You hardly notice the psychopaths after a while. It's the wind in the winter that gets you.
Vermont? Western Mass? Big chunks of Native land?
Vermont is a good example. And Native lands. I suppose most of New Mexico?
I'm looking at Vermont. It went 66% for Biden. Clearly northern Vermont looks pretty red.
Here's a population density map of Vermont, which looks an awful lot like the 2020 election result map.
Massachusetts definitely has rural blue parts, though.
New Mexico has some blue parts that are rural, but also some clear correlations.
Anyway, I don't want to live in rural Kansas and you can't make me.
I'm not sure about the cheap houses everywhere. The house I grew up in is now worth about $300,000. It's a very nice house. I suppose they replaced the textured carpets at some point. But that's still 10x the median household income for the town.
Here's the thing though, it's not just rural Kansas. There's tons of *cities* that are at like half their peak population or worse. There's abandoned houses in Rochester and Kansas City and Cleveland.
I mean, I'm in a city that is half its peak population. But some of that loss leaves no empty houses because it's due to smaller household size.
Maybe we should have healthy immigration policies that welcome people internationally into these communities and help them establish robust networks and support for themselves?
The NY Times "extremely detailed" map of the 2020 election shows by smallest available unit for each state so you cans see some finer detail (A few states do not have that data available).
Main blue rural areas: A lot of Vermont, Western Mass, Native lands, some black majority southern counties, some Hispanic border counties, various desirable location white people places--Colorado mountains, California coasts beyond the cities
But yeah, rural blue areas are The Black Belt in the deep south, areas with large Native populations (esp. in AK, AZ, NM, SD), Western New England, and the Driftless region of Wisconsin and Iowa (that last one has moved sharply right very recently, but is still left of other rural areas).
I wouldn't mind living in the Rio Grande Valley, except that my Spanish isn't fluent (yet). It would definitely put me in the immigrant-experience situation, which would be new. I've never been in the minority for that extended a length of time.
Are the rural blue areas experiencing the same population decline problems as the rural red areas are? I realize a lot of them are high-poverty areas, and people might be leaving due to that, but I'm still curious.
The rich, white outdoors places are relatively Biden in l a lot of different places. The little chunk of West Virginia where I have daydreamed a cabin/2nd home went for Biden by 3.2%. Surrounding election districts: Trump by 22,42, 50, 61, 61, 70, 76, 80, 80, 87. The last one was 236 Trump, 16 Biden.
13: and the Driftless region of Wisconsin and Iowa (that last one has moved sharply right very recently, but is still left of other rural areas).
Similarly for the Mesabi range/Lake Superior shore of Minnesota.
5: Certain suburbs are liberal and Boston, Laurence (poor city) and Lowell are liberal. I'm not sure about Springfield. Some suburbs are liberal on Social issues and string technocratic Democrats. Others went for Trump in 2016. On certain issues, Western MA is way more liberal. It may be hippy-types. I do know that there are more pockets of support for single payer there than elsewhere.
Now who's high on the fu-gee-la??
Also what does it mean to grow as easily as the milo?
20: I was just thinking about it, because they are trying to settle a bunch in MA, and it is so damn expensive, and then I see the government sending 8 Afghan refugee families to Mississippi or Alanama (I can't remember which) and thinking those people are going to be so isolated from their culture.
Like most people, I'll inherit bits of farmland in very red areas. I'm trying to decide what do to about it.
22: I mostly meant 11 in the "and a pony!" sense of wishful thinking that we could invest $$ into helping people properly, instead of half-assing things in this country.
So, AIHMHB, a sinkhole opened up literally across the street, in the middle of town, across from from of my childhood best friend's house. Six houses have either been swallowed or demolished thus far.
The owners of those six houses cannot discharge the land in any way. It's insane. The city won't take it, because they don't want the liability. They're stuck paying insurance and taxes for this land forever, or until the sinkhole stabilizes and grows over and people start to think of it as a natural area with some worth again. Maybe in 100 years?
(I can't remember the details, so I can't fend off questions, but it's been well over a year, and none of them have yet found a way to stop owning the land.)
What's wrong with just not paying the taxes?
I'd have to ask my friend, because I can't remember the logic. But basically, you'd accumulate tax-debt and the city would not take the property as they would other abandoned property. It's almost as though they'd consider it destroyed, and only come after your other assets.
That's me ret-conning the logic. I truly don't actually remember what it was.
You karst always get what you want.
That's a stretch but I appreciate it.
Anyway, I don't think they can come after your other assets here.
Milo is a cereal grain, and according to where it's grown, is also known as sorghum.
It's a good way to attract birds. Most game birds can or won't eat uncracked corn.
31: Yeah, I thought there would be something better with "cast" but nothing I came up with really fit.
The thing about free land is that good corn land is really expensive right now. So, you have a house but you need like two sections to make a living and that's several million dollars.
Seems like for the sinkhole properties, you'd try to get some kind of reassessment or abatement on the property value. There's no house (destroyed), and the land is unbuildable with the sinkhole there, so the value ought to be very low.
I think that is true. But it's still annoying that you can't get rid of it. And maybe the liability insurance is high? I don't know.
Just get a sign that says "haunted" and a motion-activated tape player with a spooky sounds tape.
Not precisely on-topic, but the latest Anne Helen Peterson post goes into the costs of ranching.
Buying a 328 acre ranch for millions of dollars to start a direct to consumer beef business is not normal. For many reasons, the first of which is that the kind of direct to consumer beef business you can run on 328 acres is not going to cover the many costs of living on the land. I don't know how Ballerina Farm finishes their cows, I don't know what their exact costs are, I have no idea how much of their ranch can be grazed. But I do know there's no cow/calf calculator that spits out a number that makes Ballerina Farm work as a profitable business. Even with an efficient breed like Angus, they'd need much cheaper land. Their Berkshire pigs will help a bit, but not enough. They take about 200 days to get from birth to market. And the pigs' food costs money before they can become food that costs money.
Do you mind if we geek out about land prices and cattle costs really quick? Because I don't know enough about their business, I can't tell exactly how much they could make off cattle and pigs in a year where everything went exactly right. But on average, you can have 100-150 cattle on a ranch their size. If you were selling one hundred cows a year? After you deduct the cost of feed, pasture maintenance, breeding, vet costs, machine hire, processing and everything else, you might make anywhere between $35k and $60k a year. With $60k being at the very bonkers high end.
Net profit on a cow is $600 (at, "the very bonkers high end")? I did not realize it was that bad.
They eat corn and even on sale it's like $.79 a can.
The abandoned semi-urban places I know best are at the southern tip of Illinois and scattered through Ohio, though I haven't been back to OH in 10 years.
East St Louis is a trip-- it's where many primarily Mexican hispanics live because cheaper than St Louis itself, but in 2019 I don't think there was city-sponsored trash pickup if you just lived there, your building (or you) had to pay a contractor. This is what progress looks like there
44: I'm in a middle-class suburb, and we don't have town trash pick up. We pay for it or take our stuff to the transfer station ourselves.
I would love to have trash pickup but for some reason that is a private sector thing here.
Looks like there are some Afghan refugees headed for Akron this year.
I have a pretty naive question about rural living-- water. Small settlements don't have sewer or water lines, right? So rusty septic tanks and wells? OK for a few houses, but a village of a few hundred? And if there are commercial animals, pigs especially-- how does that work, does anyone know? That is, if well water is found unusable what happens next? I know the answer if the settlement is black and in the south. I'd guess as with lots of other health outcomes, the countryside is a health risk?
The well water in most of the Midwest is fine. Even some houses in towns will have their own well. They don't let the pigs poop in the toilet, so a septic tank works fine. Village housing is really spread out so it's fine regardless. Animal waste is a huge problem. Don't drink from surface water.
Yay, Vermont is on-topic!
Here's a population density map of Vermont, which looks an awful lot like the 2020 election result map.
Heh, kinda, I guess? The NYT link is paywalled for me but judging by this the correlation looks weak. Biden did worst in the smallest county and best in the biggest, but that's about all you can say. Biden also carried the second-smallest, his margin in some small or medium counties is very close to to his margin in the largest...
Are the rural blue areas experiencing the same population decline problems as the rural red areas are?
Vermont's population has been growing, but not as much as Nebraska or Kansas in the past three decades, and most of Vermont's growth has been in Chittenden County. Don't have the time for more meaningful research than that right now.
It's kind of weird talking about population density in Vermont because there are basically no unincorporated areas. I knew some places worked differently but I didn't know the Northeastern US was basically the only region of the US like this. I grew up in a town with a population of about 2,000 people spread out over 45 square miles - maybe 2 square miles of a downtown area with a few cross streets, stores, churches, offices, and a school, and then 43+ square miles of rural roads. When I try to find comparisons for it in the midwest, I have to choose between places with a nominal density of a thousand people per square mile and places with no names at all, no middle ground.
Re: the houses in the sinkholes, is it illegal to sell them to a private buyer? Or just impossible to find a buyer willing to pay something close to what they were worth before the sinkhole? The two situations seems very different.
47.1: Good. Northeast Ohio has infrastructure and needs people, and it's not like the weather here is notably shittier than Afghanistan.
45. How is dumping enforcement? Are there nice parks near the edge of town? There's a weight limit on free dumping here, I'd like to pay for a camera on the road between the light industrial are at the edge of my town and the creekside park 1 km from it.
There's a civic-minded Philly trash man who nags and cajoles to try to get extreme disasters cleaned up, he somehow wrangles the truck when there's a set of volunteers to load it. He chronicles the good fight on insta, 30k followers, yafavtrashman.
In East St Louis it's quite bad, rats the size of cats at night.
50. Many Bosnians resettled in St Louis in the nineties. Vacants turned to a nice neighborhood now. The hostility to Mosques has mostly been rock throwing and the like, no call to prayer, but no arson either. https://www.google.com/maps/uv?pb=!1s0x87d8b41dc2e86be9%3A0xf04e9ad2baa81973!3m1!7e115!15sCgIgAQ
Re: the houses in the sinkholes, is it illegal to sell them to a private buyer? Or just impossible to find a buyer willing to pay something close to what they were worth before the sinkhole? The two situations seems very different.
Impossible to find a buyer. No one wants the liability.
I'm in the corner of NH that is near Vermont and Western Mass and we surf the line between our hippie neighbors and the conservatives who are in our own state, but are mostly on the other side of a big mountain. A lot of blue towns in the area have been trending red - and many have crossed over - but there are still a number of blue stalwarts that are going strong.
Does this land even have road access?
Henry George, heavily ellipticized:
Imagine a vast, unbounded savanna, stretching off in endless sameness. Every acre seems as good as any other. There is no difference in location, fertility, or water. Perplexed by this embarrassment of riches, [settlers] stop somewhere, anywhere, and make themselves a home.
The soil is virgin and rich, the game abundant, the streams flash with trout. What they have would make them rich -- if only they were among others. Instead, they are very poor. To say nothing of their mental cravings, which would lead them to welcome the sorriest of strangers, they labor under all the disadvantages of solitude. For any work requiring a union of strength, they are limited to their own family. Their children can have no schooling, unless they pay the full salary of a teacher. Anything they cannot produce, they must buy in quantity to keep on hand -- or go without.
Soon, though, other immigrants arrive. Conditions improve immediately for the earlier pioneers. Many things that were once impossible are now practical. Labor now has an effectiveness that it could never approach in the solitary state. If heavy work is to be done, the community -- working together -- accomplish in a day what would have required years alone.
Together they hire a schoolmaster. All their children are taught for a fraction of what it would have cost the first settler. Occasionally, a passing lecturer opens up a glimpse of the world of science, art, or literature. And finally comes the circus, talked of for months before. Children, whose horizon had been only the prairie, now visit the realms of imagination: princes and princesses, lions and tigers, camels and elephants.
The land yields no more wheat or potatoes than before -- but it does yield far more of the necessities and comforts of life. The presence of others -- the growth of population -- has raised the productiveness of labor in these other things. This added productivity confers superiority over land of equal natural quality where there are no settlers.
I have a pretty naïve question about rural living-- water. Small settlements don't have sewer or water lines, right? So rusty septic tanks and wells? OK for a few houses, but a village of a few hundred? And if there are commercial animals, pigs especially-- how does that work, does anyone know?
All but the smallest Vermont towns have sewer systems downtown. Outside the downtown area (what would probably be called unincorporated in other parts of the country; it sounds so exotic to me), the minimum residential lot size is 4 acres in most of the state. If you can't get a decent well or spring on a lot that size, something weird is going on. I don't know the details of commercial utilities.
Cassandane's parents live in a rural California town, near wine country, near but not in some unincorporated areas. They have water districts and fire department districts overlapping with the town and the unincorporated area and people pay something like taxes to support them. I assume there's something similar for other services but I don't know.
55: Pittsburgh used to have Georgian property taxes until we had to stop because it meant rich old fucks had to pay more.
The thing about it being costly to be alone is why setting was mostly done in groups in the plains. Or near the railroad.
Are the rural blue areas experiencing the same population decline problems as the rural red areas are? I realize a lot of them are high-poverty areas, and people might be leaving due to that, but I'm still curious.
Mostly no. As others have noted these are mostly non-white, high-poverty populations, which typically have high birthrates that offset the also-high outmigration rates. (Although migration is a two-way street, and people who go to the city often can't make it work and end up migrating back. We see this a lot in Alaska.) Hispanic northern NM might be an exception, as it often is.
My grandfather migrated to the city when the Dust Bowl hit and migrated back when the Great Depression happened.
The rural Black Belt is definitely losing population, presumably mostly to nearby urban areas like Atlanta. Here's an article about Alabama.
And here's an article on population decline in the Mississippi Delta. (Recall that the Mississippi Delta famously sparkles like a national guitar as you are flying into Memphis, and is utterly unrelated to the Mississippi River Delta in Louisiana.)
But "the Mississippi alluvial plain, shining like a national guitar" just doesn't scan, so we're stuck with it forever now.
"Put on my blue suede shoes
And I boarded the plane
Touched down in the land of the Alluvial Plain Blues
In the middle of the pouring rain."
It just doesn't work.
60, 61: Huh, interesting. I was thinking mostly of Native areas and regions along the Mexican border, but it makes sense that the demographics would be different in the Black Belt.
Just make the song about walking in New Orleans.
Not to mention Alluvial Plain Airlines. The plain/plane confusion is enough to make it unworkable.
The Mississippi Delta is fascinating to me because its basically a rift valley filled in with silt.
I think the population decline in the rural black belt has been going on for basically 100 years. Like here's an article about decline since 1970, but then before that you're in the Great Migration.
Though it's a little confusing because all the data I'm seeing for the Great Migration is about *percentages* and not numbers. Even in the deep south the number of Black residents grew slowly even as the percentage of all residents was rapidly decreasing, but I think if you combine that small growth with large moves from the rural south to the urban south that there's a significant decrease of population in the rural deep south during the Great Migration.
It's pretty impressive that you have a google alert that sends you a message whenever someone uses that number.
Anyway, maybe I'll go be a farmer. We have only one cousin left who farms. Someone needs to do it and he wants to retire in five years.
The tractors practically drive themselves.
So you can be on ketamine the whole time.
I'm making a hay roll from the k-hole.
In other country news, can we talk about Canada? The blockade in Ottawa is almost two weeks old. The treatment of the protestors by the police has been appallingly different than other recent protests especially the Indigenous protestors in BC. And now a major border crossing is blocked.
You're Canadian right? But from a different part?
The Sarnia crossing is easier to access anyway.
Seems to me that blockading a border crossing is a classic act of war.
Canada should remind people that they are violating the interstate commerce clause.
They've called for the dissolution of the House of Commons and proposed forming a junta underneath the Governor General and the Senate. They've blocked the main road to the airport now. Meanwhile, ex-cops & military officers have set up two supply camps in two parking lots surrounding the downtown area. Apparently sedition and setting up (what are rumoured to be) armed camps in the capital is like, something we have to tolerate? Or we'll make the seditionists really, really mad? I don't know.
proposed forming a junta underneath the Governor General and the Senate.
Such patriots!
I mean, the governor general is probably some ancient bore, right?
Oh and also they're setting up their own pantomime law enforcement system. With sworn officers and everything! Looks a lot like a militia. And I cannot overemphasize how unconcerned the acutal police force in Ottawa seems to be about this.
https://twitter.com/glen_mcgregor/status/1491872930782855183
I guess I was wrong. She's only 75 and was Canada's ambassador for circumpolar affairs.
Canada doesn't have any billy clubs or tear gas or any of that stuff?
Not even a board with a nail in it!
But, I'm from Ottawa. I've protested downtown countless times. Several times while facing riot cops with helmets & shields. They have (or had) armoured cars with water cannons. I've seen them. They were pointed at me. Based on this experience I'd say very, very clear who is on whose side in this situation.
80: I love that woman who sued and got an injunction against the noise in Ottawa.
I *just* read about the blockade of the Bridge. That's even crazier, since it makes a major route of trade impassable. Some Kennedy school prof who does crisis/disaster management advocated slashing their tires and taking their gas.
Why the hell are American right winger interested in funding protests in Canada?
Because they are openly opposed to functioning democracy.
At least some of them are also probably treating it as a test run for doing something similar here.
They've certainly been creating their own "courts" and "law enforcement" here for decades. Blocking a downtown would be new. So would not shooting anyone.
The US version would obviously involve way more gunfire, regardless of what it looks like exactly.
I kind of wonder if this isn't being done in Canada because they see it as less likely they'll get shot by frustrated drivers or residents trying to sleep.
I feel like "we oppose right-wing vigilantism" ought to be a message Democrats can run with.
You'd think "we will not allow warlords to occupy the capital and control our borders" would be popular here too. But apparently not. I'm clearly out of touch.
It's so weird how the police keep saying they can't do anything. Part of me wants them to go in with clubs swinging but then I remember all tactics will be turned instantly back on the left-wing/POC/homeless.
But like you can't just let people camp out in your capital for two weeks! Right? That'd be a sign of good government failing, right? Can't be happening.
Add the Ottawa Police to the extensive list of shitty police forces in Canada. See also the news from Thunder Bay but they were already on it.
Also the family that owes the bridge at the border must be pissed. That'll prob be how that breaks up. Getting them to talk the 'truckers' down.
(I'm from the East Coast)
Presumably the trucking companies are losing money big time right now.
No. The national trucking org is against the blockade. Many truckers are immigrants so have different concerns.
The protestors haven't impacted trucking as far as I know except at the one crossing.
There have been stories the trucks are purpose-bought for the protest. Using US money presumably?
Oh also my provincial legislature is shut down for security concerns after a bunch of MPs and MLAs got packages with 'chemical irritants'.
Thanks. I knew the national trucking organizations were against it, so I incorrectly assumed someone in trucking was losing money.
OT: Ian McDonald is no longer hot blooded. They checked it to see.
It's not so much a trucker protest as a truck-themed protest.
106: He didn't make it to a hundred and three?
103: I think that one crossing amounts to 28% of all trade between the US and Canada, so that's a lot. Though I get what you're saying about it not really affecting trade *within* Canada.
99: I often feel that some future historian will write a Decline and Fall of the United States. I'm not sure whether it should be the fall of the Empire or the Republic, because losing the imperial aspirations is not such a big deal. I am sure that Trump and the Jan 6th uprisings would figure prominently.
It feels like we are on an i winnable trajectory. This is school child history and not sophisticated, but their were people in the late aromas Republic who fought to keep it. And maybe this is a half-remembered quote from Tacitus, but here goes. The names of many offices remained during the early empire, but their purpose was eliminated. The embrace of fascism by elected Republicans in Congress seems very similar.
There needs to be a whole lot more summary termination of police officers in the US and Canada.
At a certain point, one would think that even Canadians would be upset enough about these people to effectively demand that something be done. Maybe we're getting there. Maybe another month will be required.
Looking at small town Montana, the problem out east is that it just doesn't take all that many people to successfully exploit the natural environment. $600 profit for a cow/calf pair is high, in Montana, and so if a ranch is going to support an ownership couple and even just one younger adult couple, there's going to have to be either a shitload of land, or lots of other sources of income. The upshot is that the younger adult couple leaves and builds lives doing something else, and when it's time for the older couple to cash out and retire, the land is worth too much for the younger couple, and the old folks' choices are some Texas gazillionaire or the Bison People. I think the project pursued by the Bison People is great, but it's not providing the same kind of economic and social spinoffs that continuing the land in cattle production would create. Don't need feed stores, car dealers, elementary school teachers, lawyers, fast food, etc when your surrounding farmland de-industrializes. Texas gazillionaires are a blight on the land, but they do hire employees to run the properties. And they lease to outfitters who bring hunters -- a reversion to a different kind of 19th century paradigm, but it does bring money from elsewhere that can knock around in a local economy.
(My ski trip to Austria -- from which I finally arrived home last night -- included a rancher from the very far east. Property has been in the family more than a century, and he's obviously doing well enough with to be be able to afford a ridiculous luxury now and again.)
I was surprised to see places near where I grew up marketing to our of state hunters. I guess that's where the money is, but really it's just shooting at birds, which you can do pretty much anywhere.
Texas gazillionaires are a blight on the land
Yes.
This was an interesting dive into conditions in Ottawa. It speaks to the police issue in 88: apparently the police chief is communicating up "We cannot handle this situation, the intelligence deeply worries us, we need the military." It also heavily implies there is a tightly-locked-down secondary headquarters where the more serious fascists assemble.
(This is from somewhere else, but I also got the impression the trucks themselves are being used tactically, making the juntaists likely more resilient to full police assaults than traditional protestors would be.)
116 -- that is very interesting. Thank you for the link.
My inner child wants to think The Pushcart War is relevant.
107: It's not so much a trucker protest as a truck-themed protest.
"Weapons of mass destruction Truck-related program protest activities.