Fading scenes: Small towns lose identities to changes in population
07/15/2001
By Todd J. Gillman / The Dallas Morning News
Pastures get paved. A ranch becomes someone's back yard. Sewer lines go in. Somewhere along the way comes a strip mall, a fast-food joint, maybe a lawyer's office. From the Rockies to suburban Atlanta, urban refugees are filling in the empty places, turning quaint villages into icons of sprawl and sleepy close-knit places into boomtowns.
At the same time, in vast stretches of middle America, many small towns are watching young families and jobs drift away. Driven by stagnant wages and a dull farm economy, lured by opportunity and easy access to doctors and malls, millions of people fled rural communities in the last decade.
Roughly one in four Americans, or 69.5 million people, lives in towns of fewer than 10,000 or in rural areas around them, the latest census showed. More than half of small-town residents lived within an urban shadow, where many dread the development they see coming their way.
At each extreme, civic leaders and old-timers wrestle with a common challenge: how to maintain a town's character.
Small-Town America: Changes and challenges
Through Hollywood's lens, in small towns there's always an apple pie on the windowsill or someone itching to escape the tedium. Real life is rarely so idyllic or bleak. But often, the pace really is slower in small-town America. Everyone does know everyone. It's why people stay, why they leave and why they move in.
While some towns struggle to attract new industry and keep a town square alive, others try to slam the brakes on growth, as roads, sewers and schools strain under the load of new homes and families.
"There's this feeling that a small town is a small town is a small town but ... if there's thousands of acres of wheat, it's very different than if there's thousands of acres of typical suburban houses," said Census Bureau geographer Mike Ratcliffe.
'The vitality's gone'
The exodus from rural America has gone on for decades. Nowadays, more people grew up in small towns than still live in them, by some estimates.
"I don't think there's too many places anymore where people feel comfortable leaving their doors unlocked," said landscape architect Elizabeth Brabec, author of Rural by Design: Maintaining Small Town Character and a professor at the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment.
Areas dependent on agriculture have been hit hardest. Every county in western North Dakota and eastern Montana lost population in the last decade. In parts of western Kansas and the Dakotas, the population peaked in the '90s Ð the 1890s.
But in the booming suburbs of Atlanta, Dallas and Denver, other small towns are reeling, not from stagnation but from a flood of urban and suburban refugees who strain the roads, sewers and schools.
Double- and triple-digit growth in places such as Collin and Denton counties offsets losses elsewhere, reversing the nationwide hemorrhage of population from small-town America in the 1990s. Frisco, for instance, outgrew the small-town category with a sprint from 6,141 to 33,714 people.
"Conditions out there run from desperation to thriving," said Iowa State University sociologist Paul Lasley, an expert on rural development and attitudes. "There are communities that are dying Ð people are still living there, but the vitality's gone. There's no new investment; they talk about what they used to have, not what the future holds."
The changes, up and down, reflect a national transformation, and they have profound implications for single parents, low-income workers, children, seniors and policy-makers.
"For the places that are remote, the issue of economic development is absolutely paramount. How do you get investment in your community, and along with that, how do you stabilize the population?" said Thomas L. Daniels, an expert in small-town planning and author of When City and Country Collide: Managing Growth in the Metropolitan Fringe. "On the urban fringe, you have major issues of growth management. How do you accommodate the people who are coming, while hanging on to the open space, the farmland, the forest, the clean water, the clean air? How do you maintain your identity?
"You can't just shut the door and tell people to go away."
Home sweet home
People from small towns often look back with nostalgia.
Take Harris Vaughan, a marketing and public relations executive. He grew up in a place named for Adam and Eve's garden: Edenton, N.C., a riverside town of 5,000. Quiet, safe, picturesque, even a bit boring. Home.
When it came time for college, he moved to Raleigh. He misses Edenton, but unless he wants to build fishing boats, there's nothing for him there. "With size comes more cultural opportunities and more educational opportunities. I have a daughter and that's important to me," said Mr. Vaughan, 29, whose dad, a peanut broker, is mayor back home.
"But it's a good and bad thing. I don't know if I'm going to be as willing and able to let her go out on her bike and explore the world. You can still do that in Edenton."
Boomtowns typically have lakes or mountain vistas or are within commuting distance of big-city jobs. Places blessed both with beauty and convenience get a double dose of growth. Four of the five fastest-growing nonurban counties nationwide are near Denver. The town of Dallas, Ga., on the fringes of Atlanta, spiked 80 percent in the 1990s, to 5,056. Demographers note similar "hypergrowth" in the Texas Hill Country, the Ozarks and the lake regions of Minnesota and Wisconsin.
"Amenities and urban accessibility explain a lot of the high growth," said geographer John Cromartie of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service.
Is it progress?
But growth is not necessarily progress.
"The places that are exploding ... they may be exploding so much they're going to pieces. In 20 years, they won't be recognizable to anyone who grew up there," said David Wharton at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, who has written about small-town life in Texas and elsewhere.
Losing that small-town intimacy would be tragic, he said.
"You have very little privacy. Everybody's sticking their nose in your business. ... There is a claustrophobia," Dr. Wharton said. But there's also a powerful flip side: "People really care about each other. ... I think it's meaningful to know the people you live with, for good and bad. It provides you an anchor, a place that you can think of as real."
Cities, however, have become the nation's economic engines, and urban areas grew twice as fast in the 1990s as nonurban areas. Last week, the U.S. Conference of Mayors reported that the top 319 metropolitan areas accounted for 86 percent of the nation's economic growth in the 1990s; that output from the 10 biggest cities outranked the combined output of 31 states; and that nearly all the new jobs created were in cities.
Nationwide, census figures show, there are 21,594 places with populations of fewer than 10,000. Of those, 8,607 are inside metropolitan areas; they account for 23.7 million people. The rest, with 17.1 million people, lie outside urban areas.
Three-fourths of the nation's small towns have fewer than 2,500 people. Nine out of 10 have fewer than 5,000. And history is not on the small town's side.
Many settlements in the Great Plains sprung up in the late 19th century to serve farms. They went up every five miles or so, a reasonable distance by horse. Bigger towns came every 30 miles as train stops. Now, farms are mechanized, and people drive. The Plains have been dying since World War I.
"There's a large number of places now where you drop through the levels of population that will support given facilities and services and business. So many places have lost their hospital, maybe their nursing home. Some, in extreme cases, have even lost their drugstore," said Calvin Beale, a USDA senior demographer who has studied small towns and counties for decades. "The people in the northern Plains, they really are concerned about what the future holds."
Some stay put
Many factors keep people where they were born: a sense of belonging, a family business, a lack of money to move, an aging parent. Many others push them away: hard-to-find social services, lack of retirement options, the hour's drive to a pediatrician.
But all too often, planning experts say, small towns are so eager for investment that they don't plan ahead. Strip malls are commonplace on the outskirts of boomburb and decaying town alike. Yet they often bring congestion and suck business out of downtown, leaving a town with a hollow center and an ugly fringe.
"When people move to a community, they move for the way it looks at a particular time, not for what they think it will look like in 20 years," said Samuel R. Staley, an urban planning expert at the Los Angeles-based Reason Public Policy Institute, a Libertarian think tank.
Dr. Staley knows well the challenges of small-town evolution. He grew up in Bellbrook, Ohio, a 9,500-resident bedroom community of Dayton, and now leads its planning board. Forty years ago, the town was a quarter of its current size, and Future Farmers of America was the biggest activity for children like him.
"We all have a place in our soul or our heart where we long for how things ought to be," he said. "But most people today don't have any recollection of living in a small town, and there are fewer and fewer Mayberrys out there."
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