The End Of Gilbert

By Rod Dreher • September 24, 2012, 2:13 PM

A Louisiana expat sends this story of a small north Louisiana town on its last legs:

While people traveling down Louisiana 15 could actually pass through Gilbert and not realize it, Sharp said the village has more than meets the eye.

She said it’s the people who reside in Gilbert that make it worth stopping.

“I love Gilbert. Everybody as a community comes together here and that’s what makes a town,” Sharp said.

Ezell said the village continues to be close-knit. Whenever there is a death or an emergency, the entire village rallies to help one another.

The question is, for how long?

“There is no industry in Gilbert. Farming is pretty much it,” Carroll said. “If you go to school and get a degree, or if you want to be any kind of professional, you have to leave town.”

Gilbert officials are concerned these youth may opt to move somewhere else, leaving the town with few people to lead in the future.

“There’s nothing really here for the young people to do — they have to leave to go to work. Other than farming and dirt business, there’s not much for them,” Stephens said.

“It’s a high concern of mine because in 10 to 15 years, there won’t be anyone left. As long as I can keep going, I won’t let that happen, but right now there’s nothing here to keep our children.

“In the next 10 to 15 years, a lot of these towns will just wither away.”

I wonder: will this be my town too? There is little economic diversity here, and the local political leaders can’t get their act together on development. Someone told me the other day that the police jury (the governing body in the parish) refused to approve a zoning request for a housing development in a certain part of the parish, supposedly because they want development to be focused on another part of the parish. I don’t know if this is true, but if so, it’s a classic example of short-sightedness. There is a chronic affordable housing shortage here. We need places for middle and lower middle income people to live. Without housing, how can we attract new industries here? And so forth.

People in our town say that politics is holding the place back, regarding economic development. I hear this all the time, from all different kinds of people. It sounds like Gilbert’s problem is somewhat different from my town’s, but the overall point — that towns die from loss of the next generation, and you lose the next generation when they have no way to support themselves and their family — is a challenge common to many small towns.

This past weekend in Natchitoches, I spoke to several old friends who talked about how small towns can be really great and affordable places for people in particular lines of work — especially those who can work via broadband. There’s a guy from southern California who teaches at my old school, who is said to have up and moved with his family to the middle of north Louisiana to teach because he couldn’t afford California life anymore. If you can work online, or have a specialized skill that can be utilized locally, why not? On the other hand, not everybody can work by broadband, and a community that builds its future on broadband-dependent jobs will have no place for working-class people, except in service jobs. Still, better than nothing, right?

This is a problem.

I wonder, readers: are any of you living in small towns that are growing and healthy, and navigating this challenge well? If so, what are they doing right? If not, what are they doing wrong?

Posted in A Sense of Place, Economics, Louisiana. Tagged economy, Gilbert, Louisiana, small towns.

33 Responses to The End Of Gilbert

EngineerScotty says:

September 24, 2012 at 2:30 pm

The problem is, of course, that many of the longstanding fields of employment that used to sustain small towns like Gilbert, no longer do so.

Knowledge employees in production industries (i.e. folks that design stuff for sale, as opposed to service professionals like accountants and doctors who cater to the local community) might work, given the presence of qualified individuals who a) like the small-town lifestyle, and b) are willing and able to tele-commute. But the critical mass of such jobs are likely to be in the big cities/suburbs.

Many towns in the “south” (here referring to all the warm climes of the continental US, not just “Dixie”) are attractive to retirees; who bring with them pensions, social security, and other sorts of retirement income–irrespective of where they lived when they were working.

But export agriculture has long been mechanized and become big business, and provides far less economic benefit to small towns than they used to. Manufacturing is in many cases gone. Gilbert (and towns like it) probably has limited allure to tourists. Gilbert is probably too far from any big city (the closest are Shreveport, Baton Rogue, and Jackson, MS; all more than an hour away) to attract commuters–who would have their choice of many other similar small towns closer to their jobs.

I dunno, Rod. If you want to preserve small towns, you need to preserve small-town economies.

Some conservatives I have read (not you that I can recall) like to gloat about the fate of Detroit–suggesting that it’s demise is due to such things as organized labor, Democratic governance; some racists like to blame a predominantly African-American political class in Detroit and Wayne County itself. But the same forces that are undermining the Motor City are what are undermining places like Gilbert; the jobs are leaving, and after a while, the hope and pride leaves with it.
Siarlys Jenkins says:

September 24, 2012 at 2:34 pm

How about a local business formed to help farmers integrate wind and solar power into their farming, in ways that don’t shade the crops, but do open new revenue streams, decrease costs, and/or make the farm more self-sufficient?

Another good rural business would be new waste disposal technology (I mean animal and human waste) that keeps the waste at a warm temperature, adds the right bacteria, and produces sterile, odorless fertilizer, without dependence on either sewage pipes or long-term holding tanks? In the Amazon, such material disintegrates in 30 minutes, leaving no trace. The right heat and humidity can do the same, and if it produces methane, catch it for cooking gas.

In short, apply those degrees in fields that will make rural areas and small towns more prosperous, while making a living for the young folks with the degrees.
Jon S. says:

September 24, 2012 at 2:35 pm

Where I come from, small town Midwest, there is little hope for the really small towns. They are built to serve the agricultural community. But since the incentives for farms is to get bigger and bigger and since farm families have fewer and fewer kids, there is no reason for the local town. Once the high school goes, the town goes.

To the extent we are doing anything, it is living off of government subsidies. Ethanol and wind subsidies create jobs and, in the case of ethanol, drive up corn prices. But this is a house built on sand. A company in town just just laid off a bunch of workers. Why? Because they make blades for wind turbines. Because the wind subsidy is set to expire orders are way down. In other words, there are a large number of jobs that depend on milking the federal cow. People do not want to move here because it is too cold (wimps!) and too far from “culture.” Most of the bright kids go somewhere else. My medium sized town (25,000) will make it for a good while, but the really small towns have a tough road to hoe.
CK says:

September 24, 2012 at 3:18 pm

““There’s nothing really here for the young people to do — they have to leave to go to work. Other than farming and dirt business, there’s not much for them,” Stephens said.”

Tell that to Jim Rogers, I’m sure he’d be willing to buy some farm land in Gilbert.

“There’s going to be a huge shift in American society, American culture, in the places where one is going to get rich. The stock brokers are going to be driving taxis. The smart ones will learn to drive tractors so they can work for the smart farmers. The farmers are going to be driving Lamborghinis.”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2012/05/10/legendary-jim-rogers-brokers-going-broke-farmers-will-become-rich-very-rich/
Franklin Evans says:

September 24, 2012 at 3:35 pm

Not meaning to be flippant, but your reference to the ex-California teacher is the strongest rememdy: Stop focusing on the children born there, and promote the town for those who will want to raise their children there.

It’s a tough row to hoe regardless. The town has to have and maintain good schools, the sort of infrastructure that will attract young adults to live there — and by that I don’t mean a crass overlay of popular culture, but a sincere expression of open arms and hearts.

Small towns have NIMBY and a touch of xenophobia in their genetics. It takes a strong effort to soften those obstacles, especially in a fashion that avoids alienating the longtime natives. Replenishing the population clearly is not coming from local replacement. It has to acknowledge that “imports” are the only real alternative, and go about finding and keeping them.
Roberto says:

September 24, 2012 at 3:35 pm

This is exactly on point but this post brings to mind one of my quibbles with localists and “front porchers,” or at least some of them. They make it sound like the only reason young people leaves places like St. Francisville is wanderlust and/or greed. They don’t recognize that human migration is driven by both “push” and “pull.” People leave because they can’t see how they can make a living and they are drawn to places where they can.
Roberto says:

September 24, 2012 at 3:36 pm

Sorry, I meant this “isn’t exactly on point.”
Derek Leaberry says:

September 24, 2012 at 3:45 pm

I live in Queen Anne’s County, MD, population 50,000, with no town with a population of more than 3000. It is on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and is that state’s leading agricultural county. It is accurately described as rural/exurban. There are no poultry processing plants as in most of the other Eastern Shoe counties and one guitar manufacturer. The county has several retirement communities and many affluent have second homes in the county.

Because of the proximity of Washington, Baltimore and Annapolis, workmen in the skilled trades do well. The gateway to the Western Shore, Route 50, is filled with every morning with hundreds of independent blue-collar commuters making good money in businesses that they own and run. In some ways, they are what Chesterton-Belloc wanted to create.
Sam M says:

September 24, 2012 at 4:23 pm

Is my town growing and healthy? Depends who gets to answer the question. From my perspective, it’s doing well. It had about 25 percent more people 40 years ago, but the decline has slowed. We are a county seat, so there’s some stability in professional jobs. So… things are great.

But I don’t know. When I graduated from high school in the 1990s, you could still get a job paying $14.40 an hour to start. Now the starting wages at the plants are about $8.50. You can make it if you stay sober and show up and learn the machines, but fewer and fewer people do that.

And then there are people like me. I claim to care about this sort of thing. And I think that I actually do care. But I care about other things more. Like the river in town. When I was a kid, there wasn’t a fish in the world that could live in it. Now, it’s a hatchery trout stream. People canoe and kayak on it. It’s a great resource. For me.

Not so much other people. My concerns about the river mean that certain industries won’t locate here. My concerns about how the air smells has a similar impact. People like me love to talk about how these are advancements, and they really are. But there is a downside, and it’s one I don’t happen to have to pay.

Just the other week, someone from work invited me and the kids out to his family’s fully operational narrow-gauge railroad, complete with steam cars and all the rest. The engine was used in the local railing indistry when that’s how it was done. The engine burns coal. And how. I couldn’t BELIEVE the smoke belching out of the thing.

These are the things that built this area. Forget about the clearcutting for a minute. At one stage, there were hundreds of these engines spewing black coal smoke into the atmosphere, all within a few miles. It must have been miserable.

But people had work. People had a sense of dignity. And everyone shared in the misery.

Would I make that trade?

I dunno. Would you? If not, what WOULD the people here be willing to sacrifice for shared prosperity?
Rhubarb8 says:

September 24, 2012 at 4:30 pm

This is one of the problems with the sort of front porch localism I read a lot about around here. Local leaders may be closest to local problems, but they also believe that they can push off undesirable aspects of development (and “undesirable” people) off to the next town over in a way the feds or state authorities can’t.

Local government, so humble and in-touch, yet full of petty tyrants. The folks who shut down lemonade stands? The people who tell you to take down that flamingo from your lawn? They’re not the big, bad Federales, that’s for sure.

I’ve seen so many local governments in my area fighting like crazy to keep the future at bay, only to preserve a lifestyle that they won’t allow anyone else to live.
M_Young says:

September 24, 2012 at 4:55 pm

” There’s a guy from southern California who teaches at my old school, who is said to have up and moved with his family to the middle of north Louisiana to teach because he couldn’t afford California life anymore.”

Yup. California has had net domestic outmigration for two decades, except for a very slight in-migration for two years during height of the dot.com bubble. It’s not because of Prop. 13 (passed in 1979), it’s sort of because of environmental regulations. But it is really because of international immigration.
Charles Cosimano says:

September 24, 2012 at 5:18 pm

That is, of course, assuming that they even want working class people in their community.
Will in Mississippi says:

September 24, 2012 at 5:41 pm

Setting aside how you keep educated professionals or the creative class, keeping towns from declining requires a critical mass of both population and economic activity. Otherwise, you can’t sustain an economy. Even a local economy dependent upon external transfer payments withers if the community stops being able to serve demand; i.e. people have to go to another town for everything from phyiscians and shoppoing to entertainment.

That’s a big part of the problem in small towns dependent upon agriculture, which is very heavily mechanized.
JonF says:

September 24, 2012 at 5:51 pm

EngineerScotty,

I would not blame Detroit’s decline of the loss of jobs. The city started losing people long before the auto industry hit its peak, and while its metro area was still booming (and parts of that metro area are still prosperous). No, I am not going to blame Detroit’s woes on black politicians, but I would suggest that its political leadership in general (including white politicians) had something to do with it.
M_Young says:

September 24, 2012 at 6:19 pm

“No, I am not going to blame Detroit’s woes on black politicians, but I would suggest that its political leadership in general (including white politicians) had something to do with it.”

LOL — since the city has been black run since the 1970s, to black it on political leadership is to blame it one black politicians.
M_Young says:

September 24, 2012 at 6:25 pm

“Small towns have NIMBY and a touch of xenophobia in their genetics. It takes a strong effort to soften those obstacles, especially in a fashion that avoids alienating the longtime natives. Replenishing the population clearly is not coming from local replacement. It has to acknowledge that “imports” are the only real alternative, and go about finding and keeping them.”

Without a people that resemble the traditional inhabitants of a place, there is little reason to get sentimental about the infrastructure. Better to let the towns die in peace.
cermak_rd says:

September 24, 2012 at 6:42 pm

I am familiar with 2 mid-sized towns. One is where my vac home is located. It’s in Iowa. I suspect it’s near where Jon S. is referring, unless multiple places are laying off wind turbine blade workers. It is losing population. Specifically, it is losing population among those who have an education. And it’s been that way for a generation now.

The same thing has happened in my home town in central IL. For a generation, the top tenth of the class has left. They have left for jobs and careers.

The people left are good people, but they are less educated and more hard-pressed to keep their heads above water. If this out-migration continues, will their children have the sort of mixed-income here comes everyone sort of high school experience that I had?
M_Young says:

September 24, 2012 at 6:50 pm

“to black it on political leadership is to blame it one black politicians.”

Oops, bit freudian there perhaps — ‘to blame it on political leadership is …’
TWylite says:

September 24, 2012 at 9:41 pm

I agree that Detroit has had TERRIBLE political leadership for quite some time. Not everyone is a scoundrel like Kwame Kilpatrick, but people like that have had far too much influence. That and the lack of economic diversification really did a number on the city. There are plenty of other Rust Belt cities that haven’t suffered so severely. Pittsburgh is a notable example. They have moved way beyond relying on steel.
An interesting twist of fate is that a lot of automobile manufacturing has migrated to the deep south (Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, etc.), in a much less unionized environment. These were the same areas where lots of people, particularly blacks, packed up and migrated to the industrial Midwest after World War II.
J_A says:

September 24, 2012 at 10:00 pm

For these small towns to survice, as the old population moves out or dies, it has to take in new people, which will be different than the old people, and the new Gilbert will not be the same as the old Gilbert.

In the Plains and midwest, most of the demographic growth in small towns (the few that grow) is hispanic immigrants.You might not like the change, and then your alternative is for the town to die. But if you want “some” Gilbert to remain, you need to understand that it will no longer be the same.

See for instance: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/us/as-small-towns-wither-on-plains-hispanics-come-to-the-rescue.html?pagewanted=all

If you refuse to read a NYT article, just google “hispanics populating midwest towns”, and you will find several other similar articles and studies.
Siarlys Jenkins says:

September 24, 2012 at 10:40 pm

My concerns about the river mean that certain industries won’t locate here. My concerns about how the air smells has a similar impact.

OK Sam, step out of the Liberal Confessional Booth, wake up, and smell the coffee. Its not like manufacturing can’t be done without creating pollution.

The expense of production isn’t really different, its just a question of who pays. If you let the industries dump their wastes, that means the fishermen, the boat operators, the people who rely on the water supply for drinking and bathing, are subsidizing the production costs.

If industrialists have to run a clean operation, for the same reasons I can’t let too much garbage pile up against my fence for fear my neighbor will respond to the stench by calling the local health department on me, those costs are instead paid by the shareholders, managers, CEO’s, and end purchasers. In other words, they pay the full cost of production, instead of passing it along to others.

Once that is in motion, there is quite a market for new, more sophisticated, and in the end, simpler and less expensive processes for eliminating and recycling waste. Organic wastes come down to some combination of nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen and carbon… all we need is the right reactive pathways and catalysts to remake it into something more useful.

Industries stay away from clean rivers only so long as they can find some political hack willing to pimp some other river as a sewer. That’s why regulation can’t always be left up to those sentimental local governments who are so close to the people they can step right on them. We need a level playing field.

Without one, as the saying goes “Your local coal fired power plant has a new air filter. Her name is Jasmine.”
J says:

September 24, 2012 at 11:07 pm

You can’t save all these towns. Probably not most, either. There is a point of no return when employers simply can’t find enough quality and well educated workers within a 20-30 mile radius.

Wave goodbye and organize decent upkeep of the cemeteries as these places fade out. The Agrarian Age is over; this is part of what that means.
M_Young says:

September 25, 2012 at 12:38 am

” Pittsburgh is a notable example. They have moved way beyond relying on steel.”

Here are the demographics of Pittsburgh.

“At the 2010 Census, 64.8% of the population was non-Hispanic White, 25.8% non-Hispanic Black or African American, 0.2% non-Hispanic American Indian and Alaska Native, 4.4% non-Hispanic Asian, 0.3% from some other race (non-Hispanic) and 2.3% of two or more races (non-Hispanic). 2.3% of Pittsburgh’s population was of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin (they may be of any race).”

A rare majority white city, rated one of the best places in the US to live by Forbes in 2010. Transformation from a rust belt city. Notable lack of Asians and Hispanics (i.e the new immigrant groups which are supposed to ‘save’ us). All this despite a modest population decline.

Here are the relevant figures from Detroit.

The census reported that the city had 82.7% African American, 10.6% White (7.8% non-Hispanic white), 1.1% Asian, 0.4% Native American, 0.02% Pacific Islander, 3.0% other races, 2.2% two or more races. In addition, 6.8% of the population self-identified as Hispanic or Latino, of any race, mainly made up of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans.”

Both rustbelt cities hard hit by the decline in their traditional industries. One with 64% white population, one with under 8% white population. One a success, one which has been very near state takeover.
EngineerScotty says:

September 25, 2012 at 1:54 am

I was wondering if M_Young would show up and prove my point for me.
Roberto Rivera says:

September 25, 2012 at 7:56 am

One with 64% white population, one with under 8% white population. One a success, one which has been very near state takeover.

Of course, these are the only two options and it goes without saying you have controlled for every other possible factor.

Pittsburgh had a huge advantage in making the transition to a high-tech and service economy: the presence of two world-class research institutions literally next door to each other. Carnegie-Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh draw and incubate talent in ways that the likes of Wayne State can’t imagine.

Buffalo’s demographic is much closer to Pittsburgh’s than Detroit’s, yet its median family income of about $31,000 is actually a few hundred dollars lower than Detroit’s. Both are about $8,000 lower than Pittsburgh’s.

Thanks to Wikipedia, I can play “Dying Rust Belt Cities” all day long.
Franklin Evans says:

September 25, 2012 at 9:43 am

M_Young: Without a people that resemble the traditional inhabitants of a place, there is little reason to get sentimental about the infrastructure. Better to let the towns die in peace.

That is certainly a logical outcome, but the implication of my assertion is that people who have not had any prior connection to a town might still — due to, of course, a complex set of circumstances — have the same emotional connection to that town — i.e. acquire and support the same values of the “natives” — if given the chance to form it.
M_Young says:

September 25, 2012 at 9:43 am

“I was wondering if M_Young would show up and prove my point for me.”

It’s funny how ‘the Right’ is supposed to be anti-science, when the Left is so willfully blind to the empirical evidence all around it, at least when it comes to fairly stark average differences between identifiable human population groups, and the real world effect those differences can have.
M_Young says:

September 25, 2012 at 10:06 am

“Buffalo’s demographic is much closer to Pittsburgh’s than Detroit’s, yet its median family income of about $31,000 is actually a few hundred dollars lower than Detroit’s.”

That’s a good counter-example, Roberto. Still, the white population of Buffalo is just barely a majority — 50.4 percent. Looks like a tipping point situation to me.
Geoff Guth says:

September 25, 2012 at 1:26 pm

I’m not sure what all of the racial categorization is meant to prove.

Interesting thing: I’ve been seeing quite a bit of working class America at work lately, mostly in warehouses and loading docks. I’ve seen workplaces dominated by whites, by blacks, by Hispanics (oddly enough, they’re always dominated by some ethnic group) and I have yet to see any correlation whatsoever with the quality of work done, in the form of efficient loading and unloading, etc. Some places do seem to work better than others but race doesn’t seem to be a factor. (oddly enough, there is a geographic factor; I dread hauling to the southeast, especially rural areas–regardless of race they’re almost all inefficient. Nice people, but no sense of moving with a purpose whatsoever. And that’s not a knock on Southerners; Texas isn’t like that at all)

I also had recent opportunities to ride the six train out and into the Bronx. At first glance, it looked like a social con nightmare; for one thing for long stretches I was the only white guy on the car.

But beyond that cursory look, I saw a lot more commonalities than differences. People tired out after working hard. People working to better themselves. People traveling with their kids. Okay, yeah, there was one guy on the train hawking his book of poetry (I’m kicking myself for not buying a copy; the world should do more to encourage poets) but other than that, what struck me was how utterly normal the other passengers were. Not welfare queens. Not 47 percenters. Just honest average working class men and women.

It made me feel pretty good about the future of the country, whatever the demographics may be.
M_Young says:

September 25, 2012 at 4:48 pm

“oddly enough, they’re always dominated by some ethnic group”

Exactly.

As for the Bronx — I think if you compare it with still sort of white Queens on any measure — crime, food stamp usage — you’ll get the picture.
JonF says:

September 25, 2012 at 6:37 pm

m_young
I’m from SE Michigan, I am more familiar with Detroit’s sordid past than you are, and I yield to no one in heaping full opprobrium on Coleman Young, who almost single-handedly drove Detroit into the ditch in the 70s and 80s. But he didn’t come out of no where. Before there was Young there was Roman Gribbs, a law-and-order hack whose answer to the city’s problems was to turn the police into a paramilitary stroke force with instructions to shoot first and worry about who they shot later. is it any wonder people turned to a demagogue like Young after having Gribbs declare war on black folk? This is precisely how corrupt tyrants come to power in every age of the world: by playing on popular outrage against a former intolerable regime.
JonF says:

September 25, 2012 at 6:40 pm

And m-young, those differences between supposed races are statistically trivial– the differences between individuals within each group dwarf them, often by an order of magnitude. You could assemble groups of people by pure random chance and find similar fluctuations between the groups.
Siarlys Jenkins says:

September 26, 2012 at 12:10 am

M_Young: what keeps Queens going is all those immigrants diligently building businesses. There aren’t as many of them moving to the Bronx.

But the Bronx has a beauty of its own:

http://www.aleksandreia.com/2010/08/24/24029/