people i talk to all say the same thing. STAY AWAY, life is harder and the children suffer.
chavy it's common sense. No reason to build in a small city not even if you're a farmer now a days just take it to a private land
retiredusfsnps very nice!! my daughter has taken and interest in horses, i wanna to get her lessons and where i live there are places i can take her. At the moment she wants to become a vet. I have a cousin who said his door is open if we want to move to texas. His family owns a ranch and he says they have enough room for us to stay till i get on my feet.
chavy don’t have kids then lmfao
chavy small town or small City Life is beautiful. I brought my wife and four children, ages 9 to 14. from the crowds to the farms. 8 years later and they would never go back. we are now looking to open a business in town, to help the economy, not necessarily ourselves. it would be nice to see some businesses return, and they are. small towns are the answer to Amazon and the decline of the strip malls and big box stores.
chavy the only way to do it. Is if you have an online business or someone working for you. Than you can relax on the countryside
If The Atlantic is going to do a video on small towns, shouldn't they actually USE small towns in it, instead of 3 cities? Even their smallest, Dodge City, has a population of 27,000. Do they realize how far people from ACTUAL small towns have to drive in order to get to a place that populated?
Right. I think the term "mid size city" is very underused and accurately describes these cities
I wouldn't call these cities. They're too small.
Neither small, nor a town.
yeh Erie is not exactly a small town in my book we have gone to erie for years and it is nothing special really, and it is certainly not a small in anybody's book it has a population of thousands it is nothing really special but not what most would think of as small town america.
We like to travel the back roads and have seen, and stopped in, hundreds of small, some really small, towns. These three places are much bigger than small towns. Cities like Erie had a diversified manufacturing economy until imports made with near slave labor eliminated the industries. It was worse when the only decent paying employer in a small town closed just after Wallyworld devastated downtown. Those towns are on the way out.
I do not know how to stop this without taking control of our government from the ruling crony capitalist businesses that allow Boeing to abandon a union shop Seattle for a non union factory in South Carolina. At least it was not Vietnam.
One of the things we could do is start inforcing the Anti-trust Laws. Too much of our economy has become monopolized. This drives up stock prices at the cost of quality and lower market prices for consumers. Another thing is to tell business students that a business exists to satisfy customers. If the stockholders make some money that is OK but is not the primary reason a business exists.
Actually, Erie is thriving compared to the depressed small towns around it. I'm originally from NE PA so I know this.
Sorry for the typo.......I'm for NW Pa.........
I have heard that Erie is on an urban upswing.
I live here ,they are poring millions into the downtown area but outside of this oasis everything is still on the same decaying trajectory. The only other attempt at change is all the bread and circus festivals during the summer months which is wearing thin and not the answer nor is there one IMO. Unless we can acknowledge that our government is under global oligarchs control we are just swimming against the current that’s taking us down the drain.
Oh I know I’m from Pittsburgh
the "small town" of Fresno is the 34th most populous city in the US
As a young person I'm more inclined to believe that there is not enough being done to truely fix the job crisis
The big problem is that policy is almost exclusively focused on propping up or bringing back classes of job that simply don't exist in the numbers they used to rather than truly helping people to pivot to the changing realities of the 21st century.
People should invest in themselves instead of waiting for big industries to move in.
You can tell a area's success by how many people are moving in and how many are moving out. If a city is growing that says that more people want to live there and they have the ability to do well there.
Since when is Erie a "small town"?
Small city but yeah
Lol. Do they seriously consider places like Erie "small towns"? Talk about out of touch.
Exactly, Erie used to have 150,000 population before the horrible era of middle class flight, urban renewal, racial tension, decentralization and deindustrialization.
Erie is not a small town, but it faces the same fate as most small rural towns in the US. The major reasons for those cities existing in the first place have vanished. The young and ambitious tend to leave the region for a good college education. A handful will remain if they smell opportunity to take over as pillars of the local community, but usually you will find that those who follow that path, are closely related to the old guard. Having the luxury of staying put instead of seeking greener pastures tends to be for those connected to the old money and the old guard.
The farmers wonder why the market fluctuates by more than a dollar a day - speculation! Some cocaine addicts sit on computers waiting for the price to drop so they can buy it then sell it when the price goes up later that day. What value does that add to the economy??
Are you kidding me? Erie isn’t a small town. It’s a small city. The metro area is a quarter million people. The shithole I live in is a small town of about 2k people. Walmart and a hospital/ER is 20 minutes away. After 4pm and on weekends, if you don’t want to pay $250 at the ER, healthcare is an hour away and only open for a few hours. The nearest airports are an hour or more in either direction. I desperately want to get the hell out of here and I’m trying.
looking at farming like a factory is a fast way to ruin your land and also go out of business.
Miss O.P. Large scale family farming is best treated as a hybrid. Not full automation but not purely human. Build your high tech pivot and get that auto-steering tractor but actually go out to run that pivot and keep a person in the cab. Use high tech instruments but rely on low tech instincts. Combine precision with exercise, knowledge with experience.
@@lgmmrm Bad news for the illegal fruit pickers....sweet...
I live in a small town, and love it. However, I am retired. I went to college, got a PhD and worked hard. Most people where I live are not educated. Additionally, and it doesn't matter to me, small towns have hierarchies and local training/education that make most people underachievers who don't present competition to the town businesses. There is definitely favoritism and social stratification. Anyway, most people are taught in school to be good followers of the leaders and not to think about important things. They are trained to be permanent children. I know all these things because I grew up in a small town as well and know how they try to manipulate people. It really only works on the dumb people though. So over time the towns become dumber because the smart people are not allowed opportunity and move away, leaving only the leaders and the stupid people. This type of thing is also happening on the state level in the US. Thus some towns and some states are becoming dumber and more easily cowed. Like Florida for instance which appears to be a magnet for stupid but in fact is a repellent of smart.
I also grew up in a small town and never ever had anyone tell me i could not be a leader , was told i could be anything i wanted. You are talking about the colleges of today not small town schools. Nothing you have said is true, you are just lying to satisfy your own ignorance.
You are right Chris, and for your detractors, they should read: The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, and Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto.
"I went to college, got a PhD, and worked hard" Most of the people I know from rural//small towns didn't go to college, none of them have a PhD, but most of them are harder workers than anyone else I have met in life.
Texas is also like that a magnet for stupid.
@@rachelc3535 actually most are on the dole and game the system.
Nice video 👍👍👍👍👍
I believe that online shopping killed a lot of the brick and mortar stores. Brick and mortar stores and small towns in general are like the Ford Model T, they were great in their time, but that time has long passed.
Brick and mortar stores who chose to forgo customer service have given rise to the online stores that are stealing their business.
First key to grow small town is embracing diversity! Some small towns see diversity as threat to their way of life which they tend to resist consciously or unconsciously.
Towns that grows the most tend to be diversified
Nah bro diverse is not always a good route to go...you only want smart hard working people with low willingly to create crime...more groups of people means less unity and common goals. Human nature is to want to destroy and hate. We need to compete with everything, let the best and brightest shine everyone else can drown in the free market
@@wethans69 it is attitudes like yours that keep small towns stagnant and impoverished. Diversity would be good for small towns.
@@robertpreskop4425 Buddy how is my idea of getting good hard working people to come to your town horrible, you tend to become the mean of people you are around, if you import shit you will become shit. However if you see good people keeping houses clean and making that cashflow you will be smarter and harder working just to get that guap
Globalism and multiculturalism is a way to make everybody feel like they dont belong to any group..people are happiest when they are with like minded people
@@wethans69 The only small towns that are doing well right now are the ones with large immigrant populations. Sure the older white people will be racist but relations between the two groups will improve over tim.
Its all bullshit, most American small towns were built in the 1800, and 1900s (most coincided with the railroad), the country prospered up until the 1920s, until the depression. They were self sufficient, for instance I was from a small railroad town in Maryland. It did have several shops, a movie theatre, a bowling ally, a motel, a hardware and some grand victorian homes. The tracks were used to haul truck crops and seafood of the Eastern Shore to cities like Baltimore and Philadelphia. The town died when the trucking industry killed the railroad. Trust me transportation and technology killed the need for small towns, and in the 1950s when suburbia was born, a brand new home in a development vs constantly working on a old home, so small town property value goes down, many homes are converted to apartments and there goes the neighborhood. Point is, that's how this country has ALWAYS been, constantly changing. We have always had competitive labor, and if you can think of a way to make millions, you can do it. What I see happening is the working man in rural white America at least is disappearing. To proud to be a laborer, to dumb to be anything but, not a good combination. That's why half of Mexico is here, if they didn't have jobs to take, they wouldn't come. Rural small town whites remind me of old gold miners, there`s no gold, so whining and crying about it wont help. Time to move on just like your fore fathers did, until you find what you need. But actually, start to work labor jobs again, stop trying to be the guy who is making millions and be what you are, youll have no trouble. Talking about days that are never coming back is only depressing you, and America changes again, like it or not.....
Erie PA, small town lol. Come to rural Nebraska. The entire town rolls up the sidewalks for Friday Night lights in the fall, and you can count on the one had how many stoplights we have. Give me a break, seriously.
Fresno has a population of 600,000 .. Close to a million. It's not close to a small town... There's a ton of people there
I would like to start a comic book publishing company in erie or in of the small towns around it.
Do it! That sounds like a good thing to do, with a good future. I wish you success.
Erie has a population of 100,000, not including the surrounding metro area. This is a small town?
Compared to cities with populations in the high hundreds of thousands, if not millions, perhaps.
Yes look up Douglas Arizona..all family stores closed down and big stores too 3 blocks of stores closed down since 2011
But i mean........big corporations like walmart bring jobs to rural communities, i work for a local small family owned business, i work basically full time hours, but i make only $9 an hour and dont get health insurance, however when my fiance worked at walmart he made $11 an hour and when he was part time he still got some benefits
Living debt free in rural Ohio. Have a nice home, all our needs met. Feel really blessed. My husband is very skilled. Brick layer, tile, block. He had a small business in Florida for 20 yrs. We were middle class. Now he works for a union, but doesnt make as much. But the Lord takes good care of us. We also give away over 10 percent of income. He also gets a small salary as a pastor. So we have done fine for the past 11 yrs., when we decided to move back to where we are from
God bless you and your family ❤️
That jazz at 2:00 whats the name of it?
City government in Erie Pa does not give a shit, I lived there for 16 years 9 of them I worked out of temp agency's never to get on full time with any company more than half closed shop,Tucson, AZ is no better
I live in Tucson and couldn't disagree more. Unlike my life in Michigan before moving here in 2013, I have never been unemployed, I have always had a good salary with full time work and my cost of living is considerably smaller than the rest of the country. In fact, MSN recently ranked Tucson as one of the only mid to large cities in the US where you can still live on the minimum wage. As for the heat, yes May through August are hot. I'll take it and my 65 degree January any day over 6 months of sleet and no sun in Michigan.
Americans don't believe food, healthcare, shelter are human rights BUT you do have a right to a job? LOL.
Ah am in tears! I can't finish watching 😢
I live in a placed called gravois mills, pop 142, the next two 15 mins over is versailles where I work, pop 2400. The two biggest businesses we have are walmart and a factory called gates thay makes tractor psrts. Our economy is stable but not the best. But if either of those 2 buinesses leave, it will be the pin in the grenade for our county. But as they have no intention of leaving our economy is fine mainly because the local business lower the cost of products to increase profit margins and help stabilize the town. When we where required to raise our minimum wage we didn't fire or lay off anyone, we balanced it by making goods more available. The people hear knew a wage increase was irrelevant as prices kept going up without an increase. So the businesses worked with the people and everyone won.
Erie Pennsylvania is NOT a small town. A real small town is a place of under 40,000 population.
Twenty seconds in and there is a sign saying, "Keep jobs in Erie." In what reality is Erie, PA a small town?
What a synchronicity, I'm reading a biography of John Boyd, he was from there.
Where are the small towns that the headline referenced
The industrial revolution came and went ,the chemical and nuclear age came and went and all have left both positive but mostly negative marks on our environment,politics,history and economy weather we would like to acknowledge it or not.America and the world needs to return back to a predominantly Agrarian society and way of life that was extended. Cities and small town like this are proof of the waste of post industrial/consumer society and look at the economic and cultural aftermath it left when it petered out it happened with these non computer tech. factories and if anybody seriously thinks that this will never happen to our computer technology society then you are dreaming it it will happen far sooner then we think and the aftermath in regards to the effect it will leave on our communities and society will be even grater than what happened when the industrial revolution died.
Not post industrial /consumer society.
Reporting in from rural Southeast Texas, free trade has destroyed rural America. At one time factories supplied jobs, now it is dollar store, walmart, lowes... etc.
Why can’t you just move to a different city? I know it’s hard, but if it’s that bad you do what you have to do. What is the economic point of the government stepping in and supporting this city when the free market has not deemed it useful?
small towns i am retired with a pension i would love to help bring income to your town you should make retirement freindly towns that welcome seniors to live in your town
Michael Anderson your $300 a month ain't gonna improve the economy!
bigshambala he might be waiting for a little town people to invite him in to their little town!
Michael Anderson
First of all never tell anyone that you have a pension.Most people don't get pensions and they will quickly become jealous.As you can see from the comments they aren't very smart.
Richard Fernandez tf nobody's jealous its just that its amazing what length amaerica will go through to replace the historic american population that is all.
Yea I only work hot summers cold winters for 30 years for that luck
Upstate NY is the same. Once GM and other industries which are gone now. They tried casinos but that only goes so far. What we got are jails and SUNY’s but not much more.
Niagara Falls has a giant casino and hotel owned by the Senecas and all it did was siphon the little remaining activity out of that impoverished, decayed factory town. Casino gambling is NOT an economic catalyst but politicians are too stupid to see that proven fact.
Y’all keep electing these clowns so...
Basically if your town is dependent agriculture, then your fucked.
Not entirely, lots of these places already have self contained local economies. May not be the best living, but people are surviving.
yup the commodity markets are not your friend if your a small town
Trump said the countries full. So no small towns are thriving, growing even. Its really amazing. They had lots and lots and lots of growth. The most growth that America has ever seen.
That is baseless bullshit. Most small towns are struggling and declining. It is your outer ring suburbs that are growing and thriving.
1:18 would be a good place for the ghost adventures crew to investigate.
Michigan was the same way in the 80’s. Flint lost their industry when GM left town and wanted to try tourism to boost their income to make up for the lost jobs. They spent millions on “attractions” only to watch them close because no one wanted to go to Flint because there was nothing to see there except high unemployment and crime. The incompetence of these towns amazes me. Small towns will never come back unless the jobs that built those towns up come back.
The exact same thing happened to the big metropolis of Detroit, too dependent on one industry.
That's the thing though, there's no policy that will bring those jobs back to small towns in any substantial sense. Even if all outsourced jobs came back to the US, most of them would still cluster around the urban centers where most of the opportunity already is, for the same reasons.
These small towns aren't trying to pivot because they want to, they're doing it because it's the only play they have left.
show some compassion. The reason why Flint went under...MAYBE ITS BECAUSE YOUR RETHUGLICAN PARTY friends and governor KILLED A LOT OF THEM through his POISONOUS WATER and chemicals that his investor friends did to the local environment. THINK THAT MIGHT KILL an economy...? yeah? Yeah, it might. They would have done better if they weren't being killed off by their own governor and state a decade ago or more!! And then, the Pandemic. Look, that down didn't do anything wrong. USE ANOTHER EXAMPLE other than Flint, MIchigan. YOU ARE INCOMPETENT.
This is over two years old. It needs to be taken down or updated
Considering the average population of a city/town or whatever you want to call it in America is 20,000 people and Erie has over 4 times that amount, it's not a small town. Therefore, I assuming all statements in this video are opinion based and not fact based.
You want a small town? SE Missouri. Our largest town is 30,000 and that’s with a couple thousand of students during the school year, the average size is 5,000 or less.These people aren’t rural.
Exactly what I thought. Sure, Erie is struggling but it is not a small town by any means. If these folks cared about small towns they'd be driving to places like central/northern PA. (Former coal county, basically). Trust me, that area is not doing well at all....
The fact that that's the average population doesn't mean that's not a small town, just that there are a lot of small towns.
The winning cities of the future will adapt sustainability. Local ownership and co-operative owners will be encouraged over Wall Street ownership. Community, cooperation and quality of life will be the driving factors. Greenspace liveability parks walking multi modes of transportation will be normal
two years later , tired of winning lol
Erie is a city, not a small town.
Thank you. Erie was once over 150,000 in population that is not small.
Takeaway from this video: America is still great
There's too much music.
I mean, Fresno is not that small.
Can't believe people wil be born, and raised here and stay. For thier entire life on this planet .....
What a refreshing change to hear something different than the narrative of unrelenting misery and whining about shitty factory jobs in industries that have long-since gone by the wayside. When I was growing up in the 70s, almost nobody wanted to work in a factory or on an assembly line - despite the wages and benefits often being much better than many other jobs at the time - because they were stultifyingly BORING dead-ends. That's something that almost never gets mentioned by politicians and others that just love to romanticize about the glory days of the post-WWII era up until the early 80s when, supposedly, you could buy a house, raise a family and have all of the good things associated with a stereotypical middle-class lifestyle - all on the earnings of a single wage-earner working a relatively unskilled job in a mill or whatever. But come on, get real! Times change and there's a pile of unavoidable reasons why the vast majority of those jobs have been automated over the years and the ones that haven't yet been were often offshored to the developing world. The focus now should be squarely on helping to facilitate the creation of new sorts of jobs through innovation, rather than desperately trying to keep dying, uncompetitive industries from packing up and leaving or simply going out of business.
They may have been boring dead ends, but when all your realistic prospects are similar, the ones that used to offer security and higher wages start to look better in retrospect. I agree they're not coming back, but there are valid reasons they've been romanticized as something of a golden age for blue collar workers.
Who the hell would live in Erie?
kikyoass I live in Erie
kikyoass Those whose parents lived there, obviously. Now, you probably meant to ask "who the hell would move to Eerie", and the answer is people from local farms who want to live in a nearby city.
Someone that has been there. Best sunsets in probably the world. World class fishing. Close to Cleveland, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh. I've lived there. It's a great area with a crap job market.
I live near erie, i agree.. who the hey would go there except for the roar on the shore
kikyoass love me some Pennsylvania u mook!
Erie needs to change the spelling of its name to match that of Eyrie in Game of Thrones and make a theme park out of it.
LagiNaLangAko23 No but near by in Warren pa it is somewhat mountainous
I think part of the problem is that people of all ages, leave their small towns and rural communities, and relocate their entire life in a big city where they work and perhaps attend school. What they don't seem to realize is that they can stay within their hometowns and commute to work and school, and invest their income within their own communities, instead of the big cities. This is how we keep the local businesses, schools, and other services funded and running within rural communities.
Additionally, all rural communities should begin investing in their own Shuttle Service where groups of people can be transported into the cities and dropped off at their jobs or schools, and then taken home in the evenings whenever their work or school day is completed. Rural communities should also be experimenting with Electric Vehicles and Solar Powered...everything they can get their hands on. There's a way to enrich small and rural communities, but residents within those communities must want to do this.
Yes, but speaking as somebody who comes from a town like that, many of the reasons industry and businesses are attracted to more populous areas are also what makes them attractive to many upwardly mobile younger people. Things like amenities, shorter commute, better public transit, nightlife and cultural events etc. make city or suburban living more attractive than rural living for many,
Wake up, people. It's the moneyed folk like Trumps financial backers who don't give a darn for the workers. They're not concerned about providing meaningful employment at a living wage. It's all about how much MORE money you can make for THEM.
Oh course they are. Go to upstate NY and take a look around.
When the water goes you can forget California agriculture.
They might just start desalination plants at a lower cost (a new industry) and move to a less intense agricultural industry. Most of California besides SFO and LA are actually very nice places to live and they are not close to innovations and mobility, plus they have access to capital and trade. Nah. California will be fine. Can't say the same about most of the industrial Midwest. The Mississippi River would be then just another way to get out.
Commodity price volatility is caused by low interest easy money funneled to speculators
We live in the Columbia SC area and I don't think this area is going in the right direction. I feel like the taxes here are too high! School achievement and educational expectations are way too low. Everywhere you drive there are lots of cops that seem to be doing nothing. Car insurance here is through the roof! I wish more people here took better care of their houses and cars. I wish there was more cultural diversity. For a city that is "famously hot" there is a lack of public pools. There is no water park which is sad for a metro of 810k people. The last thing that weighs down this area is a lack of quality jobs. I get the feeling that most people around here believe that $15/hr is a good paying job and I just can't work for that. Before we moved here for my wife's work in 2016 I was making over $52,000/year or the equivalent of $25/hr. Doing the same work, the offers were ludicrous! I got offered $15/hr at one employer and working for the county I was offered a salary of $29,800!
We are moving back to Tennessee in December and I can't wait! It is cheaper to live there. Pay is higher! The schools are better! And I think the weather is better! Nashville (a 40 min drive) music scene can't be beat! There is cheap and free live entertainment everywhere. The city we are moving to has tons of free festivals every year. Check out Clarksville Tn.
Honestly I’d never live in a small town, I don’t know how people can live with the same thing day in and day out for years let alone forever. Living in the city there’s more job opportunity but there’s also so much culture variety and so many new things. It’s so exciting.
No
“KEEP JOBS IN ERIE!❗️”
💟Beautiful and More!‼️🥇 I Love ALL Life Forever!❗️💚
Are America’s small Town’s really strugglings?⁉️
Yes!‼️ but I Love ALL Life Forever!❗️💝
There's no turning back.
I think this is too rosy a picture. The problem is you may be competing for the same place in the world. I mean a burgeoning tech scene may need to come at the expense of somewhere else.
Cake baking , dog grooming , tattooing, lawn care , coffee shop etc, etc , those businesses are not helping
I forgot Dog grooming - bullshit shoestring businesses that provide nothing.
They are a positive start, they are mostly micro businesses. It is better than nothing!
They never get to the point. I'm not sticking around for the through-line.
Lmao the whole midwest looks like this except chicago
Prayers from Philippines😇 dear Americans talk to your govt & tell them to invest in the American communities.
Grace Antonio Duterte is killing his people...are you serious??
So when is Trump going to move his Trump clothing line manufacturing to the US?
How can he criticize other companies for maximizing their profits by leveraging cheaper oversees manufacturing when he himself does it (and with no plans of changing)?
If he moves it back here, it will be like other textile factories that have moved back to rich countries. An automated system with a few people to look after the computers doing the work. You can bring back the factories but you can't bring back the old factory jobs.
at 33 im in between. i spent most of my life around the village of shepherd in michigan. its like1200 people or so. one thing we learned early was what city people call "hustle" or make ends meet. the problem becomes when we must compete with a half starving indian kid who without labor laws or minimum wage laws can make the same products as grown men for 1/20th the cost. ntil all nations have minimum age and labor laws that match ours, we will always be at a loss. not everyone wants to sit behind a pc, some like the heat, cold, or nature.
YOU think thats bad! my hometown population is only 5,000 people, and possibly abit more around the area, so like 6,000 - 10,000...and their are hardly any jobs...Erie atleast has a chance of surviving, our town will eventually die out... it already lost more then 1,000 people since the early 2000s.
Wouldn't' it be fun if small towns in America all showed off their unique traditions or local weird factor here for us all to see? Check out the video about embracing oddities over at the Grasping at Creativity channel for what I'm talking about.
Its the corporations and companies which are shortsighted and don't care about small towns. There are plenty of opportunities to buy land or to help that small town BE ON YOUR TEAM with one of your new companies. Think how easy it would be and the lack of competition from other companies. A corporation could even provide a new rail station or transportation service to the small town. Any NEW WORKERS or people who flock to the place, would be guaranteed to be customers, and workers. It would be easy. Expansion after that would be easy. Then you could hire truckers or a trucking company that would bring the products into the cities. A small town like that and the county would bend over backward for the company. In a rural area, there IS ROOM for building a big structure, NOT IN THE CITY. Duhhhhh! But see, the modern billionaire and millionaire and investors, are SOOOO GREEDY, that they can only see SHORT RANGE, SHORT SIGHTED GOALS and profits. They care NOTHING for the long range hard work of empire building. THIS IS WHY HENRY FORD WAS GREAT. He knew it was better to win people's hearts over to make successful business in the long run, rather than just treat americans like slaves, working cheap with not a good work environment or wages or health benefits. If you want a loyal army which will produce great products for yourself, you need to invest in real america, small towns. IN fact, I would imagine, that a smart company could eventually own the whole town, and even produce quality education for the growing town, which in turn, would help the company. MOST COMPANIES AND CORPORATIONS CAN NOTHING for actually helping people. I don't even ANY MORE....think they exist just for profits. I really think a lot of corporate leaders just enjoy being cruel and powerful and looking down on rural people and small towns and the poor. Those poor people can be turned into a great resource if you just help them and train them. Then LOYALTY will come. But not through cruelty, hardship and BLIND PRIDE.
we have to work for $2 a day like china
Why would you want to work ?
If I was a small town always being ignored, mocked and scorned, I would not even bother to pay taxes. I would gather all the townspeople and secede from the Union. To hell with America and its lack of compassion. IF you know that "others' are dumbing down the town in education when you retire, WHY DON'T YOU HELP THEM rather than criticizing them. YOU go out, and help them. If I had more money, that is what I would do.
There needs to be an update to this page how these towns are doing now since Obama been out and President Trump has been in the White House.
Not much different. Urbanization,rural flight,globalization,& economic shift from production to information didn't just reverse because of words/tweets from some temporary politician.
Unemployment is very low and has been for a while now, but work doesn't pay. Minimum wage needs to go up, stop blaming workers for not getting enough education, or being lazy, or having a kid, or living in the wrong place, or not being a "go-getter", or presenting themselves poorly, or... the problem is you can work 2,000 hours a year for well over minimum wage and still make less than $20,000 a year. And no benefits, because you are probably working two part-time jobs to do that.
5:25 like what.. a fucking american flag screwdriver? they sure do put their piece of fabric on everything.
Please stop outsourcing jobs to other countries. We need these high tech jobs here. Can everyone become a Software Engineer? No of course not but going for cheap by exploiting workers in other countries while destroying your own local economy is madness.
@General Sherman did nothing wrong, except stop don't assume because when you ASS-U-ME etc..
Remote work. You don't have to live in Wyoming to work with a company that has a headquarters there. You can opt for a citizen say 75% of the time.
Citizens put money back into the economy. Even remotely if you picture someone working in MN on a job in FL or a worker in FL on a remote job in KS. Its a nice little network.
I feel sorry for these small towns. But some one has to help them re invent themselves. They need to start their own business, maybe start up their own small factory. And don't try to trade or compete with the big guys. If you are a small town and there is no Walmart, then it should be easy to start your own shoe store and small production plant. ONLY ADVERTISE to your own small town and maybe one small town nearby. YOU SUPPLY their needs, not the whole world. If you are nearby, they probably will shop your place a lot sooner than a big place 7 miles away. Get creative. Create a bicycle store. Why? because in a small town, if people ride bicycles, they will save money on gas for the cars. PRoblem is, in rural areas, the politicians and tax collectors tend to be more cruel.
Aaaaand it's still infrastructure week. -_-
As a long time resident of Eden NC, the now ninth worst town in NC to live in I can tell you the struggle is REAL. I am 59 years old. I have lived here eighteen years and I have no intention to move away period. I am a strong believer in the adage "Grow where you got planted." Business and politicians are not necessarily our enemy but they damned sure ain't our friends. At best they are amoral neutrals. At worse they are locusts and aught be approached as such.
Small towns need to stop looking for a Messiah and aught instead seek to build community one neighbor at a time. Some economists moving even now into economic and political policy forefront are floating the idea that towns should be ignored outright and forced to close down forcing entire populations to give up and trickle away. This is not fear factor hype this is true. I first became aware of this in recent articles in The Economist, The New York Times and the Washington Post.
NOT OVER MY DEAD BODY!
Greedy businessmen and corrupt politicians from all sides are who to blame. If you don't agree, you probably never worked hard in your life or struggled to keep a job in the face of what I've just described
Yes. I live in a small town, not a small city like this video is talking about. What I have seen over the years is the people in power want to keep it a small town and they keep new business out. They fight any changes that may threaten their vision of what their small town should be. This short view point has kept out a number of both small and large business. Over the years we have had the chance to get such companies as GE, Corning, Texas Instruments and others but they were locked out or roadblocks were put in their way to the extent that they went somewhere else. I tell most of the kids to go somewhere else if they want to work, especially in their chosen field. It is sad as small towns do have a lot to offer and you can still keep that small town feeling if done right.
Too much technology screwed us up. I'm fifty two but still remember the hustle and bustle of old fashioned industry, when most everyone had a job. Now we have to watch and listen to some geeks explaining about their "companies" that teach other people how to run their businesses and some tatooed dude who owns a small T-shirt company talk about production...
You should thank (Ronald Reagan)
Yeah that sonofabitch with his horrendously failed supply side/trickle down economics coupled with deep tax cuts for the wealthy has turned the US into an indebted, pauper nation.
Better ten us because we have pay food utilities
No one can fix this problem, many countries just live on $5.00 USD a day. USA need $300.00 just to survice one day. you do the math.
Yeah and you think the income is in both countries the same right?
we did it to are selfs
how are these small towns?
I think the US should reduce or stop spending money on other countries and focus on reviving the drying cities in the US. In fact, most of the countries they spend money on for democracy are not democratic.
jobs might come back to america but they will never come back to the fly over states.
mockery from project mockingbird
Put lipstick on a pig and it's still a pig.
Trump wants to help these small towns. If you can get a cooperation from Congress that's the problem. Even when the Republicans had the house they were not cooperating with him to get anything done. We need to vote these congressman and Senators out. They won't do their job they did stay forever and ever and ever. There's no term limits says seem stay around forever. I think Trump will help the country if it get some cooperation and some bills submitted to him that have some balls behind it to do something for this country.