New Geography

Tag: Appalachia

  • Bailing out on the Dreamland…And Returning Home

    My father, who was from eastern Kentucky, headed with millions of other Appalachian people for the “promised land” after the great depression. The promised land in that day consisted of cities such as Dayton, Detroit, Gary, and Cincinnati, out of which rose great factories that employed thousands on giant “campuses.” They thrived through the vigor of this transplanted workforce – uneducated like my father but full of gumption, tenacity and work ethic.

    My father tells of begging for a job: when turned down by Personnel, he went running, not walking, to see the foreman who put him “right to work that night.” It was in those factories that my dad and other “immigrants” found good middle-class pay…if little in the way of inspiring work. But, he and the others were not picky, as necessity was the mother of this invention.

    Today the world is different. Many of the workers who left for jobs in other cities are returning home to Appalachia – and not entirely by choice. Many of them are being laid off from the auto factories with little else to turn to but family and ties to “place”.

    This creates a new challenge to areas like Appalachia and my region, eastern Kentucky. These are no longer inevitable geographies of distress; certainly they are no more challenged that those of the former dreamscapes up north around the Great Lakes.

    The media will be slow to see this change. Recently CNN focused on the poorest of the poor in Clay County, Kentucky in ways that fit the media stereotype as a home to the ignorant, the racist and the sexist. They even quoted a Clay County woman who observed that “Hillary’s place was in the home.”

    The media is not the only group stuck on the old images. From Kennedy’s famous tour to LBJ’s announcement of the War on Poverty in 1964 from a front porch in Inez, Kentucky to John McCain’s visit during the primary, the region has proven to be an enigma to presidents and policy makers who abhorred the intractable poverty they saw there. It just wasn’t right that an America of plenty would have that “other” “third” world so resistant to the policies and dollars designed to provide transformation.

    In the past, policies were implemented that alternately featured the fundamental nature of the people – not always flattering – to absentee ownership and the exploitation of its rich minerals by outside interests. Or they reflected radical policies and programs that did not take into account the unusual ties to local culture and the strong sense of place and community – attributes that are not often in line with of the culture of consumerism and national mega-corporate prominence.

    Have we reached a turning point where the peeling away of the onion reveals not a past assessment of red America as epitomized by sound bite depictions but one of lessons that can be learned? We were surprised if not alarmed by a Greenspan who admitted that he too was caught off guard by the crash of 2008. We were lulled into believing that Harvard and Yale graduates really do know more and are smarter than the rest of us. We were lulled into believing that just one more plastic Santa or TV set made in China was going to fill the void in our busy lives.

    Have we turned a corner? My father tells of his father making mandolins to supplement his small income as a dirt farmer. He also tells of crops failing and of meager, if existent, Christmas presents. But each spring this man with ties to the land and place reminds me to “plant my corn when tree buds are the size of squirrel ears.” Now I don’t know the first thing about planting corn or even what a squirrel ear looks like. But as we move through the current crisis and a reassessment of the American Dream, I hear echoes of a desire here not to embrace modernity but to seek a return of front porches; local foods and farms; a desire for something beyond the cold flickering computer screen in the middle of the night; and an understanding that we may have, if not more information, perhaps more wisdom than those who hold themselves out as experts.

    All this will be critical as we consider people returning from the Great Lakes and the big cities back to Appalachia. Rather than seeing them as new victims, or unreconstructed red staters, the Obama Administration needs to regard these people as assets for renewing a part of the country that, always close to last, can begin to fulfill its own potential on its own terms.

    Sylvia L. Lovely is the Executive Director/CEO of the Kentucky League of Cities and the founder and president of the NewCities Institute. She currently serves as chair of the Morehead State University Board of Regents. Please send your comments to slovely@klc.org and visit her blog at sylvia.newcities.org.

  • Auto Bailout: Help Mississippi, Not Michigan

    We should be getting used to the depressing spectacle of once-great corporations begging for assistance from Washington. Yet perhaps nothing is more painful than to see General Motors and other big U.S.-based car companies – once exemplars of both American economic supremacy and middle-class aspirations – fall to such an appalling state.

    Yet if GM represents all that is bad about the American economy, particularly manufacturing, it does not represent the breadth of our industrial landscape. Indeed, even as the dull-witted leviathan sinks, many nimble companies have shown remarkable resiliency.

    These include a series of small and mid-sized firms – in fields as diverse as garments and agricultural machinery, steel and energy equipment – that have managed to thrive in recent years. It also includes a growing contingent of foreign-owned firms, notably in the automobile industry, that have found that “Made in America” is not necessarily uncompetitive, unprofitable or impossible.

    Indeed, until the globalization of the financial crisis, American manufacturing exports were reaching record levels. Overall, U.S. industry has become among the most productive in the world – output has doubled over the past 25 years, and productivity has grown at a rate twice that of the rest of the economy. Far from dead, our manufacturing sector is the world’s largest, with 5% of the world’s population producing five times their share in industrial goods.

    So what is the problem then? If it is not the effort and ingenuity of American workers or our infrastructure, Detroit’s problems must lie somewhere else, largely with almost insanely bad management.

    We have to remember that the Big Three have been losing market share through even the best of times. Their litany of excuses is as tiresome as their product lines. Back in the 1970s it was “cheap” Japanese labor, something that can no longer be cited as an excuse. European car makers, if anything, have even higher wage costs.

    Then there is high gas prices – a good excuse, it appears, back in the 1970s, as well as more recently. But the Detroit auto industry has now had three decades to come up with fuel efficient products that are also fun to drive and reliable. While they have slumbered, the Japanese, Koreans and now the Europeans – with products like the new Volkswagen Jetta – have made enormous strides.

    Now it is the credit crunch, the car makers say. OK. Will increased credit mean that people will suddenly scoop up the same products they have been deserting in droves for decades? Keep in mind that the desertion could get even worse if the congressional greens – led by new Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman – impose stiffer taxes on gas, which will hurt the guzzlers that have generated most of Big Three profits.

    So why the push to bail out the Big Three? It’s basically about regional politics. The deindustrializing states of California and New York may not care much, but the big car companies’ operations are overwhelmingly concentrated in the politically volatile Great Lakes region, an area that proved decisive in President-elect Obama’s victory. Another big reason may be that up to 240,000 jobs in Illinois, the nation’s new political epicenter, are tied to the big automakers.

    Sadly, dependence on the Big Three has had long-term tragic results for this entire region. Between 2000 and 2007 – before the onset of the financial crisis – the nation’s largest percentage losses of manufacturing jobs were concentrated in Big Three bastions like Detroit, Warren-Farmington Hills, Saginaw, Flint and Cleveland. In the five years before the onset of the financial crisis, Michigan alone had lost one-third of its auto manufacturing jobs. Now that figure is up to half.

    Worse still has been the psychological dependency that has grown from this troubled relationship. By their very nature, declining businesses – particularly unionized ones – tend to protect their older members and encrusted bureaucracies more than they look to the future. This also creates a political environment where the incentive is not to spur innovation, but to protect the already established.

    Michigan, for example, has met the challenge of its Big Three habit with a combination of farce and failure. Under the clueless leadership of its governor, Jennifer Granholm, the state first hoped its “cool cities” program would keep young, educated workers close to home. After that failed to work, the governor then pushed the highest tax boost in state history, a reliable job-killer.

    So let us be clear. It did not take a world financial crisis to sink Michigan; it was getting there very well on its own. Nearly one in three residents, according to a July 2006 Detroit News poll, believe that Michigan is “a dying state.” Two in five of the state’s residents under 35 said they were seriously considering leaving the state.

    Fortunately, the Big Three do not represent the entire picture of American manufacturing. Even within the Great Lakes region, Wisconsin, which ranks second in per capita employment in manufacturing, has held onto most of its industrial employment due to its large, highly diversified base of smaller-scale specialized manufacturers.

    If Congress and President Obama want to figure out how to restart our industrial economy, they need to travel not to Detroit but to an alternative universe that includes the South and Appalachia, where most of the new foreign-owned auto manufacturers have clustered. States like Alabama, with the second-largest per capita concentration of auto-related jobs, as well as South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia and Mississippi, have been growing these high-wage jobs for a new generation. In the process, they have brought unprecedented opportunity to some of the nation’s historically poorest regions.

    Nor are these states looking to remain mere assembly centers. For example, they have launched bold new research initiatives, such as the recently formed International Automotive Research Center at Clemson University, which offers the nation’s only Ph.D. in automotive engineering, to make their region a major center of technological innovation for the industry. And the fact that the region will likely be producing the majority of the most low-mileage and low-emission cars certainly cannot hurt their future prospects.

    However, it is also critical to see beyond merely autos. If you look at the period between 2000 and 2007, as we did at the Praxis Strategy Group, much of the fastest growth in manufacturing was taking place in areas tied to energy production like Midland and Longview, Texas, and Morgantown, W.Va., all of which enjoyed 15% or more increases in manufacturing jobs. Already states like Arkansas, Alabama, Iowa and Mississippi boast more per capita industrial jobs than either Michigan or Ohio.

    Another strong performer has been the Great Plains. Places like Dubuque, Iowa, and Fargo and Grand Forks, N.D., experienced substantial growth in industrial jobs during the past decade. The base here, as in Wisconsin, is highly diverse and includes agricultural and construction equipment, electronics as well as a burgeoning sector in the renewable fuels sector, such as LM Glasfibre, a Danish firm with a large operation in Grand Forks. Washington state has been another bright spot, powered by Boeing and other manufacturers attracted to its low-cost, low-emission hydropower.

    If the country is serious about enhancing U.S. industrial might – as it should be – it might want to ask executives and entrepreneurs in these areas, as well as foreign investors, what they need to keep growing and expanding exports. There is clearly a demonstrated global market for Boeing airplanes and Caterpillar construction and agricultural machinery, as well as a host of high-tech and fashion-related products now being churned out in factories scattered across the country.

    The people running these firms should be those at the congressional hearings, not the pathetic losers from companies like General Motors. They might even have some helpful ideas, like streamlining regulations, investing in critical infrastructure and research facilities, expanding support for training a new generation of skilled blue collar workers and using incentives to encourage firms to improve their energy efficiency. These are the steps we can expect our competitors in Europe, Asia and the developing world to take as well.

    Rather than looking for ways to bail out the most egregious serial failures, let us find ways to provide incentives for those successful at creating new jobs and saving existing ones.

    This article originally appeared at Forbes.com.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History and is finishing a book on the American future.

  • Bailout or Just in Time Delivery?

    Toyota is careful in its ways; it didn’t get where it is today by idly locating manufacturing plants. And, so it chose Georgetown, Ky. – 12 miles north of Lexington on I-75 – for the location of its first and largest U.S. plant. It was followed in the ensuing years by numerous other foreign auto plants locating in the South – BMW, Mercedes, Saturn, Hyundai and yet another Toyota (in Mississippi).

    Why, you may ask, did they come to the South? The easy answer is that they came for cheaper land and labor. They were also drawn by large and much criticized tax incentive packages as the South decided – value judgments aside – to get in the game and establish a manufacturing base to replace the sagging agriculturally based small farm economy. Here in Kentucky, the less than bright future for tobacco was ample motivation for welcoming Toyota.

    But I believe there is more to this move. They came also for laborers eager to find the good paying auto jobs that had escaped the South for too long. The influx reversed a trend of Southerners leaving for the great factories of the North as my father did 60 years ago as he fled Appalachian Kentucky for Dayton, Ohio.

    Also, contrary to East Coast “attitudes” they came for another reason – the work ethic common to this region. In Kentucky workers from 116 of its 120 counties were hired when Toyota began operations – 7,000 strong. They wanted to work, and were willing to move, commute, or hitchhike for the opportunities. Just as importantly, Toyota created a new employment strategy of hiring a “cushion” of temporary employees to insulate full-time employees from the impact of an eventual economic downturn.

    This image contrasts that of Southerners – particularly those in Appalachia – as generally lazy, fat, dumb, happy, pregnant, barefoot, toothless, racist, sexist or any combination thereof. Speaking of lazy, we can thank Gary Tuchman and CNN for the latest contribution to stereotyping our Commonwealth when they chose to find poor sad people on a front porch in Clay County Ky., to enunciate in butchered English their discouragement with the state of the world.

    So when we hear about the bailouts, first for the financial industry and now the Detroit-based U.S. auto industry, we have reason for skepticism. Our auto industry – that is the generally healthy industry created by Japanese, Korean and German manufacturers – doesn’t seem on the bailout list. Neither do our local banks. They’re not too big to fail and not stupid enough to follow the lead of Wall Street.

    Of course, we don’t want to see any part of America fail, including Detroit. According to one Toyota executive, the webbing of the auto industry is so intertwined that the failure of the U.S. auto industry would bring down the entire house of cards, including the supplier plants that Toyota and other “new age” manufacturing plants call “just in time delivery” facilities.

    But others do see the bailout as undermining a trend that favors efficiency in manufacturing – and the wise investment Toyota and other companies have made in developing smaller, more fuel-efficient cars. Still others are baffled about what they would do if it was their congressional vote. The global economy has grown complex in many ways. Among the most vexing issues are those surrounding present and future government involvement in private companies.

    Ultimately we wonder what the attitude of the new administration will be toward Kentucky and the South. Kentucky in particular stood out once again with early poll closings, to be declared “red,” by a large percentage as it went to McCain. Obama tiptoed only once into the state, and that was in “blue” Louisville. He made no effort to win us over as Kennedy and Clinton had in earlier presidential campaigns. We will soon learn if he remains true to his rhetoric that proclaims that we are neither “red” nor “blue” but one America.

    There’s much our new President could do for this part of the world. The mega car factories might show what our workforce is capable of but they have not been enough to reverse our relatively low per capita incomes. New investments – roads, waterways, freight rail lines, skills training – could help lift our region up even further. We just hope that the new President realizes that all of America will benefit if the South can build on its automotive industry success to achieve a much broader prosperity.

    Sylvia L. Lovely is the Executive Director/CEO of the Kentucky League of Cities and the founder and president of the NewCities Institute. She currently serves as chair of the Morehead State University Board of Regents. Please send your comments to slovely@klc.org and visit her blog at sylvia.newcities.org.

  • The Geography of Change: Election 2008

    As an old radical Democrat, I remained fearful that this fall would see another 2000 and 2004. But instead there was a massive shift of perhaps 10 million votes, or about 7 percent to the Democratic side.

    Yet in some ways the “red” and “blue” map of results doesn’t look very different than in the past – a vast interior sea of red, although close inspection reveals some important shifts from red to blue. But the second map, of change – 2008 compared to 2004, is astounding: now a sea of blue across the North and West (except for the Arizona due home state effect). There was also a fascinating (Bible?) belt of counties that became redder than in 2004, if that were possible, from Appalachia, the southwest tip of PA, through WV, TN and northern AL, then west across the border South through TN, AR, ands OK.

    The 2008 election clearly reinforced and amplified some trends already apparent in 2006, a Democratic ascendancy based first in large metropolitan areas, but now extending far into suburbia and even exurbia, and dominated by an intellectual and professional class, and second, traditional racial and ethnic minority areas, urban or rural.

    Now these are joined by a third group, a dramatically larger Obama vote from the under thirty, and probably enough to have shifted several critical states – CO, IN, IA, NH, NC and VA – the Democrats. The three groups overlap, of course. Except in those anomalous border states, the relative shift was about the same in rural small-town America as in the large metropolitan areas. However, the turnout certainly increased more for minorities and for the under-30 than for us white non-Hispanic adults. Frankly, along with other political geography experts, I underestimated the likelihood of the shift to the Democrats of VA, NC and IN.

    There are some fascinating details. First is the amazing success of Obama in counties dominated by colleges and universities, with switches in strongly Republican Whitman county in Washington (home of Washington State), or Gallatin, MT (Montana State, Bozeman) and Monongalia (Univ. West Virginia), or Tippecanoe (Purdue University), IN, and dozens of others. Second is the shift of many metropolitan core, suburban and exurban counties to Obama, including in California Ventura, San Bernardino, Riverside and San Diego (truly amazing), as well as Reno (Washoe), NV; Orlando (Orange), FL; Houston (Harris); TX; Birmingham, AL; and Raleigh, NC. Perhaps the most unusual were the switch of very long time Republican strongholds as Omaha NE, Cincinnati, OH, and Grand Rapids, MI. Third, Democrats also continued to carry even more counties with environmental in-migration, especially in the west.

    We may have seen a historic shift from the baby-boomer generation to a newer Millennial generation. But the Democrats should remember from 1994 that the American electorate is centrist, and any supposed realignment is fragile.

    Richard Morrill is Professor Emeritus of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Washington. His research interests include: political geography (voting behavior, redistricting, local governance), population/demography/settlement/migration, urban geography and planning, urban transportation (i.e., old fashioned generalist)

    Election maps courtesy of Mark Newman, Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan

  • Bringing Hope to Red America

    In the end Appalachia remained out of sync with much of America this year. West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and much of the hill country went for John McCain. Senator’s Obama’s message of “hope” did not play as well here as elsewhere.

    This may seem a bit odd. The major targets of the election were Joe six-pack, Joe the plumber; Joe the ordinary man. Joe represented the disaffected males, the lost ones yearning for a simpler time and a better time. Enough Joes in other states voted for Obama to get him a spectacular victory in places like Ohio, Florida and Michigan.

    But no one thought much of Joe the coal miner and not much thought has been given to what this election means to the many “Joes” who live in Appalachia. For too many generations, our Joes have either hunkered down and worked the coalfields, or eked out a meager living on rocky hillside terrain. Many survive on the cash economy, tinkering as best they could to put together a living. My father tells me his grandfather made mandolins to supplement his farm earnings and played them at family gatherings. He describes his upbringing as poor, but happy.

    There were town centers where, as my dad put it, families would come to “trade” on the weekends. Baseball teams formed and played in the circuit of small towns. I once saw a 1914 picture of my grandfather as a member of one of those teams – called the Mize Nine. Today you could not get nine people together in Mize, now barely a wide place in the road.

    It is a world where the much discussed disappearance of the middle class didn’t apply because it never existed. Like my father, many of them left for the factories of the north in the 40s and 50s. The culture was and is a story of unparalleled literary and artistic musical strength, but little in the way of jobs outside of coal.

    Appalachian people were sometimes portrayed during the primary as racist, ignorant and pathetic. Appalachian towns like Inez, Kentucky – the site of LBJ’s proclamation of the war on poverty in 1964 – were visited and heralded as the towns to be rescued – only to once again be left behind.

    In an era of demand for change, what can be expected of or for Appalachia? It is a land where minerals are king and largely owned by outside interests. It has resisted change and remains ridden with poverty and an image that defies change even in the face of success – and there are some success stories in Appalachia.

    Barack Obama is the candidate known for his message of hope. He is known for his soaring speeches that lift us up. But, he is a Chicago kind of guy and seems to grasp the need to pay attention to the big cities and surrounding regions where 75 percent of Americans will likely live in the year 2050.

    But, “hope” also applies to places like Appalachia. We don’t need to be caricatured in the national media as pathetic, poor and somehow outside the brave new world.

    Yet we should not expect that help will come from Washington and solve the problem. It is dawning on all of us that what is big and glittery may not be what we seek. The environmental, energy and fiscal crises have converged to drive home what Katrina only began – the need for a realignment of our priorities.

    Those priorities are not fundamentally about big new investments in infrastructure or Washington support for improved education. Those would be welcome, but the change that will work long-term comes from the local level, from the ability of smaller places to reinvent themselves.

    I see some signs of this. Places that were left behind or written off are coming alive once recalling the early days of the Mize Nine as we seek to build locally what is beyond our scale in those more glamorous venues.

    Being “left behind” is something that implies that others must reach out and provide the rescue. In Inez, the people are speaking and they are saying we will take control of our own destiny. We want to write a new story that transcends poverty and the painting of images by the 24 hour news outlets. Perhaps, instead of trying to catch-up, these places can leap forward to lead the way toward local prosperity and a better quality of life. Will we in Appalachia now finally make the intentional choices to secure a better future or will we continue to let others tell our story of woe and misery?

    The truth is that the story won’t change if we don’t begin to write and tell our own stories. As the new administration grapples with the many issues it faces – health care, energy and fiscal distress to name just a few – it should remember the words of Colin Powell: “All villages matter.” Small places – and big ones – do not need Washington to save them, just to acknowledge that they are important and deserving in their own way.

    So, as President-elect Obama looks to the future, he should grasp the opportunity that is upon us to build great communities in all corners of the nation under the new rules of the game of the 21st century. Appalachia may not have voted with him, but we are still part of his constituency; “red” America, as he suggested last night, is still part of his America.

    Our new President needs to realize – as do we – that the tired old policies of Washington will not work any longer – “handouts” have never been the answer. And, as one voter here said: “We intend to hold Obama accountable in his presidency.” She paused before adding: “And, we expect him to hold us accountable as well.”

    Sylvia L. Lovely is the Executive Director/CEO of the Kentucky League of Cities and the founder and president of the NewCities Institute. Please send your comments to slovely@klc.org and visit her blog at sylvia.newcities.org.