Affordable Housing Institute : US

As urbanization remakes the global south, it’s also operating much closer to home, and though Americans are much better equipped to cope with them, the changes are no less profound. 

 

 

As highlighted in this article from The Economist, America’s northern center – the Mississippi and Missouri drainage basins – is slowly or rapidly depopulating, except for a few nodes called capital cities and major regional business hubs. 

 

In eastern Colorado, the human tide ebbs. Cheyenne county, which had 3,700 inhabitants in 1930, now has just 1,900. And the drift away from the area seems to be speeding up. In the old county jail, which is now a museum, a photograph from 1910 shows a three-storey schoolhouse towering over the town of Cheyenne Wells. The new school is one storey high—yet it already seems too big.

 

Cheyenne County, where the dots are bigger than the towns

 

The impact on homeownership patterns – and the implications for property values and policy choices – will be huge. 

 

America as a whole is growing briskly. Between 2000 and 2006 its population swelled by 6.4%, according to the Census Bureau.

 

Driving American urbanization are the twin forces driving it globally:

 

1. Better agricultural technology.
2. Movement toward information-based employment.

 

As people move off the farms and into the coastal cities, what happens to the towns they leave behind?  They evaporate of people, if not of property:

 

Yet the expansion has passed many areas by.  Two-fifths of all counties are shrinking (see map).

 

Draining out the middle: where it’s white or red, the population’s growing slowly if at all.

 

In general, people are moving to places that are warm, mountainous or suburban.

 

We’ve known this for some time, as I’ve previously posted in Where will people move?  They’re moving to warmer, wetter, more varied places.  The Upper Midwest is none of these.

 

They are leaving many rural areas, with the most relentless decline in a broad band stretching from western Texas to North Dakota. In parts, the Great Plains are more sparsely populated now than they were in the late 19th century, when the government declared them to be deserted.

 

You realize that this means fewer people in those areas than a hundred years ago.  During that same interval, America’s population increased nearly fourfold, from 76 million in 1900 to 303 million in 2008. 

 

For every 1 in 1900, 4 in 2008 – and all three new ones moved to the cities

 

At 2.5 people per household, that means we have created 90 million new households in a century plus, all in the cities.

 

Yet America is growing more crops than ever, with ecologically cleaner farming.  Why?

 

A big reason is improvements in farming technology. Tractors in eastern Colorado do not resemble the vehicles that trundle around farms on the east coast and in Europe. They are many-wheeled monsters, sometimes driven by global positioning systems.

 

It could be a Terminator except it’s painted in John Deere colors

 

Toby Johnson says his 40,000-acre (16,200-hectare) ranch in Cheyenne county –

 

We have to stop for just a moment.  Mr. Johnson’s ranch, 60 square miles, a square eight miles on a side, is just about the size of the District of Columbia.

 

Cheyenne, Colorado, wheat squares broken only by a highway

 

When the West was being settled, a standard section was 40 acres, one-quarter mile on a side. 

 

 

Now the farms are 1,000 times bigger.

 

– employed between eight and ten workers in the 1950s.

 

Even half a century ago, American agriculture was among the world’s most productive, and technology has made it even more so:

 

It now has two, including him.

 

Thus, while productivity has risen, the job base has shrunk by a factor of four.  Farming has not only become technological, it has replaced people with capital, because that’s what the farm equipment represents – capital expenditure.

 

When old farmers retire, their plots tend to be swallowed up by larger, more efficient operators.

 

A farmer in the Thirties

 

A farmer in the Oughties

 

This is economically rational and, at least in a macro sense, good for everybody.  Larger operators have better capitalization; they can run those enormous machines over more acres for a much smaller incremental cost.  Technology implies scale in both acreage and capital.

 

Fewer jobs, fewer people.  Fewer people, fewer homes.

 

And fewer jobs

 

The population of the Great Plains teeters on this shrinking agricultural base. While much of Colorado grew, Cheyenne county shrank every year between 2000 and 2006, when it lost more than 300 people. Children are disappearing even more quickly. Ten years ago 495 pupils enrolled in the county’s public schools; this year 320 did.  

 

As we saw in Demographic Shakers, when you stop having young people, fairly soon you stop having people.

 

In Kit Carson, the second-biggest settlement, the school enrolled just four teenagers in the tenth grade. Shops and houses nearby are already boarded up. If the school were to close, there would be little reason for the town to exist at all.

 

Presumably, twenty years from now, it won’t exist – as a town, that is.  Some towns die.

 

Optimists point to two likely developments that may slow the decline. Assuming a power line is built, wind farms will probably appear in the area in the next few years, as they have in western Texas. That will generate construction jobs and tax revenues.

 

The construction jobs will be transitory; the tax revenues, while welcome, with still hav little profitable in which to invest.

 

A more ambitious proposal involves building a “super-highway” between Mexico and Canada, which would pass through eastern Colorado. Backers say it would almost double traffic through Cheyenne county, leading to an increase in jobs and perhaps even in people.

 

Somehow I doubt that a truck stop will really attract all that many people

 

I can’t say that I’m a prairie truck stop cowboy, but I’ve driven enough of those undulating grassy interstates to know that simply having one is no particular job attractor; it just migrates the few jobs that remain to the off-ramp areas.

 

Yet the road is many years from being built.

 

If the people won’t come to our wheatfields of dreams, whom can we attract?

 

 

There is a somewhat drastic alternative. In the 1980s two academics from Rutgers University suggested turning the plains into a “buffalo commons”, where the animals that grazed the area before white immigration would be encouraged to return. The idea was so unpopular that its authors occasionally had to be protected by police.

 

Frank J. Popper has seen the future, and it’s a herd

 

Some prickly people might feel insulted when you suggest that a hairy, dumb, four-legged animal is more suited to their towns than they are.

 

I and my fellow buffalo snort at this notion

 

But it is nonetheless coming to pass.

 

Neighborhoods and housing are land used to grow people.  When they cease growing people, it’s time to start growing something else.

 

Buffalo meat is leaner than beef, and thus well suited to contemporary health worries.

 

Perhaps, like Arthur C. Clarke’s Ambrosia Plus, it tastes like chicken?

 

Partly as a result, the buffalo are coming back: some 62,000 were slaughtered between January and November last year, a 17% rise over a year earlier.  Of the plains states, only North Dakota has openly mulled turning over large tracts of land to the furry megafauna.  

 

No indoor plumbing required, and low maintenance costs

 

But other areas, including eastern Colorado, have preserved grasslands and are touting their natural resources and history—a vivid one of brutal treks and Indian massacres.

 

Jo Downey of the [Priaire] Development Corporation reckons nothing can stop the drift away from places like Cheyenne county, and others agree. The challenge for the future is not to stem the tide, but to keep life as pleasant as possible for those who remain.

 

Four counties in search of a future?

 

Curiously, it’s possible that the same technological forces slowly depopulating the Great Plains will lead to their stabilization in a virtually connected, physically isolated world somewhat like the original Australian stations that Arthur Upfield so vividly evoked,

 

Even in the widest open spaces, there can be crime

 

or Isaac Asimov’s Solaria, one of the possible ultimate future cities about which I previously posted:

 

‘We have no police force on Solaria.  …  No crime, you see.  Our population is tiny and widely scattered.  There is no occasion for crime, therefore no occasion for police.’

 

The same serenity has developed in Cheyenne County:

 

Rayetta Palmer, a councilwoman in Cheyenne Wells, can nonetheless cite a list of local strengths. The few children get lots of attention: Kit Carson’s schools have a pupil-to-teacher ratio of seven to one, compared with 18 to one in Denver, the state capital. As a result, they do well in tests. Crime is rare. The community is strikingly cohesive: at the petrol stations that double as cafés, locals do not take empty tables but sit together, as in a school dining room.

 

Just like Cheyenne County, Solaria’s few people were surrounded by machines:

 

‘The human-robot ratio in any economy that has accepted robot labor tends continuously to increase despite any laws that are passed to prevent it.  The increase is slowed, but never stopped.  At first the human population increases, but the robot population increases much more quickly.  Then, after a certain critical point is reached the human population begins to decline.  A planet approaches a true social stability.’

 

With all this distance comes a curious cultural retreat:

 

‘Why is it the Solarians object to seeing one another [in person]?’

 

‘It follows inevitably.  We have huge estates.  An estate ten thousand square miles in area is not uncommon, although the largest ones contain considerable unproductive land … In any case, it is the size of an estate, more than anything else, that determines a man’s position in society.  And one property of a large estate is this: You can wander about in it almost aimlessly with little or no danger of entering a neighbor’s territory and thus encountering your neighbor. … In short, a Solarian takes pride in not meeting his neighbor.  The desire not to do so led to the development of ever more perfect viewing equipment, and as the viewing equipment grew better there was less and less need ever to see one’s neighbor.  It was a reinforcing cycle, a kind of feedback.’  Page 104

 

Can someone say, Second Life?

 

Who needs a real city when you can meet anybody in a virtual one?

 

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