Greenfield Southeast

Greenfield Southeast

What If We Thought of the Small Town South as One City?

9/30/2013

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How many people do you think live in small towns or rural areas in the South? Let me be more specific - how many people live in counties with fewer than 60,000 people?

Let's make it multiple choice, and I'll give you a hint -- this number is comprised of the population of 753 qualifying counties. 

A. 1 million
B. 5 million
C. 10 million
D. 17 million
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The answer is D. 17 million. Essentially two New York Cities (just the five boroughs). Together, the Southern states - not including any counties in Missouri, Florida, or Texas - come to around 50 million in population.
What if we go more rural? How about counties with fewer than 20,000? That has to be basically nothing, right?
It's the population of the entire San Francisco metro area - 4,500,659 over 369 counties.
I'll say that again -- the population of the more rural South is equal to the population of the ENTIRE Bay Area.
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I know the Delta Regional Authority and Appalachian Regional Commission are out there along with some sub-regional groups, but where's the ecosystem? Where's the collective effort? There are more and more efforts coming on line to increase quality of life for all people in large cities like Boston and Chicago and even smaller cities like Denver and Kansas City. Where's the equivalent effort in the small town South?

If you live in Orangeburg, SC; or Vicksburg, MS; or Dyersburg, TN, how are you going to get a leg up? In all honesty, odds are you aren't.

While the world marvels at the wonders of New Orleans, Nashville, Atlanta, and others, another generation is slowly being entrapped a half hour's drive away. 
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A Problem We Must Choose to Solve

9/19/2013

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This week, the Walton Family Foundation gave $6 million to the Philadelphia School Partnership to promote the growth of excellent schools. This announcement in and of itself was not remarkable. Major gifts and attention are regularly heaped on urban school districts. Their leaders become nationally-recognized advocates. Through fits and starts, many urban districts are improving; and the money and attention is well deserved.

But what was just as striking to me is the announcements that were not made this week. Mark Zuckerberg did not show up in the Mississippi Delta to give the keynote at the Clarksdale Municipal School District's annual convocation. The Gates Foundation did not announce a partnership with Greene County (NC) Schools in an effort to redesign small town schools. Even writing those felt weird. They're so unlikely as to seem absurd.

If we make the assumption that all lives have inherently equal value, then we must acknowledge that there is something amiss. If you're a poor kid growing up in New Orleans, you have at least have a shot at attending a good school. If you're in Itta Bena, MS; the odds are much, much less favorable. And yet, the lives of both children matter equally; we should treat them as such.

And where exactly are the children with the greatest need for a great school? The small town South. In the United States, there are one hundred eleven counties where more than 50% of children live in poverty. Of those one hundred eleven, seventy-eight are in the South (highlighted below).
Southern Counties with More Than 50% of Children under 6 Living in Poverty
Source: Measure of America
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So three out of four counties with insane child poverty are in the South. (If you drop the barrier to 49%, twelve of the next sixteen are - yup - in the South.) And now we also know that poverty deeply taxes cognition. 

This is just the latest revolution in a lengthy cycle, a cycle with no foreseeable end. Those counties are exclusively rural. Not a single one is within forty five minutes of a major metro area. There is no hospital with an excellent emergency room. There is no magnet school to apply to. In many places, there's not even a grocery store. It may sound insane, but that's the inescapable reality for tens of thousands of children.

As a society, we value connectivity, knowledge, and novelty; it should come as no surprise that counties like those above have slowly receded from our consciousness. Or that we look cross-eyed at people who say things like "I work for a KIPP school in Helena, AR," or "I'd love to start a mobile health unit in Plymouth, NC."

It is time for a coherent, regional effort to address these issues. It's the same problem across the region; we should treat it as such and get to work.

It's time to destroy these notions and mindsets of what is valued and where we should therefore focus our energy.

It's time to quit trying to make heaps of money or design the next great app or score the next great status job and do something about this.

So here's our focal point: the oldest of those children growing up in poverty will graduate from high school in 2025. I have some ideas. I'm sure you do, too. And I'm certain that the folks living in these areas do. So why wait? Let's do something about this.
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More on Persistent Poverty in Rural America

9/16/2013

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The Housing Assistance Council (HAC) recently released a report about the state of people, poverty, and housing in small town America. It's full of great data, but most jarring to me was that showing counties that have experienced persistent poverty continuously since 1990.  Yet another angle to the same story - if you're a non-white person living in a small town in America, chances are high you're living in poverty or in danger of falling back into poverty.
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I'll let them take it away:
An increasing number of rural communities are experiencing persistently high poverty rates. These areas are often isolated 
geographically, lack resources and economic opportunities, and suffer from decades of disinvestment. Often forgotten or 
hidden from mainstream America, these areas and populations have had double-digit poverty rates for decades.
Persistently poor counties are those with poverty rates of 20 percent or more in 1990, 2000, and 2010. There were 429 of 
these persistently poor counties in 2010. Fully 86 percent of them had entirely rural populations. 

Overall, more than 21 million people live in persistent-poverty counties. Nearly 60 percent of them are racial and ethnic 
minorities, and the median household income is $31,581, more than 40 percent below the national median. More than 
5 million people live below the poverty line in these counties, with an overall poverty rate of 25 percent – nearly twice the 
national rate. The poverty rate for minorities in these communities is even higher, at 32 percent. 

One highly visible outcome of this economic distress can be seen in these areas’ poor housing conditions. The incidence 
of housing units lacking adequate plumbing is more than twice the national rate, and nearly 400,000 households in these 
regions live in crowded conditions. Additionally, while housing costs are relatively low in many of these communities, more 
than half of renters in persistent-poverty counties encounter affordability problems and pay more than the federal standard 
of 30 percent of income for their housing. 

The persistence of poverty is most evident within several predominately rural regions and populations such as Central 
Appalachia, the Lower Mississippi Delta, the southern Black Belt, the colonias region along the U.S.-Mexico border, Native 
American lands, and migrant and seasonal farmworkers. One of the more distressing trends is that the number of persistent poverty counties is actually increasing. Using the same benchmark, the number of persistent-poverty counties increased by 8 percent from the 2000 level.
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Small Town Americans Maintain Astute Policy Priorities; Few Rely on Farming to Make a Living

9/2/2013

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The Center for Rural Affairs asked eight hundred small town Americans what policies would most advance quality of life in their communities. Here's what they said:
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The study also shines new light on a seismic demographic shift that's taken place in small town America over the past half century.
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